Category Archives: people

the week in review

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… ๐Ÿ˜

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.

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.

weird…

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. ๐Ÿ˜

the email fiasco is mostly resolved…

i hate these things, and they appear to come in batches, so i’m hoping that i won’t have to deal with them for a while…

spamcop is up and running. there’s still a significant amount of mail from the past few days that has yet to be delivered, and there’s a good bet that, even when it is delivered, it’s not going to be all of it, but hopefully it will be enough that i get caught up again.

also, my “alternate” email address, which i was using during the time spamcop was down, now POPs the way it’s supposed to, which means that i don’t have to keep a browser open on my mac in order to reply to emails. what i’m hoping is that the technique i used to fix my POP problem will be the same as my clients whose POP mail accounts at sedentarysousa and kosherredhots need, but, unfortunately, i won’t find out for a couple of days. i’m fairly confident that it will work, though…

the only remaining snag is that qwest/centurylink’s SMTP server is STILL on a couple of blacklists, and there’s no telling how long they’ll be there, because qwest has its head so far up its ass that it can see daylight out the other end*… and there’s a very good chance that, despite the fact that i’ve had “someone with more authority” (i.e. my host provider is going to try to contact their real postmaster, and not just some phone-flunky) attempt to communicate with them, they’re going to ignore it anyway, which is why i don’t really expect anything to change in that regard.

Continue reading the email fiasco is mostly resolved…

genius!…?

this guy has it all figured out: Russian ‘genius’ lived with 26 female bodies – the guy is a college professor and museum curator, and he speaks 13 languages… and he had a little “thing” for corpses in teddy bear costumes… but because of he didn’t actually produce the corpses, and they were all people who died many years earlier, the guy will probably not face any charges…

if an “ordinary” person did this, you can be guaranteed that the local government would come up with a “law” that he “broke” in order to put him away, but because of the fact that this guy actually knows something that most people don’t, and the local government knows that, the guy gets away with anything he likes…

as long as he’s not hurting anybody, i say more power to him! 8)

oh my GAWD what have i gotten myself in to?

continued

spamcop is working, however…

when i send email from me at salamandir dot info to a friend of mine, whose email address i provide (spreznib at hybridelephant dot com) it bounces with the following message:

ERROR: Your message could not be delivered.
The mail server generated the following error message:

This message was created automatically by the mail system (ecelerity).

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed
[email protected] (reading confirmation): 550 High probability of spam

Arrival-Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:10:45 -0400
Reporting-MTA: dns; smtp.centurylink.net

Action: failed
Final-Recipient: rfc822; [email protected]
Last-Attempt-Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:10:45 -0400
Remote-MTA: dns; mx1.thewebhostserver.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 High probability of spam
Status: 5.0.0

when i check mxtoolbox dot com, it tells me that 208.47.184.3 (the IP address for smtp.centurylink.net) is on a couple of blacklists, because SOMEBODY has been sending spam from smtp.centurylink.net without encountering the HAMMER

however, when i call qwest/centurylink, they say that it’s not 100% sure that their server is on a blacklist, and i should investigate “other problems” because of the fact that they don’t show anything wrong, they can’t do anything…

 

 

 

 

 

 

this is the sound of me, repeatedly faceplanting on the desk… ๐Ÿ˜›

dead people

Pete Rugolo – despite the fact that he was kenton’s arranger 15 years before i was born, i grew up with stan kenton music from the time that i was old enough to remember. my father was a frustrated, but quite good tenor sax player, who was faking it as an electrical engineer, and, as a result, we always had jazz of some sort or another playing in the background. stan kenton was in heavy rotation…

at this point, i’m probably one of the few people who will know who you’re talking about when you say that pete rugolo died…

busking

hat formerly belonging to Jon H. Stebbinsi got up at an unreasonably early hour this morning and went down to the FSM to busk.

while there, i found one of the vendors had a hat for sale for $10, that i couldn’t resist. it’s not a costume hat, it’s a real, authentic, merchant marine hat, that probably belonged to an officer. inside the hat was a little printed card that said “Return this Bernard Cap to:” that had the name, address and phone number of someone who was completely unknown to the person from whom i bought the hat.

i googled the name, and came up with some confusing results. googling for Jon H. Stebbins – the name as it is actually written on the card – gets no results, but it asks if i meant to type “John H. Stebbins” and gives a lot of nautical and marine references for that spelling. the one, glaring exception to this is the record of the courts opinion in reference to the case of U.S. versus Stebbins, from 2005, in which John H. Stebbins, Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army, raped his 6-year-old daughter, was convicted in a military court, and was sentenced to life without parole, plus a $75,000 fine. the opinion of the court was that he deserved everything he got…

however, if i just google Jon Stebbins, the first results i get have to do with the author of the book Dennis Wilson, The Real Beach Boy, The Lost Beach Boy and other classics…

i’m not sure either one of these is the Jon H. Stebbins that previously owned my hat, but if that’s the sort of people i’m going to find when i search for him, i think i’ll give it a miss…

it’s a cool hat, though… 8)

busking went really well, despite the fact that we were a trio (sketch had another engagement). we got a lot of really positive feedback from the people in charge, and made a fair amount of money at the same time. i could get used to this… 8)

Elwood Decker!

Elwood Decker -- Infinite Bliss And Eternal Peace To AllElwood Decker: A Path to God

Elwood Decker

i’m indirectly responsible for this… at least for the first one…

i originally heard The Bobs song “Elwood Decker” in 1996 or 1997, thanks to my my beautiful wife (who is THE Bobs fanatic), and immediately wondered who the hell he was… so i proceded to find out.

after some preliminary internet searching, i wasn’t able to find much about elwood, but i found a connection between elwood and a guy to whom i may be related, norm hammond. it turned out that norm hammond posessed all of elwood’s paintings, and it turned out that they had just hung a gallery showing in the old train station in oceano (the bobs changed it to nipomo, which is in the same neighbourhood, but more euphonious) of elwood’s paintings. norm sent me a bunch of reproductions, one of which is currently hanging on the wall behind me. i suggested that elwood really should have a web site, and norm said that he was working on several avenues to publicise elwood — at the time he was in the process of writing a book about him — but that he had never even thought of a web site. i suggested elwooddecker.com and (although i hadn’t expanded the business to the point that it is now) suggested that i could register it for him and build a web site. he said that he would think about it, but he was more interested in writing at that time. i haven’t heard from norm since then, but that’s okay, because it appears that elwood got a web site anyway.

i also put together a one-page biography of elwood, with one of the pictures of him that norm had sent me, and gave it to richard bob at the bobs christmas show, the last time they did the show at jazz alley (1997? 1998?).

of course that was some time before i got involved with the cirque de flambé and the fremont philharmonic, which would, eventually, get me to the point where i am friends and colleagues with matthew bob… 8)

so i went to bellingham yesterday…

so i went to bellingham yesterday. it has been a long time since i’ve been in belligham, and it has been even longer since i have seen the… crazy hippy freaks unique crowd that was there for kenyth’s 77th birthday party last night.

kenyth was my advisor when i first started college, and i started college during the latter part of the last century, but that comes later.

first, i drove through mt. vernon and saw many cow-fields adjacent to the nookachamps river that are going to be ripe for mushrooming in a few weeks, and, basically, i’ve decided that i’m going to take at least one weekend day and do exactly that… because mushrooms are my second favourite drug (the first is hashish, but that’s a separate story).

it took me about an hour longer than i thought it was going to, to get to bellingham, which still puzzles me somewhat. i went to ken & kamalla’s place, but nobody was home, so i then went to the madhouse, which is where i spent the night last night, and talked to darol and the lady who lives in the cabin (which was my space, 25 years ago) for a while, then i went out to wander until it was time for kenyth’s party.

the first place i went was the lake whatcom railroad trail, near where i used to live on valencia street, where i walked east (up hill) on the trail to this spot, where i found this:
old railroad bridge
it was somewhat strange back before everything got developed, but it is somewhat stranger now that it’s the only remaining evidence of a railroad line that used to go right through the middle of what is now a shopping mall and a fairly populated neighbourhood.

i then continued wandering east on the old railroad grade until i found a place that was built about the same time i lived there, which is a dam which funnels all of the water into a creek. a long time ago, shortly after the dam was first built, i used to go there and hide in the tube at the south end of the dam, and grafitti the inside of the tube. at one point, i even took a couple of sheets of plywood down there, so that i didn’t have to worry about getting soaked while i worked. i cleaned debris and gravel out of the tube at least twice, and i had a cozy, invisible little camp/hidey-hole there for a couple of years. now you can still get into the tube, but there’s a sizable pool at the bottom of it at this point, so you’d have to be a spry 20-something to get in there… i imagine that i could probably get in there now, but i imagine that if i wasn’t careful, i would get wet, and i didn’t want to do that yesterday, because it was threatening rain, and i didn’t have a change of clothes handy…

then i went down the tracks a little further, until i got to whatcom falls park, which is another place i used to live eons ago, when ezra was small. this is the place where the PHBFH lived, while i lived in the madhouse (when the PHBFH was living up to her acronym, which was about half of the time), when we went to vancouver BC to see the opera, when ezra was a tiny baby, and there were several old lady opera attenders who looked down their noses at us because we had a “babe-in-arms” at the opera, and everybody knows that babes-in-arms disrupt civilised things like opera… and they didn’t even notice when ezra went to sleep, shortly after the opening chorus, and slept all the way through, without making any noise at all. then, when we got home, very late at night, it was raining, so i parked the car while the PHBFH got out to open the door, so that we could avoid having ezra out in the rain for too long… except that the PHBFH wouldn’t open, or go anywhere close to the door, because it had a teensy little frog, smaller than the diameter of a dime, sitting on the door handle… 8)

then i went back to ken and kamalla’s place, where there was someone home this time, although it wasn’t kamalla, because she was apparently in california visiting her grandkids. i engaged in geek/music and/or music/geek talk with ken until it was time to go to kenyth’s party… which, coincidentally, was in the same dance studio where ezra took lessons from the time that he was 5 until he started at the pacific northwest ballet school, which used to be the nancy whyte studio, but is now called the “Presence Dance Studio”…

kenyth & francieas i said previously, kenyth was my advisor during the time that i was at fairhaven college, which was 1979 through 1984, and again, on and off, from 1986 to 1989. prior to my arrival at fairhaven, kenyth was actually the dean of the college, but by the time i got there, he was “just a professor”. his two “specialty” classes were “Introduction to Personal Philosophy 101” which was informally known as “the fly in the flybottle” or simply “the flybottle class”, and “Awareness Through The Body”. when i first started at fairhaven, you could take body awareness as many times as you wanted, but you could only take the flybottle class once… however, it had such a powerful effect on me that i actually took it twice (with kenyth’s approval) – although i never took body awareness at all (which is kind of a shame, now that i think about it).

before i met kenyth, i was a child from bellevue, a place which is, like it’s new york namesake, an excellent place from which to escape. kenyth introduced me to the person i would eventually become. he did this by allowing me to be me, gently, uncritically and with a great deal of humour (as well as various other things), and by not requiring me to be anything which i was not. it didn’t take long for me to realise that i acutally am another person, one who is 180 degrees different from the person my parents wanted me to be (who was boring and had no life).

and i saw a whole bunch of crazy hippy freaks unique people whom i haven’t seen for quite some time. i saw: douglas drake and joni papp, who i saw at burning man in 2008; karl meyer and stephan freeman, who i see at the moisture festival every year; sally peyou, who i got email from last week, but haven’t actually seen since 2007; yoav and yael yanich, deirdre morgan, kathy veterane, darby freeman, lisa carderelli, dani cutler, jamie jedinak, and a lot of other people whose names i am already forgetting again… all of whom i haven’t seen in at least 20 years… i got email addresses for the people i’ve been thinking about, and wondering what ever happened to them…

i went to sleep, and woke up in the madhouse for the first time since 1989 and it felt so right… if i ever have the opportunity to move back to bellingham at any point in the future, you can bet that i’m going to jump on it in a second. 8)

kenyth's dance

Jaymes Douglass Fyrr

i met this guy when i was in my 3rd semester of college. in 1979, i lived in stack 6 at fairhaven college, with a bunch of crazy people for the first two semesters, and between the second and third semester i moved into stack 4 with another bunch of crazy people, one of whom was jaymes douglass fyrr (not his real name). before i lived there, the suite was inhabited by a bunch of crazy college guys adolescents whose idea of a good time was pouring beer down their gullets until they were so wasted that falling out of the third floor window didn’t faze them (really). after they were kicked out moved elsewhere, the suite became the realm of me, my roommate reuter, st. gordy and his roommate (whose name i don’t remember), st. fred, and jim and his roommate (whose name i don’t remember).

jim and i got along the way suite-mates who were from two totally different worlds would be expected to get along – i.e. we were civil, but he didn’t get to know me very well, and i didn’t get to know him very well – and when the year ended, jim went back to his parent’s home and i did “something else” (i didn’t get along with my parents, even then). when fall semester 1980 came around, i had to choose a new roommate if i wanted to live in the dorms, and jim needed a roommate for his apartment in buchanan towers, so i said what the hell.

during the fall semester, we got to know each other quite well, but then it turned out that he didn’t pass a class he needed to graduate, so he dropped out and went back to his parents’ house and i got another roommate, randy (who is a completely separate story).

fast forward a few years to 1983, after my son was born. i was living in a big apartment on the side of sehome hill with my son and his mother, the PHBFH, and we got…

a phone call from jim, who had planned on going back to school, finishing the class that he needed and getting his degree. what it came down to was that i had an extra room in my apartment, and jim needed a place to stay for spring semester. once again, i said what the hell.

it was considerably different this time, compared to the last time we were roommates. jim didn’t want to do his own laundry or cooking. we had meal tickets and “saga” in the dorms, but that was a long time ago, and it got really tense when he asked the PHBFH to do his laundry. also, at the time, jim was getting really cranky and mean, so when he graduated, we asked him to move out.

i should have known then that he wasn’t the best person to hang around with, but i have had a tendency to “forgive and forget” in the past (now i’m just as willing to forgive, but if you slight me, i’m definitely going to remember it), and it wasn’t too long before i was sharing a house with him again. st. gordy owned a house on state street and jim already lived there when i moved in. at the time, i was transitioning between the print shop and the music shoppe, and jim stepped into my vacant position, thus making the transition somewhat easier. for a while we worked down the street from each other, me at the music shoppe and jim at quik kopy, and we would take our lunch break at the park down the street and get stoned. by 1990, jim was developing, what i considered at the time to be, a very unhealty relationship with the “mom and pop” of the “mom and pop print shop” at which he worked (which was part of the reason why i left originally, as well: they were scary people), which was making his crankiness and meanness even worse, and by 1994, just before i moved away from bellingham, jim and i didn’t spend an awful lot of time with each other, simply because he was so disagreeable to be around.

then, in 1995 i moved to seattle, and i didn’t think about jim that much, because i was going through my own little hell, living at 5 different locations and having 3 or 4 jobs within a year before things started to settle down, and in 1996, i got…

another phone call from jim…

it seemed that his toxic relationship with the “mom and pop” had blown up, and he had been fired from the print shop, at which point he got a job at “the other print shop” in town and promptly gotten fired from that, because he was mean to the customers and kept coming to work drunk. he asked if he could come and stay with me while he got “cleaned up” – which i took to mean that he wanted to get sober and get a job. at the time, i was flush with my first successes in the computer industry and, despite my better judgement, i said he could stay with me for a couple of weeks, until he got his feet under him.

the first night he stayed in my apartment, he asked if i had any beer, which i didn’t… so i went out and bought a 6 pack, which – even now – usually lasts me a couple of weeks. i drank one and the next day, i got up and went to work. when i came home, there were no more beers in the house, and jim was complaining that we didn’t have any beer.

at that point (because my father was an alcoholic) i got straight to the point, and said that there wasn’t going to be any more beer, or anything else alcoholic to drink, in the house, and if he didn’t like it, he was welcome to leave… which, after a few days, he did. he didn’t go far, though… i actually caught him sleeping in the bottom of the main stairway in my apartment building, on the “fire escape” level, below the bottom floor, and told him that he couldn’t stay there – actually watched him pack up his stuff and leave twice before he went somewhere else.

it turned out that he had copied my key before he left, though, and when he left, he went back to bellingham, where he met a lady i had worked for, named almitra, immediately prior to moving to seattle (or, it’s possible that he knew almitra before coming to seattle, and conspired with her to get a copy of my key. i’ll never know for sure…), who convinced him that i had stolen her computer – in reality, she had given it to me in lieu of cash payment, but that, too, is another story. i can just picture them, both soused to the gills, and jim saying “i have a key to his apartment, we can just go in while he is at work and steal it take it back…”

which they did.

it didn’t take much sleuthing to determine who had my computer, and so i went to bellingham with st. gordy (who is a fairly big guy) to find him. the first place we looked for him was at st. gordy’s house, which had been gutted by a fire and had been posted as “unfit for human habitation” by the fire department… and, naturally, we found jim living in his old room, as though nothing had happened. in fact, he was incredulous that we had found him at all, but he didn’t have the computer… it wouldn’t have done him much good anyway, because the electricity (which was the original cause of aforementioned fire) had been shut off.

at first he wouldn’t tell us where it was, but… have i mentioned that st. gordy is a pretty substantial fellow? jim was a predictable drunk, and caved almost immediately, and soon we were on our way to almitra’s apartment. after a tense interaction with almitra, which involved st. gordy and the police, i learned what the phrase “possession is 9/10ths of the law” means, and left without a computer. fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view) i had encrypted the entire disk, so the only thing they could do with it was totally wipe the disk and start over… with no fonts or a typesetting program or anything other than a blank operating system. jim actually called me a couple of weeks after, to try to wheedle the password out of me, but i refused.

i have never seen him since then. about once a year for a while i would get a “i’m sorry, do you still want to be friends” email from him, which i ignored. then i had my brain injury and i stopped hearing from him… i guess maybe he thought i had died, or something, which would have been fine with me.

i got email from him again about this time last year: “remember me?” i wrote back “yeah, i remember you.” and haven’t heard from him since.

this story leaves out A LOT of detail, and merges some of the details together, to save having to go out on long, meaningless tangents in order to explain relatively minor events… but that’s basically my side of the story. if jaymes douglass fyrr finds this via google or something and wants to respond, i probably won’t delete it.

ketchup

If you go to the Third World and find 100 people who have never tasted ketchup before, you find out two things: one is that people don’t actually like tomato ketchup, the other is that they dislike all ketchups equally.
     –Rob Young

i downloaded a whole bunch of music from Sharps a burning-man related dub DJ with whom i am related – he’s either my fourth or fifth cousin, either twice or thrice removed… i’m not sure about the particular details, but our shared ancestor is my great-grandfather… or great-great-grandfather, or something like that… i find it somewhat incredible that i am related to so many people, most of whom i don’t know, and that there are other people, some of whom i am related to, who know a lot more about my family, even though they are completely unknown to me, than i do. it’s also good to see that i’ve got relatives who are not my immediate family (who all seem to despise me for not entirely unknown, but entirely unrealistic reasons) who, never the less, have the same predilictions for artistic expression as i do. it is definitely very grounding for me. i keep having to remind myself that i – and everyone else alive – has 1024 great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents, and the further you go back in time, the fewer people there are… eventually – and it’s a lot sooner than most people think – you’re bound to run into similar family relationships.

along similar lines, through another guy i met who is from whitecourt, alberta, i got a new pile of information about my mother’s family, and i now have more-or-less confirmed lineage back to the early 1600s, and a “home turf” in st. vigeans and arbroath, scotland. i’m still hoping that someone will come along and give me similar information about my father’s side of the family: i’ve only been able to trace them back to the mid-1800s, and, although possibly the father (or, possibly, grandfather) of the last guy in my current list was originally from “the old country” (whichever one that is), i don’t know anything about him… of course i am one of a long tradition from that part of my family, of oldest-children who have been estranged from their families for one reason or another, on top of the fact that the civil war put extreme pressures on family loyalties, and that part of my family was in the thick of the action on both sides of the conflict – which would mean that there are more-than-likely parts of my family history that were deliberately forgotten over the years.

i’ve been doing a lot of performances with snake suspenderz over the past couple of weeks. we’ve been busking at the ballard sunday market for a while now, and the past couple of weeks we haven’t been busking there, but we’ve made up for it by busking at the wallingford market on wednesday, and the interbay market on thursday… and hobbit and i went and busked at the phinney ridge market on friday last week. the fremont phil did a gig at the fremont outdoor cinema on saturday last week, and we’ve got another gig scheduled for the mobile food rodeo, coming up on the 17th… and the day after that, snake suspenderz is doing two gigs in the same day, at the pike place market and beneroya hall… and i’ve discovered that puyallup has a sunday market, which opens up the possibility of going to ballard in the morning and puyallup in the afternoon… 8)

i’ve also had a surprising amount of hybrid elephant business. i’ve got a button order in the process that’s 500 buttons, plus at least two international orders and at least two more domestic orders over the past few weeks, and another one just came in… but the reciept from paypal hasn’t come in yet, so it may not be a real order… ah, there it is… it’s a real order now… 8)

now i know, but it’s too late… 8(

R.I.P. Ivo Peลกรกk

Ivo Peลกรกk

i found this video a while ago, and couldn’t figure anything out about it other than the probability that it was czech and made in 1978… now i know that it is the Ivan Mlรกdek Banjo band and that the dancing guy, whose name was Ivo Peลกรกk, just died…

now that i actually know what it is, i found a whole bunch of videos of music by ivan… too bad i can’t understand what he’s singing about…

Joลพin z baลพin translates, approximately, as “Joey from the swamps”.

i knew it!

i’ve got a whole pile of new genealogical information from my fourth cousin, twice removed (a guy named evan, who lives somewhere in canada) to rustle through, the upshot of which is that i now have traced my ancestors back to 1620 or thereabouts, and i have, actually, found the source of the name Dorward who were the “wardens of the door” (i.e. security guards) at Arbroath Abbey, in Arbroath, Fofarshire (Angus) county, Scotland…

as moe said… “woot!” 8)

i’m not sure what to think of this…

we have a border collie, lucy, who is obsessed with things. when we first got her, she obsessed about the cats, who were not amused. then, when we got stanley, she obsessed about stanley and forgot about the cats. then we got mango and it was as though stanley never existed…

mango has started staying at monique’s work over night, to cut down on the amount of travelling he has to do – and he was intended to be the “clinic bird” anyway – but lucy still obsesses about where mango used to be…

it has been 8 days now, and she’s still obsessing about mango’s empty cage…lucy and not-mango
if it’s possible, she’s obsessing more since he’s been staying at work…๐Ÿ˜ฎ

this is why i don’t subscribe to things like this…

despite my interest in geneaology, i usually don’t just arbitrarily subscribe to things like ancestry dot com and genealogy dot com. however, i have recently subscribed to both of them, because i finally got around to uploading a GEDCOM file of my research (8 generations). almost immediately they send me this message that says i have “hints” about some of the people in my family tree…

my sister, my father, and my grandfather.

i know about these people… i know more than i would like to know, and probably more than they would be comfortable knowing that i know… i know what the “hints” are, and i don’t care

what they didn’t tell me in the “potted meat product that isn’t quite SPAM” was that they also have “hints” for 65 other relatives who are far more removed than my grandfather… such as Otto Tobe Biver, my first cousin twice removed, and Sarah Davisson, my grand aunt of wife of great-great-great grand uncle, and Charles W. Hammond, my great-great-great-great-grandfather…

genealogy

Half of European men share King Tut’s DNA – half of all european men, presumably, includes men of european descent, which includes me. the article says that tutankhamun belonged to paternal haplogroup R1b1a2, which, according to my (admittely very limited) research, doesn’t existhowever, paternal haplogroup R1b1b2a does exist, and i can see some anonymous reporter (it was actually alice baghdjian at reuters) making the switch without realising it…

AND since my paternal haplogroup is R1b1b2a1a2c, i am part of R1b1b2a that split off approximately 17,000 years ago.

tutankhamun lived between 1341 – 1323 BCE, or approximately 3300 years ago… what they’re trying to say is not that half of european men are related to tutankhamun, but that they share DNA with tutankhamun – a distinction that is actually in the title of the article.

in order to be related to tutankamun, he would have to be a common ancestor (i.e. the progenitor) of half of all european men… which, i get the very strong impression, is what most people reading the article will probably think, but is actually not the case… if it was, not-so-old king tut (he died when he was 18) must have been a randy and prolific little bugger.

the fact is that tutankhamun and half of all european men – and myself – have a common ancestor 17,000 years ago – approximately 13,500 years before tutankhamun’s birth.

it’s not the same thing as when they announced the discovery that all non-african people are part neanderthal. for that matter, i, half of all european men, and tutankamun, also share DNA with president john adams (paternal haplogroup R1b), approximately 30,000 years ago. at some point in the distant, prehistoric past, i share a common ancestor with john adams…

knowledge – it makes life boring.

so…

i expended A LOT of spoons last weekend, because it was the solstice festival, and snake suspenderz played both days, apart from the caravan on friday. i’ve uploaded a whole bunch of pictures, which i haven’t yet got all sorted out, so there’s very likely going to be more pictures uploaded eventually. of course, the fremont “solstice” festival actually didn’t occur on the solstice (something for which i’m sure our ancient ancestors would decry with loud voices), but that’s because us “modern” folks have to get up and go to work on monday… a tradition which, despite the fact that it recently included me, i have never been able to figure out…

but today is especially important, because it is also our 13th wedding anniversary, which means, traditionally, i’m supposed to give my sweetie lace – which would be nice and i’m sure she would appreciate it, but it’s also impractical and i’m not sure she’d ever use it for anything… the “modern traditional” gift is textiles, and we just got a new bed-spread recently (with zebra stripes), but i’m not sure what other textile items we actually need at this point – i’m sure clothes are on the list, but i’d really rather give my sweetie something more romantic than clothes…

and i’m more convinced than ever that the decision to get married was one of the smartest decisions i have ever made in my life, but that’s only because of the fact that i decided to get married to moe, and not someone else.

