Best. Protest. Ever.

TECHNOLOGY UPDATE Introducing the new Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge device, trade name BOOK. BOOK is a revolutionary breakthrough in technology: no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It’s so easy to use, even a child can operate it. Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere--even sitting in an armchair by the fire-- yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as several CD-ROM disks. Here’s how it works: BOOK is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. The pages are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence. Opaque Paper Technology (OPT) allows manufacturers to use both sides of the sheet, doubling the information density and cutting costs. Experts are divided on the prospects for further increases in information density; for now BOOKs with more information simply use more pages. Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into your brain. A flick of the finger takes you to the next sheet. BOOK may be taken up at any time and used by merely opening it. BOOK never crashes or requires rebooting, though, like other devices, it can become damaged if coffee is spilled on it, and it becomes unusable if dropped too many times on a hard surface. The “browse” feature allows you to move instantly to any sheet, and move forward or backward as you wish. Many come with an “index” feature, which pin-points the exact location of any selected information for instant retrieval. An optional “BOOKmark” accessory allows you to open BOOK to the exact place you left it in a previous session--even if BOOK has been closed. BOOKmarks fit universal design standards; thus, a single BOOKmark can be used in BOOKs by various manufacturers. For the benefit of those users who need to store numerous views at once, every BOOK comes with the Distinct Optical Guidance Easy Awareness Reminder (DOGEAR) free of charge. These simple optical guides can be used as many times as there are pages in the book. You can also make personal notes next to BOOK text entries with optional programming tools, such as Portable Erasable Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language Styli (PENCILS). Portable, durable, and affordable, BOOK is being hailed as a precursor of a new entertainment wave. BOOK’s appeal seems so certain that thousands of content creators have committed to the platform and investors are reportedly flocking to invest. Look for a flood of new titles soon.

What is happening in this picture? 1) Dave's shoulder rub just dislocated Nate's elbow 2) Dave's amorous advances are met with opposition from Nate 3) A camping trip at Mt. Cheaha gets silly If you guessed #3, then you would be close. In fact, the camping trip, which consisted of Dave, Nikki, Nate, Mark C. and myself, got very silly and remained that way. The trip began with a round of skeet shooting on Goodner Mountain, during which Dave demonstrated particular aptitude at knocking many wild, high-flying skeet into smithereens. Nate, on the other hand, showed his skill at flinging the skeet at and hitting beer bottles lying on the ground directly in front of him. However, Nate was joined by Mark C, who showed that he could not only fling skeet at the bottles but blast the bottles apart with his shotgun. Many native talents were dislplayed. After a goodly number of the native clay pigeons had met the same fate as the beer bottles, we ambled on back to our cars through the mud. One could sense it was going to be an interesting evening.

And indeed it was. There was much silliness around the campfire, must singing and dancing. Mark's fiddle sparked the fire in our bones, and we howled at the moon hidden behind the rainclouds moving over us. Though the rain fell in sporadic drifts, we were undampened. Awoooo.

However, let me stress to those of you who have long been considering taking only a light fleece blanket with you when you are camping in 37 degree weather: DON'T DO IT. Don't even think about it, in fact. Though we made it to Cheaha Falls Shelter before the rain started, and though we had a fire, and though George Dickel made his presence known, it got downright cold. Cold, cold. The moment I lay down in that miserable excuse for a blanket I knew it was going to be a long night. I could feel the wind reaching my armpits, for chrissakes. Needless to say, I was glad when rosy-fingered dawn finally showed the hell up.

On the way home, Mark and I shunned the interstate. Drove on backroads the whole way, occasional handwaves from pickup trucks going in the opposite direction. Saw pieces of land I'd love to purchase and spend a lifetime on.

One must always return to the core of the land.

According this Toronto Globe and Mail article, a new portrait of Shakespeare has been found. Don't know if I buy this one.

"He recalled the noisy music at dinner and said to himself, "Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words." And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, overpowering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!"

Indeed. Let us praise Milan Kundera.

Don't forget to go see Jill's New Zealand web site here!

Our voices are being heard: 2016 signatures and counting. Please sign the Oak Mountain Red Trail Petition.

