smiling over my shoulder

you're doing it wrong.

2010-02-19T11:11:00.000-08:00

i recommend you read through this list of commonly mispronounced words and phrases. i was completely shocked by a handful of these. how many of these do you regularly mispronounce? i counted about 17 that i mispronounce, and maybe 6-8 out of those 17 that i'm misspelling/misstating.

some of the words/phrases the article claims are incorrect:

- tenderhooks (it's tenterhooks)
- stomp (you stamp your feet)
- spitting image (it's 'spit and image')
- persnickety (it's pernickety)
- chomp at the bit (it's 'champ at the bit')
- card shark (it's cardsharp)

foodscapes

2009-07-15T22:07:00.001-07:00

very neat food art.

that iz all.

as long as i'm remembering how to blog,

2009-03-18T13:31:00.001-07:00

i wish to use this forum to express my enthusiasm for the fact that GoogleReader FINALLY added like half a dozen new features that they should have had ages ago. i'll ignore the past and just be REALLY pleezed with the current iteration. functionality and efficiency just went way way way up, and community conversation is now possible. wOOt.

if you don't use gReader yet, i most earnestly encourage you to checkitout.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/

why Trader Joe's?

2009-03-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

i've been meaning to blog this query for some time:

why is it that progressives in northern california love Trader Joe's? and, more to the point, why does no one seem to object to spending money at Trader Joe's as opposed to, say, Whole Foods?

from a freakonomics piece on TJ's...

Who owns Trader Joe’s? ... A huge German discount-grocery chain best known in the U.S. for no-glamor stores often located in marginal neighborhoods.

this company, according to a wall street journal piece (that i haven't read because it requires a subscription),

is so good at selling cheap goods that WalMart couldn’t compete with it in Germany.

i've been wondering for a couple years now why no one i know seems to have a problem with shopping at Trader Joe's. anger against and boycotts of Whole Foods have been prominent in my various communities for almost a decade now, but i've never heard *anything* regarding objections to Trader Joe's.

my inclination is to think that this is a fairly straightforward case of people not educating themselves, making assumptions, believing rhetoric, and/or willfully ignoring the corporate nature of a brand because they really like the brand.

but i'm also curious as to whether i'm missing something--are there reasons to support Trader Joe's over Whole Foods? do they have better practices in some categories? (my main complaint with TJ's, as a conscientious consumer, is their packaging--the quantity of plastic is obscene.)

note that for the moment i'm controlling this discussion for scale of business--i'm not interested in the debate about whether to shop at chain grocery stores or locally-owned/cooperative stores in this particular discussion. (i'm kind of assuming most people on my side of san francisco, when asked whether they'd rather support Rainbow Grocery, Whole Foods, or Trader Joes', would say they'd prefer to support Rainbow; what i'm interested in is which of the three stores they'd list second, and why.)

headache, at 10

2009-01-30T23:31:00.000-08:00

i just spent an entire day trying to get rid of a headache. i've been awake for 12 hours now, and pretty much all 12 hours were spent attempting to alleviate or eradicate the symptoms of my headache.

i was supposed to wake up, go to the office, drive down to monterey to drop off documents at a couple libraries, have dinner down there with an old friend who i haven't seen in a long time, then drive back up to sF. but the priority for today was my evening plans--a tete-a-tete with a close friend i haven't seen in a while.

i woke up at 9am with pain in my brain-parts. a headache right when i wake up is actually fairly rare for me, and it's a bad sign--the headaches that i have when i wake up are usually the hardest to get rid of. they're not insurmountable, though; especially if i'm diligent. so! i opted for an extra-drugs-day. i took what i hoped would be enough meds to take the edge off the morning headache and get me to baseline conditions. i then ate a smattering of healthy organic food bits, swallowed an array of supplements, and went to the office.

i went into the office a little earlier than i would've if i hadn't had the headache, actually, because i was worried that if my pain didn't lessen i wouldn't be able to drive to monterey, and i wanted to make sure the documents would get delivered regardless. my (extremely awesome) boss said that we'd figure out another option if i couldn't drive, but in the meantime i should try to de-headache. yes yes yes--onnit! the earlier meds hadn't worked at all, and the pain had gotten worse due to my exposure to sunlight, so i gathered my options and tried: 1) protein; 2) water; 3) sugars; 4) meds; 5) kombucha; 6) lie down; 7); warm; 8) dark; 9) pressure point massage... an hour and a half later my head felt exactly the same. so i gave up on the plan to drive south, cancelled my dinner plans, and we found another person to do the delivery i was supposed to do.

at that point, since my boss and i just finished a major project and the thing i'd planned to do with my work day was no longer an option, i had almost nothing to do at the office. i futzed around for a bit, trying to be somewhat productive, but looking at the computer screen under the fluorescent lights was, as usual, making things worse. so at about 2pm i headed home, with the firm goal to sequester myself, apply all conceivable headache remedies, and salvage my evening plans.

it turns out that it's relatively unusual that i'll still have a headache at night if i've really tried during the day to get rid of it. there are a bunch of factors that affect my pain--diet, exercise, drugs, stretches, lighting, smells, temperature, anxiety level, eye strain, ad infinitum--and if i'm both diligent about monitoring the situation and willing to make a variety of sacrifices i can usually get myself to a headache-free state by about 6 or 7pm.

unfortunately, however, the Extreme Anti-Headache Regimen doesn't actually guarantee anything; and today--for no particular reason that i can discern--happened to be a day when my head just wouldn't be placated. i came home, ate good foods, hydrated, rinsed my sinuses, took more meds, blacked the windows, and climbed into bed to be warm. i wrapped a scarf around my head and lay there in the dark, buzzzzing from the meds, massaging pressure points as needed. after 2-3 hours, which is usually enough totally boring placid downtime to give my body rest or recuperation or achieve stasis or whatever, my head still felt the same. but lo, the twilight approacheth! when vampiric beings might brave the outer world without fear of total incapacitation! wOOt! soooo...

SWITCH! new (complementary) tactics: i got up, got bundled, and went out for some exercise. the thing is, with the exercise, you have to be careful--if you get too hot, or get too cold, or change altitude too fast, or exert yourself a little more than you should, the headache can get way worse; but if you go out walking at a moderate pace on a warm-ish day, being careful not to attempt too many hills, exercise can majorly alleviate head pain.

the weather being glorious, i was poised for success. i walked for a while, did a bunch of yogic stretching, did some dancing to loosen up my back and release extra tension from all the various crevices that might be contributing to the pain situation, and then walked some more. none of these activities seemed to be helping, but i kept going, since i wasn't interested in returning to the sitting-at-home-swaddled-in-darkness thing. my walk ended up taking me near the office of my chiropractor, which reminded me that sometimes adjustments help eradicate pain. so i went in, paid a bunch of monies, and the nice human cracked my spine a few times. body felt better; head did not. in a last-ditch effort, on my walk back home i bought a bunch of foodstuffs that have previously been known to be useful for helping with headaches, and ate some of each. arrived home, re-rinsed sinuses, re-swaddled in the darkness, and then...

nothing. i still have a headache. my plans for tonight, which were very important to me, have been canceled. i am sad, and i am angry.

in the course of this long and rather boring narrative, you'll purrhaps notice that not once did i mention anything about reading, writing, viewing, talking, or otherwise being productive. that situation of non-existence occurs because those activities were absent. while working toward a goal of a pain-free head, it is pretty much out of the question to spend time at a computer, or reading a book, or watching a screen. talking to other humans is even challenging. which is to say: not only was i in pain the whole time, but today was a total fucking fail in terms of productivity. 12 hours of nothing but headache management. at least i got some exercise--yeah, i'll give you that--but that's pretty much it.

the reason i'm writing this piece, as it turns out, is less about the headaches and more about the way i'm making decisions. i'm continuously facing dilemmas about prioritization.

recall that i experience a headache to some degree pretty much every day. (or did you not know that? yeah, that'd be the case. chronic daily headache. lookitup.)