My impression of the majority of mainstream news for the next three weeks:

weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weinerweiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner weiner…

get it out of your system now, and pay attention to things that are really more important… ๐Ÿ˜

the rapture!!

so far, the rapture hasn’t happened… i’m preparing to have a big ol’ laugh at harold camping’s expense when the day is over… 8)

unauthorised authorisation dialoguein other news, i got a new unauthorised authorisation dialogue, like the one i got back in august of last year, but it’s for a different site… the site, LEAP.cc, is the site for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which i have visited a while back, but there currently is no site there, and, instead, it asks for an authorisation (which i have NEVER provided), so i’m thinking that either they’re not in business any longer (not very likely) or someone has hacked their site. needless to say, i didn’t enter anything into the fields, and it’s acting pretty much the same way as the twitter dialogue that was coming up last year, so i’m going to guess that it’ll go away eventually.

the rapture still hasn’t happened… i’ll let you know something else comes up… 8)

Scientists confirm Extraterrestrial genes in Human DNA – for some reason i thought this was appropriate, despite the fact that it was originally posted in 2007…

Family Radio, which is harold camping’s “ministry” is offline… it’s the end of the world as they know it…

DNA testing

i am paternal haplogroup R1b1b2a1a2c, which comes from the south of france, in the basque regions, and maternal haplogroup H1a1, which comes from from europe, near east and central asia…

which doesn’t surprise me that much…

okay, this is just stupid…

i’ve seen these billboards around saying that "judgement day" is going to be may 21st, 2011. this comes from the mouth of “genuine prophet” Howard Camping, who has been an intenerant radio preacher for at least 30 years – i remember listening to him in the 1980s, when i was a cab driver – but here’s the important part:

HE ORIGINALLY PREDICTED THE WORLD WOULD END IN 1994!!

i’m as willing to let the other guy believe what he wants as the next guy, but this is ridiculous. if he wasn’t right in 1994, what on earth makes people think he would be right ABOUT ANYTHING this time? either we are all ghosts, living an imaginary life and completely unaware of the fact that the world ended 17 years ago, or this guy is demonstrably off his rocker… and that goes for the people who would put up billboards announcing it, as well…

i’m willing to let people believe what they want most times, up to and including the first time they predict the end of the world… but after that, if the world doesn’t actually end, they and their beliefs are to be laughed at.

i should know better than this, part II

last week i discovered my sister and brother-in-law’s blog and this week i’ve discovered my brother and sister-in-law’s blog. my brother is ten years younger than me, and the last time we had any appreciable contact was when he was around 10 years old… although it’s frightening how much alike we look. he doesn’t have a beard, but…

now he apparently thinks he’s an edgy tech journalist, or something like that, and there’s at least a 50% chance that my brother and my brother-in-law are hosted by the same company, which may be owned by one or both of them…

this is our opening night for the moisture festival

the moisture festival has actually been going on for a week, now, but tonight is the opening night of comedie/varieté at the palladium featuring the fremont philharmonic. we’ve settled on “whatever is your take on ‘formal'” for the uniform-of-the-day, and this is what i’m wearing:cam-whoring pre-moisture-festivalwe’re supposed to show up around 5:00 pm, i think doors for the first show are at 7:00, and doors for the second show are at 10:00… which means, conservatively, that we’ll be finished around 12:00 or thereabouts… which means that i won’t actually get out of there until 1:00 or so, and it usually takes me around 45 minutes to drive home, so i won’t be getting to bed until around 2:00 or thereabouts… and i’ve got the same schedule again tomorrow, only it starts with me getting to the palladium at 1:00…

busy, busy, busy…

by the way, for those of you who are wondering (and i know you’re out there), the altar cloth behind me is tucked up behind the box to keep it away from the puppy. there have already been several “near miss messes” that have involved the puppy, who wants to tug and chew on everything that hangs down, and the altar… i keep telling myself that he’ll grow out of it, but i keep wondering if he’ll do it before or after destroying my altar… ๐Ÿ˜

i should know better than this…

i should know better than to go poking around on internet with a little bit more information than i should probably have. i feel the same way i did when i was a teenager about to get in trouble. i should stop now…

i found my sister and brother-in-law’s blog… one of the sisters that i haven’t spoken to or heard from for… um… a REEEEALY long time… the last time i remember seeing this particular sister (which is confounded by the fact that i have a swiss-cheese memory) was around 30 years ago or thereabouts… when she was about 12 years old… and i was about 20…

it’s not 100% for sure, but everything i’ve seen points towards that being their blog… everything matches up…

i don’t know whether i should link to it, but it’s definitely going into my RSS feed… ๐Ÿ‘ฟ

more goodies from the past…

Ezra Kirby, 1872 - 1939this is ezra kirby, my great granduncle, age approximately 25 at the time of the portrait. he lived from 1872 to 1939 and he spent his entire life as a farmer in champaign county, illinois.

is it just my imagination, or does that photo look an awful lot like my own son? … who i named ezra, not even knowing that i had a great granduncle with the same name…

okay, i think i’m going to put this project away for a while. it’s getting scary.

beach

we went to the beach for three days of doing nothing except exactly what we wanted, when we wanted to do it. here are pictures:

art
this was right outside our back window.
Not now, I'm busy stalking!
the feature, of course, was Rye, also known as “sheep dog in training”…
(more photos by clicking)
dogs and ocean
one of quite a number of shots i took that wasn’t one or more dogs looking somewhere else, or the shot being interrupted by moe, or other things…

the week then continued with my trip to a concert by The Residents, which will go in another post, later on. 8)

A Proposal For An All New Ten Commandments

yeah the old ones lost their magick so I thought Iโ€™d give you all some new ones…

#1 If you cannot respect the rights of others than you yourself shall be denied your rights.

#2 Shun all forms of social status and classes, these are mere illusions that attempt to justify ignoring the needs of society.

#3 If you make children, you are responsible for their health, education and happiness. If you take a person into your household or join a person in their household that has children of their own you are to accept full responsibility of their care as if they were your own.

#4 When you view someone as a burden to society, know this line of thinking is a much worse burden and more detrimental to society than poverty or handicap.

#5 When your religion, belief, ideology or personal opinion justifies violating the rights of others, know you are an enemy to the cooperative.

#6 Live a full and happy life, shun rewards and promises of heaven. Be sincere in you words, deeds and love. Make every day of your life the paradise you seek.

#7 Do not lose your individuality to fads and peer pressure. Your uniqueness is your contribution to society.

#8 Defend yourselves and your domains, but leave justice and punishment to the cooperative for none of us alone are God but all of us together are.

#9 If you cannot gaze upon the masses with civility then lower your gaze.

#10 Abide by these ten commandments and in so doing, Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will.

ologies

i got my first ever backup of my entire home directory and my music collection finished a few minutes ago… 107gb… which is nowhere near all of the space i have available… 8) i still have to find out how to make the disk mount at startup, which i suspect will involve finding out how to add it to /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab. i’ve also got to figure out how to actually move my home directory, rather than just using a new one – basically what i want is, when i type cd .. into the terminal, instead of going to the main hard disk, i want to go to my newly populated external disk. i’ve got a list of instructions which don’t seem to do much more than moving stuff from one place to another, and neglects to tell the system of the change, and i already know how to move stuff…

i just got a HUGE packet of information about my heritage and genealogy… it’s enough that i’m going to be able to add another of the missing branches of my family tree, and it will definitely push my family research back to “the old country” – in this case, ireland – and the 17th century CE. it is something that i got in email from someone with whom i am apparently fourth cousins, either once or twice removed (depending on how old he is) – the last ancestor that we have in common was my great-great-great grandfather. i’m still sort of stuck finding any information at all about my mother’s side of the family, but i think i may have a lead on my maternal grandmother’s social security application, which should give me a birthdate and (hopefully) a maiden name around which i can start investigating.

Actually Really


Live at the Film Forum

Mar 17 – Mar 19

Thursday, Mar 17 at 08:00PM
Friday, Mar 18 at 08:00PM
Saturday, Mar 19 at 08:00PM

Dancer/choreographer Ezra Dickinson and musician/sound-artist Paurl Walsh create a visual and sonic environment that is directly and kinetically linked to the performance onstage. Employing new technology, Dickensonโ€™s movement becomes the instrument through which Walshโ€™s sound is created. Together they build an exciting story that explores the making of the work itself. Dickinson has worked with Maureen Whiting Company, Dayna Hanson and Zoe Scofield; Paurl Walsh has worked with Implied Violence, Degenerate Art Ensemble and X-Ray Press.

About the Performers

Ezra Dickinson was born in Bellingham Washington; he began dancing at the age of four. Ezra received training from Pacific Northwest Ballet for twelve years on full scholarship. Ezra earned his BFA in Dance with an emphasis in choreography from Cornish College of The Arts, while at Cornish Ezra was the recipient of The Merce Cunningham scholarship in Dance, The Kreielshimer scholarship, and The Presidents scholarship in Dance. Ezra has toured across America performing at venues such as Jacobโ€™s Pillow, Bates dance festival, The Baryshnikov Arts center, Danspace, The Southern Theater, ODC Theater, PICA TBA, and The Sitka Fine Arts Camp. Ezraโ€™s work in choreography, and movement installations have been on display in 12min Max, Northwest New Works Festival, Gallery 1412, Chop Sue, Act Theater, Gallery 154, Move, Ten Tinny Dances, Moore Inside Out, Heathrow Airport, Henry Art Gallery, 911 media arts center, Next Fest Northwest, SAM Remix, Art Zone, and The Northwest Film Forum. Along with being co-artistic director of The Offshore Project, Ezra is in his fifth year of dancing for the Maureen whiting Company, and is a member of The Castaways.

Paurl O. Walsh graduated from Cornish College with a degree in Classical Composition and Electro-acoustic music. He is an active composer of electronic music (including large-scale surround sound performance installations), modern classical chamber music, music for dance and theatre, and good ol’ rock and roll. Writing and performing throughout the US and Europe, he has been a core member of the hyper-experimental performance art/music group Degenerate Art Ensemble, designed and produced music for the theater group Implied Violence, and can most often be seen performing in the prog-punk outfit X-Ray Press. He also runs ExEx Audio, a creative recording studio centered around working collaboratively with artists to help them better express themselves through sound.

magick

magick is largely back to normal… she’s running around and barking at everyone, and the only way you could tell that she had been sick at all is the little shaved patch on her front leg… and we now have another aged pet on a very specific diet that can’t be shared with any other animal, which means 7 kinds of pet food instead of two or three…

moe sez the working theory is that she has a bleeding ulcer and esophagitis, but she still could have cancer or something else. at this point, it’s another miracle of modern science, or something… 8)

updates

i’m officially shocked. my request has apparently been answered, although i still am having trouble getting it installed… there’s a good chance that somebody will help me out, however… maybe even today. ๐Ÿ™‚

also, magick survived another night, and she’s looking perkier than she did yesterday. we’re planning on spending a few days at the beach in a couple weeks, and it would be great if we had a functioning dog that didn’t have to be carried everywhere for that…

update

magick is feeling a little better, and she had an ultrasound, which didn’t reveal any large masses, or bleeding into her abdomen, which is good. they still don’t know what’s wrong with her, but the possibilities include HGE, cancer or an ulcer. at this point, they’re going with ulcer and she’s scheduled for more tests with an internal medicine specialist tomorrow.

yay!

magick survived the night, and was actually looking a little bit perkier than she did last night… when she looked totally pathetic (and she was).

moe says it could be a flare-up of a condition that she had – and survived thanks to moe’s heroic intervention – in 2005, hemorrhagic gastroenteritis or HGE. if it is HGE, despite the fact that they still don’t know what causes it, apparently there are newer drugs that they didn’t have in 2005 which are more effective at staving off the effects. of course, if it’s not HGE, then it could be cancer, or any one of a number of other things, which generally have more fatal effects than HGE.

we’ll know more after magick has an untrasound, which is scheduled for this morning.

magick

magick

she’s home, but she doesn’t feel well, and she’s confined, with an IV catheter. she hasn’t vomitted, which is a good sign, but we still don’t know what’s wrong. she’s having an array of tests tomorrow. moe said it could be a number of things ranging from tragic but survivable (and magick has survived such things a number of times in the past) to fatal…

i knew it was too good to be true… 8/

magick is sick… ๐Ÿ™ and it appears to be one of those “this dog is 12 years old, and we’re really not sure what’s wrong with her” type of sicknesses, but, according to moe, it involves vomitting blood, which isn’t a good thing under any circumstances…

the only good part about it is that she was with moe, at work, at a veterinary clinic, where moe is the senior veterinary technician.

DEAD PEOPLE!

Fauntleroy stabbing victim officially identified as entertainer Hokum W. Jeebs – i didn’t know hokum as well as i knew tuba man, but i knew him well enough… he and tuba man both have been great inspiration to me over the years. i only really met hokum about 5 years ago, or so, but i’ve known about him for a long time… at least since hokum hall (now kenyon hall) was opened in the 1990s…

and hokum, as well, was taken out by thugs who were only interested in robbing him… didn’t even take the time to say “oh, this guy is a seattle icon, maybe i’d better not kill him”…

what the FUCK, thugs?… seriously! ๐Ÿ™

forwards into the past!

another highlight from the genealogical information that i got yesterday is my great great grandmother Martha Ann (Mattie) Solomon‘s death certificate. according to what i can gather, contrary to “family rumours” that have been creeping around since i was a kid, she was not a native member of the Creek tribe. however she was murdered by an “insane woman” in 1938, shortly after my father was born…

weird! ๐Ÿ˜ฎ

bunch of new information about my great great great grandparents 8)

someone found my years-old request for information about my great grandmother, and now i have a whole bunch of new stuff to sift through and i have been able to add substantial information about my great grandmother on my grandfather’s side of the family, and her siblings, parents and grandparents.

one of the highlights was the death certificate for my great great grandfather, Rufus Penn Anthony, who died at the age of 77 in warrensburg, missouri, in 1930. the cause of death is listed as “tree fell on him while chopping & killed him instantly” while contributing factors in his death were “old age & nearly blind”…

sounds like one of my ancestors, going out and trying to chop down a tree when you can’t see so well…

i still need information on my great great great grandparents on my great great grandmother’s side, on both my great grandmother’s side and my great grandfather’s side of the family, but i don’t have any information at all about my mother’s side of the family apart from my grandmother’s name and her husband’s surname…

yay!

no more puppies…

well, one puppy left, but we’re keeping him. the rest of them have all gone off to their homes. and the puppy area has been dismantled. we’ve still got an X-pen up, but that’s temporary, and as soon as the puppy gets more sense it’ll be put away as well.

daily bleh

i made my monthly backup, which is now in the process of downloading. i’ve discovered that, pretty commonly, and regardless of platform, if i download using http, i get about ¾ of the way through the download, and it just ends, for no obvious reason, but if i download using ftp, everything appears on the local end without a problem… thus proving, once again, that a simple, text-based application that is designed to do one thing perfectly will always beat out a big, bulky application, most of which is code for the GUI, which does a whole bunch of things, but there’s no guarantee that it does any of those things perfectly, when it comes to getting things done the right way, the first time…

listen to me… you’d hardly guess that, buried deep in the inner core, was a dyed-in-the-wool mac-head… ๐Ÿ™‚

rob sagan has been placed… yay!

i have had two “incomplete” orders for incense since the 1st of january, one from the netherlands and one from taiwan. they’ve ordered $4 and $12 worth of incense, respectively, got up to the point where paypal figures out shipping and realised that it would be 5 to 10 times as much just for shipping as they would be spending on actualy product. i’ve been wondering about why people do that for a while:to me it seems fairly obvious that, to someone outside the united states, a shop that is in the united states and sells things that are imported from india is going to charge a lot more to ship things outside the united states than some local shop that sells the same items imported from india. a friend of mine says that it’s because, overall, over the past 20 to 50 years, people, in general, have gotten stupider. i was talking with him about college experience these days (since moe is currently in college as well) and what it comes down to is that, even 20 years ago, expectations were a lot higher than they currently are, and i think that there’s a direct correlation to the general consumer on internet… no wonder there are so many people who think that the email message they got telling them that they had won $500 million dollars in the nigerian lottery is anything other than a scam… it definitely doesn’t say much for the education system, or internet – the “information superhighway”…

more turmoil in egypt, which includes the last of the internet connections finally going down… there’s a “million man march” scheduled, and the word is that the military has said that they won’t fire on civilians… but i’ve heard it all before, and until mubarak is under lock and key, either in egypt or elsewhere, i’m going to remain skeptical of anything i hear about the stability of the egyptian government…

ETA: apparently Egypt President Mubarak announces plan to retire in Sept. but i don’t think that’s going to be soon enough for most people… we’ll see how it all works out… fairly soon…

bwaxoteebadorf

we had the second to last puppy potluck this evening. there is one puppy that had a home, but the new owner decided against it, so rob (the savage) needs a new home. he is available, if you’re interested.

i’m probably not going to go to the fremont sunday market tomorrow, because the weather has been rainy all day today, and it’s supposed to be rainy tomorrow as well.

egypt is still in turmoil. mubarak hasn’t quit yet, the people are upset, but nobody only about 100 people have been killed. although there appears to be some looting and general thuggery, it’s still not immediately clear whether or not mubarak is behind it. there still is no internet, but news is still getting out the old fashioned way, by shortwave, ham radio, telephone and even by fax. i wonder how long it will be until they restore internet connectivity… or how long it will be until they have internet connectivity regardless of whether or not it is through “normal” channels. i can’t help but think that it won’t be that long.

PUPPIES!

chaos with teeth attack!this is what happens whenever the puppies and i interact. they mob around my feet, chewing everything, tugging on everything, and basically making it so that if i take any further steps i risk stepping on a puppy.

it seems to me that this batch of puppies is a lot more bite-y than the previous batch, but it may be that time has dimmed my experiences…

yeah, they’re cute, but at this point, the only reason i put up with them is because i know that it’s going to be a relatively short period of time before they go away.

pooples and stuff

the pooples are growing like pooples, and have gotten to the “chaos with teeth” stage, where they’re enthusiastically biting everything that they encounter, whether it is food, toys, doggie boobs, feet, hands, or what-have-you. they mob around my feet with their sharp little teeth whenever i go into their enclosure to feed them, or change their potty-pad… moe sez there’s two more weeks before they go to their new homes.

reba and magick pooples rob and dash

the black one has an official name. they all were called a name beginning with the letter R to help keep them separate when they were born, but the black one is now named Dash (he used to be Rave). the other ones are Reba (the only female), Rob (otherwise known as “the foot savage”) and Roy or Ray or something like that (Rye), which i call “Plug” because he was the one that was plugging up the works when they were being born.

only two more weeks, and then we go back down to a “normal” quantity (i.e. four instead of seven) of dogs again… ๐Ÿ˜‰

in other news, i went to the fremont sunday market last sunday and renewed my membership, which means that, tentatively, i will be going to the FSM for real on the 6th of february, but i haven’t ruled out the 30th of january yet, or whenever the weather is nice enough to vend without getting too wet and miserable. i’ve made some minor changes in the way i present myself at the FSM, which, i’m hoping, will mean that i will actually make more money than i have in the past, because, now, people walking by will be able to come in and browse the products without having to ask me for a price for everything they pick up… or, conversely, they will be able to browse the product and not walk away so quickly because nothing has prices on it… i’m really excited to go to the FSM and try this out, but i’m also aware of the fact that, if i don’t grok the weather correctly, i will probably have to set up, tear down, or both, in the pouring rain, which would very definitely not be good for my product or my disposition…

also…

i had some maintenance to do on my flickr account, and when i logged out, i was delivered to the front page of Yahoo!

i don’t know for sure that they’re tracking what kind of news stories i read, especially when i’m not logged in, but i think that, when i’m not logged in, they don’t really care – plus i’m paranoid enough that i register every cookie from every web site i visit, and i know for a fact that i don’t have a tracking cookie from yahoo or any of its affiliates…

which makes my experience all the more telling. with all the furor and hoopla that’s going on in the world, the FIRST link that showed up at yahoo was about increased speculation that barack obama dyes his hair… ๐Ÿ˜

i guess that’s a drawback of being enlightened: you see where people really need to be taught, and those are the exactly the same times you are effectively prevented from teaching. as uncle al said, it is no good trying to teach people who need to be taught.

Skidoo!

THE BOOK OF LIES is a very profound book, and one that contains a fair amount more Truth than the name would imply. today i’ve been taken by Skidoo!, chapter 23. the fact that it is actually chapter 23 (2+3=5) does not escape me, although which came first is quite obvious (the book of lies was first published in 1913, and the principia discordia wasn’t published until the late ’50s or early ’60s). but it’s crowley’s roundabout, poetic way of stating the plain and obvious which makes it so infuriating and intriguing. if he’d just said “The Way out is THE WAY” and given concrete examples of exactly how “The Way out is THE WAY” i probably would have gotten it when i first read the book, in the late ’70s. as it is, i am still pulling threads of wisdom out of it today, and i’m not sure that i’ll ever figure out exactly what he was talking about.

i guess i’ll take this as a compliment…

i have posted a number of aleister crowley’s writings on the net, including The Book of Lies, which has been more or less in the same place at least since 090520. my recollection is that it was at a similar location prior to that, and i originally posted it around 1998 or thereabouts.

i was poking around on the web this afternoon, when i found a complete copy of the book of lies down to the "publisher’s imprint" on the title page, and the META reply-to tags with MY email address in it on every page, at Biblioteca Pleyades – which, to it’s credit, makes the claim that “Everything on this Site has been obtained on the Internet… Nothing herein has been produced by us.

also, my understanding is that the book of lies is one of those books on which the O.T.O. is not, currently, actively pursuing legal complaints when people post it online, but… they COPIED my HTML without even ASKING… ๐Ÿ˜

i guess i should remember uncle al’s own words, ΚΕΦΑΛΗ ΠΗ

bleh-ckup

BLEH!

now that’s out of the way…

i renewed my membership in the fremont sunday market this morning. the probability is high that i will be going to the FSM the first sunday of next month, but there’s nothing firmed up yet.

i did my business taxes today, and for the 10th year in a row, i have not had to pay any business taxes, which may seem like it’s a good thing until you realise that my business has been essentially failing ever since it started. at the same time, i made $1,200 in 2010, compared to $1,000 in 2009, and even though i had fewer sales, the total amount is approximately equal to my 2008 income, so at least i’ve been failing consistently well.

the second puppy potluck was last night. moe’s co-worker, a guy called flash, got his car well and truly stuck in the mud on the other side of our driveway and we had to call a tow truck to winch him out. fortunately, someone gave moe a membership in AAA for xmas, so instead of pissing everybody off and being a royal waste of time, we all joked and laughed about flash’s typical muddy exploits while we waited for the (free) tow-truck winch expert who removed flash and his car from our driveway without any problems. after the potluck, moe and i went bowling with the rest of her coworkers – flash showed up late, because he was stuck in the mud. ๐Ÿ˜‰ because of the fact that i was intensely stiff and sore, i didn’t do any bowling, but i made up for it by devouring their catered dinner because doc C. was paying for it… ๐Ÿ˜‰

i was stiff and sore because i spent friday doing something that i have been talking about for a couple of months, which was clearing the unwanted bric-a-brac out of the loft of the workshop. i started by carrying ⅘ of the stuff that was in the loft out of the loft, sorting through most of it, and then returning the remainder to the loft – which means about 50 trips up and down the ladder with heavy, bulky stuff. i now have a pile of freecycle and/or craigslist stuff (the DVDs are just the tip of the iceberg), and a bunch of stuff that’s either going in the trash or directly to the dump. i’ve also got enough space for a person to comfortably sleep in the loft, now. ๐Ÿ™‚ i’m getting really impatient with the DVDs, however, and i may take them to seattle tomorrow and see what i can get for them at that used movie place on the corner of first and stewart.

but i’m still feeling the effects of over-exerting myself

another week closer to the eschatonโ€ฆ

Future Shock? Welcome to the New Middle Ages – those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. the middle ages were also characterised by illiteracy, the catholic church and the plague… just sayin’…

THE RICH REALLY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE POOR – speaking as one of the poor, tell us something we don’t already know… ๐Ÿ˜

WikiLeaks’ Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us – and, if they have their way, the government is all set to make it so that we never find out how much they lie to us. minitrue in action.

also, CIA Doesnโ€™t Want You To Know It Gave Iran Nuclear Blueprints – oops… ๐Ÿ˜

US government getting more interested in IPv6 – they’d better be more than just interested in it, considering that all remaining allocatable IPv4 addresses would now fit into a /6 prefix (≘ 67,108,864 addresses).

Microsoft confirms code execution bug in Windows – BWAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH! ๐Ÿ˜€ it’s just like i said… another good reason not to use micro$awft products…

and, speaking of “another good reason”… Hepatitis A warning issued after Christmas communion – if you took communion on xmas, and you live in long island, they’re saying that you need to get vaccinated… the blood of christ is infected!

Miami-Dade police buy drones – they work so well in afghanistan and iraq that now they’re being used by domestic police forces as well. presumably they won’t be firing missiles with them, just yet… “At this point, it doesn’t really matter if you’re against this technology, because it’s coming…”

meanwhile, Passengers overpower plane hijacker after he storms cockpit shouting he had bomb – no department of homeland security necessary.

The Next Net – abandon the corporate internet!

va fan culoSupreme Court justice: No protection for women in Constitution – reagan-appointed justice scalia wants to force us to live one hundred fifty years in the past. “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.” — Susan B. Anthony

Scientists Create 52 Artificial Rain Storms in Abu Dhabi Desert and Have scientists discovered how to create downpours in the desert? – my impression is the more we tinker with the inner workings of how the planet really works, the more likely it is that we will have to deal with the unexpected, and potentially disasterous consequenses of our tinkering… of course, on the positive side, once we have blown ourselves up, it won’t be more than 100 years or so until the planet is back to the way it’s supposed to be, more or less.

uh oh… Disaster Tax Rules Don’t Apply For BP Oil Spill Claims – so, in spite of the FACT that the gulf oil spill is the largest oil spill ever to have happened, if you live in the gulf region, have had your income affected by the gulf oil spill, and made claims against BP for lost wages or income, you will still have to pay income tax at the highest rate because BP claims that their oil spill was never officially proclaimed a “disaster”… i bet some people are going to be really thrilled to learn that…

Congressional Prayer Caucus asks for โ€˜correctionโ€™ to โ€˜E pluribus unumโ€™ – federal endorsement of a religion or deity violates the united states constitution.

All drugs should be legalised – now, let’s see if we can be as forward thinking as they appear to be in the old country, eh’? it would eliminate things like Grandpa killed in drug raid from happening.

Commuter outrage as terrorist attempts to blow himself up on Quiet Carriage – there is definitely something insane with a society that can make jokes about people blowing themselves up…

Florida Professor Arrested for Having a “Suspicious” Bagel on a Plane, Man at JFK declares rabbit, Customs says it found cocaine, Planet That May Not Exist is For Sale on Ebay, in 10 Acre Chunks, Woman Arrested After Trying To Return Wallet, Saudis detain Israeli vulture for being โ€˜Zionist spyโ€™ – why do i bother? ๐Ÿ˜

pupples

so i was sitting at my computer terminal today and i heard this sound that sounded like puppies growling, so i got up and grabbed the camera and went to make sure they weren’t ripping each other to pieces, or something like that…

this is what i discovered:

pupples pupples pupples

of course, after five minutes or so they were all asleep again… 8)

paddy

she came home from the hospital yesterday, but it seems like she’s worse than she went in. she can’t walk or stand, she’s so dizzy that, when she’s agitated, she rolls (torticollis), and she’s agitated pretty much all the time, although she’s been a lot calmer since about 5:30 this morning… she’s eating and drinking, but… ๐Ÿ™

paddy

she started having seizures this afternoon, or what moe is calling “old dog vestibular syndrome“, or some combination of the two. moe is at the vets and/or hospitalising paddy overnight, depending on what are the vet’s recommendations.