As I read Henry Miller my thoughts tend to march on quickly, one idea supplants the other and dissipates, decaying into loam from which another thought rises from seed and explodes. On slow nights, it may simply mature. Reading hectic thought like HJ jangles my mind. One minute I am swept along with him along the rues of Paris, the next I am impatient and wish he would slow down, tell me more about the colors washing in words over him. More details. Fewer abstract thoughts.

But I thought about this a little while ago after the day had fallen into night and Debbie and I talked for an hour and I wanted a beer to accompany my continued reading of Mr. Miller. I drove on down to the store and was perusing the beer selection, wondering what on earth would inspire anyone to buy Michelob Ultra, when I heard a deep “Yo, what about some of this?” sound out next to me. It was a towering UAB basketball player, obviously, his obligatory ballcap almost scraping the ceiling tiles. He and his buddy were looking for wine coolers, of all things, their heads continuously knocking against the advertisements for hot-dogs and beer hanging from the ceiling. They were laughing, dressed in full Blazer uniforms. So I turned, and as if from some scene in Sixteen Candles, I saw two cute girls in the aisle next to them who were smiling at each other as the two players began carrying out an open dialogue about how many wine coolers the evening might require. The girls were in college (you can tell - don’t ask me how) but they were both wearing that smile that goes years beyond the mere undergraduate experience.

They had been watching the tall guys ever since they walked into the store. It was almost surreal, these two junior/senior girls staring at each other in grins, obviously in heat. Sure enough, one of them cast her eyes toward one of the basketball players, and the whole scene slowed down, laden with time. I was watching Eve’s primal glance. Venus parting the clouds to view Adonis in play.

There I was, Scout sleeping in the front seat of my car, trying to figure if I had enough money to buy a six pack, when there goes the entire history of lust and sexuality right before me. Men walk in. Cute, single girls are smitten. The cycle starts up again. It lit up the aisles of the 7-11.

I don’t know; maybe I’ve been reading too much (or just enough) Joseph Campbell and Henry Miller, but it was beautiful. Maybe, thanks to Debbie, I’m just slap out in love with life. But whatever the origins of my interpretation of the event, it was fun to watch the first reaches of love. Not anything remotely suited to televise but real and embarrassingly honest. Hell, the girls were surrounded by chitlins and corn nuts.

Upon reflection, I wish I’d stayed and watched how things panned out; whether the gal stayed and let her gaze linger until it mattered, or whether they merely tittered into oblivion. Or the guys might have ceased being oafs and looked around themselves gently.

But it was enough in my break from Henry Miller and his onslaught of the sensual which I had been objecting to in my mind, that the earth embraced itself and made me laugh in the flow of things. And it reminded me that the streets will always pulse with the deep mathematics of attraction. A natural geometry of angled flesh.

This site is now brought to you by Google. That's because they bought Blogger. I can see the GAP ads now: Everyone in blogs...

Not too sure about this one. I'm all for it if it's correct. "GASOLINE SOLUTION! We CAN buy gasoline that's not from Middle East. Why didn't George W. think of this? Gas rationing in the 80's worked even though we grumbled about it. It might even be good for us! The Saudis are boycotting American goods. We should return the favor. An interesting thought is to boycott THEIR GAS. Every time you fill up the car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia. Just buy from gas companies that don't import their oil from the Saudis. Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill my family, my friends and me. I thought it might be interesting for you to know which oil companies are the best to buy gas from and which major companies import. Middle Eastern oil (for the period 9/1/00 - 8/31/01): Shell.............................205,742,000 barrels Chevron/Texaco...........144,332,000 barrels Exxon /Mobil................130,082,000 barrels Marathon/Speedway.....117,740,000 barrels Amoco.........................62,231,000 barrels If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to over $18 BILLION! Here are some large companies that do not import Middle Eastern oil: Citgo..................0 barrels Sunoco...............0 barrels Conoco..............0 barrels Sinclair...............0 barrels BP/Phillips..........0 barrels Hess...................0 barrels All of this information is available from the Department of Energy and each is required to state where they get their oil and how much they are importing. They report on a monthly basis. Keep this list in your car; share it with friends. Stop paying for terrorism."