if, on a given day, i choose to ignore the headache and maintain a normal lifestyle, i almost always end up doing shoddy work or being only semi-productive due to the pain, plus i end up nearly incapacitated and incapable of friendliness and/or funtimes by about 8pm. if, on the other hand, i choose to structure my day around avoiding headache triggers and minimizing chances of pain exacerbation, i end up getting almost nothing done because my options for productivity are so extremely limited...and i still often end up in some degree of pain. when there are particular constraints that i'm presented with, such as work deadlines and important events to attend, i try to make informed decisions about which parts of my life to sacrifice so that i can fulfill the necessary obligations to my work, my friends, or my self. it's extremely difficult to have to make some of these decisions.

a normal person presumably gets to have enough hours in a week that he or she can go to work every day, socialize a few nights a week, put in time on a hobby or project or two, and still have some downtime for solo relaxation. i, being a normal person in at least a couple respects, also strive for a work-play-hobby-relax balance. however: i have a headache, i would estimate, approximately 50-60% of my waking hours. (that's when i'm managing them, with a full array of meds.) this means that every day i need to think about what my priorities are for the next 24-72 hours, and then pick which parts of my life are going to be painful and which parts i'm going to try to have be pain-free.

keeping in mind that my methods for eliminating pain are erratic and subject to myriad uncontrollable factors.

and that the meds i use don't always work; work best if used infrequently; and have frustrating side effects, sometimes even including weird shadowy rebound headaches.

and that when i have a headache both my coworkers and my friends generally find me unpleasant to be around.

it's hard, when faced with these decisions, to make 'good' choices. if i prioritize work and and decide to take lots of meds on the weekdays, i can't take the meds on the weekends. if i prioritize my social life and try to schedule my headaches so that i have less pain when i'm with my friends, i end up having to fit in my work in all hodge-podge, whenever i can manage to put some time in. and neither of those scenarios necessarily leave me any time to myself when i'm not in pain.

this essay doesn't really have a conclusion...yet. i'm still going to doctors and trying new management techniques and thinking about new drugs. i've lived a variety of lifestyles over the past decade, and i continue to experiment with a variety of activities and environments to see if there's a set that better suits me. and i'm working on bolstering my mental health--which if it wasn't the root of the problem when this started is DEFINITELY a primary factor now, due to the neuroses one accumulates over 10 years of living with chronic pain...

but at the moment, since i've been dealing so much for the last year with all these huge sweeping goals and determined ambitions to improve my quality of life--a need for Change and Direction and Purpose and Momentum and blah blah blah-- i wanted to write for a minute about the frustration and anger i feel on a day-to-day basis just trying to get little tasks accomplished and take care of myself while holding down a job. it's fucking hard for me to balance all this bullshit, and even when i'm doing a relatively great job with the balancing, i'm only partially satisfied with the results. as i try to push myself to be the person i want to be, i'm continually stymied by the limitations of my own body. and they are fucking DUMB limitations-- they're arbitrary; they're invisible; and they're probably self-induced.

and yeah, they've been around for 10 years this february.

(non)fiction

2008-11-18T12:08:00.000-08:00

Although it was early in the evening, and it was a little unusual to see a guy walking down the street carrying a futon, followed by a Goth girl carrying a lamp and a blender, it was just unusual enough that people would have felt stupid if they asked what was going on and someone pointed out it was modern dance, or performance art, or people robbing an apartment. San Francisco is a city of sophisticates, and except for a homeless guy who remarked on the tackiness of Tommy's Pier 1 Imports decor, they had moved half of the furniture and clothing without comment.

~christopher moore, 'You Suck'

sidewalk art

2008-11-03T14:14:00.000-08:00

looks like this dude has been around for a while, so maybe y'all have seen these; but just in case not--checkit.

super-neat trompe l'oeil perspective-bending sidwalk chalk creations.

likelihood that i'll ever write a full post about burning man: non-high

2008-10-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

instead, i'll just repost a story about one of the best parts of the week, with the accompanying photo, which was taken by michael broxton.

friday evening on playa, a bunch of fP folks were chillin on top of the true prophet art car, strangelove, watching the sunset and trying having confusing lethargic half-conversations in a vague attempt to figure out if strangelove was actually going to de-dock and wander around. after many minutes of this, while the sky played a grand symphony of 360 degrees of technicolor, a true propheteer came up and told us that strangelove was indeed going to head out of camp, but that the primary passengers were going to be a group of officials from the u.s. bureau of land management. we were welcome to stay for the ride, IFF we promised to behave ourselves.

several humans, without further ado, scampered the hell off of the vehicle. the handful of us who remained looked at each other, mildly perplexed. authority figures! in direct proximity to us! and we might not all be, um, completely sober! but...sunset! and art car! and roaming the desert without having to deal with riding a bicycle through that #$%&@ sand! and then, gradually, we realized that ALL of those things, rather than just some of them, were in fact huge chunks of awesome.

so. a half-dozen or so BLM officials--plus, we later discovered, larry and marian--climbed onboard. several of them came up to join us on the top of the car. and we proceeded to give them what we hoped was the best tour of the playa they'll ever get :) we talked about as much cool shit as we could think of--all the parts of burning man art and culture that we're proud of or part of--burning man regionals and san francisco burner culture; yuri's night; false profit and false profit labs; the black rock arts foundation; the significance of the temple in general and basura sagrada in particular... and they talked to us about their histories with the event--two of them had been working in conjunction with bmorg for over twelve years.

we dropped them off at center camp a few hours later, after a long tour of art and a climactic show at the flaming lotus girls mutopia.

best night of the week.

new levels of fear; new thoughts on caution

2008-10-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

on saturday, around 1pm on a gorgeous calm warm day in san francisco, a friend and i encountered the results of a three-car accident that completely blew my mind. the vehicles involved in the accident were placed roughly in the center of the intersection of 16th and folsom. top speeds in that intersection rarely exceed 40 mph, and even 35 mph is probably pretty rare. but somehow, these three cars were arranged such that one car was upside-down and partly on top of another car, with the trunk of the upside-down car resting on top of the hood of the right-side-up car. both of these cars' noses were pointing the same way, and they were both pointing straight down folsom streen in line with the lanes. the third car was positioned mostly perpendicular to the other cars, slighly askew, with the front right side smashed in where it seemed to have encountered one of the other two cars. sadly, and even more oddly, the upside-down car looked like it was full of camping gear or such, with gear packed onto a bike rack coming off the trunk.

queries

a) if you are good at this sort of thing, and can try to explain to me how the upside-down car ended up in its position, let me know. i crave this knowledge with a serious thirst.

b) what steps do i personally need to do to make sure my car doesn't end up upside-down on a low-speed city street?? since i had previously considered the possibility of this sort of consequence to be roughly, oh, 0, i'm kind of wondering if i'm unaware of certain types of reckless driving that are practiced by a small percentage of our population, and that i may fall privy to on beautiful autumn days when i'm quietly setting off for a weekend's camping retreat.

c) i've been nervous to cross all streets, both in a vehicle and on foot, for the last three days. one of the images that is flashing before my eyes when i deal with such terrifying adventures is a slo-mo of a car falling roof first from the sky. i think it's coming off the top of a building. what, precisely, is the likelihood that i will get smashed by upside-down falling cars while crossing a street in san francisco? (pleeze give answers for scenarios both with and without godzilla-type monsters in the near vicinity. and remember, we have earthquakes AND multi-level parking garages!!)

untoppable song-writing (aka: a notable lack of progress in r&b classics for pre-teen slow dancing since 1994)

2008-10-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

on saturday night, i rocked it old skool at a rollar rink in the sprawl of sacramento. i was mocked extensively by most of the several hundred middle schoolers at the rink, due in large part to the fact that my friend had insisted that we all wear outfits 'appropriate for, say, black rock rollar disco' to his birthday celebration, but also due in moderate part to the fact that i insisted on dancing on my skates any time the dj played top 40 hip hop (which is to say: pretty much the whole time). but i still had a rad time. excessively rad, really--rollar skating is fucking awesome.

all of this pales in interestingness, however, in comparison to the identity of the last song of the night--

the ONLY couples skate song that they played--

the song in the coveted sigh-it's-almost-time-for-mom-to-pick-me-up-and-omg-my-crush-is-right-there-i-totally-get-to-skate-with-him-holding-hands!!!! time slot--

i'll make love to you, by boyz ii men.

apropos

2008-05-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

found this in my google reader this morning.

