yes! one short bus headed for the crapper. goodbye excursion. sucker. shit, my 35 yr. old, $4,000 used car probably gets better gas mileage that this $40,000 fucker. good riddance. beyotch.

before there was a mall, there was a public park and swimming pool. now there's not much. the history of the cinderella city mall. (from the senator)

heh. suv's are now...short buses.

White House acts to shed arrogant image: New PR office to sell Bush policies and war on terror

Weeks after September 11, a public diplomacy office was set up in the state department, under the leadership of former advertising executive Charlotte Beers, but it has been unable to stem a tide of hostility towards US policies.

rednecks, christians, crooked suits and homeowners associations can welcome marketers to the list of people who drive me to think very bad thoughts. now, according to this at the guardian, the white house has a new push for marketing 'brand america' with the help of pr firms and marketers. i'm sure there are creative, or at least competent marketers out there, i have met one or two in my days working for the internet, but by and large, these people are my worst nightmare; ladder-climbing, bean-counting, money wasting, failed creative people who suck the life and energy out of anything else that people could possibly do, smiling all the way. i'll never forget a quarterly meeting of one of my previous employers, i think i may have written about it already but f it, and during the marketing presentation we were told that since a year ago the team had spent much less money and revenues had actually gone up slightly. suddenly the marketing team were the fuckin' heroes! read another way around, the marketers had stopped doing alot of the stupid shit that they had robotically performed for the last money bleeding years and lo and behold, it didn't really matter.
what the fuck is happening? mattdatt, a little help here?

here is a cheery one for the morning coffee, a few murders/suicides by special forces just returned from afg. lord knows what the dudes have been through and they are still, of course, supposed to be good ol' middle class americans. (via mefi)

a little of the "flakiness" that those in the hinterlands like to sass los angeles about and feel that they are not a part of, is moving to a redneck state near them. largest scientology building in the world in florida. wonder if it'll float a few inches off the ground like the big blue tower we've got down in hollywood.

and some blatant cronyism from our good friends in the govt;wak.(via mifi)

more natural selection from our good friends in texas; morons.

a new song for yew. another flashback track, "doot doot" by freur.

heh. britany flips the state bird. (via mefi)

i've always liked the fictional ability to suss out the zeitgeist of the times by scanning popular news, televsion etc., at least i've often dreamed i could do this. then i read new stories like this and know that i'm not the guy to figure this chit out. wtf?

the undisputed center of the universe, a hub for car thieving teens!

thurston moore's birthday is today; he's 44.

echo park comes to south pas
was woken up at four o' clock last night to the sound of POUNDING POUNDING POUNDING on a door a house or two away. this was followed by "...GOTTA DO SOMETHING...YOUR DOG...THIS IS INSANE, YOU CAN'T DO THIS!!" bellowing through the night. there has been a yappy lil' dog living a few doors away and over the back fence for a while now, but i seem to remember it not being out during the night. last night it was and it looks like some neighbor str8 snapped.
i thought it was my upstairs neighbor and waited to hear him stomp back into his pad, but that never happened and in the morning found out it was not him, but an unknown snapper across the way.
so i lay there saucer eyed for a good 45 minutes. when i was young, and before my pops moved out of the house, there would be the occasional parent fight and the slamming of doors, no more than alot of folks had, but enough for me i guess, so last nights behavior tweaked some ancient threads way down in the dark stuff inside of me. stared at the full moon, thought about getting up or reading, considered my reaction and eventually dozed off.

mefi and boingboing have a couple of links to sites made up of "band" photos. heh and hëh.

the new mojo magazine is out, with a cd include full of reggae toe-tappers.

an old excerpt from the days before the "responsibility era". from thomas oliphant at the boston globe:

"WASHINGTON —IMAGINE YOU WANTED to be George W. Bush's running mate back in July…One of the very first questions on the disclosure form presidential campaigns supply is always a simple, ''Have you ever been arrested?'' And another demands from those with military records the places and dates of every chunk of that service. In fact, an accounting for every month of your life (as with any job carrying a Top Secret clearance) would be required.