ETA: paddy is in the hospital overnight. it doesn’t sound particularly encouraging.

i have had about as much of animals as i can take for a while… ๐Ÿ™

wump

i look unusuali look unusual.

when i was growing up, my parents took offense at the fact that i wanted to look unusual, and they tried very hard to get me to look more like i “fit in”. because of the fact that they were my parents, and i had very little control over the things they were requiring me to do, i complied. also, i am very much aware of how negatively “looking unusual” was portrayed by my parents, in an attempt to dissuade me from looking unusual. they always said that if i looked unusual, people would not want to hang around with me and it would affect the “opportunities” i would be presented.

the way i looked at it then, and the way i continue to look at it (because i still cannot see why there should be any other way of looking at it), is that if the fact that i look unusual means that people will be more hesitant to hang around with me, then i probably wouldn’t be that interested in hanging around with those people to begin with. it’s better that people who wouldn’t hang around with me for superficial reasons be repelled from me to begin with, because if they were not, I would be repelled by them when something superficial came up in which they weren’t interested. if people are going to be repelled by my unusual appearance, then if i looked more like everyone else, i would be forced to associate with people from whom I want to get away. only people who are willing to look beyond appearance get to know who i really am. everyone else just thinks i’m a freak, and that’s the way i like it.

i am especially that way when it comes to “work”. at this point i don’t have a “job” in the traditional sense, but if i had to wear a uniform, or dress a certain way every day in order to “fit in” and make a living among people i didn’t get along with, i would go mad very, very quickly. i’ve barely been able to get by in “corporate” jobs in the past, even under the best of circumstances. i’ve only had one job from which i was not fired, and i’ve only had one job that has lasted longer than two years in my entire life. in a lot of ways i feel like i wasn’t cut out for what “normal” people do every day, and my experience with “jobs” pretty much reflects that.

puppy watch & catnip bliss

lucylucy’s due date is tuesday, so i’m on puppy-watch. i know that the due date is just an approximation, and that they could come any time between now and two or three weeks hence, but i’m hoping that it will be sooner than later, and i imagine lucy is as well.

charlie on drugsi bought the cats some fresh catnip today. they haven’t had any for a while, and have been having to fall back on the aerosol “catnip” spray, which has been running very low for quite a while. i’ve always wished there was a drug that all i had to do was be around it, that would do the same thing to me that catnip does to cats.

OY!!! 8P

after i logged off last night, our most senior dog – paddy, the one who scared me so badly a few months ago – who, despite the fact that she’s been in pretty good health for the most part, suddenly had a grand mal seizure last night. it wasn’t entirely unexpected (moe said she commented to one of the vets just the other day about the possibility), but once again it scared the holy hell out of me…

once again, i hope i don’t have another day like yesterday for a long, long time. never would be a totally acceptible option.

today was the second day of shows for the panto. today, we didn’t have a drummer. for the first show, he didn’t call or anything, and just didn’t show up. he’s put up posters and passed out flyers with the show times printed on them, and the show times are also available on the web site, and he’s always been late for, or entirely missed rehearsals, and we’ve had to wait to start the show because nobody knew where he was at least twice, so when he finally showed up, about ten minutes before the end of the show, it was the last straw, and kiki fired him… she said that it was the first time she had fired anybody, and as far as i know, it was the first time anyone has been fired from the fremont philharmonic, but he had it coming… you don’t schedule yourself for a show with “professional” musicians (is there such a thing? i still don’t really know for sure) and then just not show up for a performance without at least calling ahead of time (like i did for the show at the gage, yesterday)…

i’m about ready for the holidays to be over, and today’s only the 5th… 8P

beer good…

so lucy is pregnant again and we’re expecting puppies in the next few weeks. i bought a roll of linoleum for the floor, and most of the materials to make a whelping box. i didn’t get the materials to make a pig rail for it because i want to wait until we have a box that’s the right size.

the panto starts on saturday, at 4 and 7. in between, i’m playing with snake suspenderz at the gage for about half an hour.

i’d post more, but nablopomo has left me a little drained…

another week closer to the eschatonโ€ฆ

Spanish woman claims ownership of the sun – just wait until she gets sued for sunburn…

evil googleAnti Sarah Palin Post Gets Google Censorshipdon’t! be! evil!!

FCC may forgo โ€˜Net Neutralityโ€™ for wireless networks – say goodbye to the internet…

Homeland Security Seizes 70+ Websites for Copyright and Trademark Violations and Homeland Security shuts down dozens of Web sites without court order – due process be damned, after net-neutrality fails, you’d better believe that they’re going to start cracking down on anyone who has a web site with which “they” do not agree, regardless of whether it contains illegal material or not… and of course nobody cares, because net-neutrality is something of which most people aren’t even aware.

Bioencryption can store almost a million gigabytes of data inside bacteria – “a single gram of E. coli cells could hold up to 900,000 gigabytes (or 900 terabytes) of data, meaning these bacteria have almost 500 times the storage capacity of a top of the line commercial hard drive.”

Minn. Pol With Gun Outside Abortion Clinic Says He Was Just In Area ‘Checking On’ His Girlfriend – this is how one married, republican politician justifies potentially unlawful behaviour: it’s all a “misunderstanding”, he was just “trying to check up on her”… with a loaded gun… of course if he had been a democrat, or an ordinary citizen, he would have been put in jail, and there would have been no story…

Drug tunnel uncovered at San Diego-Tijuana border, officials say; nearly 20 tons of marijuana seized – if they had passed Proposition 19, they wouldn’t have to worry about it, but because they didn’t, the federal government now has to make a big deal out of it, and waste the taxpayers’ money to rid themselves of something that would have been useless otherwise.

Willie Nelson charged with pot possession in Texas – give willie a break: he’s a celebrity, he’s already got massive problems with the government, and he’s an old man, for god’s sake! ๐Ÿ˜

Civil Unions for Illinois? – civil union ≠ polygamy, regardless of how much you say it does…

FoxNation.com Reposts Anti-Obama Article From The Onion, Doesnโ€™t Mention Itโ€™s A Joke – it’s things like this that are one of the principle reasons why the terrorists have won the war on terrorism.

this is why people treat torture as though it was “no big thing”… – Torture memo author compared waterboarding to speeding – dude, where’s my country? ๐Ÿ˜

Clueless Patsy Set-up by FBI in Christmas Tree Bombing Plot and FBI stopped Portland bomb suspect from taking job before sting – the FBI has been up to their old shennanigans again: finding a mentally disturbed 19-year-old kid, preventing him from getting gainful employment, building him up to believe that he’s serving a greater purpose, convincing him that he’s building a bomb (complete with a real test explosion in a remote area), and then arresting him and claiming that they’ve caught another “terrorist”. if they actually had a terrorist, my guess is that nobody would recognise him… ๐Ÿ˜

Rep. Kucinich slams fake Afghan elections, fake withdrawal, fake Taliban – i still say he would have made a much better president than the democretin that won…

and, while we’re on the subject of the fake taliban, The ‘Fake Taliban’ Is A Real Embarassment To NATO – “It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.” also Afghan "peace talks" impostor paid by MI6

Woman: TSA Agents Singled Me Out For My Breasts – i wonder how much longer this is going to go on before someone decides to do something violent?

TSA Glass Box Mother Over Stored Breast Milk – she’s a mother, and pumps breastmilk for her infant. she doesn’t have a problem, until one day she’s held up because the TSA doesn’t know their own rules, so she files a complaint. the next time she travels, the TSA is waiting for her and makes up rules to prevent her from making her flight. the reason they get away with it…?

Why the TSA pat-downs and body scans are unconstitutional – ๐Ÿ˜

and then the TSA touches their balls... like this...TSA Worker Accused Of Assault Had Prior Record and TSA Groin Searches Menstruating Woman and TSA Tactics Find Ominous Parallel in Nazi Germany and Children Being Trained That Being Taken From Parents & Molested Is Normal – whatever happened, opt-out day apparently didn’t have any effect, and things are continuing to get worse at a surprising pace…

Are Air Travelers Criminal Suspects? – federal agents should be subject to the same laws as ordinary citizens. why aren’t they?

TSA Administrative Directive: Opt-Outters To Be Considered "Domestic Extremists" – we’re teetering ever closer to the edge of an abyss…

meanwhile, Child Finds Loaded Gun Magazine On Flight – oh yeah… the terrorists have definitely won… ๐Ÿ˜

"Barefoot bandit" suspect pleads innocent – go colton!

another week closer to the eschaton…

in honour of the “holiday” Cambodians beaten, raped and killed at illegal detention camp funded by UN – trick or treat for UNICEF…

A Helpful Venn Diagram by Dave MakesArkansas school board member to resign over anti-gay post – the problem with this guy, and all of the “christians” out there like him, is that the only reason he’s sorry now is because he got caught. if he hadn’t posted those comments on facebook, maybe expressed them privately, but for the most part kept them to himself, then he would continue to be a member of the arkansas school board, and nobody would be wise to his warped sensibilities. the “problems” caused by minorities of any kind are going to be solved only when these hateful, and unfortunately quite large portions of the population are eliminated, either through re-education or attrition.

Furious growth and cost cutting led to BP oil spills, past and present and Panel Says Firms Knew of Cement Flaws Before Spill – if you thought it was over, think again…

Fresh blockades as a quarter of France’s petrol stations still drya couple of weeks ago i posted a link to an article which said that there is no “plan b” to fall back on, in case “plan a” (which appears to be something along the lines of “ignore it and maybe it will go away”) fails. this is exactly the kind of chaos that you can expect to see more of, as time goes on, and oil becomes more and more scarce. here are some examples of how things are falling apart faster than we can fix them:

The scary actual U.S. government debt – “Let’s get real, the United States is bankrupt.”

What It’s Like to Work in Walmart – an underemployed teacher gets a job at walmart, hillarity ensues. beware: this could will probably happen to you.

Oops: Pentagon loses contact with nukes in Wyoming – it’s all right, folks, nothing to see here… move along.

Google finally admits that its Street View cars DID take emails and passwords from computersDON’T. BE. EVIL! ๐Ÿ˜›

Group offers $10,000 to anyone who can disprove the claim that โ€˜cannabis is safer than alcoholโ€™ – they’re confident that the $10,000 will remain unclaimed, and i don’t doubt they’re right, but i doubt that it’s going to make that much of a difference when it comes to legalisation. most people are pretty stupid, and that includes the people in charge… ๐Ÿ˜

meanwhile: Study: Alcohol more lethal than heroin, cocaine – overall, alcohol outranked all other substances… cannabis, ecstasy and LSD scored far lower… BIG surprise, especially considering that the alcohol lobby has been pouring money into the campains against the legalisation of cannabis…

Sex researchers: "Size" does matter – year-long study from turkey concludes that men with a higher body mass index last longer in bed. mcdonald’s advertising to follow soon.

I Can’t Find My Phone – finally, a web site that’s actually good for something!

John Cage still being cheated out of royalties for his silent work

another enjoyable evening at chumleighland

101030 monster mash posterso ¾ of Snake Suspenderz went out to Cholmondleigh-land (his actual site is here, but he’s got some sort of infernal device on his site that keeps crashing my new version of firefox – konqueror does okay, however, which makes me wonder what is really the problem). all in all, a quite enjoyable evening, although the hippie ineptitude factor seemed to be working overtime: we were consistently running late, and it wasn’t until 10:00 or so that we managed to get the live show over and start on the films. i managed to be able to break moe away from her homework and brought her along as well, which made the evening all the more enjoyable. we were joined on stage by the inimitable master payne and, of course, the reverend himself, although he didn’t “ascend a stairway of machetes, barefoot” because somebody ripped off all his machetes, so instead he walked a pathway of broken glass, barefoot. since the last time i was there, he has actually finished the rail-pup (a self-propelled closed-circut railway) which was even more fun in the dark – you’d be barreling along blindly, cranking to beat the band, and the track would suddenly curve and you’d be riding on two wheels trying not to fall over… not like the last time i was there, when the track wasn’t finished yet, and if you didn’t watch where you were going, you’d plunge off the end of the track into the undergrowth…

chumleigh and i have been doing what we do, more or less, for 35 years or so: in 1978 i was playing with a dixieland band, and we were playing for the last official “Fat Tuesday” celebration in seattle. unbeknownst to us (at the time), there had been a major riot in pioneer square the night before, so there were mounted police in riot gear everywhere, and most everyone else was sticking to the edges of pioneer square, and acting very dodgy, and here we were, this small band of incredibly young musicians playing happy music in the square, very surreal. then this guy came up to us and introduced himself as reverend chumleigh, and wondered if we had a job or worked anywhere, and offered us a job playing at the alligator palace in la conner. i was the only person that had graduated from high school at the time, but i didn’t know where la conner was, and ended up in bellingham. i didn’t actually meet him again until much, much later, in 2008. in the mean time, i worked as a fish packer, a migrant farm worker, a typesetter, spent two years in a tech school, and then worked as a musical instrument repair technician, as a typesetter (again) and as a computer geek before i had a brain injury and realised that what i really wanted to be doing all along was music, whereas chumleigh was playing with the flying karamazov brothers, being involved with the beginnings of the oregon country fair, and building a reputation as one of the biggest names in vaudeville…

definitely makes me wonder what would have happened to me if i had known where la conner was, back in ’78…

ETA: in poking around, looking for links to the alligator palace, i found this article from Frog Hospital, about fishtown, a place that i visited in the early 1980s, and another article, about robert sund, whose cabin i stayed in the first time i visited fishtown… which, while it doesn’t have much about chumleigh, brings back a whole bunch of memories…

another week closer to the eschaton…

Future Chaos: There Is No “Plan B” – sooo… have fun while you can, i guess, ’cause if plan A fails, there’s going to be a whole hell of a lot of chaos, almost immediately, and there’s nothing you as an individual, and not much you as a group of well armed and well prepared people can do about it… ๐Ÿ˜

norman foster and the dymaxion carIt’s the 1930s car that was meant to change American lives. And now the Dymaxion’s back. – one of my lifelong dreams has been to own and/or drive a dymaxion car. maybe someone will be able to pull it off this time. ๐Ÿ™‚

Tooth Regeneration Gel Could Replace Painful Fillings – Could this new gel be the biggest dental breakthrough since the introduction of fluoride?

Squishable, Breathing Smart Phones – for high paid geeks with way too much time on their hands.

David Harmer GOP Tea Party congressional nominee from California says โ€˜Abolishโ€™ public schools and California shooter says he saw Glenn Beck as โ€˜schoolteacher’ and Republicansโ€™ โ€˜scaryโ€™ immigrant photo depicts Mexicans in Mexico, photographer reveals – we’re still losing to these morons?!?

and this is for those who think that the budget crisis that we’re currently in the middle of is the fault of the democrats: Democrats shrank US spending, deficit in last fiscal year, figures show – and we’re still losing to these morons?!? ๐Ÿ˜ admittedly the democrats are nothing to write home about, but they’re not the source of the current problems, and i really wish the republicans would remember that when they put all these ads on TV about how evil the democrats have been recently: we’re still recovering from the bush years, which were principally republican, and we will be for quite a while yet, so just cool it.

Multnomah County stops prosecuting dozens of illegal acts as crimes or Oregon county decriminalizes heroin, meth, cocaine and shoplifting, among others – but the federal government is going to continue to prosecute drug crimes anyway, even if states legalise or decriminalise them, so there’s really not an awful lot of news here.

Holder: US will enforce marijuana laws despite how Californians may vote – this is the reason why the only way we’re ever going to make any kind of substantial change in the “war on drugs” is to legalise them at the federal level…

according to a new RAND study, either Legalizing pot wonโ€™t hinder Mexican cartels or Marijuana Legalization Would Markedly Cut Mexican Drug Cartel Profits… you decide which is really the truth… ๐Ÿ˜ here’s the Marijuana Policy Project’s spin on it – What Exactly Did that RAND Study Say About Cartels and Marijuana?

Tracking devices used in school badges – big brother waches over your kids, too, whether they’re at school or not.

Microsoft’s search engine will mine Facebook data – another reason not to use either microsoft or facebook. i have placed a directive in my robots.txt file that specifically denies microsoft’s search engines from indexing my site (while allowing everyone else), and i don’t use facebook… but my wife does…

Facebook is ‘killing privacy for commercial gain’ – a law against facebook… now there’s an idea… ๐Ÿ™‚

Can a Person Be Moral without Being a Christian? – hint: his answer is no. “[I]f God is not your god, you will serve Buddha. Or, if not Buddha, perhaps Allah. Or, if not Allah, perhaps Baal. Or, if not Baal, perhaps Confucius.” let’s see: buddhism, confucianism and islam are recognised, but i don’t know of any modern baal-worshippers, except for jews, and, by extension, “christians”, who worship בעל (ba’al, or “lord”)… and he apparently doesn’t recognise hindus, or jaina, or taoists… maybe i shouldn’t expect so much. i keep this guy in my regular news feed primarly because he is so absurd. he gets more absurd with every new post. maybe he’ll follow the pingback to my site and learn how truly absurd i find his views. maybe not. who knows…

Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are Related – isn’t internet wonderful?

NSFW – the National Schools Film Week, you pervert… ๐Ÿ™‚ now if it was NSFW it wouldn’t be so bad…

Dame Joan Sutherland

Soprano Dame Joan Sutherland has died, age 83

i was in an opera with Dame Sutherland when i was 18 or so. i believe it was bizet’s Carmen in which i was a supernumerary. i remember, one time, just before a performance, i couldn’t find my dresser (even the supernumeraries had individual dressers, because the costumes were so complicated), so i went to find her, dressed only in a pair of tights, and ran into Dame Sutherland in the hallway, who commented that she liked my costume, and wished that there were more of them in opera…

little did i know at the time that i would end up being the tuba player for a pit band at a burlesque theatre…

lucy

moe’s latest dog, lucy, is an outstanding shepherd dog (she’s a border collie), and moe wants to breed her. lucy is in heat, and according to moe’s tests, she’ll be ovulating within the next three days or so, so she is leaving tomorrow to go to the ranch where the dog lucy is being bred to lives… she’s transporting adolescents across state lines for immoral purposes… wonderful… ๐Ÿ˜‰

another week closer to the eschaton…

Think US politics are absurd? Brazilians elect actual clown to Congress – brazil has its collective shit together in more than two ways that i’ve noticed recently… maybe american politicians should be paying more attention to the brazilians…

60% of countries will be bankrupt within 50 years – the only hopeful thing about the future is that i will very likely die before that happens.

Drug cops smash into wrong house, terrorize elderly couple and Pot raid at school turns up tomatoes – if it were legal, they could be spending their time going after real criminals instead of hassling immigrant grandparents, and kids about their tomatoes… ๐Ÿ˜

Why Comcast can (but probably won’t) read your e-mails, IMs – every now and then i need to remind myself why i am NOT a comcast customer. this will do for a couple of years, until something else awful and terrifying is revealed about their policies…

GPS directs driver to death in Spain’s largest reservoir or Un hombre fallece tras hundirse su coche en la presa de La Serena – i, for one, welcome our new, robot overlords… or not…

Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back and Student finds tracking device on his car; FBI demands it back – what…?

Hello, this is your ISP. You have been disconnected from internet. Have a nice day. – if micro$awft gets its way, this could happen to you if you get any kind of malware or virus. more reason to use linux, of course, but why would anyone think this is a good idea to begin with is a little mystifying.

Android phone auto reverts jailbreaks – i agree, that people who are required to pay for a piece of hardware to make their lives easier, should be able to use that piece of hardware for whatever they choose. the company from which you buy a cell phone does not retain an “interest” in the hardware, once you buy it… much as i like the approach taken by the makers of the android cell phone, i don’t think they should be able to arbitarily “take back” a phone that has been modified.

Woman screamed about God while destroying art and California Stem Cell Agency Rewards Blasphemy While Admitting the Humanity of Embryos Slated for Destruction – yep, people are still concerned about what other people do being “blasphemy”. in one case, a woman broke into a protective plexiglass housing and destroyed a piece of art, and in the other, people, for whom it did not make any difference, were “forced” to comply with the wishes of the people who were crying “blasphemy” and take down an otherwise inoffensive piece of art. i wrote to the contact person for CIRM (i encourage you to write to him as well) and sent him this:

i am not offended by any language, but because of the fact that you have seen fit to remove the poems in honour of stem cell awareness day, i can no longer see them, and that offends me.

No-one has the right not to be offended.
     — John Cleese

A truly great library contains something within it to offend everyone.
     — Jo Godwin

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
     — Salman Rushdie

Being offended is a natural consequence of leaving the house.
     — Fran Lebowitz

The most efficacious method of dealing with deviancy is to ignore, to the furthest point of our tolerance, those items which we find offensive.
     — Ilbert Geis

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
     — Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet), 1694-1778

by the way, if you’re interested, the poems that were too “blasphemous” to post on CIRMs web site, can be seen here. USAToday is good for something after all.

Insane Clown Posse is actually a Christian band, and nobody knew – i knew there was a fundamental reason why i didn’t like them apart from their encouragement of drunken violence…

another week closer to the eschaton…

Feds want backdoors built into VoIP and email US Would Make Internet Wiretaps Easier – yes, the united states government wants to listen in on your phone calls, and analyse your email messages, because you might be a terrorist. forget about innocent until proven guilty, forget about warrants, if these people don’t get what they want, heads will roll… and they might just roll anyway.

Web’s creator slams โ€˜blightโ€™ of web disconnection laws – tim berniers-lee has a point, and we should listen to him…

2 out of 3 Android apps use private data ‘suspiciously’ – DON’T. BE. EVIL! ๐Ÿ˜

Red Hat says end software patents – the supreme court heard the Bilski case earlier this year, and it ruled that the patentability of intangible products should be reduced. red hat takes it one step further, and says that the patentability of intangible products should be eliminated entirely, turning the entire software industry on its ear. it’s a great idea, but it’ll never work out in practice, because people are still too greedy.

Downloads are not performances – despite the fact that i belong to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), i actually think this has the potential of being a good thing. whaddaya know?

Microsoft surrenders Live Spaces future to WordPress – part of me wants to laugh at the people who signed up for the micro$awft me-too web 2.0 hype, but part of me wonders if wp is really the best choice, if micro$awft chose it to replace their hype… ๐Ÿ˜›

Authorities Plan To Trawl Phone Calls And E Mails For Signs Of โ€œResentment Toward Governmentโ€ – my guess is that they won’t have to go far, especially since my resentment towards government is plainly evident, and has been for quite a number of years… ๐Ÿ˜

US Is ‘Practically Owned’ by China – don’t get too comfortable, the new bosses will be arriving soon…

The Proof Is In The Numbers: America Is Getting Poorer – where’s that hope-y, change-y stuff that they were talking about? it’s about time for that stuff to start kicking in, isn’t it?

Attempts to Ban Fake Marijuana Are Further Proof of Prohibition’s Failure – more flap about K2 and the valiant, but ultimately futile attemps to ban it. all the more reason to legalise cannabis. especially when the creator of the substance that makes K2 popular says this about attempts to ban his substance: “It’s not going to be effective, is the ban on marijuana effective?”

Key ingredient staves off marijuana memory loss – now that we’ve lightened up (a little bit), we’re discovering that cannabis really is good for something. The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition – legalizing drugs would save roughly $41,300,000,000 ($41.3 billion) per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition, and produce roughly $46,700,000,000 ($46.7 billion) annually in tax revenue. and we’re still fighting a “war” that we can’t win?

Barefaced cheek on Google Street View – ireland welcomes the google street view cameras with characteristic abandon.

Boss Hogs Bacon Chocolate Sueyts – yum… ๐Ÿ™‚

Happy International Blasphemy Day

happy international blasphemy day! blasphemy is “impious utterance or action concerning god or sacred things” or “irreverence toward holy personages, religious artifacts, customs, and beliefs.” it comes from greek words βλάπτω which means to “hurt” or “injure” and φήμη which means “fame” or “report”. essentially, “blasphemy” is something that we can do that causes a “bad report” for God.

if that “god” is not unchanging, limitless and eternal, that “god” is not a God at all, and we have no need to worry about creating a “bad report” for him.

if, on the other hand, that God is unchanging, limitless and eternal, then nothing that we, as human beings, can do will ever affect that God, and His love (or whatever you may call it) for us will never be affected by anything that we can do, regardless of how “blasphemous” it may seem to be.

therefore, it is my opinion that “blasphemy” means “something that can get you in trouble with another human being”, and it is, therefore, more-or-less meaningless except when used as a way to keep people under control, and then only when the people are scared enough to believe it is actually possible for “god” to do bad things to them.

i am not that scared.

for “christians”:nude, blue-eyed jeezisfor “muslims”:mohammed with a bombfor “jews”:Ganesha Yantra on the roof of Ganesha The Car

for buddhists…? hindus…? anyone else even have the concept of blasphemy?

[previous]

final scores for the NADAC national championships

email from moe: “We missed 3rd place by 0.76 of 1 point. Total scores were between 680-700 after 8 rounds… and it came down to less than 1 point. That’s a competetive 8″ class”

so, zora is almost the third fastest dog in north america and canada: less than 1 point separate her from the third place winner… ๐Ÿ™‚

my guess is that there will be additional information on moe’s blog eventually.

another week closer to the eschaton…

The City That Ended HungerBuckminster Fuller said that we, as a people, have posessed the technology for 50 years (and he said this almost 50 years ago) to create a world where nobody has to work to survive. Why Bother Working At A Job You Hate? and The RICH Economy are my attempts at changing the world’s consciousness, but it may be that Belo Horizonte, brazil’s fourth largest city, has taken it one step further. brazil has a number of other interesting features upon which i have commented previously.

meanwhile, back in hell america, Building sand castles on Floridaโ€™s beaches is illegal – this is how BP is hoping to make you think that the oil spill is gone.

What the TSA isn’t saying about Full Body Scanners and Your Right to Opt Out – Say “I Opt Out.” Every Time. – has an interesting URI – Don’tScan.Us – and is there to remind everyone that, when travelling by air, you have the right to say “I OPT OUT” when confronted with a TSA request to what amounts to a strip search. also Portable, rapid DNA analysis tech developed – Big Brother doesn’t care whether or not you have fingerprints, and is interested in your DNA instead… more orwellian doublethink: Welfare is Employment Rights are Privileges War is Peace Illness is Health Collapse Is Recovery

Judge orders lesbian reinstated to Air Force and yet the congress in it’s infinite wisdom has decided that, even though a judge also ruled that DADT is unconstitutional, they’re not going to do anything to change it at this time. correct me if i’m wrong, but the judge that said that DADT is unconstitutional basically said that it’s against the law for the military to enforce the law as it currently stands, and still, congress feels that it’s okay to leave the law as it stands, right? that settles it, our government, and likely the governments of the countries in the rest of the world as well (since they all cooperate with each other, more or less) is irreparably broken. it’s time for that major shift in the way people think that i’ve mentioned before to actually start happening now…

and, by the way, now there’s Irrefutable Proof the Bush Tax Cuts Were a Miserable Failure – and we’re still losing to these morons…

despite the fact that Yes on Prop 19 Holds Steady Lead, 47%-42%, in Latest SurveyUSA Poll, this is what supporters of prop 19 are up against: Ex-Drug Czar Bill Bennett: Showtimeโ€™s โ€œWeedsโ€ is โ€œDamaging,โ€ Jonas Brothers Should Fight Prop 19 – regardless of whether prop 19 passes or not, however, Federal judge rules Colorado’s medical marijuana law is no defense for US drug charges. california can legalise all it wants, but until the federal government changes its mind, people will still end up going to jail for smoking a joint. and, while we’re at it, T-Mobile Claims Right to Censor Text Messages – big brother just got a little bigger and a little less like your brother.

along the same lines, according to Chapter 69.51A RCW on Medical "marijuana" (which is actually called “cannabis”, but i’m not arguing at this point), apparently i wouldn’t qualify anyway… oh well… 8/

Twitter blames website upgrade for re-introducing XSS holehopefully, the last word on my battle with twitter and their most recent cross-site scripting bug… which is still gone on my machine, but presumably that’s because i deleted my account before this latest round happened, and when they re-introduced it, i didn’t have an account to infect any longer…

twitter… ๐Ÿ˜ feh.