Smash the glass, and the clock will start to work, leaving you with the broken object as a reminder of your dramatic decision. Leave the object as it is, and you remain out of time, having the beautiful object as a reminder of your resistance to change. What would you do?

yesterday i decided that late this week i'll be smashing some glass, if all goes according to plan.

were i the sort who believed in signs, i would probably read something into this.

graph paper

2008-04-29T15:44:00.000-07:00

one of the tasks on my to-do list for the month of may is:

Figure Out What You Want To Do With Your Life.

i mean, roughly.

this obviously includes a few sub-tasks, but one of the prominent ones involves decisioning about graduate school. and without going into the whole rigmarole, i'll just state that i'm trying to decide how to reconcile interests in economics, sociology, and environmental sustainability into a reasonable academic path, and in the process necessarily trying to gauge my relative interest in long-term study of each field.

the one of these that i'm least sure of is economics. i've been in love with economics as an academic focus since my junior year of college, and i think it's crazy interesting. but! it's also kind of, well, hard. as in: it was hard to get A's in when i took upper division courses in it. also as in: other things (like sociology and environmental studies, for example) are easier. so i go back and forth.

and in the meantime, as i continue to not make decisions about anything having to do with the aforementioned situation, i've been reading and learning about fun ways of using economic frameworks to think about life. i've also become aware of my tendency to think about things in terms of data points, summed quantifications, diagrams, and graphs. i've also noticed that i adore thinking about correlation and causality. ...and i've taken these various pieces of information and observation and thought aimlessly about whether they mean i should go take a bunch of hard classes with lots of math in them.

WHICH IS ALL TO SAY: i really appreciate this post in the nytimes freakonomics blog, and am happy to be reminded that this site exists :)

freedom

2008-04-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

the guy over at unit structures has created an application that disables your computer's networking capabilities for a selected time interval. this elates me, and leads me to hope that at some point in the not-too-distant future i will gain a modicum of strictly enforced 'self-restraint' with respect to getting things done while sitting at my computer.

recycling!: top secret advance newsflash

2008-04-03T17:59:00.000-07:00

i just heard that on earth day this year (4/22), san francisco's going to switch to an uber-inclusive plastics recycling program, accepting all 1-6 plastics.

NEAT!

note that this is dramatically different from the current situation. right now, san francisco curbside collection only wants plastic bottles (of any number) and plastic tubs that are numbers 2, 4, or 5. that's IT. no bags, no trays, no anything-else. just bottles and tubs.

further note, more cynically, that just because this plethora of plastic will be collected from residences does not mean that it will actually end up recycled, since the recycling of the plastics is dependent on finicky and fluctuating and non-profitable markets.

but imo--and this is certainly a debatable stance--setting up an *easy-to-use* inclusive curbside system is better than a picky curbside system. (pro: the system catches more of the plastics that can be recycled and recycles them! con: people are led to believe that all plastics get recycled if you put them in a blue bin, which is absolute bullshit.)

this is an unofficial and semi-unconfirmed bit of info. i'll try to find proof by earth day :)

homelessness in san francisco

2008-04-02T20:07:00.001-07:00

for the past couple months--as i've been working through a very long prioritized to-do list that specifically has, in bold and underlined letters, NO BLOGGING stamped in a very visible location--i've been collecting and sitting on blog post predecessors that i wistfully hope will eventually become subjects of multi-paragraph bits of writing in this forum.

but that's totally a pipe dream. so. with that in mind, here's a link to an article that was in the guardian in mid-february. it's an expose on the homeless shelter system in san francisco.

if i could, i would make every resident of the bay area read this piece. i found it very informative and also extremely moving.

when visitors come to san francisco--even (especially) from new york city--the homeless are the first thing they notice in my neighborhood. it shocks and horrifies them. i know that the problem is something i've become numb to, and i'm glad that reports like this are being written. and hats off to the guardian for making homelessness a headline issue in their publication so far in 2008...

celebrating earth hour: let's drive out so we can see the city!

2008-04-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

from an article about how earth hour is a nice idea but in practice probably doesn't save any energy:

There are reports of swarms of people driving their cars (which of course burn fossil fuels) to the city in order to see the spectacle of a lack of light. Ironic (or rather, moronic)? People who light candles during Earth Hour are quite likely just as misguided, judging by this back of the envelope calculation. ...

So if there isn’t any positive environmental impact from Earth Hour what does it achieve? Publicity for the environment? Was a Nobel Prize and and every other news story from the past few years not enough?

the environmental theme for 2008, in case you haven't noticed yet, appears to be:

'wow, this shit is really complicated, isn't it?'

'i've never been one for word games', tom said unwittingly.

2008-03-31T15:02:00.000-07:00

was introduced to a couple new types of word play this weekend. my favorite, causing many moments of laughing out loud, is the tom swifty. i'm always down for a good pun, and some of these are straight-up delight-inducing.

'Can I go looking for the Grail again?' Tom requested.
'I have a split personality," said Tom, being frank.
'I wonder if there's a number between seven and nine," said Tom considerately.
'Who discovered radium?' asked Marie, curiously.
'I unclogged the drain with a vacuum cleaner,' Tom said succinctly.

new amusement for empty moments--hooray!

(ht to axel. wOOt!)

if you have an all-dairy diet, you should probably drive a lot to compensate for how much damage you're doing to the environment.

2008-03-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

via freakonomics

arright. this topic has officially gone off the deep end. apparently, people who drink lots of milk should drive to the store, not get their calories from a non-dairy source.

now all these people who read freakonomics are going to be blustering about quoting the blog and justifying driving, without thinking about the fact that a cup full of milk is way more emission-intensive than, say, produce from a nearby farm.

(the comments on that particular post are full of other eye rolling responses.)

i get it. emission and footprint calculation is complicated. but OMG, stop throwing out argumentative little blasts like this that are going to deter people from taking personal action to change their lifestyles! not all choices about emissions are this complicated or distressing!

i was irked about the same thing as i read a portion of this recent article from the new yorker.

The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. “In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity,” Williams explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO2. Researchers at Lincoln University, in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped eleven thousand miles by boat to England produced six hundred and eighty-eight kilograms of carbon-dioxide emissions per ton, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the United States). Similarly, importing beans from Uganda or Kenya—where the farms are small, tractor use is limited, and the fertilizer is almost always manure—tends to be more efficient than growing beans in Europe, with its reliance on energy-dependent irrigation systems.

that is, in fact, totally interesting and important to keep in mind. but it got me to wondering just how many products would actually end up being tricky and counter-intuitively problemmatic like that. i would guess that it's rare--that if you were to look at 100 types of produce, *most* of them would be better bought locally than from another country. i could DEFinitely be wrong--but my point is that i'd rather hear about generalities than exceptions.

also, i would like to see the authors of posts and articles such as these add some framing to their discussion that points out that there are ways to shift the emission imbalances that they're pointing out. (like, noting that the walk to the store would be fine if you use something less ecologically-damaging than ANIMAL PRODUCTS to get your calories. or pointing out that if britain systemically changed their ag production to include more renewable energy and less artificial fertilizers, they could hook up some less carbon-intensive foodz.)

reason and passion

2008-03-03T10:29:00.000-08:00

(rarely am i a one for poetics, so i'm curious about my own penchant for sighing over pretty verbiage this week, but...)

this poem was brought to my attention this weekend, with recommendations for rumination. so. acknowledgement of rumination and contemplation hereby issued, with appreciation for the suggestion; thanks, nev.

And the priestess spoke again and said: "Speak to us of Reason and Passion." And he answered saying:
Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite.
Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.
But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?
Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion; that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.
I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house.
Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.
Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows - then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason."
And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, - then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion."
And since you are a breath In God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

~kahlil gibran (from 'the prophet')

826 continues to be awesome

2008-02-28T09:35:00.000-08:00

826 recently opened a new and fabulous store in los angeles. pictures and descriptions can be viewed in this blog. (LOVE the aesthetic. totally hilarious.)

having known for some time that there are 826 centers in several cities around the u.s., and being curious if the other cities have excellent institutions akin to the pirate store, i looked around to try and figure out what stores are where. unfortunately, only two of the stores appear to have store-specific websites (=BAH). but i was at least able to compile a list, since there's one on the national site, and if you want to see better descriptions of the stores, with pictures, go to that page.

here's the list:

826Valencia - The Pirate Store
826NYC - Superhero Supply Company
826Seattle - Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company
826Michigan - Monsters Union Local
826LA - The Echo Park Time Travel Mart
826Chicago - The Boring Store (a secret agent supply store)
826Boston - not quite yet a cryptozoology shop (but already involving some collection of cryptozoological artifacts)

and for good measure, here's the real actual thing that 826 is...