"… you tell Bush that you and your advisers had made a conscious decision to withhold the fact of a drunken-driving conviction when you were 30 from the public. You say you had only acknowledged a heavy drinking problem in the past, and that while continuing to booze for a decade after the arrest you had quit completely 14 years ago….You add that you had decided to dodge all details because you didn't want your twins to do what you did…

"Now imagine further … the relentless Bush lawyers had picked apart your military record (in the National Guard) like crows on road kill, exposing white lies and big gaps like whether you did a lick of anything for the last year-and-a-half of your obligation.…As for the untruths and gaps in your National Guard record and even your resume and autobiography, you tell Bush that you've said all you're going to say before the election on this subject, that the records and your memory are hazy, but that you're certain your obligation had been fulfilled properly."

the right still wets their pants over a smoked joint, a blow-job and a money losing land deal, and yet, for some reason never really explained, this kind of behavior is acceptable.

nood.

a mild warning, the following (via boing boing) may be a bit much for the morning:
"Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power of the dictionary." yers.

hey, check it out, jay ryan has some new posters on display at his site. go buy some!

new song, by the men at work. that goddamn guitar solo sticks with me. i think its the prE synth floating around the song that makes it as catchy as it is, either that or some nostalgia.

we can all relax now. words of hope in the nytimes, from a lousy businessman that has been propped up by others his whole life:

Traditionally presidents stick to talking about the fundamentals of the economy, as Mr. Bush has done repeatedly in recent weeks, while steering clear of any suggestions about how markets will act. President Clinton, about 18 months into his presidency, talked at length about fluctuations in the dollar but was warned by his chief economic adviser, Robert E. Rubin, not to do that again. If the predictions went awry, the thinking went, the president would be blamed. Thereafter, Mr. Clinton usually heeded the suggestion.

Mr. Bush's advisers have given him the same counsel, and he has usually steered far away from market predictions. But today, to the clear distress of some of his aides, Mr. Bush went into an extensive discussion of the falling market, after a reporter asked what would send the market back up.

"Value," Mr. Bush said. "They're going to realize that there's values in the market. In other words, if they buy stock, they're buying value, as opposed to buying, you know, buying into a bubble." He said market confidence would increase if Congress passes a corporate accountability bill this week before the House goes into its summer recess. He then returned to his theme, predicting that corporate earnings are bouncing back and stocks won't be far behind.

analysis, hello kitty style.

(via talking points memo) a conservative editorial at the ny press, that intead of defending their crooked shrub - shakes its head and aknowledges that something has gone wrong:

What kills the President is that every time Harken comes up, Democrats get to retell the story of how he made his money. And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having "earned" a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest day’s work in his life.

and

they won’t accuse Bush of intentionally bungling the war on terror to please the Saudis. But they may note that it was tragic that, at a time when thousands of Americans were murdered by extremists whose only ultimate means of support was oil, we had an oil man in the White House.

from a trip to amoeba last night:
faust IV cd
air - premier symptoms cd
rolling stones now! lp
rolling stones - flowers lp
the jam - the gift lp
all used 'natch. the gift was one to perla.

oh yeah. heard today on bob brinker's moneytalk that the euro is now worth $1.01. thanks shrub, and the rest of you corporate cheats. (trip overseas coming up in three weeks 'natch.)

the same day that i see this article at the nytimes (reg. required) and think, 'ah, noone'll give a shit that we're bombing civilians. either they already know it and hate it, or don't really fuckin' care what happens', i see this at cnn (via mefi) about a practice bomb being dropped on a house in texas. so very fucking lucky noones little girl was in the bathroom the dead weight crashed through.