Trojan poses as skeleton key jailbreak utility – but it only works on iPhones… wait, what? 8) heh heh heh… i am so glad i’m not a mac-head any longer…

GoDaddy.com Goes on the Auction Block – recently i read a couple of articles detailing how a whole bunch (<200) of wordpress blogs hosted by godaddy got hacked. i don’t know whether selling godaddy will make things better or worse, but it’s one of the reasons why i don’t use godaddy to begin with.

IE captain flees Microsoft for Google – when i was first getting into testing software, back in 1996, i attended a planning meeting in advance of the release of IE3 (which was still crawling with bugs, in spite of bill gates’ claim that micro$not released “bug free” software), and chris wilson was there, although he wasn’t as “important” then as he later became. however giving up micro$hit for google is sort of a lateral move for someone who is allegedly as “important” as he is… and, given that he is ultimately responsible for such travesties as IE4 and IE6, i would think that google would have second thoughts about hiring him…

How do you copy 60 million files? – yet another reason why linux rocks, and you should use it and not that crap operating system from redmond.

Nuclear Winter And Peace – look… another article by Fidel Castro… you might get the impression that he’s actually changed the way he thinks recently, and that i agree with him now…

pubic schools billboardOops! Billboard spelling error creates embarrassment

The true history of the Koran in America – reports of qur’ans in american libraries go back at least to 1683, and the first qur’an to be published in america was in 1806, over 100 years later. both thomas jefferson and john adams owned one and read it frequently… just sayin’…

Pope’s astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him – unfortunately, is not a joke… nor is this: Christian group declares jct 9 on M25 cursed, although it took me several readings to confirm that it was, in fact, totally serious… what?!?

Church of Body Modification – this has been the subject of a bunch of spam messages i have been receiving recently, but it’s a real thing, and it looks fairly interesting…

Fabrican – it gives the reference to “jeans so tight you must have sprayed them on” a whole new meaning…

more from wyoming

Rockit Doggie™ in the National Championship finals

Rockit Doggie™ in the National Championship finals

Rockit Doggie™ in the National Championship finals

they made it into the finals!!! ๐Ÿ˜€

i don’t know how accurate that clock is, or how it synchronises with the “official” clock, but moe said that the worst she can do at this point is the FOURTH FASTEST DOG IN THE COUNTRY, which is nothing to sneeze at. ๐Ÿ˜€

moe, pe(s)ts & other stuff

moe and zora the papillon have gone to wyoming for the national dog agility championships. they took lucy the psychotic border collie with them, and i’m holding down the fort with the two “old” dogs… and three cats, a snake and a bird. stanley the bird is chattering, and the dog who can hear (magick) is hiding under my desk, because that’s about as far away from stanley as she can get. the dog who can’t hear (paddy) is asleep behind me.

i hope moe does well at the championship. i asked her what sort of chance there was of zora winning some sort of prize, and she said that she’ll be happy if she qualifies for the finals. i don’t know what that means, but i still hope that zora wins some sort of prize… being the owner of a dog that is a national champion is about as close as i’m ever going to get to having that sort of fame myself…

i was entertained by the cats entertaining themselves with a squeeky catnip mouse. there is definitely going to have to be two or three more of those hanging around, because kitty chaos was definitely enjoyable to watch, although they gave up too quickly, because it very quickly developed to the point where one of them was hogging the mouse and wouldn’t let the others play.

i am no longer sick, but i am not completely well yet. i was about 95% yesterday, and i would say that it’s crept up to 96% or 97% today. my guess is that getting old means that i don’t recover as quickly from being sick, or that i notice the things that aren’t quite normal more than i did when i was younger, or – most likely – a combination of the two, but whatever it is, i find that after i’ve been sick, the period between my actual sickness and when i have recovered fully, really sucks: i want to do stuff, like grade and/or scrape the driveway, but it requires so much effort that i can’t do a practical amount of work before i’m completely exhausted and have to rest for a couple of hours before i can even think about doing more… plus my ears are alternately plugged up, or not, and my nose is alternately plugged up, or not – i burned a stick of incense on my desk, not more than an arm’s length away from my nose, and i couldn’t smell anything… and taking something like “day-quil” makes the symptoms go away, but it doesn’t make me able to smell, and it gives the world this kind of foggy semi-euphoria that interferes with my thinking…

another week closer to the eschaton…

Google guy "invaded teen users’ privacy" Google damages users’ brains – DON’T! BE! EVIL!

On the Advice of the FBI, Cartoonist Molly Norris Disappears From View – this is what happens when you take any religion to its logical conclusion.

Linus Torvalds outs himself as US citizen – gadzooks! i can’t wait to get out, and linus is on his way in… tell ya’ what, linus… i’ll trade you. Silence is the Death of Liberty is an example of why…

New 64-Bit Windows Rootkit Already ‘In The Wild’ – i’m tellin’ ya’… it’s pointless for micro$awft to create “new” operating systems, because they’re all based on former, defective, operating systems, and they’ve already got a built-in cadre of hackers who are already 98% of the way to breaking anything new that they come up with, before they release it. NOTICE TO MICKEY: the way to fix this is to use an entirely different approach, right from the very beginning – instead of basing your next 64-bit “super secure, can’t be hacked” OS on the same 8-bit kernel on which every other MS OS has been based, why not try something that no-one expects and build an entirely new kernel? what? you’re not creative enough to do that? oh, well forget it then…

Open source: a savvy bet, even in tough times – another way of putting it is that “free” is a very good way to keep me as a customer… Principia Mathematica Corporatica

Massive La. Fishkill Prompts Oil Spill Questions, Gulf Oil Refuses to Stay Hidden Underwater and In legal filings, BP says thousands of oil spill victims do not have right to sue – will it ever end? not during this decade…

Nation of Israel Buys @Israel Twitter Account From Miami Pornographer – bwaah hah hah hah hah! 8D

Purging Evil – society still has a very, very long way to go. my impression is that it will continue to be as bad as it is, if not worse, until there is a fundamental shift in the way we think and behave, and guys like cal thomas are preventing that fundamental shift from happening. yet another example (the web is full of them, there’s no counting how many stories like this there are) ‘Devil’ appears in bathroom tile – and, yes, both of these are serious. the people reporting the stories believe that they’re true, no matter how absurd they really are. more absurdity:
Scientists are creating โ€˜mice with human brainsโ€™ Montana Republican Party wants to make homosexuality a crime Mother Denies Heart Surgery For Infant, Cites Religion – these are not jokes.

another week closer to the eschaton…

i don’t use facebook for a large number of reasons. primary among these is that, despite the fact that a lot of my current friends are facebook members, there are certain people from my past that might want to get in touch with me, and i would prefer it a great deal if they did not know how to get in touch with me. not being a member of facebook is a good way to accomplish that. among the other reasons, in no particular order, are these: Facebook users ‘are insecure, narcissistic and have low self-esteem’, Understanding the latest Facebook privacy train wreck, Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook, More Reasons Why You Should Still Quit Facebook and Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook? i’m not going to rant about this, despite the fact that i could rant for quite some time about facebook, because whatever i say, people are going to do what people are going to do, and one of those things is to use facebook in spite of it’s obvious and blatant flaws.

reminder: THIS is the reason why i am no longer using LiveJournal for anything remotely blog-related. i know enough about how these things work to realise that there’s probably a lot going on that i don’t understand, and that i don’t know about, but there’s one distinct advantage to having a blog located on a server over which you have exclusive control, and that is that you don’t have perverts sysadmins stalking poking their noses in where they’re not supposed to be. if you’re looking for an alternative, i can host your domain and you can run your own version of wordpress there, and i promise i won’t comment on flocked entries. contact me for more details.

Death by iPod – this is directly related to last week’s link detailing people still falling for scams, despite the fact that they’ve been running essentially the same scams for at least ten years… society needs a collective brain upgrade. examples: Google squirrels into human brains with Scribe experiment and Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent

Windows malware dwarfs other viral threats – “The vast majority of malware – more than 99 per cent – targets Windows PCs”. another very good reason to use linux.

50 Mind Blowing Facts About America That Our Founding Fathers Never Would Have BelievedSheriffs want lists of patients using painkillers – for example…

Stuffed Pony Blown Up By Bomb Squad Suspicious ‘FurReal’ pony blown up near elementary school – it was a battery powered, stuffed pony, in the vicinity of an elementary school… because the clowns at clownland security didn’t have anything better to do…

‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Unconstitutional – this actually happened a few days ago, but i haven’t seen it in any of the regular news at all. the “christians” will say that it’s further evidence that they are a “persecuted minority”. meanwhile Self-Described โ€˜Christian Counterpart To Osama Bin Ladenโ€™ Arrested In Plot To Bomb Abortion Clinic and Self-labeled โ€˜Christian counterpart of Osama bin Ladenโ€™ allegedly planned clinic bombing – “christians” are the real terrorists.

What does it take to be happy? About $75,000 – money can’t buy happiness, but apparently $75k a year will get you pretty close…

New research restores psychedelicsโ€™ medical respectability – first they were used as medicine for thousands of years, then they decided that they have no medicinal value, now they’re saying that they might have medicinial value after all… i wish they’d just make up their minds and stop decieving us. sign The Vienna Declaration to advocate for evidence based drug policy and strengthen the call for policies driven by evidence. join the movement to end the failed war on drugs!

Cannabis Yoga – to help you come down from your stressful life. this is not a joke.

Noam Chomsky to become new X-Factor judge – this is a joke.

but i don’t believe in gravity!

i’ve subscribed to a number of anti-evolutionist blogs (for entertainment purposes only, mind you). this one, from It’s Harvest Time typifies the combination of laughable, and frightening ignorance which i frequently find so disturbing that i question my own sanity in subscribing to wingnuts like this. i originally wrote “freaks like this” but then i realised that it would be a significant put-down for freaks – like myself – and i decided that a hardware reference would be more along the lines of what the guy actually is.

Stephen Hawking’s Recent Stupidity
British Professor Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s most noted professor [sic], was quoted recently giving his explanations on the origins of the universe. Let me give an EXACT QUOTE – “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” FROM NOTHING! This man believes that the universe was created BY ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! I don’t [sic] who you are – that’s STUPID! Don’t laugh, though. This is a quote from the atheists’ best! This is a prominent professor of theirs [sic]! This is not one of their uneducated paupers on the streets of downtown Detroit; this is the VERY BEST THEY HAVE TO OFFER! And, rather than believing in a Creator who created the universe with nothing, for a specific purpose, they would rather believe that the massive amount of matter and order in the universe came from nothing! How pitiful!

Evolution
NPR (National Public Radio) has been trying to figure out recently how humans became the dominant species. Again, instead of believing in an intelligent Being who created the world with a divine plan, they believe that over a period of BILLIONS OF YEARS, the human race evolved from primates. That is the most laughable theory I have ever heard. Evolution is philosophy, not science. It is not science because it has NEVER BEEN OBSERVED. No species has even been witnessed to evolve into another. No organism has ever been witnessed to reproduce another organism of a different species. IF IT HAS NOT BEEN OBSERVED, IT IS NOT SCIENCE. As laughable as it is, they are “making it as sure as they can.” It’s weak, but it’s the best they have.

to say that he disagrees with stephen hawking would be one thing, but to say that the man is stupid is another thing entirely, and when he offers no proof whatsoever that stephen hawking is, actually, mentally deficient in some way, it borders on libel. personally, i have a tendency to think that it’s possible that stephen hawking may have thought about these things a fair amount more than i have, and, while i don’t completely agree with him about the creation of the spiritual universe, i have a tendency to think that his theories about the creation of the physical universe are more correct than not.

i would point “rev.” bob board (who doesn’t have a wikipedia page, to give you an idea of how significant the world considers his opinions) towards something like this:
since i get the impression youtube is where he has gotten most of his current ideas about evolution. i also believe that he’s a lot more likely to watch an animated cartoon, even a poorly drawn one, than he is to read a book, no matter how simple it is…

but i doubt it would make any difference in the way he thinks…

a message to pastor terry jones and his ilk:

all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them

i guess that means it’s okay for me to advocate burning bibles…

of course, he should be entitled to burn qur’ans; it’s his right to be stupid in this free country. it’s also right for me to organise a protest against him, which will be just as offensive to him as his is to me.

seriously, i think the proper way to protest this is to organise a mass bible burning on christmas, to protest the stupidity that brought this qur’an burning on september 11th into fruition.

No-one has the right not to be offended.
     — John Cleese

Where books are burned in the end people will burn.
     — Heinrich Heine

i’ll even contribute my collection of gideon bibles that i have stolen out of every single hotel room that i have ever stayed in (there’s at least a dozen)… that oughta’ get the protest rolling…

another week closer to the eschaton…

we’ll start out this week’s post with a public service announcement: National Chronic Illness Awareness Week is coming up 13-19 september. be nice to somebody: one in two americans has an invisible chronic illness or condition!

Predator drones patrols of southern US border start Wednesday – this is now a police state, where only the priveledged live, the starving refugee is given temporary status, and the illegal immigrant is hunted down and summarily killed ejected.

example: California Cops Taser Senior Citizen in His Own Home – couple returns home, man falls, wife calls 911, cops show up and taser man when he refuses to go with them. beware – this could happen in your home, to you.

Oil Rig Explodes Off The Louisiana coast – didn’t we already go through this once? and, by the way, we now have a BP ultimatum: Let us drill or funds will dry up – considering that it took them all of a week to make the money that they have spent on cleaning up the spill, i think that they could go a little while longer before they are completely out of money…

More War Lies – war is peace, love is hate, lies are truth… business as usual.

Stephen Hawking Breaks Atheist Rules – yep, he said there doesn’t have to be a “god” in order for everything to be here. broke the rules, indeed… Is Stephen Hawking’s New Book Science or Science Fiction – “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Mohandas K. Gandhi

Top Web Scams of the Decade – in other words, if you don’t know that you shouldn’t respond to random, sketchy-sounding email from someone you don’t know, you probably shouldn’t be online at all. Pew Study Claims One Fifth Of American Adults Donโ€™t Use The Internet – i’ve got an idea: make it so that you have to have a license to use an internet-connected device, in the same way that you now have to have a license to drive a car. kill two birds with one stone…

Budget cuts bring end to Stockton narcotics unit – hey, let’s move to stockton! 8)

California pot legalization โ€˜could end Mexican drug warโ€™ and Marijuana activists stage Mexico City smoke-out to protest prohibition – hint: legalisation of cannabis could go a long way towards ending the war on drugs everywhere

The Pain-Killing Power of Marijuana – especially with people like this guy’s brother pumping out new research…

Two new scientific studies reveal hallucinogens are good for your mental health – another thing hallucinogens are good for! 8)

Ancient brew masters tapped drug secrets – another thing beer is good for! 8)

Mind-Altering Parasitestoxoplasma gondii on the loose!

network/s/ing

i am writing this from portland. to be specific, i am writing this from the back yard of my mother-in-law’s house. when i booted up my battery-powered laptop, it automatically found a network, and logged me in. it also found 3 other networks, for which i don’t have the password stored in my computer.

my impression is that i can go pretty much anywhere in pretty much any metropolitan area in this country, and be able to log on to the network with not an awful lot more than a password. this particular network’s password was (probably) supplied by my wife, who set up her mother with wireless ethernet last christmas, but it shouldn’t take any more than asking someone to be able to log in to any network. i just heard someone on the radio this morning who was saying that, inevitably, they’re going to include wireless networking, or wifi hotspots in new buildings, the same way that new buildings currently are wired with electricity, sewers and running water. i shouldn’t have to do more than ask someone to get free access to internet, in the same way that i shouldn’t have to pay someone to get water, or go to the bathroom.

and yet, that’s what google – the “don’t be evil” company – is out to make happen. it’s not bad enough that google anticipates the keywords that you type in, based on information that they have gathered from your previous searches, or that google is willing to sell that information about you to other people without your knowledge or permission, but on top of all that, they want to make you pay to get what should be equally free to everyone.

yeah, i know that you can go into a restaurant and get a fancy glass of water, but you’re also going to get quite a bit more than that in a restaurant, if what you’re starting out with is water, and when water is all you need, paying for all of that other, admittedly desirable, stuff, is starting to be more of a “luxury” item than anything else…

here’s an option: give free high speed internet to everyone, but let google and verizon build their “private, for-pay” internet and have them deliver that “private, for-pay” internet in a way similar to that in which fine food is delivered at a restaurant, and see how long it is before people realise that “private” and “for-pay” means that regardless of how raunchy, evil and nasty they want to be, someone is going to be aware of their actions.

another week closer to the eschaton…

Crabs provide evidence oil tainting Gulf food web – oil spill? what oil spill? wasn’t that two weeks ago? 8/

and, while we’re on the subject of oil, 2,487.5 mpg! Catchy headline unneccessary – “We find it incredibly thrilling to report mpg ratings that require a comma so we’re going to write it again: 2,487.5 mpg. Wow.” that’s right, they’re talking about two “prototype” internal combustion, gasoline powered cars, in measured competition one got 437.2 miles per gallon, and the other got 2,487.5 miles per gallon… detroit is still hyping their 20 – 25 mpg cars as “energy efficient”, “fuel saving”, and other preposterous blather, despite the fact that mileage on my cars hasn’t changed significantly in over 30 years. apparently, we “umayrakins” are swallowing it hook, line and sinker, and begging for more. it’s my understanding that you can’t sell a car in europe these days that doesn’t get at least 40 mpg… what do we have to do to get these “prototype” cars into mass production?

oh, and by the way, Senior U.S. scientist rescinds previous claim that ¾ of oil from spill is gone, says most is still there and Top Expert: Geology is “Fractured”, Relief Wells May Fail … BP is Using a “Cloak of Silence”, Refusing to Share Even Basic Data with the Government – what? were they really thinking that we would believe that they could clean up two months worth of oil spill in less than a month? and once they got the well plugged up, the first thing BP did was go back to it’s habit of not sharing information with anyone again… it all goes back to that link that i found a couple weeks ago, where the guy was claiming that the BP gulf disaster may have triggered a ‘world-killing’ event

Time To Terminate Western Civilization Before It Terminates Us – right on! its about time somebody said it! it’s about time we all get down to learning at least Ten Reasons to Become Self-Sufficient and Ten Ways to Get There

It’s time to presume the web is guilty – it’s an interesting way to look at it, but i think he may have something there. especially considering that Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash – when i was a software tester, there was this thing called “good enough” which was a state where the software still had bugs, but it was “good enough” to release to the public, because the bugs that it had were small, inconsequential, difficult to show, or inconsistent enough that there wasn’t an immediate need to fix them. there were exceptions to the “good enough” rule, which included software on which peoples’ life depended, such as avionics, medical software, and that kind of thing, but when i was a software tester, the concept of a virus that spread through email was something that had only recently been realised and hadn’t been around for more than a couple of years, and most of what appeared on the web was presumed to be innocent. now we’ve gotten to the point where software testers can’t assume that “good enough” really is good enough any more, and even when it is completely bug-free, software may be vulnerable to a specifically designed attack. moral: your computer is suspect. be wary of anything it tells you, and watch your back at all times.

cardinal francis george, head of the u.s. conference of catholic bishops, has gone on record regarding proposition 8, saying no court of civil law has the authority to reach into areas of human experience that nature itself has defined. he obviously hasn’t seen this video, shot at the honolulu zoo on november 11, 2004, of a chimp raping a frog. that’s about as natural as it comes, and if nature intended for a frog to provide oral pleasure to a chimp, then two people of the same sex having the right to marry, or an individual’s choice to use cannabis shouldn’t be far off, right?

Church Vows to Burn Qur’ans Without Fire Permit – the church said they were going to burn qur’ans, but the gainsville fire department said that they can’t burn books without a fire permit (shades of Fahrenheit 451, anyone?). now the church says, permit or not, they’re going to go ahead with their “protest”, because islamic law “is totalitarian in nature,” islamic teaching contains “irrational fear and loathing of the west” and that the qur’an teaches that jeezis “was NOT the son of ‘god'”. again, i would ask, is "christianity" that much different? change “irrational fear and loathing” to the east, and remove the negative from the last statement, and i would say that the similarities are striking…

there are a couple of things from LiveScienceOne Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes and Age Confirmed for ‘Eve,’ Mother of All Humans – that i’d be willing to bet are going to be abused massively and frequently by “christians” who will say that they just prove that “eve” exists, even though it’s only about 196,000 years older than the “young earth creationists” claim, and even though both of the articles specifically say “this doesn’t mean she was the first modern woman”… it’s just a matter of time before they latch on to this and try to twist the meaning of the words to fit their own schemes…

How Can You Control Your Dreams? – i have never seen, and probably will never see inception but lucid dreaming has always held a great deal of interest for me.

Simon’s Cat – that is all.

another week closer to the eschaton…

let’s start off with a bit of double-you-tee-eff, shall we? Topless sunbather accused of sensuously rubbing in sun cream – keep in mind, this happened in italy, where it is legal for women to go topless on the beach everywhere, and not just in secluded areas. apparently, however, that was okay with the mother of the teenage boys the sunbather was accused of troubling, it was when she started rubbing on the sunblock that the mother started to get upset. i wonder if anyone thought about asking the teenaged boys what they thought?

Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future – they’ve decided that we can’t have the music ourselves, but now they want to mandate that, in the future, all mobile devices will come equiped with an FM radio, so that other people can program our music for us… or something like that. honestly, the whole copyright system is so screwed up that i don’t pay that much attention to it any longer, except when it involves copyrights that i hold…

so i did a little bit of research into whether washington state has a water rights law that prohibits homeowners from harvesting rainwater. what i discovered is that rainwater collection is a complex issue, but homeowners are not prohibited from having a rooftop rainwater collection system, and that under certain circumstances, it is perfectly legal for property owners to have cisterns of 30,000 gallons or more. Rainwater Collection in Washington State is the place to start. i understand what the people are saying about modern folk thinking that we have to ask permission to excercise our inalienable rights, though. it’s time that changed.

Warning to Travelers About New, Drug-Resistant ‘Superbug’ – it’s the end of the world as we know it, and i feel fine…

Voogle Wireless – don’t… be… evil!

Senate Passes "The ______Act of____" – H.R. 1586 started out as one thing (TARP taxes), became another thing (an aviation bill), and is now a batch of spending policies… and it has one of the most unlikely names imaginable.

Marijuana legalization in Mexico gaining support – now all we have to do is convince our “leaders” to do the same thing… if the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow, even if it is begrudgingly.

Why hemp could save the world – this is an article by D.M. Murdock, otherwise known as acharya s, who i’ve been reading about for 20 years or so. she’s got a lot of interesting things to say, and this is one of them.

Science supports medical marijuana – this is a response to a journalist who is apparently misinformed concerning science and cannabis, but it’s good reading all on its own.

Taking God to School is an article about how we should be bringing back “Prayer, The Ten Commandments, learning about creation, readings from the Bible” in public schools. as you have probably already guessed, i think this woman is not only wrong, but crazy, and possibly dangerous, but apparently that doesn’t matter, because “God is not bound by policies and politically [sic] correctness”. that phrase catches my eye. first of all, i don’t know who they’re fooling by saying that they know what we should be doing in our public schools when they can’t even use proper grammar to form a sentence, and if they’re claiming that “god” isn’t bound by political correctness, then they are, essentially, saying that their “god” isn’t politically correct. for people who have such a hangup about conformity, it’s rather unexpected for them to acknowledge that their “god” isn’t politically correct, and it makes me wonder if even they don’t take what they say seriously…

Muslims Seek to Censor Gospel of Christ – another one from “christian” news wire that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, this one is about muslim leaders having a press conference to plead with legislators to do something about “christian” protestors demonstrating in the public forum around mosques. of course the public thoroughfare around any place of worship is fair game for protesting, but let’s put the shoe on the other foot: what if muslims were “spreading the gospel” of mohammed outside a “christian” church? the “christian” leaders would be having seven kinds of a hissy fit, and demanding that laws be drawn up immediately to prohibit such a thing (see Strippers protest church for a change), so why the furor about muslim leaders heading them off at the pass? not only that, but it’s only a press conference, nevertheless these “christians” somehow interpreted this as their “potential for violence” and say that “gentle christian saints” (HAH!) will be holding their own “press conference” outside the mosque. then, there is something that made me wonder even more about these peoples’ sanity: they say that “Islam is not a religion, nor a cult, but a total and complete 100% system of life. It has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military components.” — and “christianity” isn’t? and “christianity” is somehow different from all that? and “christianity” is somehow better than that? never, in the 2000 years since jeezis, has there ever been any evidence that is the case. PERIOD. “The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.” that means ANY religion, whether it is “christian” or muslim. they shouldn’t get a special law that prohibits islam any sooner than they should get a special law that prohibits “christianity”. people who get upset about things like this are stupid to think that they’re going to get special treatment just because they happen to believe in the right things, and they’re stupid to post things like this on the web, because there are people who will, undoubtedly, work out the flaws in their logic and see how stupid they are…

Man tries to get his name legally changed to Boomer the Dog and Unicorn Being a Jerk – now there’s some craziness that i can get behind… 8)

mac os 10 doesn’t recognise an .mpeg file? weird…

QuestionCopyright.org | A Clearinghouse For New Ideas About Copyright – it’s about time someone started taking note of the fact that the copyright system is totally screwed. the next question is whether or not they’re going to be able to do anything about it.

Bombing Iran – here’s a good idea… let’s not… 8/

American Christianity is not well, and there’s evidence to indicate that its condition is more critical than most realize – lets hope more people realise it before the rest of ’em drive us into armageddon, ‘eh?

Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter – i was a vegetarian during my “hard-core hippie” years, but i grew out of it about 20 years ago, because i realise that God is perfect. also, i figure that if i am in a situation where it’s either eat meat or perish (which is not too unlikely in these “last days”), there is more likelyhood that i will be able to survive… and that’s not to mention the taste: there’s nothing vegetable that can beat the taste of bacon… or lamb… perhaps this is the reason behind all of that rationalisation.

Mitch Miller dies – i’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again: too many cool people from my generation have been dying recently. once again (and with a great deal of futility) i say, STOP IT!