826 National is an innovative tutoring, writing, and publishing nonprofit based in seven cities across the country. Since starting up in 2002, our goal has been to assist students ages 6-18 with their writing skills while helping teachers get their classes excited about the writing. Our mission is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.

Through volunteer support, each of the seven 826 chapters provides drop-in tutoring, class field trips, writing workshops, and in-schools programs—all free of charge—for students, classes, and schools. 826 chapters are especially committed to supporting teachers, offering services and resources for English Language Learners, and publishing student work.

huzzah.

we die to each other daily

2008-02-27T16:35:00.000-08:00

just saw this quote on satsi's blog, and it resonates all deep n shit right now. i'm in the midst of a bit of a conversation with myself about closeness, love, and intimacy. these words are all manner of aching terror and crystalline beauty.

We die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

~t.s. elliot
from the play The Cocktail Party; more quotes here.

supperclubbed

2008-02-21T11:11:00.001-08:00

anastazia of bad.unkl.sista is one of the creative directors (or some such fun title) at supperclub, and last week she was in charge of the performance each evening. i was invited to come out and perform as a character during the shows, and was able to participate on wednesday and friday nights.

notes and observations:

-i really need to work on finding my character before i go out to a crowd. spend more time in front of a mirror, watch myself move my limbs and use my facial expressions...

-i have a hard time interacting with crowds unless i have a character.

-i have an easier time interacting with crowds if i'm onstage.

-dancing to cheesy house music is ALWAYS hard...but even more so if you're trying to be an alien bug and stay dignified (and even more more so if you're utterly sober).

-i'm better at fun playful characters than i am at stately dignified characters.

-i miss being orange the way i used to be orange.

sum: that was a great exercise. i found a bunch of things to work on, and hope to try similar performance again soon.

i'm sorry, sir; your record's too clean for you to become our next president...

2008-02-08T18:43:00.000-08:00

amusing article in which a nytimes reporter accuses obama of not doing as much drugs as he claims to have done in his memoir. as far as i can tell, the reporter seems to be hinting that the candidate was...lying to gain street cred...?

hum. interesting form of mud-slinging, there.

word of the season:

2008-02-08T17:16:00.000-08:00

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 08, 2008 is:

sitzmark \SITS-mark\ noun:
a depression left in the snow by a skier falling backward

Example sentence:Proper skiing etiquette dictates that a skier who falls in the middle of a trail should smooth over his or her sitzmark so it won't pose a hazard to other skiers.

:)

flight suits, shopping carts, brooklyn

2008-02-04T22:28:00.000-08:00

a friend of mine and his extremely impressive crew of humans recently won Best in Show in the Idiotarod, a totally rad and ridiculous race over in nYc.

(idiotarod...idiotarod... *maybe* the most fun word to pronounce that i've ever dared to pronounce. try it. and while we're talking about the name, can i tell you what this same crew dressed up as for last year's race? rod stewart. a whole team of rod stewarts. puns = awesome; the end.)

super-photog steph goralnick took a typically badass set of photos, and it does an excellent job as a photo essay for the winning team's progress.

if you just passed up on that link, i shall tell you what you missed: Team Danger Zone. five pilots from the top gun program, plus their flight crew. a shopping cart turned fighter jet that spews smoke and has a soundtrack. THREE costume changes, including flight suits, beachware (for the volleyball game, duh), and dress whites for the after party.

morals of this story:

-new york has better races than we do.
-if you have attention to detail with respect to your costume changes, you will be rewarded in kind.
-top gun, and especially the bar scene, continues to be a work of cultural inspiration.
-if you get a chance to trick these humans into letting you work with them on any projects or activities, you should do so. and i'm pretty sure they're okay with bribes.

home as art

2008-02-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

1. gorgeous sculpture home. (article about gorgeous sculpture home)

2. funky home made from found objects. (better photo) (i've actually been to this one. recommended. pretty impressive.)

change of plans - kucinich won't be an option

2008-01-24T15:42:00.000-08:00

dennis kucinich announced that he's dropping out of the race.

*sigh*
back to compromising and feeling like my options are teh lame.

although...i really hate to admit it...but if he's gonna drop out, i'm kind of glad he's doing it *before* the california primary.

thank you note

2008-01-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

dear mission,

i've loved you since i met you. you're the best neighborhood i could ever imagine. i love all aspects of you--each diverse avenue of awesome. thank you for your little secret bits of incredible. thanks for being so cozy,and for being so crazy. thank you for housing so many of my friendlies, for providing space for such great local businesses, and for displaying yourself as a canvas for casual and devoted artists.

you're pretty much the greatest.

love, orange

(photo by hd.)

what could you make with just one piece of paper?

2008-01-10T12:06:00.000-08:00

i can't find a good description of the details of this situation, but apparently the hirshhorn museum in dC sponsored a contest, requesting submissions of a single piece of paper.

the entries are beautiful.

hello

2008-01-10T11:04:00.000-08:00

apparently, 'hello' is a newish word. and it's got me all pondery about what people have said to greet each other throughout the history of the english language. would be neat to plot out different greetings, showing when each came into usage and how long it lasted in common usage...

from a word blog:

The earliest known appearance of the word HELLO in print is in a letter written by Thomas Edison dated August 15, 1877. In the letter, addressed to T. B. A. David, president of Central District and Printing Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh, Edison suggested that the word should be used to answer the telephone. HELLO is an alteration of the much older word HOLLO.

electric apricot

2008-01-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

at amy's suggestion, i went to see electric apricot last night. if you've ever been part of the jamband scene or dealt with the hippie music scene in any way, i recommend the film. les claypool et al. did an excellent job of caricaturing all that is delightfully inane about the creation and proliferation of hippie music.

i was expecting the film to be a spoof of phish or the dead and their respective followers, and i was prepared to be amused but not quite get it, since the phish and dead scenes weren't really things i actively participated in more than attending a show or two. instead, the film looked at a small-time norcal jam band composed of earnest middle-aged men--playing the circuits in marin county, going into the studio to make their first album, and aspiring to the opening slot on a crap stage at a major west coast festival. so...having spent a few years on staff at a smallish norcal festival, in a smallish norcal town known for its devotion to local hippie sound, well... yeah, i totally got it ;P

anyone from davis reading this thing? anyone who's been to high sierra music festival? go find the the movie and watch it. HILARIOUS.

(in my reading after viewing, i was particularly tickled to find that the 'band' played real shows, unannounced, around norcal in order to get footage for the film. oh, the inexpressible delight of getting to a show of your fave jam band a bit earlier than you normally would've, and being rewarded by the discovery that les claypool's joke band is the opener...)

pS. props to producer and actor jason mchugh for wearing his 2004 disorient shirt for a good 1/3 of his screentime! and i wish you the best of luck in pulling mr claypool out to the playa one of these years :)

another example of carbon offsets being bs

2008-01-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

the green wombat, which i wouldn't exactly describe as anti-corporate, posted an uncharacteristically scathing set of words today regarding the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in las vegas. CES is claiming that the carbon dioxide created by conference attendees will be entirely neutralized through carbon offsets.

The cost of the CES carbon tax: $108,000. No, there's not a zero or three missing from that number. For the price of a Tesla Roadster and change, CES is cleansing the collective environmental sins of 140,000 people. Without wading into the controversial arena of carbon offsets or questioning the good intentions of CES' organizers, that number begs an obvious question: If neutralizing a looming global catastrophe comes so cheap, wouldn't have Bill and Melinda Gates just have written a check by now?

CES is using CarbonFund.org for the offsets.

more research to do; more words to post...

...and a pox on the alleged single-axis continuum of political thought!