stazza called today to let me know that there was an exotic car show up at art center today. so, i rolled on up in my "classic" car to see what was what. thankfully, no charge for parking or entrance, just a lawn full of very well taken care of'ed cars. a good group of ferrari's and a pile of lamborghini's and a few lotus were there in addition to only a few porsches, some old pantera's, which i have NEVER found interesting, and various one-offs like a beautiful volvo sport-coupe and sunbeam alpine. i'm not really mentioning the nsx's and corvettes because next to the older models they seemed to blend together into so many plastic shapes.
the cars from 80's and 90's were impressive, especially with the hood open, but the lines of the older cars cannot be beat. mondials and 308's and diablo's seem to look very matter-of-fact compared to muria's and dino's and my new fave, the espada. not that the newer cars are boring, but the design seems more of a natural progression, like a vine growing, like its development is assumed in some way; aerodynamic goal reached: check, monster engine: check. whereas the older machines do not have this pre-planned sense of purpose; they are made to go fast and look fuckin' cool.
you don't see many dino's and daytona's but there was one of each present as well as a beautiful black 400, the ferrari sedan.
but the espadas! there must have been 57 seven of 'em, or at least four. a strangely long car, with rear seats that one could put small people or belongings in, curious windows and idiosyncratic dash that was made between 68-72, it was full of lines that said sleekness and speed while at the same time, a funny kind of practicality that most all other cars did not have.
leaving the show, and enjoying the ride in my old mustang i thought of how very few of the cars i had just seen, perhaps even the newer ones like the nsx's, had anything to do with a marketing dept. are the days gone where someone makes an automobile knowing that someone will buy it if it does something well? or all all cars made with notebooks of demographics behind them, created specifically for a particular group of people, very specific groups of people down to age, job, m. status, as opposed to "people who appreciate fast fucking cars". and with all of this "marketing" we now have our over run world of "sport" "utility" vehicles which are more often than not used for neither or those purposes. and then there is the design of these behemoths.
it was a nice museum visit to see cars created before the days when cars were disposable, before the advent of the japanese appliance. my (ever-present) disgust at grocery getters reminds me of a passage out of jeremy gilbert-rolfe's "beauty and the contemporary sublime":

"The car is a semiprivate and mobile extension of the home. Perhaps this has something to do with why the sports car never caught on in America, where an expansive notion of living room requires cars to be as close as possible to the size of small houses. The cars that Martin and Armi were talking about (he is referencing an article here) were Corvettes, big fat things compared to the European cars whose market their manufacturers sought to renaturalize to the American way. In its recent regression to an image of comfortable infantilsm and piggishness derived from the fifties and popularized by a ring wing waging a cultrual war on the sixties generation, America has returned to the bulbous shape of fifties cars but in the form of vile, vanlike soi-disant family sports utility vhicles whose very name says all there is to say about their relationship to either glamour or mobility: their shape announces that all has geven way to the sedentary. They are sports vhicles for sports fans. When attached to a ring-wing concept, the family has to keep glamour at bay and regulate mobility. The first is achieved by associating the vehicle with the Puritanism of sports, the second by its being obese, embodying the sluggishness combined with aggresssion that represents trustworthiness to social reactionaries. The home itself is where the televison and the Internet are, a private space for sitting and shopping to which electricity makes all that happens in the world immediately adjacent while safely distant."

did i mention the vw bug at the low-rider show that had a PS2 built in?

i've been to one dodger game a year the last few and last night was this years. the blue staggered around the field for nine and were lucky that the padres are not a better team or it would have been really embarrasing. the game whipped right along though, and though the overall performance was not above-average (at least i hope it wasn't) we did get to see some examples of good fundamental baseball in the form of a few very good bunts, some base-stealing and closing pitching by trevor hoffman. i had asked peter, earlier in the game, if one could tell much difference between pitchers from where we sat in the upper deck. hoffman was the answer, a big mofo with a much larger and more powerful presence on the mound. you think the game is almost over, then they send this gorilla out to the hill.
there was a group of christian high-school kids from dallas, mexico, sitting up to our right, and a row of homies right behind us. the place was sold-out, no-doubt becasue of the sean green bobble-head doll giveaway instead of the slumping home team.
the homies were good for evesdropping, "yo, where's my bobble-head fool?!" but the christians were annoying. there was a fight a few sections over (quickly broken up) and i thought, i'd be punchy too after getting drunk on $7 beers. a nice touch was before the game, some kids had been winners in a contest of some sorts and they were allowed to run out onto the field with the home team and once reaching their individual players position on the field, recieve an autographed ball. very cute.
we didn't sit over in the outfield bleachers because they don't sell beer there, turns out we weren't drinking anyway but i dreamt that we did sit out there, because the finalists from some show call "american idol" were set-up by the center-field warning track to sing the national anthem. a bunch of made-up tools, singing in a run-of-the-mill, self-conscious "soul-style", who would have made a tempting row of targets for a perfectly aimed, albertson's sponsored, all ceramic, official sean green bobble-head.

probably come to die in this town/ lived here all my life/ there's kerosene around...
some fools in midland, mexico have fun jackass-style.