How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a ‘world-killing’ event – more debate as the world burns…

Does circumcision cause psychological damage? – if you have to ask, you’re not male…

Future Crimes Can Be Predicted Perfectly – i’d roll my eyes and say “yeah, right…” except that it’s from the 100% totally reliable FOX News…

We don’t have to get sick as we get older – yep…

Continue reading mac os 10 doesn’t recognise an .mpeg file? weird…

colour me frustrated… again…

Incoming BP CEO: Time for โ€˜scalebackโ€™ in cleanup⸘⸘⸘WHAT‽‽‽ maybe in his dreams… ๐Ÿ˜

Swastika no longer viewed as Nazi symbol – reading just the headline, one would be inclined to think that the movement to Save the Swastika might be having some effect in enlightening people who think that (卐 ≡ nazi), but when one actually reads the article, it would seem that the Anti-Defamation League is probably more aptly named the “Anti-Swastika League” because, while they’ve admitted that the swastika isn’t just a nazi symbol, they’re still of the mistaken opinion that it’s a “more generalised symbol of hate”, which is also incorrect, as any hindu will tell you. hindus and buddhists, and, for that matter, jews, should express their outrage about this (here is the letter i wrote them, if you need some encouragement or an example): it’s racist and against the very principles they stand for, for the ADL to say that the holy symbols of another religion are a “generalised symbol of hate” without qualification!

and while i’m on the subject, i feel really sorry for the lack of intelectual development displayed in Culture Served Raw – A Universal Symbol of Hate – remember, we’re talking about TEN THOUSAND years of history as a symbol of good, compared to 90 years as a symbol of evil. not only that, but the blogger in question won’t even approve any comments that don’t agree with his preconcieved notion of how evil the swastika has been, and is completely ignoring the fact that it’s only been a relatively short time that it has been anything but a symbol of good. one thing i learned very early, is that the only way to change history is to remember it differently. it’s clear that this blogger is doing exactly that, and i feel sorry for them. Swastika, a “Universal” symbol of hate? – “I understand the aversion toward the swastika in the West but to say it is universally a symbol of hate could create more intolerance, not less.”

Researcher demonstrates ATM “jackpotting” at Black Hat Conference – a number of years ago, when i was working as a software tester, one of the projects i worked on was for Triton Systems, testing a little gadget that supposedly was able to do standard ATM functions from your desktop, with the aid of your computer. they actually gave me one of their little desktop gadgets to fool around with (unfortunately, they didn’t give me any actual money to go with it… cheapskates…), and i found a number of ways to crack their proposed software and make the gadget do all sorts of things that it wasn’t supposed to do. my understanding at the time was that they used essentially the same software for their stand-alone ATMs that they used for the desktop gadgets, and ever since then i’ve wondered whether or not it was possible to do the same things on their stand-alone ATMs. apparently it is.

Collecting rainwater now illegal in many states as Big Government claims ownership over our water – it’s illegal to collect rainwater in washington? i’ll have to look into that… and if it is, get a rain barrel or two… 8)

President Wyclef? – gawd help the haitians… they’ve already suffered enough…

A priest in eastern Europe has been accused of drowning a baby boy as he baptised him. – death by superstition? i thought that had been eliminated from our society years ago… ๐Ÿ˜

jeez, first it’s uganda wanting to kill gays, and now a Kenyan gets 14 years for sex with donkey; blames devil – something must be wrong with that whole region of the world…

U.S. Copyright Group โ€˜Stealโ€™ Competitorโ€™s Website – another blatant case of the pot calling the kettle black…

Seattle’s Aerial Transport Lifestyle System – it’s the future… right?

and, last, but certainly not least, The Blue God of Judaism – a blog by Rabbi Robert dos Santos Teixeira, LCSW, that will examine the similarities between YHWH and Siva. maybe he’ll address my question concerning the ancient biblical patriarch worshipping a sivalingam

Continue reading colour me frustrated… again…

beep

the dogs are really concerned that moe hasn’t come home yet, and i’ve had to close the blinds on the front window to keep zorah, the “watcher”, from barking at EVERY THING that she even THINKS might be someone driving up the driveway, which, of course, causes magick, the “alarm”, to bark uncontrollably, which causes stanley to fly off his perch which causes lucy to try to herd stanley… so it’s been a busy time, so far. i also have to give magick medication and food twice a day because of her dental work. so far i haven’t missed, but it’s been getting later and later each day, because i don’t remember until later and later.

a couple of times in the past two weeks i have had the idea that i had to go somewhere to do something, but by the time i had finished up what i was doing enough to actually go wherever it was, i had not only forgotten where i wanted to go, but what i wanted to do once i got there. today i went out to the post office, to have a picture laminated (which they didn’t do, and actually ruined the picture in the process), to goodwill to drop off two bags of clothing and to the mobile home guys to get the dimensions for the lumber i need to buy for the floor, but i didn’t do whatever it was that was important to do while i was out, because i couldn’t remember what it was… ๐Ÿ˜ i’d start writing stuff down, but i can never tell what’s important enough to write down, and besides, writing stuff down requires finding a pen or pencil and a single place that i can write stuff like that, that won’t get lost or misplaced. i have 3 sketchbook/notebook/”moleskine”-like things that i used to write things in all the time, but now that i’m using the computer for most of my communication and scheduling, finding a place on my desk to put the notebook and write stuff down usually takes clearing off the desk a little bit, and by that time i’ve forgotten whatever it is that i was supposed to write down.

the dangly thing that i’ve had hanging from the rear-view mirror of every vehicle that has ever been in my possession since 1984 – when i thought i had bought a school bus from a woman named Mauldiwarp Moongate-Climber (which wasn’t entirely true in reality, however that is another, long, pointless story that i’ll save for another time) – finally broke. now all i have left of the school bus (which never actually worked reliably enough to travel more than 5 miles or so before it overheated) is a small handfull of glass and wooden beads, a chipped crystal drop from a long-ago chandelier, a fish made out of abalone shell, a small bell, and a broken piece of leather strap. that and the fact that i am currently listening to It’s My Life by The Plasmatics seem somehow related…

Enter turtle here

monique flew away to atlanta this morning. she’ll be back in a week. when i returned from dropping her off at the airport, i discovered an epson media projector that wasn’t here yesterday, sitting on the kitchen counter. i hope it wasn’t supposed to go to atlanta with monique, ’cause if it was, it didn’t. of course i tried to call her, but she has her phone turned off so that the wireless signal won’t “interfere” with the airplane electronics.

the doggles are all upset and wary about the change in their circumstances this morning. they all got up at about the normal time, but instead of what usually happens on tuesday, none of them got to ride in the car, they got breakfast from me, and not from monique, and they’re all currently at home. i’m gonna guess that around 7:30 or so this evening, they’re going to start worrying and fussing about the fact that she hasn’t come home yet, and that there will be a good deal of dogs staring out the front window and barking when they think they hear someone driving up the driveway. magick just had some fairly substantial dental work done yesterday, so there’s going to be a change in her afternoons for a while (she has to take medication twice a day), and that on top of monique’s being gone are going to put her even further out on the edge than she normally is.

i made arrangements with a friend to give me a ride up to burien imports, to pick up my car, so i won’t have to ride my bike for an hour, take two busses and then ride my bike for another 45 minutes to get there. i’m hoping that it will not need further repair for a while, but i’m not gonna hold my breath, because my regular mechanic told me that a car of that age and make is notorious for needing constant, sometimes expensive repair. i still haven’t heard from the lady confirming my dropping out of the great peninsula future festival, but i got confirmation yesterday for fresh paint, in spite of the fact that this year’s car is a different car than it was last year.

ETA: i got home with ganesha the car and parked it in the sun… the rear view mirror fell off… ๐Ÿ˜ it never ends…

snoid

i discovered second use, which is a very dangerous place for me to know about, because it is replete with various objects which, while extremely cool (and some of them are also immenantly useful) are, for the most part, totally useless to me… there are a few things that i could definitely use eventually – like the tessellated fish paving stones, which would go well in the paver-patio which will eventually be where the deck that has yet to be demolished currently is in our back yard. there are also a lot of things like doors, and windows that could, potentially, be used in our house, but don’t have a specific purpose… and there are things like an upright piano, which have no immediate purpose, but it would be extremely cool to have, and other things, like an antique foot-locker (with “authentic moth-ball smell”) that i couldn’t resist buying in spite of the fact that there was a good chance that i would have to use it to move out of our house when moe discovers that i had purchased more “stuff” to cram into our tiny house – which was ironic, since i had a hauntingly similar discussion with the guy behind the counter at second use, concerning the pros and cons of “needing more ‘stuff'” in the house. in fact, there was a heated discussion about the new “stuff” that i brought home, and the first thing that moe said was “what ‘stuff’ is leaving the house in order to make room for the new ‘stuff’ you bought?” fortunately, there is a pile of ex-clothing that i can take to the second-hand store, and a large pile of blankets and bedding that will actually go into the foot-locker, which will then get stored in the loft of the workshop, so i won’t have to be moving out (at least not any time soon), and my guess is that as long as i don’t start patronising second use unsupervised, there won’t be any major problems. i discovered second use because that’s where snake suspenderz played on sunday for a couple of hours. i love those guys, and i’m just starting to reach my stride where tuba-playing is involved. there definitely has to be more snake suspenderz gigs soon.

Ganesha the Second is ready, finally, and, hopefully, i’m going to pick it up tomorrow morning… oh, my! i just realised that tomorrow is the day that moe flies out to atlanta for a week, for her conference/test thingy, which means that i probably will have to make other arrangements to pick up the car tomorrow. grr… 8/ moe is going to atlanta to speak at a vet conference, and to take a qualification test for a veterinary behaviour technicans’ organisation, neither of which i can remember the exact names. it’s really cool for her, though, because she’s actually getting paid to speak at the conference, which means that she gets a working vacation in atlanta for free. i’ll figure out some way or another to pick up the car.

i’ve got a couple of art car things coming up. unfortunately, i won’t be able to do the Great Peninsula Future Festival, because moe will be out of town, and the festival involves getting there before 9:30 am, leaving after 6:00 pm, or whenever the festival closes, and a ban on domestic animals, which means that the doggles can’t come with. on the other hand, the fact that the car is (allegedly) in running condition again means that i can go to Fresh Paint again this year, which is definitely on the schedule, because i got a $100 stipend just for showing up last year… ๐Ÿ™‚

child pornography and the meaning of life

They called me a child pornographer is the story of two families who went camping and took family photos which were misinterpreted as “child pornography” by untrained photo-finishing drones, resulting in a year and a half of hell for the families involved… however, in memphis a pedophile-protecting pastor is the greatest opposition to an ordinance that would have stopped the predator he is accused of protecting with his silence. it really confuses me that innocent people are regularly treated to the “guilty until proven innocent” routine, when people who we are supposed to believe have our best interests in mind are actually the people who are most adamantly against society’s attempts to protect itself.

and, along the same lines, Some Pentagon employees found with child porn still working – so if you work at the pentagon, if you are in to child pornography, it apparently doesn’t matter. it reminds me that ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

Meaning of life – at least according to wikipedia…

blargh!

Rarely Seen Pictures Of The Devastating Consequences Of The BP Disaster and You Are Not Authorized to See These Pictures of the Oil Spill – i was gone for a week and the oil spill got worse… ๐Ÿ™ the problem i see is that they’re still referring to this as “The BP Disaster” when, in reality, it’s a disaster that affects every being on the planet, and most directly the wildlife, which doesn’t have the option to relocate when things get too awful in their part of the world. i keep looking at the pictures of eyes of the oiled beasts and thinking that it could, just as easily, be human eyes at which i am looking…

also, there are apparently Live feeds from the Gulf of Mexico ROVs which are, at this point, showing that the oil spill has been shut off showing that their cap has sprung a leak, and even if you can’t see it, they’re planning on releasing the cap within the next 24 hours anyway. good work, BP… ๐Ÿ˜

more of the “can’t leave well enough alone” syndrome that we’ve been suffering through, and if the gulf oil spill weren’t disaster enough, now the FDA nears approval of genetically engineered salmon – i would think that there have been enough science fiction movies produced in the past 50 years or so to put some fear into the types of people who would think of ideas like this. but, apparently, if i did so, i would be wrong. just goes to show how our rulers are stupid, stupid, STUPID!!

and, speaking of “can’t leave well enough alone”, Poachers kill last female rhino in South African park – it reminds me of that native american aphorism, which goes “Only when the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught will we realise that we cannot eat money.”

GodBlock – “a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions.” okay, i realise that turn-about is fair play, but i was under the impression that any internet filtering was wrong, and that we were above all that…

speaking of GodBlock, Forget about Noahโ€™s Ark; There Was No Worldwide Flood – if the bible-thumpers won’t listen to their own scholars regarding the “truth” of the bible, then the entire human society is screwed, and there is nothing that we, as sensible humans can do about it. ๐Ÿ˜

Tuli Kupferberg died. i’ve said it before, and i’ll probably say it again: all of the cool people of my generation are dying. i say stop it!!

Dwile Flonking? – what. the. fuck??

Continue reading blargh!

if i don’t come back from OCF, this is why

How much oil has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico – according to the estimates that have been made public. the faint-hearted should not click for more information.

Immorality is Worse than BP Oil Spill – it’s an interesting way to put it, but knowing that the author is a “christian” makes me realise that even saying “no, it’s not” wouldn’t make any difference, and they would just go on believing blatantly wrong things in spite of clear evidence, so i’ll just put their link here so that everybody else can see what stupid, stupid, STUPID people we have become…

TSA To Block Websites With โ€œControversial Opinionsโ€ – the move to shut down free speech on the internet accelerates… at this point there’s not an awful lot standing in the way of How to Access the Internet (A Guide from 2025) becoming a reality… ๐Ÿ˜

County coroners can’t back Brewer beheadings claim – the governor that implimented the “papers please” illegal immigration law in arizona, blatantly lies about people being beheaded in the desert, in a bid to get re-elected. fortunately there are people out there who know how to check facts, and they’ve blown this wide open.

Subway To Start Tessellating Cheese July 1? – you may not read about the previous items on the standard online news sources, but i followed a link from yahoo to get this one. our planet is simultaneously being soaked in crude oil and suffering the rule of idiots, but i’ll be damned if they’re going to get away with selling me a sandwich that has uneven cheese distribution… ๐Ÿ™

a few days ago marist published a poll which asked people if they knew what country from which the united states declared independence. of adults aged 30 to 44, 15% weren’t sure, and 10% said a country other than “England” or “Great Britain”. of all adult U.S. residents 20% were “unsure”, and 6% said a country other than “England” or “Great Britain”. here are the poll results:



&nbsp
USA Residents
On July 4th we celebrate Independence Day. From which country did the United States win its independence?
Great BritainUnsureOther countries mentioned
Row %Row %Row %
USA Residents74%20%6%
RegionNortheast84%10%6%
Midwest74%21%5%
South68%26%6%
West75%18%7%
Household IncomeLess than $50,00063%30%7%
$50,000 or more86%9%5%
RaceWhite82%13%5%
Non-white56%35%9%
Age18 to 2960%33%7%
30 to 4475%15%10%
45 to 5979%17%4%
60 or older76%19%4%
AgeUnder 4567%24%9%
45 or older78%18%4%
GenderMen81%12%7%
Women67%28%5%
July 2010 Marist Poll National Residents "N=1004 MOE +/- 3%" Totals may not add to 100 due to rounding.

things you learn from r. crumb…

so i recently broke down and purchased R. Crumb’s monumental project, The Book of Genesis, and i was flipping through it appreciating the elaborate artwork, when i came across this:

this is an illustration of a story i had located many years ago, and then promply forgot, but this is actually a better way of looking at it, and illustrates my point even better than i could have previously.

namely, what is this ancient biblical patriarch doing worshipping a shiva lingam?!?

i’ve wondered about this for a long time, and now that i have an actual illustration of it, it will be easier to ask unsuspecting “christians” why this founder of “christianity” felt it was okay to worship the way those “godless heathens” do…

okay, i’m here…

doughnut joustingi am totally exhausted from SACBO and surrounding festivities, and i’ve been pretty depressed most of the day (the morning after blues?), but i’m slowly coming around. it rained pretty much all day sunday, and there was at least a bracing dampness to the air all day saturday when it wasn’t actually raining. fortunately it cleared up for the actual parade, because i was very clear about the fact that if it was raining, all of my expensive electronic music production gear was going to stay in its respective boxes, which would have definitely put a cramp on our part of the parade. i didn’t vend sunday, but lack of motivation was only part of the reason. now that i’m fairly confident that the transmission on ganesha the car version two is going to last at least a year (because that’s how long the warranty on the new transmission that i bought for it lasts), i can turn my attention to the leak in the pressurised engine coolant system which causes the car to run really hot when it’s not on the freeway, smell funny, and requires engine coolant about every 4 days to a week. it’s annoying that i’ve had to put so much money into this free car to get it working reliably. about the most fun i had at SACBO was watching the doughnut jousting that evolved over the course of sunday afternoon. the crowds were really light because of the rain, but we were determined to make the best of it, which resulted in a couple of microphone stands and some coat hangers becoming targets on which were placed yesterday’s doughnuts, which were the target of jousters on bicycles, unicycles, wheelchairs, and pretty much anything else, armed with pool cues. i spent time with people that i only see once a year (mostly), was part of the centrepiece of the whole parade, and i was inducted into a secret society, the less said about which the better. fremont phil rehearsal tonight, BSSB rehearsal tomorrow, players rehearsal wednesday, LBG rehearsal thursday, BBWP rehearsal friday…

moe was at a sheepdog trial all weekend, and she won! she got a 92, and the person who came in second (who is also moe’s mentor and friend diane) got an 88. i’ll let her tell the story, but we’re all pretty proud of moe and her doggie. ๐Ÿ™‚ also, today is our 12th wedding anniversary.

What The Hex? is a game where you guess the colour based on the hex-triplet for the RGB value.

Oregon officially recognizes marijuana for medical value – "The Oregon Board of Pharmacy voted to change marijuana from what’s known as a ‘Schedule I controlled substance’ to a ‘Schedule II.’" only 49 more state governments and 1 federal government to go… ๐Ÿ˜

Titan’s atmosphere oddity consistent with methane-based life
also
‘Grow-your-own’ organs hope after scientists produce liver in lab from stem cells – more evidence (if you needed any) that the “christians” are wrong, wrong, wrong!!

Whale Poop Cleans the EnvironmentThe Sea Shepherds are probably already figuring out ways to use this against the japanese, politically and as a potential projectile. it also makes me wonder about how whale poop would do cleaning up the gulf oil spill…
Visualizing the BP Oil Spill Disaster – it couldn’t possibly make it any worse…

how paddy the dog scared me out of my mind

Paddy The Dogpaddy and zorah were snuffling around under the parrot tree yesterday about 8:00 pm, and i turned around and told them to leave it, whereupon paddy backed up, and did something to her left hind leg… who knows what it was that she did, but the results were immediately evident: she started yelping and crying, and peed all over herself, and trying to run around, but not being able to because her left hind leg wouldn’t work.

of course, i tried to call monique immediately, but what with having to deal with a thrashing, peeing, hysterical dog, and the fact that all this came up so suddenly that it took me totally off guard, i was having difficulty finding moe’s phone number in my cell phone. when i finally got her number, she wasn’t answering. i left her a frantic, probably incomprehensible message and immediately (well, as immediately as was possible, considering how freaked out i was) tried the second “animal emergency” number i have, micah. he said that he was just texting moe a few minutes ago, and said that he would try to get in touch with her. next, i called the restaurant where she was eating dinner with a friend, but their phone was unattended, probably because they were busy…

all this time i have been dealing with this frantic, crying dog who is trying to get away from her left hind leg because it’s causing her so much pain. as you can imagine, it was affecting me as well.

i called the third “animal emergency” number, evan, moe’s “boss” (although, if the truth were really out there, moe’s the one who runs the show: if it weren’t for her, moe’s “boss” wouldn’t have a clue how the business runs), and he was home. i described, as best i could what with paddy screaming, what was happening, and he told me that he would meet me at the clinic. i grabbed some blankets to put in the car, which meant that i had to leave paddy for a moment, and when i came back, she was nowhere to be found! i called her, but she was not in the living room. i couldn’t imagine how she managed to walk at all, but i eventually found her in the bedroom closet. i put zorah and stanley in their kennels and carried paddy down to the car and then monique called.

i brought her up to speed and simultaneously realised that i had locked myself out of the house ๐Ÿ˜ฏ in my rush to get help, so i actually had to break into the house to get my keys before i could go anywhere.

when i did, of course, that means a 30 to 45 minute trip to the clinic, but at that point i was operating on autopilot. i did notice that the “Check Engine Coolant” light was lit on the dashboard, but it didn’t matter as much as getting help for my doggie.

when i got to the clinic, moe was already there with another technician, and i left them to examine her while i went and had the heart attack that i had postponed while the emergency was in progress.

according to moe, she thinks that paddy somehow dislocated her hip, because she said that when she was examining her, she poked her thumb way down into the space where there was supposed to be the head of her femur, and then the joint reduced with a clank… i took moe’s car to get gas and when i came back, evan had showed up, and paddy was walking more-or-less normally by 10:30 or so, but it’s obvious that she’s feeling less than normal. we’re supposed to carry her up and down stairs, and she’s not allowed to jump up on the couch or the bed for a while (months? weeks? moe knows).

wuff…

friday the banda gozona performed at folklife. friday was also the day that my mother-in-law, father-in-law, and his wife came to visit, for the combined holiday, moe’s sheep trial, and my mother-in-law’s 60th birthday. i left at 3:00 and didn’t get home until 9:00, whereupon i discovered one of our doggles loose in the bedroom and the bathroom totally trashed, with ibuprophen tablets spilled all over the place, and what looked like a few chewed ibuprophen tablets among the trashed counter contents that were on the floor.

i’m actually surprised that moe and her relatives aren’t at home – i was unaware of their plans, but i anticipated them being at home, in which case this wouldn’t actually be an emergency, but… i’m not sure, but it looks to me like it could be an “accidental” overdose on the part of the guilty party (paddy), so i call moe, who isn’t answering her phone. i call her father’s cell phone, and he’s not answering either, which i find quite strange, since he is, presumably, in the same general vicinity as moe, and i know for a fact that her sheep trial doesn’t start until tomorrow, but i am faced with a possible overdosing dog and i’m starting to freak out, so i call our good friend micah, who is a veterinarian, and he’s not answering his phone either.

now i’m really freaking out… ๐Ÿ™

eventually i get hold of moe, who has been out to dinner with her parents, she comes home and vomits the dog, who wasn’t overdosing on anythign except toilet paper (she had eaten almost an entire roll, which was sitting on the counter), and everything was fine, although it left me (and everyone else) totally exhausted.

yesterday, i got an order for postcards, and i spent most of the day going back and forth with a trained, experienced graphic artist who (apparently) can’t differentiate between a file that is 250 dpi and RGB with exactly the same file that is 300 dpi and CMYK. when we finally got that all worked out, i went to a going away party for möppi, rebeccah and diemo, who are moving back to germany next month, and i got home, totally exhausted, at 10:00 or so.

today, i got up at an ungodly hour (8:00 am), feeling nauseous – :mrgreen: – but not actually nauseous enough to throw up (which i figured would make the nauseous feeling go away), and made it to folklife for a (relatively) early (1:10 pm) performance of the ballard sedentary sousa band. i didn’t actually get sick, although there were a few touch-and-go moments in the morning before i left, but i wanted to get there fairly early, because, unlike the banda gozona performance, which resulted in my possesion of a parking pass, so that i wouldn’t have to pay, the powers that be apparently figured that the ballard sedentary sousa band only needed two parking passes, which went to the two most senior members of the band, so in order to park, i would have to search out a free spot (practically impossible, given the location and time) or pay $15 to park until 2:30.

i got home at about 3:30, absolutely exhausted, and submitted the order for the postcards.

now, completely bereft of spoons, i’m going to spent the rest of my “holiday” weekend sleeping.

wesak was last thursday. i watched the monks at the buddhist temple down the street putting up decorations, but i totally spaced out mentioning it until now.

the aparajita is supposed to arrive on wednesday or thursday of this week. it’s down to the wire and i still don’t have tracking details from india, but the guy called me(!) to tell me when the shipment was supposed to be here.

Quantity discrimination in salamanders – they can tell the difference, but only when the ratio is 2:1 or greater… but these guys get paid to discover if salamanders can count. i obviously went into the wrong profession…

Man crosses English Channel in chair carried by helium balloons – including “coming down quickly to avoid restricted air space, missing a power line and then bouncing a short distance before coming to a halt” near dunkirk. once again, it appears as though i went into the wrong profession. what was i thinking?

joe

Joe Btfsplkthose of you who actually read this blog on the web may or may not have noticed the little guy in the upper left hand corner of the page (who is also posted in this entry) has replaced my incense swastika. for those of you who don’t know, this is Joe Btfsplk, the world’s worst jinx, a character from Li’l Abner, a comic strip by Al Capp. he bears a striking resemblence to myself, except that he doesn’t have a beard or glasses. he also has an unpronouncable name, rather like Abgithetz Qwrashamenkegadikeshbamratztaghaqamamamnayaglepzeqsheqiayeth or przxqgl. in spite of the fact that Mr. Capp, himself, pronounced joe’s name as a raspberry, i like to think of him as Joe But-IF-splik, sort of the same way i think that przxqgl should be pronounced pir-ZIX-quiggle. he’s depicted as the world’s worst jinx, but he also appears to know that things go wrong around him all the time, and he shows up at just the right moment to cause spectacular failure to those who may otherwise be obstacles to “good” and “right”. you can tell it’s joe, because of the little black rain cloud which follows him around. at one point, he develops the technology to capture his cloud and is no longer a jinx. he gets married and appears to be blissfully happy, but something happens that requires him to release his cloud in order to cause some sort of catastrophe to some evil-doer.

joe btfsplk has been a hero of mine for a long time, which is kind of odd, because i don’t know of anybody else who even knows who he is, much less considers him a hero.

announcing the end of “christianity” as you know it

US team creates first โ€™synthetic lifeโ€™ – along with that important step that came on my birthday, eight years ago, when scientists fabricated an entirely viable polio virus, we’ve taken another important step in clarifying the fact that “christianity” is wrong.

wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG, WRONG!!!

i wonder how long it will be until the “christians” take notice?