2008-01-04T17:55:00.000-08:00

this link takes you to one of the two most memorable things i learned in college:

http://idealog.org/ideaflash.asp?page=run

the actual graphic that is the point of this text is called 'Ideologies: A Two-Dimensional Framework'. the graphic shows four regions of political thought--liberal, populist, conservative, and libertarian--based on a person's beliefs in the relative importance of freedom, order, and equality.

all the recent discussion about ron paul had kept this framework in the forefront of my brain lately, and i've had a few conversations about it. i find it useful.

feel free to offer critique, but this isn't meant to be a suggestion for a universally applicable model of political thought--just a simple graphic for thinking about libertarianism in relation to 'liberals' and 'conservatives'. also, i think the self-placement exercise in the first link is neat :)

[ed. note: graphic! inserted! and here's a link to a website that talks about the graphic a little without making you take a quiz.]

green cab

2008-01-03T21:18:00.000-08:00

if you're in sF, you've probably heard of Green Cab by now. it's a newish small cab company in san francisco that uses hybrids. i initially heard of it because friend vera drives a cab for them. i encourage everyone to try green cab when they need a cab and can afford to wait 10-20 minutes.

here's what vera said when i asked about service:

Green Cab is the same price as other cab, and we are pretty reliable. That being said, there are still only four cabs, and on Friday or Saturday nights it won't be easy to get one. But during the day, it should be okay, anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes. Just call them and see what they say - they will tell you right away if a Green Cab is available or not.

green(er) slopes for the ski season

2008-01-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

ski area citizens' coalition grades resorts according to a variety of factors, including use of clean energy, use of biodiesel instead of diesel, impacts on roadless areas, and logging practices.

the site grades slopes all over the u.s. below is the scorecard for california. note that kirkwood is the only resort on the list to get an F. try a couple of these links if you're at all interested--the report card has a ton of explanatory text plus a breakdown of the different categories and criteria.

(A) Alpine Meadows Ski Area - 73.8%

(A) Squaw Valley USA - 70.7%

(B) Mountain High Resort - 69.8%

(B) Boreal Mountain Resort - 69.3%

(B) Mt. Shasta Board & Ski Park - 66.7%

(B) Bear Mountain Resort - 66.2%

(B) Mammoth Mountain Ski Area - 66.2%

(B) Sierra-at-Tahoe Ski Resort - 65.8%

(B) Homewood Mountain Resort - 65.3%

(C) Snow Valley Mountain Resort - 64.9%

(C) Snow Summit Mountain Resort - 64.6%

(C) Sierra Summit Mountain Resort - 63.1%

(C) Sugar Bowl Ski Resort - 60.5%

(C) Dodge Ridge - 50.7%

(C) Heavenly Mountain Resort - 50.2%

(D) Northstar-at-Tahoe - 49.0%

(D) Bear Valley Mountain Resort - 47.1%

(F) Kirkwood Mountain Resort - 37.8%

old holiday; new title?

2008-01-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

i'm a one who celebrates my new year--complete with introspection and resolutions--in september on the playa. ergo, telling my burner friends 'happy new year!' in january totally bugs the crap out of me. seriously, one should only be allowed to wish people a happy new year ONCE PER YEAR. pick whenever you want, but you only get ONE temporal opportunity each YEAR. (it's possible i tend to be kind of a pill at chinese new year celebrations.)

but-- i really enjoy the traditions that are associated with the default world's calendar new year. i enjoy spending an evening with my closest friends, celebrating, expressing affection, and ruminating on personal development. so i want to keep celebrating, but i wish we could call it something else.

so far all i've got is Get Fucked Up With Your Friends and Tell Them You Love Them Day. but that doesn't really flow, and may be slightly offensive. i'll keep working on it.

in the meantime:

-Happy New Year! if you pick this week of the year to accept such wishes.
-i had a totally RAD Get Fucked Up With Your Friends and Tell Them You Love Them eve and day.
-i love my friends, and hope that they all also had totally rad times on december 31st and january 1st :)

parable of the sower

2008-01-02T21:18:00.000-08:00

i recently finished reading 'parable of the sower' by octavia butler. i was impressed--it was a great dystopian portrait of california, and the story was engaging. got a little preachy and contrived at the end, but not enough to quite be irritating.

this was my first experience with octavia butler. anyone have suggestions for other works of hers? i know i need to read 'kindred'--any others that are outstanding?

trashion video

2007-12-29T13:40:00.000-08:00

scatha just posted a video segment on the three Trashion shows she produced for burning man--one at the flambe lounge, one on the playa, and one at sF decom. there are interviews were scatha (miss velvet cream), anastazia (bad.unkl.sista) and lucid dawn, and then a bunch of footage from the fashion shows.

juno

2007-12-26T16:59:00.000-08:00

best movie i've seen in months and months.

the case for kucinich

2007-12-21T18:05:00.000-08:00

the sf bay guardian has an opinion piece about dennis kucinich this week. it has a couple really nice bits that i'd like to share.

i don't really feel called to speak up for this man most of the time--it ends up being frustrating to the point of angry tears. everyone knows he's great; no one thinks that's a good enough reason to vote for him. but yes, he's my candidate; and i'm going to re-register outside the green party for the first time ever so that i can vote for him in the primary.

Well-Put Thought the first:

Now let's be honest here and admit that those of us who get worked up about peace and justice issues are prone to complain a lot. We are ever bemoaning the influence of money in politics and the poor job the news media do in covering the real issues. But when we get to the point where a candidate is raising the important issues and we know we agree with him and we still won't vote for him, then the next time we start complaining, it may just be time to look in the mirror.

Well-Put Thought the second:

But if antiwar voters won't vote for antiwar candidates, you have to ask why those candidates should go to the trouble of running and why the big-money candidates should pay any attention to the supposed antiwar vote. [emphasis added]

the full article.

stylized sculpture

2007-12-21T00:02:00.000-08:00

tonight after work ($5 after 5pm!) i wandered over to the asian art museum to see the japanese fashion exhibit, Stylized Sculpture. the exhibit was brief, but i got one huge awesome dab of thought out of it:

For the past quarter-century, Japanese designers have made their mark on fashion with avant-garde shapes, stark color schemes, and innovative textile technologies. To anyone familiar with traditional Japanese clothing, these radical contemporary garments resonate with the aesthetics of a culture more fascinated with silhouette, surface, and cloth itself than with the delineation of the body... [emphasis added]

(check out some photographs of the collection here.)

now...i purchase clothes with UniqueAndAwesome as one of two primary factors. it's probably even the slightly more prominent factor. BUT. the other primary factor is how it works on my body. i readily admit that i generally eschew items of clothing that i don't find 'flattering' to my figure.

in the past year, working more closely than prior with a few local designers (bad.unkl.sista and miranda caroligne in particular), i've tried to be more open to wearing clothes that are artistic and beautiful without being as flattering as my idealized version of attire. it's reeeally hard for me. i want my body to look as good as it can. and in general, even the designers that strive for clothing as art are still cognizant that they need their clothes to make the subjects 'look good' from a standard perspective. (be as creative as you want, as long as your clothes adhere to some sort of accepted beautified form...)

but these pieces in the show... nothing doing.

female form? BAH.

these were clothes as Art, clothes as Cloth Sculpture; standard body accentuations be DAMNED. it was, quite honestly, unnerving. i know, for instance, that my favorite pieces were the ones that managed to stay flattering to at least *part* of the body while swooping off into the unknown in discrete sections.

in sum: i left this exhibit feeling more determined to think of my attire as art and expression with less regard to societal norms about female form.

i don't expect me to make any drastic changes in how i'm willing to array my body, but i hope that i can start incorporating pieces into my wardrobe that are interesting and beautiful but that DON'T help mold my body into the standard western template. we'll see how it goes...the dominant paradigm is known for its dominance for a reason, you know...

(in the meantime, go see the thing. it's only here til january 6th. next thursday it's $5 from 5-9pm. and they give you an awesome supplemental booklet-thingy when you go, so you can read up on the designers later and look at the pretty pictures. neat!)

notes from standing on line at safeway

2007-12-20T21:42:00.000-08:00

if you haven't been to safeway since the plastic bag ban went into effect in san francisco...