(messin' with "design" - trying to keep the brain cells from rotting too much)

added a link to metafilter over on the left so now you can do exactly what I do, read it and tell yer friends about what ye saw!

nood, in jacksonville, of course.

welp, lookit, mattdatt and i both agree that this operation TIPS is a nightmare. the fact that he read about this on WorldNetDaily confuses me, should i be glad that this site, which, when i arrived had two different ann coulter banners, questions the administration? or should i be sad that i see what site mattdatt gets his news from?
wtf is the shrub thinking?

anyway, via mefi:

“War is a racket. It always has been…A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”

Words of a radical peacenik? Only if a Marine Corps Major General qualifies as such. In his twilight years General Smedley Butler unburdened his soul as did other career militarists, such as Admiral Hyman Rickover, who admitted that fathering the nuclear Navy was a mistake and Robert McNamara, who almost found the words to apologize for overseeing the Viet Nam war. Unlike Rickover and McNamara, Butler named names and exposed for whom the system works.

“I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.” Butler acknowledged that he’d spent most of his 33 years in the Marines as “a high class muscle man for Big Business, Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”[2]

war inc. article. and no, this doesn't mean i think we shouldn't have helped england in ww2, or defend ourselves from the japanese.

a nifty new blog discovered today, originally via boingboing which mentioned the Amazon Lite work that the author had created. some of the more technology oriented sites have been mentioning the release of the amazon api (i'm acting like i know what i'm talking about) and apparently this is one of the results.
the home page of kokogiak is here. and there are a few things, like a blog (apparently he works at amazon) and the penny project, where you can assuage your fear of numbers and get some good ol' fashioned pictures of what a billion pennies looks like.

he's also got images from 300 miles above the earth, so fuck work and "surf" there.

operation TIPS. great, that's what we need, snoops. i wonder how the right-wingers in idaho feel about this, or rednecks in kentucky. thank your crew ashcroft for this crap for me, he wasn't my choice. just what this country needs, more paranoia. stupid bastards.

nood!

a review of the 2003 honda civic hybrid is over at arstechnica. i love the idea of hybrid cars.

finally a new song to the left. this one is 'buggin' by the flaming lips from the album "the soft bulletin", 1999. i missed it the first time around, despite the efforts of my friends at sony, but this song is a great summer one - heck the album is great too.

i may not remember a number of the details in my dreams, but often i can locate where dream source material has come from. for example, yesterday at "work" akhor had the latest rolling stone magazine (akhor style) and it had a feature on dancing and clubs and drugs and sex which included a list of all the most popular combinations of e and some other drug.
so in the dream i remember taking a combination of lsd and xanex so the dream-state felt exactly like a very mellow dream state! i also remember "skating" or floating up and down these huge mountains that were covered in what looked like golf course fairway grass - i'm pretty sure this kind of motion comes from this video game i like so damn much.

supermodels are lonelier than you think. been checking in with this blog from time to time. i think its based in paris, so pics on the site are usually from foreign editions which means "more interesting" which means nude.

the free-lance oriented work is done for the time being, so here is a new "get yer war on!"

happy to see that charles dodgson is out of traction and back in action. here is a nice new piece regarding shrub's friend in the supreme court.

i might have mentioned that i bought a grip of old MOJO magazines a few weeks ago. welp, i'll pick 'em up from time to time, wander through one before putting it back on the shelf and picking up the next; they are good to keep in my man-purse in case of down-time. so the one i'm carrying now is from 9/2000. it has an old pic of the who on the cover and focuses on the year 1965.
this morning, as i'm putting away my gear here at idealab! (a week of freelance) i notice some notes scribbled on the back of the magazine that i hd not seen before. from the previous owner?