Tonight I stayed up cleaning my place, as its been a long time since. Even Scout has been protesting, in her small silent way. The dishes have been raising hell. My refrigerator looks like the Salvation Army of the produce department. So I stayed up late and read Henry Miller and ran loads of laundry galloping in the dryer and drank some wine and consolidated the recycling. Crushed all my cans. I read the Wall Street Journal, the copy my mom gave me before she left for Argentina with my dad this morning.
It’s very late/early, probably 1:00 in the morning, and the rain has just started. What I wondered was wind kept steady and didn’t rise, so I pushed up the window and molten moist blankets of air began folding themselves inside my room. Rain. Slow, quiet, deep rain. Just enough to coat the earth. Just enough to forget it happened.
But in the morning I will stir and slam my hand somewhere near Steve Chiatacus' voice as it exits my radio, in snooze, listening again to his steady gentle enunciations of the news, my temples playing a slight cacophany on the inside membrane of my skull. It will occur to me how Steve, with his clear, modest Midwest hyper-murmur could make the most horrific genocide sound like a peaceful soundbyte of culture. I wish my alarm clock were a piece of thin, round glass I could shatter every morning on my wall.
But I will stir and I will remember how the earth around me outside has been washed. And that my place is clean, too.
It will be Valentine's day. And I will smile to Debbie's emergence somewhere across town, her birth into this day. She'll wake and sleepily look around the room for a moment, her hair a study in microcosms, chaos. Her eyes pooled in the dark comprehension of waking.
Ten bucks says I had the best dreams of all.

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
--Goering at Nuremberg

Of all the little things I collect and hoard, one of my favorite things to acquire is bootleg copies of shows I've been to. Like wedding pictures or the photos from that one freshman party in college, concert bootlegs are, at best, testaments to moments of life lived deeply and originally. I will always cherish my copies of the millineum Widespread Panic shows in Atlanta as such. At worst, they are still records of your experieces, aiding your memory where for one reason or another it fails to connect.

But another factor contributes to my appreciation of bootlegs, and that is how I got them. The best by far are from tapers I've met at shows who've hooked me up with fresh copies of their most recent gigs. The process of meeting these people, trading with and getting to know them can be a lot of fun (in general, the hardcore fans are unusually interesting people). But I still love even my cruddy copies of shows, because I can still put myself there metally. Hours spent making tapes or burning CDs, and meeting the people who have them. In fact, when does a concert CD ever actually sound like the experience you actually had?

Anyway, Clear Channel is about to start offering “bootlegs” of the shows they present within five minutes of the concert’s end, as discussed in this article. I know this is nothing new, but it does signify a significant enhancement on the growing trend of live-music offerings. Will anyone actually pay to have the latest bootleg of Shania Twain’s last gig? I can hear it now:

”Dude, I’ve got this smokin’ set from Boyz2Men tour, 2001. I’ll trade you a Madison Square Gardens show for Brittney Spears at Red Rocks. I got it off Clear Channnel.”

Maybe I’m jaded from the jam-band scene, I don’t know. Considering my stance on recent developments in music sharing, I should be surprised that I’m concerned about Clear Channel’s decision to bring live music to the masses. After all, I’ve burned a lifetime of music on my Mac. I guess I just don’t want the process of getting the best tunes cheapened. Or commercialized, if there’s a difference.

Got any intellectual property questions? I know I do. Go here and read about interesting issues such as whether skipping commercials while you watch tv is a form of piracy. Aaaarrgh, says I.

Confused by all the ever-changing foreign policies? This map will help you keep on top of which countries have been naughty or nice lately.

Hey it's Dave Barry's Blog. Gotta love it.

Well, I took the LSAT on Saturday. It wasn't easy. I think I did OK but not stellar, due to two logic games that were extremely complex and took me a long time to figure out. Keep your fingers crossed.

Beautiful satellite images of the earth found here.

I've been wondering exactly how much our decision/need to go to war with Iraq is based on our contry's dependence on the oil in that region, and this "explanification" here really cleared things up for me. (now getting off the computer and going back to work..)