-safeway clerks now ask if you want a bag (untested for amounts of groceries over 15 items).
-safeway has changed their paper bag construction to include handles (!!!).
-safeway clerks now seem trained to notice, take, and USE your cloth bag, if you have one.
-the system WORKS. the people in front of me had a bottle of honey and 3 limes. normally, the clerk would just put that stuff in a plastic bag, *maybe* not double-bag it, and hand it off. instead, he asked if they wanted a bag, the guy hemmed for a second...and then.said.NO!

*le sigh*
*coo*

side note: the decision to go to safeway to purchase foods for a food drive has slightly confused the (food)worldview i've had since 1999. did you know that $19 buys a TON of food in a conventional grocery store?!? i KNOW--CRAzy!

words are still neat.

2007-12-17T20:19:00.000-08:00

matt g just sent me a link to some awesome: http://leettiles.com/

i might actually now lurve scrabble*.

* i hate scrabble. it is a stoopid game that has nothing to do with vocabulary. if i'm going to play a word game, i want it to be all about having and/or learning awesome words, not about memorizing 2-letter combinations of letters that technically have definitions in merriam-webster and trying to use the letter 'q' as often as possible. BAH.

the people who've suggested that you go visit sfmoma before february are correct.

2007-12-10T17:38:00.000-08:00

there's a really great exhibit as sfmoma right now. the entire 5th floor is taken up by a variety of installations, sculptures, photographs, and other art by a man named olafur eliasson. i was told several times, in no uncertain terms, that this is a must-see show, and i now wish to add my voice to the enthusiastic throng.

the exhibit was beautiful, fun, and intriguing. a couple of the interactive pieces were particularly fantastic, but i also spent a *really* long time with some of the photography.

another highlight of the visit was a 4-minute perusal of the sfmoma website's interactive feature on eliasson. specifically, one page includes a very short video of the artist talking about 'seeing yourself seeing' (click on that title on the main page to go see the video). he talks about viewer interaction with his pieces, about what he wants to encourage by presenting art to the public, about perspective, about awareness of one's viewership.

it could be argued that little in his exhibit or in his online speech should be particularly newsworthy for people who've spent a lot of time at burning man or thinking about art as a participatory experience. but i very much enjoyed seeing such a collection at a mainstream museum, and hearing about the artist's stance on interactivity in such a direct manner.

also, it feels to me that a lot of the 'interactive' art i experience now is created with interactivity as an assumption when it's being designed, or even with interactivity as the *point* of the piece, rather than as an aspect to be included. eliasson's work felt like presentations that had been devised first and foremost as art, and interactivity was incorporated without the loss of any beauty or artistic significance. heh...maybe all i mean is that it was really well-done ;)

[side note: my context for viewing this show includes a lot of discussion and processing in the past month about self-observation, distance from emotion, awareness of my own decision-making and analytical processes, and miscellaneous other meta-thinking/meta-emoting.

included in these discussions was a several-hour conversation about the How and Why and Who of artistic creativity--what determines who is good and/or successful at what types of creative expression? and are there categories of art that are particular to certain types of people? what types of art are proactive vs reactive? premeditated vs spontaneous? are there forms of art that don't require any learning and/or tools? post to come on all the art thinkings, i hope. in the meantime, i'm just quite delighted to have timed my ponderings and sfmoma visitation so appropriately :) happy arting!]

documenting

2007-11-29T10:59:00.000-08:00

i watched 'control room' last night--the documentary about al jazeera.

i thought it was totally great. i learned a lot, and i gained some new perspective on the war. i'd say this is the best piece of filmmaking i've seen yet about the situation in iraq, in terms of what it brought to light and what it focused on (more myth dispellation, more philosophy, less bush-bashing).

more importantly: i feel like this is the first documentary i've seen in a while that's held my interest, kept me engaged, and had enough substance to ACTUALLY FILL the whole running time of the movie.

i'm quite tired of documentaries that consist of two hours of point reiteration and visual fluff. i'm equally tired of progressive tirades that preach to the choir. (and omg i am REALLY tired of conspiracy theory. bleah.) i'm glad they're being made, i guess, but i sure hope they're being shown to some people out there who actually need long lectures on how things are all f'd up in corporate america.

examples rolling around in my head--none of which i actually think are *bad* films or anything--include:

'the corporation',
'who killed the electric car',
'fahrenheit 9/11',
'maxed out',
'outfoxed',
'an inconvenient truth',
and even 'what would jesus buy'.

all of these were useful to me, but i generally could've stopped watching any of them after 20-30 minutes and gotten the same results as if i'd watched the whole length. (ahem, confession: i couldn't even get through 45 minutes of fahrenheit 9/11. michael moore's pompous, flamboyant ass was pissing me off. i promise i'll try again soon.)

so. hooray for 'control room'! it was really well done. and look--it was so tight and cohesive, it didn't even need a narrator! *gasp!* nor did it have gratuituous pans across cultural wastelands of any sort! amazing!

in conclusion: tighten that shit up, filmmakers. i want to support these efforts, but i want to be NOT BORED and i want to feel like i'm being educated the whole time, not just for the first 10 minutes.

a wee tiny bit of (self-righteous, unfortunately) indignation

2007-11-21T18:10:00.000-08:00

i've been meaning to write up a post to summarize a sprawling debate about whole foods that i've been listening to and participating in, but in the meantime, a concrete example of the Bad that has resulted from the new store in potrero hill:

saturday mid-day. really nice out. sunny and warm. i'm walking home from rainbow grocery, with a bag in each hand. it's about 4.5 blocks from my house to the store. and i'm still a block from my house when i walk by a woman getting out of her car, removing two bags of groceries with 'whole foods' emblazoned on the sides, and walking up her front steps.

bah and boo. man, do i love me some rainbow. i fervently hope that this stupid turn of events doesn't affect them too much.

carmina burana

2007-11-21T18:00:00.000-08:00

the other night, i went to san jose with tammy, chris, and ben m. to see carmina burana. the performance of carmina burana in all its splendor involves a ballet troupe, an orchestra, and a mixed-voice chorus. it's a ballet set to the music of carl orff, which in turn was created based on a set of medieval poems on the oh-so-secular subjects of love, wine, and general excess in the face of shifting fortune.

i really enjoyed the performance. i don't know anything about ballet, but i didn't get the impression that the dancing was impeccable. (although maybe if i'd been more impressed by the costumes i wouldn't have been as critical.) and the chorus seemed a little small and non-loud. (although as chris pointed out, our eardrums are used to slightly higher decibel levels during our normal forays into musical showcasing.) but it was wonderful to take in classical singing and dancing performance at the same time. i'm pretty familiar with the whole of the choral work, so i was able to revel in listening to sounds that i like while watching an art form that i hardly ever see.

what i want to get at is: it was a great way to be exposed to some New.

i have a hard time enjoying classical music, opera, and dance performances without having at least a little knowledge of the piece(s) i'm going to see. without prior knowledge, i end up sitting there in a vast sea of unfamiliar and overwhelming soundscape. and even if there's dance or operatic acting to supplement the sound, i have a hard time appreciating the movement because i'm trying to follow the sound at the same time. if i already know the music, i have two advantages: 1. i can tell if the version i'm hearing is good or bad or mediocre, and appreciate all the best aspects of the performance; 2. i can anticipate upcoming sounds and focus more on how the dance or acting is utilizing those sounds.

this is a known thing, i would assume, for most people, and fairly simplistic. so i shall just finish with a request to my friends and my self: that i be informed of other like-formed/multidisciplinary classical works of music, song, and dance, so that i might learn more about them and go see them when they're up for staging.

[all the better if the subject matter is raucus or risque. a few quotes from our program last night, which was an excellently amusing bit of reading for the intermission...]

Part I - Primo Vere

4. Omnia sol temperat - exols the essence of lie-giving force, love--or sex.

5. Ecce gratum - by contrast, depects how sad Springtime can be without the opportunity for love and urges the 'have nots' to rectify the matter.

10. Were diu werit alle min - offers a winsome invitation to love-making.

Part II - In Taberna

11. Extuans interius - salutes the efficacy of the bottle. A drunken gambler muses about the personal use to which he has put the bottle.

pleasant self-congratulatory notes on california's greening

2007-11-16T12:23:00.000-08:00

moderately interesting post in Green Wombat today. apparently, california is innovative when it comes to environmental efforts! who knew?!

a couple neat bits from the post and the full report:

"If California’s annual statewide electricity bill was the same fraction of GDP as Texas... Californians would be paying almost $25 billion more for electricity."