Cristy
virgin
vh1
robeks
Hermosa

Well, well I been movin' down to Florida.
And I'm gonna bowl me a perfect game.
Well I'm gonna cut off my leg down in Florida, child.
And I'm gonna dance one-legged off in the rain.
Now, they say that Sidney Poitier was a blind man.
And they say that LBJ was a Soviet Jew.
When I go down Florida Way,
They're ain't no kind of sexual healing that I would not, could not, should not do, stick it right here.

Well I been movin' down to Florida.
I'm gonna have to potty train the chairman Mao.
I'm gonna make the governor write my doodoo a letter, child.
And I'm gonna grind me up a White Castle side out of India's sacred cow.
Well, I been movin' down Florida Way,
And I'm gonna build me the atomic bomb.
Well, I'm gonna hold time hostage down in Florida, child.
Ain't nobody, said ain't nobody gonna tell me what to do. Right here.

By this time I guess you've figured out about Florida.
Turn the muddy water into Vaseline stain.
They be makin' tadpoles the size of Mercurys down in Florida.
They be tellin' Julio Iglesias what to sing, now.
Now, whoever said that Sidney Poitier was a blind man,
Said the same of Elvis Presley, too.
When I go down Florida Way,
Ain't nobody, said ain't nobody gonna tell me what to do. Right here.

Well I been goin' down to Florida.
Pole cats lie naked in the Seminole sin.
When I go down Florida Way,
Like Vince, I wanna' win.
Well I went down to Florida.
I got hurt.
I took the children down to Florida.
I stuck the dick down in the dirt.
Get that boy down to Florida.
Give him a switch blade.
Tell him what to do.

yes! yes. cheney appeared in arthur andersen promo video! heh.

The video was recorded in 1996.
"I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we're doing business and how we're operating over and above the just sort of normal by-the-book auditing arrangement," Mr Cheney says in a short section of the video.

yeah, i bet you were.

dude! i totally just saw a spider that looked like billy gibbons! i must have run into his web when i went out back to feed the cat because when i went into the bathroom to wash the cat food off my paw, he jumped from my head onto my arm and then onto the sink.
he was one of them compact types like these leaping spiders, but was all brown and red, big too. these types of spiders have two big ol' black eyes up front and center and his fangs in front were covered in hair, like a beard! he looked like a little old man, and look he did, you could see him turn his "head" this way and that to check me out. i collected him on the new copy of 'little engines' that i just got from tnibooks (link to left) and have been keeping in the john, and let him go outside after giving him a look see. good luck lil' billy.

mattdotdatt seems satisfied that the shrub is a rich boy who isn't all that bright and that is a good enough president for him.
it's not good enough for me.
i would like to think that there are still people out there who give a shit about what they do for a living and strive to make something in this world besides sheer money. a good example are shrub's friends at Enron. one of the largest companies in the world (in history) reduced to rubble because of filthy, stinking greed. i'm not the biggest ayn rand fan, but why can't these people want to build something that works, that is the best, instead of the prize being sheer cash - and not only cash, but at this point even that as a goal would be better than what is happeing - but the use, the complete lack of concern that these corporate bastards have shown, over and over again these days, for the thousnds of men and women (and by extension their families) who put in honest hard work, who believed that the corporate officers wanted all to benifit (here, have some stock options, that'll keep you working) from a growing, successfull company, only to get fucked in the end.
should folks who worked at Enron have all their retirement in company stock? hell, no, that's their fault. but when the capt. of the ship and his first officers bail just before hitting the rocks, it shows no respect for the rest of the crew, and more than that, it shows contempt for other human beings.

the shrub has put himself in a place of example. he, and his pack of corporate cronies, have no problem telling folks how to live, and yet, the rules don't really apply to him. bill clinton was dragged over the coals because of a blow-job and i think its ridiculous to not expect the shrub to have to answer questions regarding his lousy corporate track record/amazingly well paid corporate past.