It's the Dubya Spin Generator, brought to you by the fine folks over at democracymeansyou.com. Just plug in your favorite issues and viola! you have a presidential speech. How convenient! "Fellow Americans, We know you love your SUV and your neighbor's wife. We know you share the same concerns as all commie-hating and god-fearing Americans. You want to be watching the war on TV just like the rest of us. You will support anything we tell you to and want what's best for the country, like we do. This war on terror is a perfect excuse to bomb the hell out of Saddam the right way, finally, or anyone else we don't like, and we know you'll support it with all your heart, no matter how long it takes, or how much it costs, because you are a sheep. The only way out of this situation is to bomb Iraq, then Somalia, then Tom Daschle, so that businesses can create new jobs for white men. But the bleeding heart Democrats are trying to take your hard-earned money and give it to people who live in luxury from hundreds of welfare and unemployment accounts instead of using it to bomb Iraq where it belongs. If you're a patriot and know that education is BAD you'll help us repeal corporate taxes retroactive to 1951 to help get our country back on its feet and keep us all safe. Remember, if you want our country to be competitive and not be buried in the corpses of murdered fetuses, put the House and Senate back into the hands of the people who are white like you, who look nothing like that bastard Clinton, and who want to give you guns and a missile shield instead of feeding illegal weird-lookin' immigrants who steal food from the mouths of your children. Remember friends, to save the good 'ol U.S. of A., vote Republican in the next election!"

The more I read, the more I feel like this:

New, from emptybottle.org! Blogging: The Movie

Naughty nature pics. Scandalous.

Our Gang Problem: Roving Band of Little Rascals Terrorizes Streets

"Celestia is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit."

Debbie Rocks
Hey, when you happen to be lucky enough to witness the personage of one Ms. Deborah Lynn Hamilton, it is incumbent upon you to address her by her new title: Ms. Deborah Lynn Hamilton, CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANT. Yes, that's CPA, folks, for the Debmeister done passed her exam with flying colors. Shower her with praises when you are able.

Another reason to love VWs. Volkswagen Successfully Tests Its First Hydrogen Fuel-cell Car.

Cool. A History of Applause.

Does the moon exist? Can you prove it?

A beer for whoever can answer this one: A traveller visits an island inhabited by two types of people, knights and knaves. Knights always tell the truth; knaves always lie. The visitor falls in love with a local girl and wants to marry her. But before marrying he wants to be sure she is not a knave. An island tradition prohibits men from speaking to women until they are married. So the traveller must ask the girl's brother, who may be a knight or a knave and is not necessarily the same type as his sister. The traveller is allowed to ask the brother one question to find out if his potential bride-to-be is a knave. What is the question?

Alabama makes it into the Onion! Alabama Governor Injured Imitating Pro Wrestling MONTGOMERY, AL—Gov. Bob Riley broke his collarbone Monday while imitating a wrestling move he saw on TNN's WWE RAW. "[Secretary of State] Jim [Bennett] and I were just funning around," Riley said after his discharge from St. Mary's Hospital. "I tried to do The Undertaker's Last Ride powerbomb—not for real, just pretend—and I slipped." Monday's incident marked the state's worst wrestling-related gubernatorial injury since 1991, when then-Gov. Guy Hunt was paralyzed jumping off a friend's roof onto a backyard trampoline.

State of the Union, 2003 I have not been to Jerusalem, but Shirley talks about the bombs. I have no god, but have seen the children praying for it to stop. They pray to different gods. The news is all old news again, repeated like a bad habit, cheap tobacco, the social lie. The children have seen so much death that death means nothing to them now. They wait in line for bread. They wait in line for water. Their eyes are black moons reflecting emptiness. We've seen them a thousand times. Soon, the President will speak. He will have something to say about bombs and freedom and our way of life. I will turn the tv off. I always do. Because I can't bear to look at the monuments in his eyes. --Sam Hamill In former times, poets were considered the voices of our collective subconscious, and we listened to them. Alas, poetry has now become a haven for starry-eyed romantics and goth punks, or at least many people seem to feel this way. To wit, one of the eligible bachelors on "The Bachelorette" last week was a poet and a firefighter, which summoned up visions of shmaltzy love poems and fireside stanzas to me. However, the good poets today are just as profound as they have been in ages past, even if they demand more from their audience. At Poets Against the War, a group of well-known writers, including W.S. Merwin, are speaking out against the potential conflict in Ur (Iraq) in a different language. Well worth a listen, and a good one at that.

Interesting history of Iraq, the cradle of civilization. Denver Post via Metafilter.