"California utility efficiency programs....reduced the need for 24 power plants between 1975 and 2003... The California Energy Commission estimates that building and appliance standards alone have saved residents and businesses $56 billion through 2003 and are projected to save another $23 billion by 2013."

"More Californians recycle than vote" (More than 50 percent of Californians recycle.)

"Per capita CO2 emissions in Texas are double those of California. Per capita emissions levels in California today are slightly lower than they were 15 years ago."

California has about 90 percent of the market for energy-efficient dishwasher and about 50 percent of the market for energy-efficient refrigerators and washing machines.

blah blah blah we're awesome... whatever. i don't think the current state of affairs in california is particularly advanced or cutting edge or forward-thinking, in comparison to what we're capable of. it's *maybe* a decent start...maybe.

Triumvirate of Awesome

2007-11-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

there are three things hovering around the edges of possibility in my life right now, each of which would cause significant change and each of which i think would be very positive. i have no interest in posting any details about these things, but i wanted to create a record of the presence of these weighty maybes. in practical terms, i readily admit that none of them are terribly likely to occur. but i'm feeling quite exhilerated at the thought of how much change could leap out at me within the next few weeks, if all my various stars align just so... it's a good feeling, even if there's a lot of anxiety tied into the uncertainty and anticipation. there's nothing i can do about any of them except Wait and See...so here's hoping.

(and the hoping, if nothing else happens, is undoubtedly a tonic in and of itself.)

what 'weary' is not:

2007-11-08T13:27:00.000-08:00

it is not a portmanteau of wary and leery.

it is not another word for cautious.

it is not intended for use as anything other than a word that means TIRED.

please make a note of it. and reread the note often. and stop misusing the word. thanks.

serendipity at work

2007-11-06T15:01:00.000-08:00

i found a good thing:

http://awkwardthingsisaytogirls.com/

i googled the word 'awkward', and this came up second.

you'll notice that xkcd is listed first on the blogger's 'things i read' list. which leads me to believe that:
a) i probably should've found this blog sooner;
b) someone i know (like maybe YOU) indubitably already reads this blog and has been holding out on me; and
c) xkcd continues to be the undisputed greatest thing on the interwebs.

real-life superheroes

2007-10-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

i've been watching heroes and the x-men movies in the last couple weeks, so this seems even more awesome to me than it would've already: people who take on superhero names and roles in their communities.

a few of the (and my) heroes...

She calls herself Street Hero, says she is a former prostitute, knows martial arts and takes to the city’s underbelly to protect women who work the streets. Her uniform includes a black eye mask, a black bustier and black knee-high boots.
...
The Super is a superintendent of a building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who fixes faucets and does electrical work for people in need. Yesterday, he wore a red cape, a yellow shirt, green suspenders and green tights under black soccer shorts.
...
A Brooklyn man who calls himself Direction Man prefers helping lost tourists and locals. He wears a bright orange vest, a pair of thick black goggles and has numerous maps spilling from his pockets.

they have an online lair, if you're interested in learning more.

(hT to magellan)

i actually kinda want to vote for ALL of them...

2007-10-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

today at 5pm in the castro, mayoral candidates are gathering for a debate. they are choosing to meet in the castro for this particular debate because they are going to discuss issues relevant to the fact that the castro will be closed to partiers this halloween. i'm very enthusiastic about the fact that the candidates are addressing festival/celebration as an issue in san francisco.

the forum will focus, not only on Halloween in the Castro, but on how the city should work to facilitate community events as a whole.

all in all, i'm really pleased about how much the mayoral candidates are managing to raise issues (poverty! art! crime! partying! privatization!) and get people thinking and talking about this election. either despite the hopelessness of their chances at winning, or perhaps *because* of that hopelessness, this group of would-be politicians are managing to engage voters, publicize issues that need attention, and even force newsom into a greater degree of accountability. imo they deserve some serious hat tips for putting their time and $$$ into this campaign with no hope of success AT ALL. (not to say that they don't get something out of it, but i still think it's pretty altruistically awesome.)

proud sanfranciscan, etc., etc.

elementary enviro ed

2007-10-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

article in the nytimes today about environmental education movements in school systems.

this is something that i've been extremely interested in since high school. i did a couple of projects related to the subject during my undergrad coursework, and it's my top choice of what i would research for my grad work, in a perfect world. specifically, i'm interested in science-based and/or system-focused environmental education--enviro ed without indoctrination or bias. change behavior; teach scientific principles; don't use scare tactics; don't exaggerate--give kids the tools and knowledge to make their own decisions.

the article itself is a bit too balanced for my taste, but it's a good note to self that a) this movement is starting and b) there's a lot of room for improvement.

one good quote, that's applicable to enviro stuff everywhere:

“It’s like if you go to McDonald’s and order a hamburger and then recycle the packaging, that’s the most trivial thing you can do,” he said. “Because most of the environmental impact is in the meat production.”

thank god someone, somewhere, has moved past teaching kids to recycle.

new Neat Thing

2007-10-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

wikiquote!

i found it while searching for a tom robbins quote. and by golly, i found the quote i was looking for.

...and it's not even GOOD for me.

2007-10-23T14:07:00.000-07:00

as i sit here munching on what appear to be mold-covered, dried-out grub casings, but are in fact my first foray into the surprisingly tasty and traditional-aesthetics-defying world of 'veggie booty', i am reminded of a piece of news from a few months back... http://www.theonion.com/content/node/54916

"'veggie booty'! because 'spinach-kale-cabbage-carrot-broccoli-corn puffs' was already taken."

tiffa

2007-10-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

this won't be anything new or different on the subject for anyone reading my words, but because i haven't acknowledged it elsewhere yet...

tiffa novoa was an amazing and staggeringly inspirational artist. her influence in my community can be seen everywhere, and its presence is a constant testament to her incredible sense of beauty and exploration of new aesthetics. her death is a loss for all of us who love art, fashion, and creative self-expression.

decom edition of the shroom

2007-10-19T13:16:00.000-07:00

magellan has been putting these onion spoofs out for a few years.
the decom issue this year is great. enjoy!

http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/2/2/725410/ShroomsLargeFormatDECOM.pdf

noteworthy articles:
-BORG seeks to lower attendance with '08's "American Dream" theme
-13,000 RVs, 28,000 cars begin trek home from Green Man

japanese fashion exhibit: stylized sculpture

2007-10-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

i don't think i've ever been to the asian art museum. my first excuse to myself is that i'm not sure i'd love it, but that's probably rubbish; there are undoubtedly exhibits that would capture my interest. so this new exhibit is going to be the prod that gets me over to the museum.

The garments—borrowed from the Kyoto Costume Institute, one of the world's leading repositories of haute couture—date from 1983 to 2007, and include a range of materials and methods from various seasons...all "with textures, colors, and shapes worthy of definition as sculpture."

the museum, which is located on the civic center plaza, is only $5 on thursdays after 5pm. perfect!

permaburn?

2007-10-19T12:41:00.000-07:00

a friend from disorient pointed this out.

We now own 640 private acres surrounded on four sides by BLM public lands. It is located in Lassen County and is 3 miles off of US 395 and just 75 miles across Smoke Creek valley from Gerlach. It is called Sage Hen Pass. There is water on the property and all around it. S I expect we will have water also. It is elevated and secluded from the highway and is ideal for us, the burning man community. There is even an additional nearby section of property nearby that would allow us to grow if we decide to acquire it as well.

...