his lil' old energy company went belly up and he made a pant-load of money, most likely insider trading. the company was crap, apparently no-one in charge cared much. maybe we should ask some of the employees how they felt when they were out of a job and the truck payment was due, what would the shrub have to say for that? i couldn't care less about when his stupid forms were filed, my problem with him is moral. he threw the first stone. he profited from other peoples misery by shady means. tell me how that fits into the moral model that you and i are supposed to adhere to as citizens?

i refuse to buy into the cynicism that the shrub and his crew exude. i will not settle for a stupid job and tivo and a plastic flag on my car and hightened states of alert in exchange for the shrub and his corp. and christian meatheads running roughshode over the hopes and dreams of what it can mean to be a human being. cynicism snowballs - and sooner or later you are fucking people over. the shrub is proof. he doesn't care, never has cared about you or me. he has no grand vision, no great ideas.
this is not a call to end capitalism. what the major crooked corporations and shrub have managed to pull off is not capitalism. its favoritism and back-slapping and palm-greasing and competition avoidance and free-market manipulation that would make old kremlin retirees proud.
where is the "meaningful progress" in that?

parts is parts. an article on yer friend, chicken nuggets.

from krugman's nytimes editorial:

The point is the contrast between image and reality. Mr. Bush portrays himself as a regular guy, someone ordinary Americans can identify with. But his personal fortune was built on privilege and insider dealings — and after his Harken sale, on large-scale corporate welfare. Some people have it easy.

over at metafilter i found this article on 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Senior Judge Alfred Goodwin who was one of the three judges on the panel for the recent 'pledge of allegiance' dust-up. some good bits:

Goodwin pointed out that he won the Combat Infantry Badge in World War II, and remembers that on the belt buckles of dead German soldiers was an inscription claiming God was on the German side.

He said he was disappointed in President Bush, who called the decision "ridiculous." "I'm a little disappointed in our chief executive -- who nobody ever accused of being a deep thinker -- for popping off."

heh.
a 74 year old republican cowboy, appointed by presiden nixon no less, with a little spank for the vapid crook son of a one-termer who was the "kind of a guy who would be appointed to something". heh.

oh, and here is another one at the nytimes:

Mr. Bush keeps saying all the right things. He is "deeply concerned." He will "hold people accountable." But words, like stocks, lose value when nothing backs them up. It is now more than six months since the president promised "a lot of government inquiry into Enron." Since then, Playboy has done a better job of exposing the women of Enron than the Bush administration has done at exposing its men. Just as the Justice Department rounded up some 1,000 alleged Sept. 11 suspects and failed to indict a single one of them for terrorist activity, so it has made a big show of its shaky Andersen conviction while failing to indict a single Enron executive or individual Andersen accountant. (Not that all the law-enforcement news is downbeat: last month John Ashcroft's minions held a press conference to boast that a 13-month investigation had led to the arrest of 12 prostitutes in New Orleans.)

...

It's not that Democrats are clean. When Al Gore blasted Mr. Pitt last weekend for having led the accounting industry's drive "to open up loopholes" in the 1990's, he could have been describing his own ticket mate, Joe Lieberman, who was second to none in doing the accounting industry's bidding. But the Democrats don't have the power to undo the damage anyway. It is Mr. Bush who is C.E.O. If he doesn't bring zero tolerance of corporate cheating to his own White House, it's hard to imagine Americans rushing back into the market trusting that his administration will enforce it anywhere else.

is this what you settled for when you got that $300 tax check back?

counterpunch has more on the crook cheney and the buffoon bush. how anybody, mostly older(?) really believe that these people are upstanding, genuine, intelligent humans that they would invite into their homes and lives i'll never understand. here is a snippet:

"I'll say this for the Pres. He's lucky, just like Bill. Of course under Bill the country felt it was sharing in the luck, whereas under W it's been one damn thing after another. Thus far the history of the Bush Presidency has been the history of falling masonry. President Rubble. But, just like Bill, W. has been the huge beneficiary of Terror. With Bill it was the Oklahoma Bombing. It turned his presidency around. With W it was 9/11. Without it he'd be a laughing stock inside the national jurisdiction as well as overseas."

in addition to F. buckley, i've read gore vidal from time to time. more often than not, its been from an issue of vanity fair on a plane flight. here is an interview with the "small r- republican" on the occasion of his latest book of essays. here is a snippet:

Q: I know you'd hate to take this to the ad hominem level, but indulge me for a moment. What about George W. Bush, the man?