Continue reading announcing the end of “christianity” as you know it

oy… 8/

so the host provider that i finally settled with in january, after leaving them for someone else, because they wanted to raise my rates by 300%, but decided not to after i switched to the host provider that decided i couldn’t have a mailing list after helping me set up a mailing list, so i switched back… and, surprisingly, has been doing a more or less outstanding job ever since…

that same host provider is apparently going out of business for “personal reasons”. the “personal reasons”?

the owner is 16 years old, and is the president of his high school’s linux club, and doesn’t have time for it any longer… 8/

damn, damn, DAMN!! ๐Ÿ˜ก

bleep

the past three days have been spent going through just my inventory of incense with the price gun labeler, individually pricing all of my incense. i plan on doing the same thing for the murtis as well, but they will only take a couple of hours. now i won’t have to fumble with a huge sheaf of papers when someone asks me how much something is, and i will charge the correct price for the things for which i can’t find the prices.

i got the flyers that i had printed for Edgewood Tire & Complete Auto Repair today. that’s another easy $200. i also got the paint pens that i’ve been waiting on, so either tomorrow or sunday i’m going to start working on Ganesha The Car Version 2.

moe and i are going to start the “cook once a month” thing again… tomorrow, i think. i was really happy with cooking once a month for the few months we tried it last year, but about october or so we didn’t do it, and are only just resuming the practice. for those of you who don’t know, it involves planning ahead to have a dozen or so recipes that you’ll make, buying a whole bunch of groceries, and spending an entire day doing nothing but cooking, packaging and freezing individual meal-sized portions for the entire month. it is a massively cheap way to do it, because you can buy a lot of the groceries at costco (we ended up spending about $300 a month, and that was with a couple of times going out to fancy restaurants), and it has the added benefit of freeing up time every other day of the following month that would have been used cooking for that day. quiche is among my favourites. and lentil soup. and now that we’ve got a medium sized freezer with new hinges (!!), we’ve even got a place to keep it all instead of having to limit how much we make because we only had a tiny freezer. 8)

Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) – enough said. Cory Doctorow is God!

Continue reading bleep

death

tom bennett is dead.

i didn’t know him that well, but i knew him well enough that when i saw him in the grocery store, i remembered who he was and exchanged hellos with him. he was the owner of edgewood tire and auto repair, and before that, TST auto, for both of which i printed stuff. i went up to their shop this morning to drop off business cards and that’s where i learned of tom’s death. apparently he was shot this morning at the top foods in auburn, by a shirt-tail relative of some sort.

☻☺

i have been digging through mounds of PHP code recently, looking for <hr> tags and not finding them, and figuring out ways to make links disappear and stuff like that for the past couple of days. i believe i may have actually put the finishing touches on the sedentary sousa web site, but i’m not going to post it until i get approval from the boss lady.

moe’s friend holly is staying with us for a couple of nights. i don’t know her very well, but she and moe are good friends from way back.

the difference between God and “normal”

my raîson d’étre has caused some difficulties for some people who have very strongly held opinions: i would say that they’re strongly “christian” people in general, but i’d very likely be wrong. and i’ve been thinking, once again, about how i am more drawn to people like radical athiest skeptic evolutionist p.z. myers than i am to spiritual teachers or groups in general, in spite of the fact that i am a lot more spiritual than most people realise. i attribute this to the way that i think – my raîson d’étre – which, admittedly, doesn’t make a lot of sense to people. basically, the way i think, it is perfectly normal for me to say that A is exactly equal to not-A, in every way, despite the fact that “normal” people would say that A can’t be equal to not-A because not-A is the opposite of A. the easiest way i have to describe this difference is an aphorism i learned when i was in the seminary, which is that the opposite of a “small t truth” is a falsehood, but the opposite of a “big T Truth” is another “big T Truth”.

in the same way, when i think about God, i think about It (here is the reason for that pronoun) existing in spite of the FACT that God doesn’t exist.

i know that God exists, despite whatever proof p.z. myers and his cohorts may drag up. if they were to pull something out of their pocket and show it to me that would conclusively prove that God doesn’t exist, i would still KNOW that God exists. i know that God both exists, and doesn’t exist, because if It were to only exist, or only not exist, then It wouldn’t have the necessary attributes to be God. “if you ‘know’ something, you are confident because of familiar experience or clear perception of the veracity of a particular fact (regardless, i might add, of whether other people agree with you or not), whereas if you ‘believe’ something, you are taking someone else’s word that it is true, having not experienced it for yourself.” i know that God exists, because i have personally experienced Its presence. and, no, i can’t describe what It was like: it is impossible to describe that which is indescribable. you either have to experience It for yourself, or you’ll never know what i’m talking about. if you have experienced Its presence, you know exactly what i’m talking about.

that’s the only difference.

at the same time, i find myself agreeing with the rationalist p.z. myers a lot more than with dinesh d’sousa or bob larson, although i get irritated with all of them more or less equally, because i see where all of them are wrong about what they believe (i.e. “taking someone else’s word”) because they all have not personally experienced God’s presence. i don’t think that makes them less human beings than people who have experienced God’s presence, it just makes them “different”…

and i, the “different” one, am completely normal! 8)

as i have said to people before, if you have a problem with the way i think, you are cordially invited to think of me as that guy with the hole in his skull who believes things that aren’t logical. you won’t be the first, you won’t be the last, and i don’t care.

linque dump Ⅴ, rants and others

i got a spam comment from Anonymous – Operation Titstorm this morning. while i agree with anonymous’ motivation for such action, i am not part of the australian government and not in a position where i can do much of anything except agree with their motivation for their actions. go anonymous, but please go do it somewhere where it’ll make a difference, okay? mass spamming of random blogs is a really good way to make a lot more people not want to deal with you any longer.

Google shuts down music blogs without warning – this is the same company which has recently announced a “1GB bandwidth internet connection to every home” deal that is in the works. making it even more likely that, whether you like it or not, google will have access to all of your data. the fact that google already has their hands in pretty much everything from where you’re going to be to who you’re going to be there with and everything in between, their Gmail was marketed with “never delete another email, EVER” propaganda (which nobody seems to remember these days), and they are in bed with the CIA and have a team of specialists ready to scan every bit of information the unwitting public feeds into their jaws makes their “Don’t be evil” company motto a bit of a malapropism.

People browse by search (or ReadWriteWeb faces the Facebook Login problem) – of course, the problem is confounded by the fact that people don’t seem willing to actually learn what this computer-thingy on their desks is for to begin with. a very good example of this is one of my clients, who regularly calls me because he thinks his “anti-virus software is tired” of zapping viruses on his windows machine, or the fact that he can’t type into his computer because the keyboard is unplugged and he didn’t realise it.

Christians claim hate crimes law an effort to โ€˜eradicateโ€™ their beliefs – no, hate crime laws are an effort to crack down on hate crimes… if your beliefs are the direct cause of the hate crime, then you’ve got something to worry about. if not, claiming that hate crime laws are an effort to eradicate “christianity” just makes you appear to be really, REALLY stupid, regardless of where you obtained your law degree. even a fifth grader can see that constitutionally protected speech does not apply, when it is clearly written into the law to begin with… ☹

New National Security Distraction: Arabic Language Students – a white-bread american physics major from pomona college is a terrorist, according to TSA officials and the FBI, who spent several hours handcuffed, under arrest and being questioned by no fewer than seven law enforcement officials, but unable to obtain legal council, because he tried to board a plane with… wait for it… not liquids, not matches, not a bomb. arabic flash cards. TSA Supervisor: You know who did 9/11? George: Osama bin Laden. TSA Supervisor: Do you know what language he spoke? George: Arabic. — therefore, you are a terrorist, because you are learning arabic… WHO TRAINS THESE PEOPLE ANYWAY?!? it’s a wonder that i am as nice to strangers as i am… 8/

finally, Security patch results in BSOD – i think this may actually be an improvement in windowsdoesn’t operation. at least now you go directly to the BSOD, rather than thinking your computer might actually be doing what it is supposed to before you go there. this is exactly the reason i don’t use microsoft products any longer. they’re releasing internet explorer eight with the same unfixed bugs in it that i reported to them before they released IE three, and they still haven’t even made an attempt to fix them. why people think that microsoft cares about anything other than making as much money as possible while exerting as little actual work as possible is totally beyond me.

Continue reading linque dump Ⅴ, rants and others

HAH!!!

HAH!!

โ— i’ve “won” after all… it took a little bit more time than i thought, but my will has triumphed over the forces of those who would use the internet against me, to their own advantage. yay me! down with the internet bullies who don’t know what they’re talking about anyway!

while it may not be worth fighting for, the fact that i have solid proof that i originated it, and have provided that proof to everybody else that you have bullied into believing your story must be a blow to your ego, if nothing else, Dr. Michael S. Elliott, M.D. and fighting in support of a copyright and winning is one of the ways that future generations determine who is right and who is wrong. keep that in mind the next time you try to change history. โ—

now that the mysterious comment to people who most of you don’t know anyway is out of the way, i’ll procede with another MINI-LINQUE DUMP Ⅳ⅝

Saudi’s Reject Pakistani Diplomat Whose Name Translates to ‘Biggest Dick’ (here is the article in the original language). i would say that life imitates python, but i think that’s already been used…

You don’t have to be bipolar to be a genius โ€“ but it helps – … um… no comment.

Father Still Has Complicated Series Of File Folders With Grown Son’s Name On Them – another one from The Onion. i can’t figure out what’s funny about this one, though… i still have a huge folder of stuff with my son’s name on it…

by the way…

if you didn’t already know, i experienced a brain injury (a ruptured Arteriovenous Malformation, or AVM, on the left side) a few years ago, which has severely affected my short-term memory, my ability to type, my emotional lability, and other things that make a big difference in my day-to-day life. one of the primary reasons for this blog is to keep track of things that i would otherwise be likely to forget.

IT IS NOT FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT!!

if you want to read it, i can’t stop you (well, i could, but, in general, i don’t want to alienate my friends), but if you don’t like what is said, for whatever reason, you can go fuck yourself with a rusty pointed pole, Dr. Michael S. Elliott, M.D.

link dump ? for a change

now that i’m finished frantically trying to put out a raging forest fire with a watering sprinkler (for the moment, anyway), i’ve got the time to post a whole bunch of things that i’ve been reading recently, that make me go everything from “hmmm” to “AARGH! *#%&!!?!”…

first up, in the “AARGH! *#%&!!?!” category, Religious Tefillin Prompts Scare On Plane – the way i see it, a 17-year-old jewish kid was putting on his tefillin (“phylacteries“, for the uninitiated) in preparation for morning prayer, while at the same time, one of the flight attendents, who thought he was a terrorist, diverted the plane, where he was met by clown homeland security and a bomb squad. there’s so many levels of stupid here… my mind boggles… ๐Ÿ˜

continuing to boggle my mind, in more ways than one, Slime mold validates efficiency of Tokyo rail network – more evidence (as if we needed it, which apparently we do) that the creationists are wrong… in more ways than one.

which brings me to the fact the following symbol, a full colon followed by a dash::–is called “dog’s bollocks” by typographers (much in the same way that the name for the symbol that represents “the artist formerly known as ‘Prince'” is called “bruce” by typographers: they’ve got to have something brief to call it), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. the interesting part is when someone delves into The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary… it just goes to prove that you can read the dictionary and find vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons. the only thing remaining is to see how long it will be before the L33T kiddies figure it out and start using it themselves…

there’s a rare (she’s been spending all of her free time studying these days) post from moe, about her new birthday present – yes, another dog. we are now, once again, officially a four-dog family. and the new one is obsessed with staring at the cats, in order to try to get them to move… it’s really funny… or frustrating, depending on whether or not lucy’s been at home all day.

and finally, this evening, Man Stuck In No-Man’s Land – a story from right around here… and it’s from the onion. it’s good to see the onion doesn’t ignore the little people… ๐Ÿ™‚

Continue reading link dump ? for a change

GROWF!!

the PHBFH is reaching out and tweaking me from three counties and 15 years away…

i responded to a freecycle advertisement for a shower chair – the kind that disabled people use so that they will be less likely to fall in the shower. it so happens that i have one, left over from when i had my brain surgery. it’s been sitting at the bottom of our property and vines have been growing over it for the past three years or so, but being as how it’s made of aluminum and plastic, it’s still perfectly useable, once the vines are removed. i did so, and responded to this lady whose email user name is “meowphhtkitty”. she didn’t seem particularly motivated to come and pick it up, and i didn’t seem particularly motivated to take it to her, so i arranged for her to pick it up last weekend, and when she didn’t show up the first time, i just let it slide…

but then she wrote back yesterday and said that she was going to be working in auburn, fairly close to my house, and was going to come by to pick up the chair after she got off work. this time i went out – in the rain – and picked most of the vines off the chair, so that all she’d have to do is wash the brown leaf-stains off it and it would be ready to go…

she didn’t show up again.

this time i was more intrigued. i wrote to her asking why she hadn’t shown up, and – this is where the PHBFH comes into it – she wrote back from a different address: one from DSHS, where she is, according to her signature, a “Support Enforcement Officer” at the “Seattle Division of Child Support/DSHS”.

she made some lame excuse about how her boyfriend forgot to pick her up and her phone battery being dead, but she’s the DSHS drone who took the call from the PHBFH and had the police come over and roust me and my son out of a deep sleep at 3:30 in the morning on a sunday, 12 years ago, because the PHBFH wanted to make sure that she got her check from DSHS on time (which meant that she had to be in custody of my son), but my son wanted to stay and be the best man at my wedding…

i’m not 100% sure of this, of course, because i never actually learned the names of the DSHS people that were involved, but i know for a fact that the PHBFH was ripping off DSHS, she was crazy as a loon, i was taking care of her child and paying child support so that the PHBFH could get away with not having a job, and i couldn’t get anybody to pay attention to the problems I was having with the PHBFH.

and, of course, after my son turned 18 and i was no longer required to pay child support, the PHBFH went certafiably nuts and was involuntarily committed to the state mental institution, which is what i had been trying to tell people ever since my son was about seven years old. of course, by then it was “too late” – my son was already 18, i was already relieved of my child support obligation, and there was nothing anybody could do about it…

i haven’t been this angry at someone for a LOOOOONG time… and it is very likely that “meowphhtkitty” has no idea who i am or what my circumstances are…

but if she thinks that she’s going to be a no-show twice, AND be associated with the place that let the PHBFH step on my balls, she’s got another think coming.

another day

another day without moe… one less day until i see her again… how much like an old teenage love song do i sound at this point…

i put a handle and feet on my saw case today. i went to a shoe and luggage repair place that was inhabited by a couple of old korean folks. i said i needed a handle for my instrument case – something that i could see that they had in their display case – and the old lady said that she had to see the case, so she could pick out the right handle. so i pulled out the saw case and she was so non-plussed by it that she had to roust the repair guy from his bunker. he spoke even less english than the old lady, pretty much restricting his communication to a series of meaningful grunts and two word responses, which were apparently in some language other than english. i don’t know for sure that they were korean, but there was an ancient (1970s era) calendar for a korean christian church on the wall. the repair guy came out, took one look at the case, and immediately started rooting around in a box on the floor from which he produced the feet, then went over to the display case and pulled out a handle from a pile of miscellaneous parts, and proceded back to his bunker with the old lady on his heels. there was a lot of talking, mostly from the old lady (the old guy preferring his grunts and two-word answers to pretty much everything she said) for about 10 minutes, and then the old lady came out and said that they couldn’t figure out what to charge me because they don’t usually sell these things. i suggested $15, which sounded good to her.

and the saw case really did need a handle. instead of being a large, unwieldy object with no handles, it’s got a standard instrument case handle in exactly the right place. when i placed it next to my trombone and trumpet cases, i realised that “real” cases have rounded edges, and the saw case currently has rough square edges, but that’s easy enough to fix.

goe mont fumby

moe went to her annual conference in florida today. she will be back in two weeks. by then i hope to have a new shower stall where we currently have a broken, non-functioning garden tub. a guy just came around to size it up and give me an estimate. the guy the other day said that he would do it for around $700, which is about what i expected. i’ve got another guy coming on monday to size it up for an estimate, and then we’ll get down to the business of actually doing it.

i got a trackback from the guy who is blogging about the guy who ripped me off and his arguments about why it seems that i am the one who ripped him off. he’s got an entertaining story, but it’s basically wrong from beginning to end. i would correspond more with him, but it’s pointless, so i have decided that he’s not worth it. basically, the way i see it, i’ve got dated, hard artwork from 1975 – 1993 that proves i am the originator of the font, and he’s got a bunch of interesting stories about other commercial, shareware and hand-made fonts from 1995 on, that seem to match. we’ll see how far he can get with that.

also, Art Clokey died… too many cool people have been dying during the past couple of years. stop it.

linque dump Ⅲ

At 13,000 years, tree is worldโ€™s oldest organism – that’s incredible… something that has been alive longer than humanity as such has been on the planet… it should be a clear indication to the creationists that they’re wrong, but it’s not.

A Manifesto! The Time Has Come! – by bishop john shelby spong. someone who the “christians” would be wise to listen to… but they won’t.

Google’s Street View camera car hits a baby deer – and, of course, takes pictures of it.

why are people SO FUCKING IGNORANT?!?

Ugandan president urges softening of anti-gay bill – this is the ugandan president, saying – once again – that he is not going to allow the “kill gays” bill to pass. an admirable effort, if it actually happens, however, despite repeated assurances from the ugandan president, i still doubt will actually come to pass.

at the same time…

Witch-doctors reveal extent of child sacrifice in Uganda – this is somewhat of a surprise, considering their stance on killing gays. you get the impression from the first article that uganda is mostly a country of mortified “christians” who want to avoid the gay plague. there’s no clue from the first article that uganda is also a place where “crime is directly linked to rising levels of development and prosperity, and an increasing belief that witchcraft can help people get rich quickly.”

if they’re really just mortified “christians” then i would suspect them to shun “witchcraft” as well, but somehow these supposedly “christian” ugandans are more mortified about gays than they are child-murdering “witch-doctors”.

it’s as though they’re saying “it’s perfectly normal for us to want to kill gays, because they’re evil, but when it comes to getting ahead, a little child sacrifice, especially if it is someone else’s child, couldn’t hurt anyone.”

“(Homosexuality) is not allowed in African culture. We have to protect the children in schools who are being recruited into homosexual activities.”… but if there’s even the remotest chance that doing so would help us get a little bit ahead, we’re not above mutilating or killing children, either…

i’m not sure i even want to try to understand that one… ๐Ÿ˜

somebody grafittied my car!

grafittisomeone grafittied my car!

i was at Hale’s Palladium this evening for the last performance of Aladdin and The Magic Lamp. i parked there and went in around 1:30 pm, and when i walked out of the palladium at around 6:00 pm, there it was. the paint was dry, which, in my mind, means that the guy must have done it around between the time that i left it, and 4:00 or thereabouts.

i asked around and i learned that the guy who tags things with “SEEDR1” is around 30 years old, and was a student at cornish until he was expelled because of a conflict with one of the instructors (big surprise). he is known for his “photo-realistic” grafitti art, but he also tags (which is likely one of the sources for the conflict with the instructors at cornish), and he was probably drunk when he did it (big surprise).

i donโ€™t know who he is — yet — but iโ€™m already closing in on his identity, and it hasnโ€™t even been 6 hours yet. i’m pissed at this guy, because his drunken tag is going to cost me time and money to cover up, but also because tagging a car — any car — is really a lame, juvenile thing to do. if i ever find him, i donโ€™t know what i would do, but i do know that i’m probably going to file a police report regarding it whether i find out his identity, or not, and if it’s possible to get reimbursed for it, by whatever means, from him, it would be an awesome thing.

grafittii’m going to get better pictures in the morning, when the light is better, but i really donโ€™t understand why he did itโ€ฆ to my car doesn’t matter, i would wonder the same thing about such a tag on any car. the guy must have known that it wouldn’t last long, nobody would see it, and โ€” especially because of the fact that it was on an art car to begin with — it is going to be covered up immediately, before i drive anywhere other than directly home.

and if the guy is an artist himself, what was going through his mind as he spray-painted his tag on my piece of artwork? how would he feel if i spray-painted a tag on one of his pieces of artwork? maybe, because of the fact that his artwork is mostly grafitti to begin with, he wouldnโ€™t mind so much, but i would be willing to bet that if he created a work of art that wasn’t grafitti, and someone spray-painted on it, he would be offended at the very least, so why would he expect any less from me?

i’m not really surprised that someone grafittied my car, but what i am surprised about is why it has taken this long. i’ve been driving ganesha the car for 5 years, and this is the first time anyone has done anything nasty to itโ€ฆ and really, thinking about it, it isn’t really that nasty, except in a vile, putrid, disgusting sort of way. and the guy managed to paint on one of the few places on the car where i won’t have to repaint the actual artwork on the car in order to cover it up, so apart from being really lame and annoying, it’s not that bad.
i am writing in I, Anonymous about it, though, because i know a lot of people read it, and very likely the guy who did it will either find out about it personally, or from one of his friends.

and, by the wayโ€ฆ the guy who tags SEEDR1 is an worse than an asshole. he’s an anal polyp and he deserves to be removed from society’s colon immediately. the guy i caught in the act of trying to rip a bumper sticker off of my car apologised and admitted that he was being an asshole, and he got forgiven by me, because he stood up, admitted what he was doing, and that he was an asshole. this guy is worse, and he is not getting forgiven. die in hell, scum!

oy… 8/

i’m having a tough time, and i can’t even blog about it! ๐Ÿ™

i’ve selected a new host provider and begun the process of switching, but because of the fact that new host provider doesn’t feel comfortable allowing me ssh access, i’m forced to do everything the slow way, one file at a time, and “ask” for help, then wait up to 24 hours for a response, every time i find something that i can’t do with a GUI that i could do in 5 seconds with ssh access. as a result, i haven’t actually switched the DNS settings and now i’m going to have to export my wordpress database and upload it to the new server again because of this post… and there’s a problem with the blog on the new host server, which i could fix in 5 seconds using ssl, but because of the fact that he’s nervous about offering ssl, even if i do hit the “submit” button on this post, download the database from the old server, and reupload the database on the new server, it won’t show up at the new server… all you can see at this point is

Warning: fopen(/home/hybridel/public_html/przxqgl/wp-content/cache/wp_cache_mutex.lock) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/hybridel/public_html/przxqgl/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 96

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/hybridel/public_html/przxqgl/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache.php:2) in /home/hybridel/public_html/przxqgl/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 868

i got email about my Tengwar Sindarinwa font from the guy who plagiarised it (taking out some of the spacing characters that he didn’t understand, reversing some characters, etc., etc.) saying that i was the one who ripped him off, in spite of the fact that i have original artwork from the ’70s that proves otherwise. what he doesn’t realise is that you can’t “copyright” a letter shape, all you can do is copyright a font name, and my “Tengwar Sindarinwa” and his “Tengwar Gandalf” have different names. there’s nothing that he can do except be annoying, but he’s choosing a very difficult time to do it.

moe applied to be an animal behaviour specialist, which meant that she had to put together almost 1000 printed pages of records, logs, articles and so forth that she has been working on for the past 7 years. she was working on the last of it the other night and one of the dogs spilled a cup of water all over her laptop. we managed to get it shut down without obviously shorting out something, removed the battery and dried it off as well as we could, including leaving it upside down on a towel over a heat register overnight, and blowing it out thoroughly with compressed air, but when i tried to boot it up it gave me the “i can’t find the operating system” icon. i called apple care and explained the situation to them, and they said that if i took it in to the mac store that they had software that could look at the contents of the disk, and even made an appointment for me – the last one of the day – at the mac store in southcenter. i drove 20 miles to southcenter and waited almost an hour before someone finally talked to me (it was after closing time). he wouldn’t take my case ID number and wouldn’t even look at the computer. he told me that, in fact, they do have the software that apple care told me about, but that their policy was to “use it for our own purposes, and not to retrieve customer data”. when i said that apple care had told me differently, he said he would give them “feedback”, but there was nothing he could do. ๐Ÿ˜ฎ

to make matters worse, i called apple care again this morning, because at least there i can give them my case ID number so that at least they will know what i’m talking about, but the first support goon i talked to said exactly the same thing as the one i talked to last night. when i told him that he was wrong and that the mac store wouldn’t help me, he passed me along to his supervisor who told me there was nothing he could do. ๐Ÿ˜ฏ

i used to be a macintosh afficianado. i was a mac-head before most of the “geniuses” at the “genius bar” were even born. the first mac i used was a Lisa. but the customer service i received from apple, and from the mac store yesterday is enough to make me never want to see another apple product again in my entire life. i currently own, and am running a dual-core intel macbook pro, and the next time i have difficulties with it, it’s going to lose it’s apple operating system all together, and gain a new linux operating system. ๐Ÿ˜ก

then there was the fact that i left my linux computer running when i went to bed last night, and this morning when i got up, it was not running and i couldn’t start it up. according to the people that i took it to (it, fortunately, is still under warranty), the power supply was laden with dust, and they speculated that it stopped working when it overheated. fortunately, because of the fact that it is still under warranty, i didn’t have to pay to get it fixed, but i drove all the way there and back twice before i had breakfast this morning.

it’s almost 4:00 already and i’ve gotten exactly NOTHING done for the past THREE DAYS. i’ve got a performance this evening at the rialto theatre in tacoma, a real, authentic, old-time vaudeville stage where i’ll be opening for Pearl Django, and i’m in such a bad mood that i’m not even excited about it. ๐Ÿ˜›

AAAARRRGGGHHH!

that’s A4R3G3H3 for those of you who are keeping score…

you may or may not have noticed that my web sites have been down for the past 24 hours. this was because at 4:00 friday afternoon, i got an email from my “new” host provider that he was going down for “4 to 5 hours (maximum 10 hours) for upgrades” and wanted to know if it was “okay with you if we start them this evening”… and then proceded to start the upgrades without even making sure that it was okay with me or not.

also, he informed me that my rates would be increasing by almost 300% because he is having trouble breaking even. ๐Ÿ˜ฏ

needless to say, i have – once again – embarked on the task of finding yet another host service provider – my fourth switch in less than a year… ๐Ÿ™„ i will probably be switching in january, after the panto is over.

more stuff after the panto.

death for xmas…

the way i see it, the possibility that uganda is not going to pass the “kill the gays” bill, and instead offer the option of “counseling and rehabilitation” will make it far more likely that the “christians” in the united states – who have been slapped in the face by the ex-gay ministry folks who have recently been forced to break ties with a guy who has been their affiliate for decades because of his “bizarre and unorthodox” therapies, and who are up against the psychologists associatiation saying that being gay is not a disease and not a choice, and who are also, ultimately, behind the “kill the gays” bill in the first place – will use the fact that uganda is saying that “counselling and rehabilitation” is “preferable” to their original plan is more justification that “counselling and rehabilitation” are effective “treatments” for this “disease”.

much as i hate to say it, i hope that uganda passes the “kill the gays” bill, so that it will be made plainly, blatantly, horrendously obvious to even the most uneducated “christian” on the planet exactly how “un-Christian” this legislation actually is. anything less will just give the “christians” more fodder, weak and meaningless as it is.

the war on xmas

the closer we get to xmas, the more i am feeling like a jew at a nazi rally, and i am aware of the irony of such a statement a lot more accutely than those of you who may be shocked at the reference.

what i would really like, is to magically transport myself to somewhere where they don’t celebrate xmas for the month of december – and possibly the months of november and january as well – just to get away from the hype that is going on. the commercialism and the politics of the holiday are really starting to get to me, and i still have 10 days until it’s over for another year.

it’s not that i don’t celebrate xmas, and it’s not even that i don’t believe in the “christ” and “god” that are behind the current incarnation of the holiday so much (although that’s another part of the story). what is really disturbing to me is the combination of not being able to turn on the television or the radio without hearing either commercials for products that i know won’t work (like Windows 7), or seeing news reports of people complaining because the greeter at walmart said something, or didn’t say something that was offensive to them… or not… ๐Ÿ˜

i was brought up in a family that celebrated the commercial aspects of xmas. we didn’t even have a regular church service that we went to that was on a day other than sunday, and the church services that we went to all the time were pretty ecuminical and inclusive of traditions and cultures that were not specifically “christian”, so when i grew up and learned that some people believed that xmas was for stuff other than getting loads of toys and candy, i didn’t quite understand, but i didn’t really notice that much when the checker at the grocery store wished me a “merry xmas”. as i developed more of a relationship with sanatanadharma (which is what “hinduism” is really called) i started noticing the discontinuity a lot more: the “peace on earth and good will toward men” compared to the war, hunger and poverty that exist in the world, the constant fighting between catholics and protestants, the constant fighting between the christians and the non-christians, and the growing furor over “the war on xmas” came much more to the forefront, and i find it quite distressing.

things like the reference to a woman who compared santa to a swastika take on a meaning that is not immediately obvious to people who believe the swastika is an evil symbol, for example. i can see how santa is a lot like a swastika, and i wouldn’t mind seeing both of them in more common usage, but if there’s going to be an uproar over whether or not to have a swastika in a public display, then there certainly should be just as much uproar over whether or not to have a public holiday that celebrates santa – even if santa is not the "reason for the season".

and, for that matter, if you think about it a little more than most "christians" have, jeezis himself is not the “reason for the season” either. people celebrated the winter solstice for a long time before jeezis showed up, and it’s really only been within the past 200 to 500 years that we’ve had anything at all like what is currently celebrated as xmas, so all of those "war on xmas" fanatics really don’t have a leg to stand on in the first place. but in general, i think that the hindus and jews and buddhists and muslims and animists and even athiests have gone out of their way to accommodate all of the fanatics who insist that they are to be greeted with the phrase "merry xmas" instead of the more ecuminical "happy holidays" in fact, the only reason we have been as accommodating as we have been is because the "christians" are a majority of our population and if we weren’t so willing to give up what we believe in order to make peace, most "christians" wouldn’t have the slightest problem killing us!

what would jesus do, indeed?

i keep feeling like i am totally alone in a society of people who would have no problem killing me if they happened to find out that i don’t believe the way they do, but at the same time, i feel compelled to inform these ignoramuses that they aren’t the only ones on the planet, and that other people – people who believe differently than they do – have just as much right to exist as they do, and what jesus would really do is get along with everyone… which is supposed to be "The Christmas Message" anyway.

