Dear America

Please stop being afraid.

look where fear has gotten us thus far. we are paralyzed with fear, and our economy is tanking, we are in at least one war that we'll be in for a long time (Iraq or Afghanistan, you pick [And Hello, the 'war on terror' isn't a real war, just inciting more fear]), we've taken out most of the world economy, the 4th amendment is almost gone.

Time to deal with it. A small chunk at a time. Sure looks like a lot of work, but just take it day by day.

Please stop being afraid. We're getting nowhere with it.

important

and i don't care how you vote. this ain't about that. this is about stopping ism's.

polar shiv

sub-prime climate change meltdown!

polar bear housing in crisis!

film at eleven.

i had a dream

so last night i had this weird dream that i got 'traded' at work.

i must be playing too much fantasy baseball.

or does it mean this?

here we go

so, i live in this city where fashion isn't exactly a second thought.

mind you, i'm still a tshirt and jeans kinda fella, but the dr has me wearing nicer clothes that i used to, she made me give up most of my PSL softball tshirts that i had stockpiled up.

i was out recently at one of my neighborhood bars and i see a flannel shirt. i suppose since i had just seen this play, which is about early/mid 90's angsty teenagers at Berkeley High, it was on my mind, but i got to thinking.
The process of fashion becoming popular, then fading for some years and then resurging some years later:
the 50's styles were popular in the late 1980's
for the very early 1990's the late 60's/early 70's styles.
now, it seems like the process is going faster and faster.
1985 minus 1955 is 30 years,
early 90's to late 60's is 25 years,
we are all aware of the current early to mid 80's trends now being displayed in bars near you - which is roughly 20 years past.
We are in ought-8, and the mid nineties are about to be here in this fashion resurgence thing. that means we are about 14 years behind.

ready? here comes the point -
if this current rate continues, the fashion resurgence trend will pass itself in about 2020. does this mean we'll start wearing the fashion of the future instead of the past? or will the cycle loop again? what will happen?

i love it.

p.s. - i tried to make a graph of this, but failed miserably. i enlisted the dr. but she said she does this crap all day long, so we are sans graph. if you can make a graph that breaks it's own back, lemme know.

p.p.s. - wtf am i doin talking about fashion? Is this what is happening to me?

blazing saddles

this is why one should keep up with pop culture.

this fella obviously didn't watch blazing saddles.

btw - thank Mel Brooks. it couldn't be made today.

of yeah, also Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Grantville, Ga., is a racist ass-hat.

He has drawn criticism from civil rights advocates on a number of issues, including last year when he led opposition to renewing the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also was one of two House members last year who opposed giving the Justice Department more money to crack unsolved civil rights killings.

i heart you, internets

finally -
something that makes me gleeful from teh internets.

i am an internet jaded mofo.

union busting

Wal-Mart warned thousands of its managers that a Democratic president would likely make it easier for their subordinates to unionize. "I am not a stupid person," said a customer-service supervisor from Missouri. "They were telling me how to vote."

pretzels

Congress passed a $300 billion bailout for the mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the mortgage crisis was causing suicides. Wall Street got drunk, President George W. Bush told an audience at a fund-raiser. "Now it's got a hangover."

well, at least Wall Street isn't choking on a pretzel.

Savory Spam Crescents - Bake 12-15 minutes or until golden brown

i got this awesome spam - thought i'd share:

these are just the headers [i know!]

• Man breaks arm in horror fall
• 4 killed in car crash, dog thrown clear and survives
• Bull goes on ramapage in Spanish town
• Try, it is pleasing to you

and now for some harpers weekly:

Dozens of revelers at the Aquamarine Open Air Festival near Moscow were left partially blind after a laser light show burned their retinas, and members of Finland's Theater Totti debuted the world's first opera for the deaf. Performers conveyed the mood and tone of the nineteenth-century opera "The Hunt of King Charles" using sign language and body language, facial expressions, and two musicians. "I was afraid it would be a pitiful imitation of opera by the hearing," said Kaisa Alanne, the director of the Finnish Association of the Deaf, "but, oh, how wrong I was! It is as if a new form of art was born."

get jean!

jeans shiv!

what a hot photo.

you know the next time i am in philly, i'm checking out this scene.

ashcroft's chest

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

rip heston

Charlton Heston, the actor and NRA spokesman who had called Martin Luther King, Jr, "a twentieth-century Moses for his people," died at 84. - harpers

RIP - Charlton. it was nice havin ya aboard.

Addendum - how could I have missed this joke? Dunno - here it is:

"Thanks Charlie, i'll be taking that rifle now. My, your hands are cold!"

clarke and dawe

dear people of australia,
i have just discovered these two men.
thanks
best wishes with everything.
chuppler

even more, yes indeedy.

amazing history

Cow Palace history - source

1941: Using money from the government's Works Projects Administration, the Cow Palace is built on Daly City land that adjoins San Francisco.

1956: The Republican National Convention is held, with Dwight D. Eisenhower accepting the party's nomination for a second term as president.

1958: Billy Graham brings his evangelical message to tens of thousands who crowd into the Cow Palace over the course of two months.

1960: In a speech during his presidential campaign, Sen. John F. Kennedy tells an audience of 20,000 that the United States should establish a Peace Corps.

1964: The Republican National Convention returns, nominating Barry Goldwater for president.

I am totally amazed by these events. damn hippies.

clay wires

i'm sorry to have bothered you, i know you are very busy with the sphinx club.

sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-it.

this is why

you should be reading bill simmons on espn -

Q: Ever since the Monte Carlo casino fire, I have been thinking about this. Say you were there that morning playing blackjack on a major roll. Then you heard the hotel was on fire. Now the Monte Carlo, as I recall from visiting there, is about 40 floors high. How long -- if they would let you -- would you ride the fire out before abandoning your hot streak? My feeling is, one of two things have to happen before I bail out -- either the dealer showing 16 pulls a 5 to make 21 twice, or I see smoke.
-- Mike, Grand Island, N.Y.

SG: See, I think this would be the greatest possible gambling moment you could have -- the time you were killing it at the blackjack tables to the point that the casino actually caught fire! They would have needed three security guards to pull me away from the table.

pretty. from here courtesy teh (s)Fist

canned hope

Apologies about the politics ramble.

i'm falling for the obama line. I justify this to myself (really, i talk to myself) by saying that at least his message is a hopeful one.
that is, at least, refreshing. and i can't vote for the manchurian candidate, guliani sadly dropped out (he coulda been beat, easy). and i was pissed when edwards dropped - he was the only one talking about telling the corporations that he wasn't going to be swayed by them.

and i like this song, too.


and if you came here to see something about canned heat, here you go.

US voting machine debacle

Can You Count on Voting Machines?
By CLIVE THOMPSON, The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 2008
Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. "I guess we've seen how technology can affect an election," she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.
For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county's 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the "GEMS server," a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.
Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold—the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga—peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working—until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn't been solved.
Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote—generated by the Diebold machines as they worked—she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren't lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit "print" and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.
Click here to keep reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html