A: You mean George W. Bush, the cheerleader. That's the only thing he ever did of some note in his life. He had some involvement with a baseball team . . .

Q: He owned it . . .

A: Yeah, he owned it, bought with other people's money. Oil people's money. So he's never really worked, and he shows very little capacity for learning. For them to put him up as president and for the Supreme Court to make sure that he won was as insulting as when his father, George Bush, appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court -- done just to taunt the liberals. And then, when he picked Quayle for his vice president, that showed such contempt for the American people. This was someone as clearly unqualified as Bush Sr. was to be president. Because Bush Sr., as Richard Nixon said to a friend of mine when Bush was elected [imitating Nixon], "He's a lightweight, a complete lightweight, there's nothing there. He's a sort of person you appoint to things."

So the contempt for the American people has been made more vivid by the two Bushes than all of the presidents before them. Although many of them had the same contempt. But they were more clever about concealing it.

a great link this morning to a site about sentence diagramming! (via metafilter) of course i misspelled sentence the first time posting this.

and, oh yeah, lowell just tipped me off to this from scientific american. more debunking of creationist boobs.

then there is this, some quotes from founding fathers regarding religion. if this wasn't the interweb, i'd double check the source of all these, but they look like fun to me! (thanks to slord)

new mp3. i chatted with p. about recording from turntable to 'puter so this may sound slightly better than the black flag sample a while back, or maybe not, but i do know that it ain't peaking or clipping. audio is a slippery slope, just ask my roommate or neighbor. sure, i may have the sampling and levels correct, but are my interconnects any good? what condition is the vinyl? has it been cleaned? haven't you had those stylus for a while? feh.
so this is a song called "postcard". it is by the who and is credited to john entwistle and is on the album 'odds and sods' which is a collection of b-sides and unreleased stuff. a particularly nice song on this record is "the naked eye" some of which you can hear in the middle of the 'my generation' blow out on 'live at leeds'. the collection is from 1975 but the song was started in 1969 and finished up in '74.

mattdotdatt sends in a boombox memory:

Thanks for the link to the boombox museum…wow, the memories. I actually owned the next model down from the Radio Shack SCR-6 (5, maybe?). I bought it from a guy on the river for $10 when I worked at Rubiayat (ask Schauer about Rubiayat/Marine Builders; he’ll fill you in). It survived falling, being stabbed with a screwdriver, immersion in water and many other abuses. It followed me to the navy and then became my bedroom system.  It returned to work with me in 1996 when I started with Diesel Injection Service, where it was painted flat back and mounted to a wall in the turbocharger shop, where I last saw it in 2000.  Two decades of selfless service.  Thank you.

i looked and looked but i'm afraid my 'box didn't make it in the museum, yet. it would help if i could remember what the f brand it was, but i cannot. i do remember how i came to live with me.
a group of us went to 'malibu grand prix' which was a large arcade that had a go-cart track connected to it. the go-carts were dressed up to look like more than a lawn-mower engine and an old mutated bike frame in that they had a plastic 'body' that looked all formula one. there were prizes available if you clocked a certain time around the track EXACTLY to the hundredth of a second. almost pure luck. so i get done racing and an employee runs up to me and says i won something, my time matched a prize. i remember wandering up to the front counter to fill out some claim form and as the time was noted i realized that i won the third best prize - a competent run - but the employee said, 'lessee, looks like you won the...boombox!' (which was the second best prize!) i was too confused and excited at this point to say anything - so i didn't argue. two weeks later, i was sleeping in since it was summer break, and my mom brought it in the house all confused. heh.
it was big without being monsterous, and in college it became decorated with acrylic paints - like everything else. it worked and worked recording all our garage band efforts.

this morning, three hummingbirds spotted by the feeder out back. one seems to feel he rules the roost in that he chased one of the others off, but allowed a third bird to perch for a bit, a girlfriend? i use 'he' loosely, but the bird does have some bright color on him which can be typical of birds n' such.

boombox museum. (thanks to sentrall.