VEWPRF, xmas, hinduism…

i’m getting fed up with the VEWPRF (primarily xmas) hype early this year. fortunately now i’ve got a gadget in my car that i can plug my music player into so i don’t have to listen to the radio. when i’m not listening to my own music, i usually listen to the classical music station, but even they are playing xmas carols far too frequently. i just got a package of CDs from india, including “Om Arunachaneswaraya Namaha” and “Ganesh Gayatri Mantra”, both of which are more than an hour of chanting, which should cover the period of time that i’m suceptible to going off on local “christians” too much.

speaking of which, Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys – more indisputable evidence that evolution is real and the creationists are wrong, wrong WRONG, regardless of how much they claim that they’re “inspired” by “god”… if any further evidence was needed.

i feel a little guilty for going off at “christians” since i am a believer myself, but i accept that science probably has a lot more clear idea of what is going on in the world than the 2000-year-old myths of a society that i do not feel a part of. i don’t deny that those myths may have value to some people, but my impression is that they are far more detrimental to most people who claim to live by them than they would care to admit. and, largely, i can say the same thing about the myths to which i adhere, in spite of the fact that they are, for the most part, totally the opposite of “christian” myths. the difference, i think, is that i admit that my myths are myths, and act accordingly. sure, i occasionally do odd things like wear a tilak, but i’m not “religious” about it, and i certainly don’t let it go this far

we played for the lenin lighting on friday, and it was cold, but it wasn’t anywhere near as cold as it would have been in new york. i dressed for it, and kept my mouthpiece in my pocket when we weren’t actually playng, but there were a lot of complaints that it was too cold. the emcee was pat cashman… who?

Artists’ lawsuit: major record labels are the real pirates – it’s about time, but i think that $50 million to $6 billion may not be enough to get the message across. remember, we’re talking about warner, sony and EMI… and it is only canada. let’s wait to see if it’s effective, and then try something like it in the untied states. definitely a step in the right direction, though.

Continue reading VEWPRF, xmas, hinduism…

update

happy 4/20. i’d be consuming more holy vegetable, but i still am terrifically short of breath and coughing a lot as a result of being sick still. i’ve been vapourising a bit and even that has been causing me to cough. i suppose i could probably make some ghee or something…

they’re putting on a new roof, so that it won’t leak any longer. it’s only about two years overdue, but there’s no point in complaining about it now. the dogs are being quiet, in spite of the roofers right over their heads, making all kinds of noises which dogs would definitely find suspicious. we’ll see how long that lasts.

the $300 withdrawal from my bank account has had a band-aid put on it, but it’s still an open and sucking chest wound. at this point i’m done talking with people until i hear from the bank concerning my contesting of the charges. moe has taken over talking with the people who actually withdrew the money, and considering that i never actually signed anything, combined with the fact that the first time i ever even heard about an “early cancellation fee” was when i checked my bank account on thursday, she seems to think that there’s a more-than-likely chance that there will be a positive (for me) outcome. we’ll see about that, as well… 8/

maybe i’ll go to the fremont sunday market on sunday. one way or the other, i could really use a day of doing nothing but making money, and there’s a good chance, since i haven’t been there in a while, that fremont will be itching for some new incense.

i got another order on the web site, but no corresponding order from paypal, which makes me seriously wonder about whether or not i’ve got it set up right. it should be that you confirm your order on my site, and then transfer to paypal’s secure server to complete your order, and of the three orders i’ve gotten since the site upgrade, two of them have confirmed the order on my site, but not completed their orders on paypal’s secure server. i wrote to one of them, but she was located in the UK and never responded. the new order came in on friday, from a guy in california, according to the site, but i never heard anything from either the customer or from paypal, so i don’t know what happened. the next step is to write to the guy and see what happened.

i’ve got to get my tabs for ganesha the car. also, i have a fremont phil rehearsal this evening.

coming to the end of another moisture festival

i met ukulele dick at the moisture festival the other day. his “real name”, acording to his schtick, is Banjo Penis. i traded him a copy of serpentine for a copy of his ukulele dick cd and a copy of his “Dick Dujour” cd, Music to Scare Children by. i’ve been listening to them on and off throughout the day, and i must say, the guy is more than just a ukulele player. i also made buttons for him that say “Act Dorky, Live Forever”. i’ve got performances on friday and sunday for sure, and possibly saturday.

the big news, or maybe not so big if you hang out with the right people, i guess, is that circus contraption is breaking up. i have no idea why, but i can imagine, as with most artistic organisations like that, that there were some artistic differences somewhere along the lines.

other news: my SSDI hearing is the 24th. i’m approaching it with an interesting mixture of hilarity and dread. i got to see part of the forms ned was filling out earlier in the week, and he said about 10 things, of which i would think that 1 of which should be enough to get me on the “disabled” list in a perfect world, but because of the fact that the world is decidedly imperfect, i don’t know if it will help or not. we’re going to work on it some more after the moisture festival is over.

also i’m getting ready to be able to accept credit cards on hybrid elephant, but i’ve only gotten one order since i went live with the new site, so i’m wondering if i can’t put it off for another month until i get more of an idea about whether or not people are going to notice it.

despite the fact that i won the battle of the computer in record time – this time – i learned a bunch of things that i didn’t know in the process. the main thing i learned is that the intermittent quiet scratching noise coming from the computer is the power supply fan, which, instead of turning on and doing what it is supposed to do when power is applied, in fact, it rotates weakly, not anywhere near fast enough to be anything like the heat sink that it’s supposed to be, and intermittently emits a scratching sound that makes me think that it, too, is not long for this world.

God is real, despite what the athiests think

my ear

i subscribe to this blog, pharyngula, which is written by professor p. z. meyers. he is a prominent evolutionary biologist and athiest whose rantings about “christianity” and the anti-scientific are the primary reasons why i read his stuff, although i freely acknowledge that the only reason i find him amusing and not childishly disgusting is because he’s not making fun of me, and i have no doubt that he would make fun of me if he knew that i exist. nevertheless, his rants about chiropractors and acupuncturists have gotten to me on several occasions, and i was going to ask my acupuncturist about it when i saw him today, but before i even remembered to bring it up, he mentioned something that convinces me even more that amusing as p. z. meyers is, he doesn’t come close to knowing everything, and about “mystical” stuff he is hopelessly clueless and will likely remain so for the rest of his life.

nervous system in the ear

what he brought up is the fact that i have been expanding my right earlobe for the past year and a half (i actually stopped about 6 months ago because my wife doesn’t like it). he’s been studying auricular acupuncture recently, and has noticed that a lot of people self-treat with piercings and modifications without realising it. he then showed me this page from his auricular therapy manual. i may agree with p. z. meyers about the perils of “christianity” and “intelligent design”, but this, if nothing else, convinces me that there are a lot of things that science knows about and dismisses as unproven, that are just as real as things that you can hold in your hand. clarke’s law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

yeah, that sure looks like jeezis to me… 8/

people have apparently been flocking to a church on the island of reunion to see “the face of christ” that was left when an unnamed parishoner got up from their leather-lined pew.

jeezis face butt print

now to me, it looks like bozo the clown on acid. and what’s with those “horns”? it’s as though it were an evil devil of some sort, overshadowing bozo the clown. it sure doesn’t look anything like even the most stylised portraits of jesus that i’ve seen. i know there’s a word for it, but the only word i can currently think of is “idolatry”, which, while appropriate, is not the word i’m thinking of.

curious

Ezra and the Maureen Whiting Dance company

so i was down at ACT theatre last night. i had a matinee show (which i almost missed because the matinee shows at ACT are at 2:00, not 4:00 like the matinees at the palladium), and i had tickets for the evening show, so i was wandering around between shows and i came across this poster for the new show put on by the Maureen Whiting Dance Company with a vaguely familiar face. i wondered if it might be who i thought it was, but the poster didn’t say. eventually i found a postcard, and sure enough, i found that was, indeed, my son, ezra.

it’s good to know that my progeny is making a name for himself. at the same time, it’s really good to know that, as an artist, he’s getting the start that i should have had, but didn’t, because of my own stuff. my guess is that by the time he’s my age now, he will be a firmly established artist with a national reputation, principally because of the exposute he’s getting now. if i had pursued my dream, instead of going to bellingham and sloughing off for 20 years, i would probably be where he is now.

it’s worse than you ever imagined…

When they took the fourth amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
     I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.
Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
     and I can say nothing about it.

Officials cite broad power for president in memos

Continue reading it’s worse than you ever imagined…

spam?

i got this very strange email today. it said:

you drive like you have sand in your vagina. your car smells like ass and I thougbt my friend crapped her pants but it was just your nasty car. I hate you.

i’m puzzled that anyone would respond that way to me. i’m not surprised that people react to my car, that happens all the time. what puzzles me is the combination of stuff that, if taken separately, would each represent a valid, if totally ludicrous complaint about my car and/or its occupants… but taken as a whole, i just have to sit back and wonder who they are and why they were so upset with me.

i don’t know what it must be like to have sand in ones vagina, but i can’t imagine that it would be very comfortable, and it would probably limit ones mobility quite a bit. i don’t know about anybody else, but i use my car to enhance my mobility, and if they saw me driving, then they would doubtlessly be aware of that. also, i am a very contientious driver: i make mistakes from time to time – i just got a ticket from one of those automated corner-watcher-robot-flashy things in federal way – but most of the time i’m a very safe driver, whether it’s on the street or on the freeway.

and if they saw me driving, then how can they be sure that it was my car that smelled like ass? i have driven through some mighty smelly areas within the past week or so, and the smell was definitely not coming from my car. if they saw the car while it was parked somewhere, i can understand why they might react that way, even though i know for certain that my car doesn’t smell like ass. it also doesn’t smell like what you would expect a car to smell like, and i’m pretty sure that some of the numbskulls around here would not be able to tell the difference. but at the same time, it makes me wonder how they saw me driving poorly enough to know that i drive like i had sand in my vagina?

and to wrap the whole thing up, they say “i hate you” – in case what they said previously hasn’t sunk in yet. well, personally, i would think that if a person was wound up enough to say the other things about me, saying “i hate you” is overstating it a little. it’s as though they thought they weren’t being clear enough about their feelings, and wanted to make sure that i knew what they were talking about. it also makes me think that they were just ranting to rant and picked me because my email form was easily accessible.

i think, and this is all just conjecture, because i’ll never know for certain (the return address on the email response form was [email protected], and i’ve already tried and failed to sent email to that address), but it’s possible that this was written by one of the teenagers that sped past me on the freeway this afternoon, only subsequently to get pulled over by the police. my guess is that they got pulled over for speeding and/or reckless driving because they incredulously and minutely examined all sides of my car – at freeway speeds – before blasting forwards at about 90 miles per hour… whereupon the fuzz, who was in an unmarked car to my right rear, and who i knew was there, flipped on their lights and went after ’em.

i guess feedback is one of the reasons why my feedback form is there, but sometimes i really wonder whether such things are good to have in a place where just anybody can get hold of them… 8/

bleep bloop boing bing…

snake suspenderz is playing at the national kazoo day celebration on saturday. we’ll be playing at the back gate stage at artichoke music on hawthorne in portland. we spent all day today and completed mixdown of all 16 tracks, and we should have a stack of 50 finished, marketable CDs to take with us on saturday.

the fremont philharmonic is in full rehearsal mode for the moisture festival, and i may be playing tuba for the sanca-pators in the moisture festival as well: i heard from a couple of sanca-pators (clayton – who also plays with BSSB and banda gozona – and thaddeus – who also plays with snake suspenderz) that they might need a tuba player, so i wrote to eben, the leader of the sanca-pators – who also plays with BSSB – but i haven’t heard back from him yet. is that incestuous enough for your sensibilities? the fremont phil has got a few other gigs coming up, including a benefit for honk fest west at the end of february. allegedly we’re going to play in honk fest west in june as well, although my recollection is that we were supposed to play last year, as well, and then we cancelled out at the last minute.

moe got home saturday, and i took the doggies with me to the airport, so that they could see that she really was somewhere else and not just hiding from them for the past 2 weeks. they spent almost the entire time she was gone, and they were home, staring at the door and barking occasionally when they imagined that they heard her driving up, as though they were going to cause her to walk through the front door by sheer force of their doggie wills. paddy, our oldest dog now that allie is gone (she’s 11) lost 5% of her body weight during the time moe was gone. she ate all of her food, and i didn’t notice her acting strangely or anything, but moe said she looked thin, so she took her to the clinic yesterday. she doesn’t appear unhealty, but moe is extra careful with paddy, because they are as close to soul mates as a person and a dog can be.

banda gozona played at the central area senior center in a benefit for cascade peoples’ center last saturday, after moe got home. it was the standard oaxacan shindig, which meant a lot of food, a lot of music, a lot of people speaking spanish, and a lot of chaotic disorganisation. i’m beginning to start to get the hang of what we are playing most of the time. it’s only taken me two years of playing with the group. it helps that i’m not the new guy any longer.

yem

so i prepared the vehicle for going to the FSM tomorrow. i figured that i would put the dogs’ food in their kennels in the car, to save time – that way all i’ll have to do is get up and let the dogs out, and while they’re outside i can get dressed and then all i have to do is put them in the car and i’m off… which seems reasonable, since i’m going to have to get up at 5:30, and recently (since moe has been gone) i have been sleeping until 10:00 or so (which is offset by going to bed between 2:00 and 4:00). but the doggies were confused when i started doing the stuff that i normally do right after i get up (i.e. getting food ready for dogs), and they only just settled down. i put in 6 boxes of incense and 2 boxes of murtis, along with all of my display gear and my canopy and i can still see out the back window, even with three dog kennels as well. i’ve been wanting to get a roof-rack for Ganesha The Car, but i want one that won’t damage or get in the way of the artwork that’s already there. i carry everything inside, with just space for me to drive when i’m driving Ganesha, and there’s no room for doggies, but this is an entirely different beast. if it didn’t mean creating an entirely new art car, i would think really strongly about a minivan – and, for that matter, if it weren’t for the economy and gas prices, i’d think about it because of the fact that it meant creating an entirely new art car. i’ve also been thinking about getting a loudspeaker for Ganesha, which i can hook up to my music player, so that i can broadcast hindu chants outside my car for shows and parades and suchlike. i’ve actually got enough money that i can realistically start thinking about actually doing something like that fairly soon.

wow…

i was just thinking about it today, and in terms of relationships, i am fairly close to some really famous people. i had breakfast with R. Buckminster Fuller when i was in high school (and he is still one of the people whom i aspire to be like), and Joseph P. Faddlefum, who was on the edge of the circle that timothy leary was in the center of, was my first college advisor and still remains a good friend, but i also know, for example, two people who know the president-elect in some way or another: one of my friends went to occidental college, and was in several discussion groups with him, and the other got a personal, printed invitation to the inauguration (although, at this point, i don’t know why). i’ve rubbed shoulders with people like artis the spoonman, baby gramps, hacki (the famous german clown), fyodor karamazov, and rev. chumleigh, although i get the impression that the first two would probably not remember my name if it came right down to it (even though i’ve appeared on the same stage, at the same time as both of them for 5 years in a row, now). and that’s not to mention the fact that my wife is the “Nuclear FOB” (which stands for “Friends Of the Bobs”), having been a fan for about 20 years or so, and the fact that i personally know matthew bob and amy bob. i know St. Fred, the inventor (among other things) of the exploder control that took microsoft by surprise when they had just released their supposedly “more secure” platform for browser plugins (which was really OLE in a shiny new package), and i worked for a couple of years with the son of Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.

i’m not that famous, and i’m not sure i want to be, but i guess i’m just as happy being in the background of all these famous people, even if nobody else notices.

in other news, i’ve decided to move my personal web site to it’s own domain (and away from drizzle), so i’ve registered puggry duckling dot com (which isn’t there yet). i’ll move my pages over to there and place a server-push to the new domain… probably tomorrow. who knows how long the server-push is going to remain there, considering that drizzle updates their DNS tables manually whenever they feel like it… 8/

i am a fucking terrorist, damn it!

god damn it, it’s a fucking good thing i don’t live in south carolina, otherwise i’d be guilty of a fucking felony and face a fine of fucking five thousand dollars… i wonder what shit-for-brains asshole came up with that idea, and if they’ve ever read the fucking bill of rights before they accepted their fucking job… >8/

diary of a tired geek

i had another session with the annoying/amusing client i have spoken of previously today. his printer wouldn’t work, and his flash plugin wouldn’t work – which meant that he can’t view the pornographic videos he watches all the time – and he wanted me to make sure that his operating system hadn’t “gotten tired” of alerting him to things… oh, and when a javascript popup window that said his computer is infected with a virus, and wouldn’t go away, he wanted me to reassure him that someone wasn’t watching what he was doing through his computer screen. he’s really annoying because i put things as simply as possible in order to help him understand, and then, when i begin to think he’s getting the idea, he comes out of left field with things like “i used to have a daily devotional icon on my computer [when it was running windows], and before you installed the new OS, i put it on my flash drive, but now it doesn’t work. can i get it to work?” and i have to begin again and explain that icons are not always the same things as programs, and just because you are able to transfer an icon from one computer to another (or, in this case, from one operating system to another), it doesn’t always take the program. sometimes the icon is just a pointer to the program, and even if it actually is the program, this does not automatically mean that it will work there. whereupon he says “well is it possible to get a daily devotional icon that does work?”… 8/ i know nothing about what this guy actually does on his computer, other than research spasticity (he actually had me set up a wikipedia account for him, because he wants to contribute), watch his “daily devotional” program, whatever that is, and view tons of pornographic videos, which he has me clear out of his cache once in a while. he’s really earnest in wanting to know more, and he appears to be fairly bright in spite of having a brain injury, but he doesn’t seem to get it enough that i wonder about him sometimes.

i also nailed up some chainlink fence material to the neighbours’ fence posts. it wasn’t a moment too soon. as i was nailing up the fence material, i heard an ominous crack and the fence gave way. it didn’t actually fall down, but now the only thing that’s holding it up is gravity and friction. my guess is that eventually there will be enough moss growth that the friction will give way and the entire fence will come down.

yesterday we had another recording session with snake suspenderz, which resulted in three tracks that are in the final stages of finishing, and one track that needs a bit more work (hobbit and thaddeus are getting together tomorrow to finish it up). when that’s done, we have one more session, and then a CD release party, or something like that. National Kazoo Day is on the 31st, and snake suspenderz is going to portland for that. there’s also rumours that we have a potential gig in eugene. among the new tracks that we recorded are a song called Serpentine, by howlin’ hobbit, and the standard Don’t Get Around Much Any More, by Duke Ellington.

monday i spent all day feeding my database and learning about CSS selectors and which bits of PHP to change in my new osCommerce installation. i got a whole bunch of the database finished, and got the site more or less into the shape that it’s going to have when it’s complete, but i still have a lot of mismatched headers, things that are showing up on one page but not on the others, or vice versa, bright colours (i’ve been changing things to bright colours so that i can see when things change more easily), and incomplete content to deal with. osCommerce is made for people who are a lot less web-savvy than i am, so figuring things out shouldn’t be too difficult. i think that, for most people, the most daunting part of osCommerce is the piles of PHP/HTML/CSS pages that they potentially have to edit, but it doesn’t bother me at all. actually, i’m a lot more concerned about the database, because i’m still not completely sure about the mechanics of the interaction between the database and the website. how much of it is database manipulation of PHP code, and how much of it is actually due to the effect that the PHP itself is having on the pages i see is still a complete mystery.

another deposit recently and my bank account is over $500 for the first time since i started the business – seven years ago! i’ve noticed that for the past 5 years or so, my bank statement for january is approximately twice what it was the year before, and it’s very definitely the case this year. in fact, it’s almost 3 times what it was last year. despite what the DVR drone said, i think i’m doing something right, and i’m really looking forward to next year as well.

i actually think i’m going to survive monique’s being gone without much difficulty, but i’m not so sure about the dogs. magick and zorah heard me drive up in the minivan today (which is usually moe’s car), and they lost it, and spent a good hour and a half staring at the door and barking trying to get moe to walk through it by sheer force of their doggie wills. it would have been a lot more amusing if i didn’t jerk violently (a lingering side effect of my brain injury) when they bark.

meanwhile, here’s what i have been reading about:
UCL records the sound of jelly wobbling – the university college in london has succeded in recording the sound of jelly wobbling in a soundproof recording chamber. i definitely went to the wrong school.

a little closer to home, YouTube video of man blasting couch with rifle shown at weapons trial – let’s see if i’ve got this straight: the guy thought he would celebrate the fact that he had this illegal firearm, and silencer, without a permit or anything, by filming himself without disguise or attempt to cover evidence that they caught him with, shooting up a couch close to his home, and then post it on youtube… if i were going to film myself identifiably using an illegal firearm to do something, i would be sure that the thing i filmed would get me arrested on it’s own merits, whether i filmed it or not. the fact that this guy thought he could take a film of him doing something illegal and post it on youtube is bad enough, but the fact that he apparently didn’t think about the fact that it might be a factor in getting him caught proves that this guy is stupider than most.

flurb

moe goes to florida for two weeks for her annual conference starting sunday, which means that i’ve got two weeks of taking care of three dogs on my own while she’s in key west playing with dolphins and manatees. it will probably be okay except for the fact that i’m planning on going to the fremont sunday market next week, and i’ll probably have to take the doggies with me so that they don’t have to spend all day in their kennels with no bathroom breaks. i’m actually looking forward to taking the little dog – zorah the cute – to FSM because i get the impression that she will be the cause of a significant boost in my sales.

i saw ezra today, and talked with him about setting up a domain or two for him. he wants a “legitimate” web site and one that is “not so legitimate” and he wants control over both of them, but not any immediately visible connection between the two. i said that it would be not too difficult, and now have the task of researching domain names, while his job is to 1) get a new computer to replace his broken one, and 2) to come up with content so that once the domain name(s) are registered, they can be populated without me having to do much other than the technical end of things.

i got a whole pile of incense samples from sugandha prabhu, but none of them are incenses that i want to carry, and part of the reason is because there’s no guarantee that i will be able to get more if sugandha prabhu disappears, which is a probability that i have been prepared for, for a couple of years now. sugandha prabhu inevitably comes up with the most outstanding incenses available anywhere (and also guides me towards the incense that nobody else carries) but he’s also one of my most flaky suppliers, and i don’t know from one day to the next whether or not i’m going to be able to get more from him. i currently have more than ½ a kilo of majmua durbar, which is a tremendously popular incense, that is apparently not going to be delivered because they stopped making it without telling anyone, despite the fact that sugandha prabhu sent me a little bit less than ½ a kilo just a little bit more than a month ago with the promise that the rest of the kilo would be “coming soon”… if it weren’t for the fact that i now have two or three months worth of free incense (i can’t sell the samples he sends), i would be a bit more perturbed than i am with sugandha prabhu currently.

i found the place where the graphics are stored for my new osCommerce web site, but it’s going to take me a while to sort things out and get everything working. it’s probably going to be at least a month or so before i have a tentative web site that is worth viewing, so don’t expect me to post links to it just yet.

new years’ rant

okay, over at Unreasonable Faith there’s a discussion going on which started out with the guy giving believers “your chance to convince us atheists there is a God. Pitch your best case for why we should believe in a deity”. i normally agree with atheists a lot more than i do with “christians”, but i couldn’t resist, especially since mine is a somewhat unique position (which i will explain more fully in a minute) to which few, if any, other people subscribe – which is just fine with me.

although, as i said, i tend to agree with athiests a lot more than i do with most “believers”, ultimately, i am a “believer” myself, and everything that i have experienced to this day only drives home to me that my way of thinking is the correct one for me, if for no other person. i know that a God exists, and that He (for lack of a better term) has three defining characteristics: the God that i worship is infinite, unchanging and eternal. ultimately, the God in Whom i beleve can be described as existing beyond “normal logic” because of the fact that in order to meet the criteria of being infinite, unchanging and eternal, God would have to be able to do what seem to us like impossible things, for example being in multiple places at the same time, or being both right and wrong, or both black and white, at the same time, without having to worry about whether or not one thing conflicts with the other. if what you call “god” is unable to exhibit these three qualities then, to me you are not referring to the God that i know to exist.

i realise that this puts me in the category of “mystics” (some might say “crazy people”, i’ll deal with them in a minute) who say that God exists beyond normal understanding, and without some sort of “mystical experience” you’ll never understand what i am talking about, but i’m not the only one to believe this way, and from what i’ve been able to see, the ones who believed the way i do had significant hardships, but were a great deal happier overall than people who went along with the herd, whether athiest or “christian”.

i look at my life as depicted in this story, called When the Waters Changed

Once upon a time, Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially horded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water which, when consumed, would drive men mad.

Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.

On the appointed date, the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.

When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they seemed to have no memory of having changed, or being warned that it would happen. When he tried to talk to them, he realised that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.

At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.

eventually, i’ll run out of my special store of water, and be forced to drink the water everyone else is drinking. then, presumably, i will give up thinking like a crazy person and start thinking like everyone else.

if that happens, please kill me.

happy new year.

happy VEWPRF

i-love-satan.jpg

in the past, i’ve tried to go along with whatever holiday might be celebrated around me whether i “believed in it” or not, however in the past few years it’s gotten to the point where i’ve taken a long, hard look at the traditions, the history, and the meaning of several Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festivals (VEWPRFs) and tried as much as possible to separate myself from them, primarily because of the fact that i don’t “believe in them” in any conventional sense, and to me, the people that really do believe in them, particularly “christians” really make me wonder about the future of the human race. i’ve had the chance to go “caroling” with a bunch of other brass players, and while i appreciate the music very much, and would really like to get together with a bunch of people who all appreciate the music, and can play it well, i decided not to go – and not entirely because of the fact that “the weather outside was frightful” (although that was about ⅔ of the reason). the weather is also the reason we won’t be spending xmas (one of the VEWPRFs i was talking about) with the inlaws in portland this year – although we probably will be spending new years day with them (’cause i have the gig where i’m paid the most amount of money i have ever been paid for something EVER on new years eve – i’m being paid $100 an hour for an hour’s performance with snake suspenderz), and while it won’t exactly be the same as xmas with them, it will still very likely have the same history and meaning. with my in-laws particularly, i have learned that it’s a lot easier if i keep my mouth shut, because, if nothing else, they give good presents and don’t expect an awful lot other than to see that my wife is healthy and happy, which she seems to be taking care of all by herself.

dont-fuck-with-santa-claus.jpg

and when you look at xmas, from it’s beginnings all the way to today, you discover that it’s basically one lie after another with no apologies or attempts to hide them: jesus, if he ever even really existed, was more than likely born in the spring, and the fact that his birthday is celebrated when it is, is primarily because of the fact that the “christian” church took over pagan solstice celebrations of one kind or another, and in the process of making it basically illegal to have any other kind of celebration, at the same time it started pushing it’s own version of VEWPRF as a “legal substitute” so that the (formerly) pagan worshippers – who still continue to this day – wouldn’t rise up and overthrow their oppressors. and at this late date, there’s less of “jesus’ birth” and more commercialism and “santa claus”, to the point where jesus – the supposed “reason for the season” (which, in reality, can more be attributed to axial tilt than the birth of a supposed “saviour”) – is almost forgotten, even by supposed “christians” for whom this should be a time to remember their saviour. and that brings up the discussion: “saved from what?” saved from sin? who created sin? if it was God, then didn’t he have some reason for creating it? shouldn’t He expect us to sin, if He created it to begin with? if it wasn’t, then why do we have to be saved from it? how is jesus any more likely to save me than norm, down the street, or myself, for that matter? if it weren’t for the fact that i have experienced “the indwelling of the Holy Spirit” (which is nothing at all like the “christian” people would have you believe), i would deny that such a thing exists, simply because of the fact that the way the “christians” describe it is totally absurd. if it weren’t forced on them when they were children and unable to see how the adults were lying to them, “christianity” would have completely vanished ages ago.

and as far as my experience of the “indwelling of the Holy Spirit”, which happened many years ago (although it continues to this day), i am aware of the fact that it’s such a profound, personal experience, that any attempt i make to describe what it was like will sound equally absurd. i’m okay with that, and don’t blame you if you think i’m crazy, but like i said, it was so much different from what the “christians” say that comparing the two is a difficult thing. my impression is that “christians” only have about a quarter of the story, and instead of being inspired to learn about the ever expansive THING that they call God, they’ve decided that that’s all you ever need, and are afraid of anything that stretches beyond their comfort zone.

so, along with everything else, my views about both Christmas and xmas (similar to the difference between Christians and “christians”, for those of you who are keeping score) are skewed enough that celebrating it myself is kind of out of the question, despite my general tendency to celebrate whatever holiday “most of us” are celebrating. so you’ll pardon me while i wish everyone a happy VEWPRF and go off and hide somewhere until february so i don’t have to listen to another round of “Jingle Bell Rock”. 8/

those “christians”… 8|

caganer of barack obamathey keep coming up with more and more truly weird things that they do to appease their “god”. once i think i’ve seen the weirdest they have to offer, they come up with a new (or, in this case old) tradition that so totally blows away everything else i’ve learned about “christians” that it’s incredible.

apparently in the catalonia region of spain, catholic “christians” have a tradition of hiding “caganers” in nativity scenes and then challenging their friends to find them. what is a “caganer” you ask? it’s only a ceramic statuette of a well known person, like barack obama, or tennis player rafael nadal or the pope, in the act of defecation. “the figures symbolize fertilization, hope and prosperity for the coming year.”

i’m sorry but that’s just funny… and the fact that it’s associated with “christianity” makes me wonder how they think they can say anything against the “strange” traditions other religions practice.

“christian” =? child abuser

this morning during my daily perusal of the RSS feeds, i learned that yet another young “christian” couple has been arrested in relation to the death of their two-year-old daughter. if my two-year-old child had died, i would be upset, to say the least, and if i had been arrested in connection with that child’s death it would definitely add several more layers of stress to the whole ordeal, but this couple were arrested because they – wait for it – allegedly

beat their child to death with a hammer, to “excorcise demons” from her.

now i’m not saying that child abuse is solely a “christian” thing (i was subjected to abuse myself, as a child, and my parents are agnostic as far as i know, and i’m not talking about this sort of thing, which could be seen as child abuse or a tasteless joke – pun intended) but things like this, especially when it comes to young couples who feel the need to “excorcise” whatever demonic spirits inhabit their child, is not only ridiculously common, but it appears to get “swept under the rug” by most of “normal” society – although how anyone could consider beating a child to death with a hammer for any reason “normal” is beyond me. and i’m sure that people who aren’t “christian” beat their children with hammers, and other things, far too frequently, which makes me wonder: why is it that, when something like this appears in the news media, the perpetrators aren’t specifically identified as “christians”? if they were even suspected of being wiccans, for example, there would be no hesitation to directly identify them as such, to further villify their religious beliefs. but i read two or three articles a week concerning “christians” who torture and/or kill their children, or “christian” leaders caught having sex with children, or that sort of thing, and while it is made obvious by the context of the article that the perpetrators are “christian”, there’s no direct mention of it.

furthermore, i wonder if any studies have been done on the percentages of different religions who abuse their children. i’d be willing to bet that “christianity” is right up there near the top of the heap…

I AM A TERRORIST IN SPITE OF THE GOVERNMENT! (and you should be too, if you know what’s good for you)

this is not supposed to happen: Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security

not here. not in MY country. not in the country founded on this document with these enumerated rights and this declaration of independence from state-mandated tyrrany signed by these men.

it’s time for action: it’s time to either leave the country, or start fomenting revolution or – preferrably – both. yes, the government has “changed”, but in spite of everything that has been said apparently it’s still just business as usual, and nobody seems to be taking the slightest bit of notice as the government is snatched away from “we the people” in bits and pieces right before our eyes!

the police and sherrifs are supposed to handle law enforcement. the national guard is supposed to handle civic emergency response. the military is for fighting wars. deploying the military on united states soil is declaring war against the inhabitants of that land.

That’s us, citizens.

and yes, i know they SAY it’s to bolster security against terrorism and national emergencies. just like the patriot act and FISA and no-fly lists were supposed to do. and yet, everyday citizens are being prosecuted or restricted based on discoveries from these “protective” mandates for non-terrorism or treasonous activity.

George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not a guidebook.

welcome to the U. S. S. A.

Continue reading I AM A TERRORIST IN SPITE OF THE GOVERNMENT! (and you should be too, if you know what’s good for you)

HA!

There Probably Is has a rotating text header that says, among other things:

Think For Yourself!
Christians have always offered people opportunity to explore for themselves. We want to give you an opportunity to think for yourself. What’s missing from life when you take God out of the picture?

this is the same web site which belongs to the guy who claims to be a “spiritual leader” of a community, who has, so far, completely ignored my honest query to him.

this is exactly why i’m so frustrated with “christian” behaviour. i exist, despite your efforts to ignore me, and i won’t go away any faster if you pretend i don’t.

in other news, it’s all their fault: much to the chagrin of John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, McDonald’s has patented the making of a sandwich.

VALIDATION!

if i needed more, here is yet more confirmation that hinduism is correct path for me, regardless of what the “christians” have to say about it: i emailed Rev. Evan Cockshaw, who is the genius behind "There Probably Is" and asked him why he hasn’t posted my "testimony” yet", and guess what?

he ignored me. of course…

it seems pretty typical for “christians” to ignore someone if they’re not immediately willing to accept the dreck they’re swimming in. on the other hand, as i’ve said before, the hindu teachers i have met – even the bogus ones – have taken delight in answering questions that would appear to be blasphemous to the normal “christian” mind. and even the bogus hindu teachers i’ve experienced are more entertaining than about 99% of the “christians” i have experienced.

also Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’

Continue reading VALIDATION!

hungary harrison “christian”

that’s where some guy ordered incense from today – budapest, hungary. he ordered $4.25 worth of incense, so i have to add $50 shipping for $4.25 worth of incense.

personally, i think he should know that it would be cheaper (and probably better quality) to buy it closer to home, but i think the problem is that internet makes normal people stupid. i have many examples of this: regan fraser, brendan fraser‘s brother, was my housemate at one point about 15 years ago, and when he found out that i worked with internet, he begged me to get involved in this scheme that he had to rip people off by accessing their bank accounts over internet. or the client that i currently have who is convinced that his virus protection program “is tired” of notifying him that he has a virus – he’s convinced that he’s got a virus, even though three different virus scanners have given him a clean bill of health…

someone turned me on to a whole pile of information about my great-great-great-grandfather and his descendants that are a part of my family, but not directly related to me. apparently such people include William Henry Harrison along with several other william henry harrisons (I through V, i think).

i submitted the following to There Probably Is dot com, and i really hope they actually post it, but i get the impression that they won’t.

Brief Biography
I am a Hindu Christian Dervish Buddhist Thelemic Tinite Antichrist Anarchist Tuba-Playing ? (??? – Canis nyctereutes procyonoides) with a Brain Injury.

Submit your story
I believe in God because … i was raised by parents who were largely agnostic. They may have had some religion, but if they did, they kept it to themselves. I attended a Unitarian church when I was small, but the classes I took were more along creative lines than religious ones, and I grew up thinking of “church” as more of a social club than a place for worship.

Then, when I was first starting college, I encountered people who claimed to be “christian” but were more like parrots than people in terms of what they told me about “christianity”. They couldn’t give me a good enough reason to believe, apart from pie-in-the-sky promises to which nobody in their right mind would pay attention.

I took a class called “Introduction to Personal Philosophy” which everybody informally called “The Fly In The Fly-Bottle” or just “the fly-bottle class” in which there was an assignment that caused me to change my mind. The assignment was “for a certain, set period of time (I chose a month), act as though there is an all-powerful God and see how your life changes.” As soon as I believed that there was a God, I was able to see Him everywhere, although He (and I use the term advisedly) was not what the “christians” said He was like at all. For one thing, He wasn’t always a “He” – sometimes She was a thought, or feeling, or a smell. I quickly learned that when coincidences happen – for example, I went for an entire week where the price of everything I bought ended with 84 cents – that is God communicating with me in a way that I didn’t immediately understand. Everywhere I looked, and everywhere I look to this day, I see God essentially “peering out” from behind everything, saying “Here I am!” There is no question that I have of God that He has not answered, and He guides my every step.

His name is Ganesha.

i guess i’m disappointed with them for discriminating against me, but at the same time, what did i expect from a “christian” web site?

Requiescat In Pacem, Tuba Man

Ed McMichael

i went to the public memorial for ed mcmichael yesterday, and it was outstanding – of course i really wish that it wasn’t necessary, but ed would have loved it. i got to meet richard peterson, and kelsey, ed’s older brother. the SYSO alumni brass played (i would have played with them, but that would have meant bringing two instruments, and i already had enough to carry), the tuba choir – 13 tubas, of which mine was one – played and sounded as good as i would have expected a group which had been rehearsing for months to have sounded. i was interviewed by lori matsukawa from King5 news. the speakers, of whom richard and kelsey were two, said funny, poignant and entirely true things about ed, the videos they showed brought a tear to my eye, the music was excellent, all of the major sports teams gave ed a personalised jersey

but, you know, i would give all these things back to know that it had been a horrible joke and that ed was still alive somewhere, and chortling with perverted glee at having pulled such a fast one on the entire city. it wouldn’t surprise me an awful lot to learn that he had been planning all this for some time.

not likely. B/

more mourning for a good friend

i went to the musicians’ memorial for ed mcmichael today. there were about 50 people with instruments, including 5 tubas (of which mine was one), about 150 to 200 other people, and the media photographers and video-technicians. the musical instruments were a mish-mash of everything, including a couple of banjos, an accordion, a complete string section (two violins, a cello and a stand up bass), a bass saxophone (from The Tempos, although the guy didn’t remember me or my father), two or three french horns, several trumpets, and at least one clarinet. we played some dixieland-style funeral music (“When the Saints Go Marching In”, “Second Line” and that sort of thing), and some of ed’s favourites including Amazing Grace, Ode To Joy, Tequila and the UW fight song (which is called “Bow Down to Washington”). i’m going to be a part of the public memorial on wednesday, and i might even get to play twice, once as a member of the tuba community, and once as an alumnus of SYSO, seeing as how ed and i were both part of SYSO during the ’70s.

i’m still really devastated that ed is dead, and that some nameless teenage doodlehums killed him. apparently they’ve caught another one (which makes three now, only two more to go), but even when they have caught all of them, that won’t bring ed back or make the rest of his friends feel any better. what the fuck, thugs?

Violence takes iconic Tuba Man

i knew tuba man, although i knew him as ed, the guy who talked like john wayne… he and i were in the seattle youth symphony together, and we attended pacific northwest music camp for several years before it became the marrowstone music festival. my favourite recollection of ed was one year at the SYSO auditions, ed had gone to the other end of the building and was warming up in the stairway, and the people giving auditions had to ask him to shut up because he was playing loud enough that you could hear him all over the building. this is a sad, sad day for seattle. 8(

—-

Ed McMichaels aka Tuba ManViolence takes iconic Tuba Man
November 4, 2008
By ROBERT L. JAMIESON JR.

OLD-TIMERS who have seen it all say this is the worst year for Seattle sports.

The Mariners finished in the cellar. The Huskies, winless on the gridiron, exemplify college football futility. The Seahawks are in a tailspin. And the Sonics split, leaving a hole where the heart of Seattle pro basketball once beat.

To this list I pass along another loss, perhaps the saddest: Seattle’s most visible, beloved and melodic sports fan — Tuba Man — is dead.

Seattle knew Edward McMichael by sight or sound, the bespectacled guy with the wispy beard and floppy Uncle Sam and Dr. Seuss hats. For decades he breathed life into his shiny brass instrument, outside city sports venues.

On Oct. 25, police say, McMichael, 53, was near a bus stop in the 500 block of Mercer Street when thugs attacked, beating and robbing him after midnight. He was taken to the hospital for head wounds and was home recovering. But he died sometime Sunday or early Monday.

“We believe his death was directly connected to the assault,” Seattle police spokesman Sean Whitcomb told me Monday night. Gang and homicide detectives were handling the case.

Two juvenile suspects were in custody, and detectives are looking for three other people. “This is tragic,” Whitcomb said. Police are seeking the public’s help.

“Ed passed away overnight,” Ronny Chesvick said Monday. Chesvick works at the Vermont Inn, where McMichael lived. “Ed was a great guy. Funny. Friendly. Easygoing. We all loved him.”

When the Mariners made a storied postseason run in 1995, McMichael played “Happy Days Are Here Again,” outside the Kingdome. After the Sonics collapsed in the NBA playoffs against the Denver Nuggets in ’94, he played a dirge to match the shock that fans — rumpled and morose — felt as they staggered away from Seattle Center.

When the Seahawks surprised the world by rumbling to the 2006 Super Bowl, Tuba Man filled the air outside Qwest Field with musical ecstasy. Sports Illustrated called him a “super fan.”

Hundreds of thousands of Seattleites have walked by McMichael outside sporting events — and local stages. He loved to play outside the opera and theater houses. To play the tuba, he told me, was to be alive.

A native of the Seattle area, McMichael graduated in the early 1970s from King’s Garden High School. He was in the band at North Seattle Community College. He later brought his talents to one local ensemble or another, from Seattle Youth Symphony to Bellevue Philharmonic to Cascade Symphony.

He could have made a living in a band but chose to play for tips outdoors. Even in the rain, he would set a bucket at his feet for tip money, right next to jugs of his favorite drink, either V8 or Sunny Delight. Then he would purse his lips to his contrabass tuba — “My baby,” he called it — and create low, noble sounds.

McMichael appreciated when people would stop and listen, or leave a buck or two. But for him just meeting folks was the biggest reward. “That’s what I value most,” he said when I caught up with him last year. “People.”

In recent days, people wondered where he had gone. They hadn’t seen him outside McCaw Hall — his usual spot on opera nights. He wasn’t outside the Seahawks game Sunday.

Police said the five toughs who set their sights on McMichael also robbed and attacked two teens around the same time, asking for $5 and to use their cell phone. When the teens said the battery was dead, the attackers jumped.

The thugs also seized McMichael, who was “on the ground in a fetal position trying to protect himself as the group was kicking and punching him on the ground,” wrote a police officer who pulled up to the scene and saw the attack.

Two of the lowlifes, both about 15 years old, were caught. Three fled.

A police report said a ring snatched from McMichael’s finger during the sickening, ruthless violence was recovered. I wondered if it was his beloved 1979 Sonics championship ring, which he wore on his left hand.

McMichael was admitted to the hospital for a couple of days. A brother flew in from Florida.

Neighbors last saw him Saturday at his apartment. He had a warm twinkle in his eye but was very groggy from pain medication.

On Monday morning, his brother went to the apartment to take him to a doctor’s appointment, but he wasn’t in the lobby. So a manager went to McMichael’s room. She opened the door and found him lying peacefully on his bed, surrounded by sports clippings and memorabilia.

He was gone.

“Ed touched so many people,” said Meuy Saelee, the manager at the Vermont Inn, who — like sports fans, friends and strangers, young and old — will never forget him.

This quirky artist, talented as he was memorable, brought sweet music to big-city life.

Our Tuba Man.

the very big stupid

i’ve been increasingly disturbed to the point of disgusted revulsion by things like 17 Kids And Counting (don’t look for it if you haven’t already seen the show, it’s really not worth it) – a reality TV show about an ignorant christian family (emphasis on the quotation marks) who doesn’t know when to quit having kids (at last count there were 18 kids, and no sign of slowing down), who are apparently a “pop culture phenomenon” because of (or in spite of, i haven’t been able to decide which yet) the fact that they encourage their kids to not even hold hands or kiss until they’re married because they want to save their “godly purity” for their spouses – do the parents not even kiss their own kids for fear of messing up their purity? it’s never revealed… – and another kid getting killed with a gun, only this time the kid had the gun with the permission of his parents, and it was an uzi, which overbalanced due to the recoil with the predictable result that the kid “receiv(ed) a round in his head”. the shooting was ruled accidental, because they followed all the rules (the parents gave consent and the kid was with a “qualified instructor”) but the result was something that any intelligent person could have predicted before the “self-inflicted accidental shooting” ever occurred.

on top of that, i have actual neighbours (as in more than one house within a mile of mine) who have not one, but three mccain-palin campaign signs in front of their houses – because one just isn’t enough. i’ve been astounded at the way the mccain-palin campaign is being so blatant about their waste of materials in their larger campaign signs: the large signs that i’ve seen, which are larger than the large signs that people put up in their yards, and actually require a framework and extra supports, are as big as four large yard signs, but only contain the words “McCain-Palin” surrounded by a field of blue. the words are strategically centered and small enough that most of the sign is blank. it is as though they are saying “we waste resources faster and better than anybody else”…

i read this in a blog written by The Progressive Curmudgeonยฎ, with which i don’t entirely agree (religion doesn’t necessarily cause stupidity, although “christianity” is more apt to do it than any other religion on the face of the planet), but which i believe says a lot about why we’re in the current mess we’re in. unfortunately he, too, feels as though there’s still a very good chance that the GOP will steal the election despite the popular democratic vote. also, there’s a rumour going around that

John McCain isn’t losing the election, he’s throwing it. After the way they treated him in 2000, he’s getting his revenge by destroying the party. What we are seeing isn’t an old man who fumbled his change over 8 years. This is a angry, vengeful bastard who’s grown sick of the scumbags who have infested his party. He’s decided to burn the house down while they are all still in it. This is an 8 year long lead up to revenge.

which is a very interesting concept indeed, although not very likely, and not confirmable even if it is true. as stupid as people are, that doesn’t necessarily mean that john mccain is one of them, despite outward appearances, although the likelihood of this actually being the case is minuscule.

it’s people like the duggars, the parents of the kid who shot himself with an uzi, and john mccain that make me wish i had died when i had my brain injury… it’s really not very pleasant to continue to live in a world where this kind of person is a majority of the people around you.

Continue reading the very big stupid

cedarfest

i just got back from cedarfest. it was rainy, and i changed my mind a couple of times about whether or not to stay the night – i set up my camp, and the rain started coming down harder and harder, so i packed up my camp and decided that i would drive home late… then chumleigh invited me to a waffle breakfast in the morning, which was mighty strong temptation to stay, and finally the decision was made for me by a fellow who came up to me around 12:30 am or so and offered me a hashish brownie, at which point i decided that i would spend the night in my car. hashish has always been one of my favourite passtimes, and i haven’t had any in a long time. i didn’t get much sleep (i went to bed around 3:30 am or so, and got up at 8:30), but i slept fairly well and wasn’t all stiff and sore, like i sort of expected, seeing as how i couldn’t really recline the seat very far. i took my camera, but even with the flash, there really wasn’t enough light, and i only took two pictures because i was distracted playing music most of the night. it was sort of amusing being in the presence of people between the ages of 17 and 25 or so, who thought it was really cool that i was old as i was and still had insightful ideas about the future – or were getting totally plastered in a way that was a real reminder of what it was like when i was during my first couple of years of college. i tried to play my long-flute-digital-delay set-up a couple of times and succeded in almost shocking my nose off – seriously, it was a strong enough shock that it dimmed the lights. i plugged my (grounded) amplifier and my (ungrounded) digital delay pedal into the chaotic mess of extension cords and power strips that ran from the big top 100 yards or so to “the house,” and – big surprise – there was a grounding problem somewhere which made the microphone hot. when i held it up next to the flute embrochure, it touched my nose and shocked the hell out me, so i quickly decided to unplug everything and play “unplugged”. i really think that i could use the set-up to busk, as long as i didn’t have to rely on external power.

fremont philharmonic rehearsal tomorrow.

dead people

Paul NewmanPaul Newman - RIP
with all the people dying all over the world, and the world going to hell pretty quickly anyway, i give you paul newman – a man who played the underdog in many of his movies, was an unapologetic advocate of our getting out of vietnam, an activist, a philanthropist, a race car driver and a popcorn impressario, who died of cancer today amid no fanfares, and surrounded only by his family…

that is the way i would like to go, although the way things have been going recently, i think that the probability of that happening is getting less and less likely…

incense and burning man

things are starting to come together concerning burning man. i have a way to get there (plan A, which was plan B has finally worked through most of the major difficulties) and people who will share driving and expenses. the gig at the queen anne farmers’ market went off without a hitch, the parade went off without a hitch, and the overall result has left me with $30 for gas, which i will add to the approximately $250 that i’ve already got. i’m going to the fremont sunday market this sunday, which will likely net me around $60 more, and the snake suspenderz gig at smokin’ pete’s next thursday should be icing on the cake.

on the other hand, i’ve made a more and more rare contact with sugandha prabhu, my long time friend and incense supplier (his name is steven, but i’ve known him as sugandha prabhu for almost as long as i’ve known him), and he says he can get me majmua durbar and aparajita, which, as far as i’ve been able to tell, are not available anywhere else. i’ve got an email in to him asking if it’s okay for me to send him money after the first of the month (and after burning man), but he’s getting more and more difficult to get hold of (i called him 3 or 4 times over the past 6 months or so, and he’s only just gotten back to me), and i’m not sure if he’s even checked his email. i’d really like to get the incense from him soon, but i’m not sure whether or not i can wait until after the first of the month, especially when he’s been so difficult to get hold of in the first place: i feel like now that i’ve actually got in touch with him that i should “strike while the iron’s hot” so to speak, otherwise he might not get back to me, or might not have the incense, or the prices may have changed… or he might have actually died… i know he’s been in and out of the hospital for the past few years with kidney problems which aren’t getting any better, and i’ve known him for 30 years or thereabouts and he’s never been that healthy to begin with… so it’s really a concern… especially since majmua durbar and aparajita are two of my personal favourite incenses, i’m running perilously low on both of them, and i know that if i don’t get them now the likelyhood that i’ll be able to get them in the future is that much less.

white center jubilee days

the name of the festival in white center is jubilee days.

i met rev. chumleigh, and remembered that 30 years ago, in february, around mardi gras, i was playing with a group of musicians the rest of whom hadn’t graduated from high school yet, and we were approached by someone who called himself rev. chumleigh, who offered us a job in la conner… and, being as how i was the only member of the band who had actually graduated from high school, i accepted and i took my tuba and headed north. and because of the fact that i had no idea where la conner was, i ended up in bellingham, and have never actually seen rev. chumleigh since then until today… when i related this story to him, he (actually) remembered who i was – which may or may not have been the truth, but it sounds good.

and, because of the fact that i am available pretty much any time, i also seem to have found myself on thaddeus’ “list”, which means that any time he needs tuba or low brass – or sound effects – i’m going to be one of the first people he calls.

music

moe is in new orleans, being honoured for being elected president of SVBT. whee! 8)

i, on the other hand, am playing for the white center festival (i don’t remember what it’s called) with a friend of a friend, named thaddeus, who is also someone who knows Rev. Chumleigh. i’m finding that, despite my injury and all of the difficulties that i’ve had surrounding it for the past few years, it hasn’t detracted from my spreading reputation as the outstanding musician who comes in at more or less the last minute and saves the show, and this is yet another example: i was contacted by thaddeus before fair, had the music delivered to me during fair (and most of it i’ve played before anyway), and rehearsed with the “rest of the band” today – and by the “rest of the band” i mean thaddeus, who is playing trombone, baritone, guitar, ukelele and other stuff, a drummer named andrew, and a “ringer” keyboard player (who is blind and knows every song ever written) named julie (i think vickie – brain injury)… and the festival is tomorrow and sunday… and i’m getting paid for it.

so i’ll be busy enough that i won’t even notice moe’s absence until she returns on monday.