The City is to be broken up into eight separate entities or Tribes if you will, probably incorporated in Nevada where anonymity is all but guarantied by the state laws governing gambling. The Tribes will each own 80 acres in California and will operate some form of outdoor retreat, a campground or religious retreat or environmental retreat. Each of these Tribes will control their own membership that can be kept private. The Camps will provide the first level of control for the membership because every member must belong to a Camp. The eight Tribes will each control 80 Camps. The Tribes will be the second level of membership enforcement. This place will have thousands of members and because the expenses of the City are to be shared equally by each member, each level of control should want compliance with membership requirements. If we share cost among thousands of members major projects are possible. We want to build a City. We will end up with a city, why not plan for it. I congratulate you and welcome you wholeheartedly into the City because if you are digging this you are the kind of person we want.

pipe dream? probably. but i'll keep an eye on it. because, well, it would be marvelous, wouldn't it?

update: 'pipe dream' would be putting it mildly, apparently.

this, however, looks purrhaps slightly more realizable:

http://www.floatingman.org/
http://tribes.tribe.net/floatingman

more of a burner resort island :)
of course i feel very cynical about these efforts. but i hate that that's true. i'd love to see these projects succeed. and i'm sure they could, if only...

blackle, revised

2007-10-09T16:21:00.000-07:00

i posted a short note about www.blackle.com yesterday, and very quickly got a comment from someone stating that the website is not valid, and in fact uses more energy than google.

a quick search returned articles on techlogg that support the commenter's statements, as well as several other blogs that involved less evidence (but plenty of venom) against the blackle claims..

the blackle site's spiel is below, but basically the site claims to save energy by using a black background for their search engine than a white background.

here's a quote from the techlogg article, which tested 27 monitors for power consumption using google and using blackle:

There’s no argument that on CRT monitors, Blackle does reduce the power consumption but it’s not by the 15-watts claimed. We tested the four CRT monitors we could get our hands on and found that only one unit, an older 22-inch Compaq, showed the 15-watts or more power differential.

But with the LCD monitor market penetration worldwide now beyond 75%, it’s the LCD monitor power consumption that’s just as, if not more, important.

The most interesting aspect we found was that of the LCD monitors we tested of size 22-inches or less, all showed an increase in power consumption using Blackle. Beyond the 22-inch mark however, five of the six models showed a fractional decrease in power consumption when using Blackle, except the ViewSonic VX2835wm, which showed a 2.2-watt increase.

For the five that dropped their power consumption, the average drop was 3.16-watts, again, not the 15-watts being suggested.

But for the sake of fairness, here’s what we suggest – if you’re using a CRT monitor, you can save some power by using Blackle however it won’t be as much as its supporters will have you believe. We still think it’s around half.

and here are the words from http://www.blackle.com/...

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page ( set ). This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: "Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time".

education divide: quick note:

2007-10-09T11:32:00.000-07:00

'Thirty-six percent of female workers in their 20s now have a college degree, compared with 23 percent of male workers.'

wait...what? wow.

found in an article about us crazy kids, with our unmarried, unattached, wandering lifestyles...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/opinion/09brooks.html?th&emc=th

(recommendations for reading on these subjects very much welcome.)

i swear...

2007-10-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

it's getting to the point where xkcd is so relevant to my and my friends' lives, i'm ready to plan a trek to find the author, kidnap him, and bring him back to what should obviously be his real home.

today's triggering strip: http://xkcd.com/326/

pertinent data points in the process of coming to this conclusion:
http://xkcd.com/320/
http://xkcd.com/231/
http://xkcd.com/311/
http://xkcd.com/305/
http://xkcd.com/304/
http://xkcd.com/303/
http://xkcd.com/300/
http://xkcd.com/282/
http://xkcd.com/277/
http://xkcd.com/263/
http://xkcd.com/262/
http://xkcd.com/259/
http://xkcd.com/245/
http://xkcd.com/242/
http://xkcd.com/238/
http://xkcd.com/207/
http://xkcd.com/192/
http://xkcd.com/214/

oh, and:
http://xkcd.com/155/
http://xkcd.com/135/
http://xkcd.com/87/
http://xkcd.com/292/

:D

k i go do work now bai.

darfur, BART, and innovative advertising

2007-10-05T14:14:00.000-07:00

for those of you who don't pass through the montgomery BART station two times every day, this month's whole-station ad campaign has been done by SaveDarfur.org.

a forwarded message about and link to the SaveDarfur.org petition, which you're welcome to add your name to, is near the bottom of this email.

but first a couple thoughts/observations...

- i think it's RAD that a non-profit was able to do a whole-station campaign. (i looked through the website--the org is a 501(c)3 coalition of religious groups and humanitarian groups. see here for list: http://www.savedarfur.org/pages/organizational_members.) whole-station campaigns are ridiculously engaging, and i love love love that all these nice thoughtful liberal sF workers are getting exposed to anti-genocide ads twice a day :)

- it's particularly impressive (and/or startling, ridiculous, amazing) that such a big expensive campaign was done when the campaign, for all its radness, is maybe not all that useful in terms of concrete results. all the ads do is ask for for people to think about their investments. 'is your mutual fund funding genocide?', 'what is your college fund funding?', 'are you invested in genocide?' and then they put the website at the bottom of the ad. when you go to the website there's a petition to sign that will be sent to 5 big investment firms; they don't provide any other suggestions for action in terms of divesting. i feel like with a whole BART station to use for ads, they maybe could've put up some more information about darfur or about the group's goals. or at least mentioned which 5 firms they're targetting. or...*something* more than just the taglines.

- while looking for info about whole-station advertising, i found a neat sfgate article from january 2006 about some anti-abortion ads that BART ran (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/13/BAGT9GMTU81.DTL). the article discusses first amendment stuff, yadda yadda, but also mentions a price of $43k for a certain amount of advertising, and notes that Viacom Outdoors runs BART's advertising (or did at that time). the BART website itself just lists contact info for a person to talk to about ads--no price schedule or further info.

anyways. neat local things connected to big interational things.

and the petition...

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Divest for Darfur
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Have you heard of divestment? It's one of the key tactics that was successfully used to end apartheid in South Africa and it can help end the violence in Darfur, too.

To "divest" means to withdraw investments from companies that are supporting the genocide in Darfur by doing business with the government of Sudan.

Join me in fighting the genocide by urging Franklin Templeton, JP Morgan Chase, Capital Group/American Funds, Fidelity, Vanguard, and other investment institutions to divest their holdings from any and all companies doing business with the government of Sudan.

Click the link below to sign the Divest for Darfur petition now and help cut off financial support for the government-sponsored violence in Darfur!

http://action.savedarfur.org/campaign/divestnow_home

Diplomacy is crucial, but economic pressure may prove an even more powerful way to force Sudan to cooperate with international efforts to end the genocide.

Sudan has been very responsive to economic pressure in the past so we have reason to hope that they will pay heed to the divestment efforts.

setting your course through the '08 election

2007-10-05T13:54:00.000-07:00

this short exercise asks you for opinions on a dozen or so issues, then shows you how your answers correspond with different candidates. neat and useful.

http://www.wqad.com/Global/link.asp?L=259460

i'm pleased to say that dennis kucinich and i are still fully aligned in our belief systems :)

and, apropos of not much:
here's one of my favorite onion bits. infographic on ralph nader's campaign platform... http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27477

too much scifi tv...

2007-10-05T13:45:00.000-07:00

can really make you susceptible to questionable fashion statements.

after starting with Firefly and then watching all available episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica, friend sam and i have moved on to Babylon 5.

unlike the first two shows, b5 is full of awesomely flashy and extravagant alien outfits. i keep thinking of Back to the Future...kind of a mesh between the various time periods in the second film. the show was produced primarily in the late 90s, i believe, but you wouldn't be able to tell. it's totally Star Wars as reimagined by a team of stylists with representatives from the Star Trek original series, Jem and the Holograms, Adventures of the Baron Munchausen, Dark Crystal, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Dynasty. it's totally fabulous.

but the result being, i seem to have an uncommonly high opinion of this outfit:
http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/go_fug_yourself/2007/10/fugly-furtado.html

i should probably check in and recalibrate my sense of taste after every few episodes.

kite runner controversy

2007-10-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

i think this issue is getting a fair amount of press, but in case you haven't heard about it, imo it's an interesting, discomfiting, and distressing controversy.

i'm interested in whether the filmmakers really went through with the film in good faith. would it have been wiser and/or more respectful to use u.s. actors? counterintuitive, but maybe so...

if anyone happens to see any really good defenses or condmenations of the filmmakers, i'd love to see them. also, if you haven't read the book, i recommend it.

the gist of the current situation:

"Ahmad Jaan [the father of one of the film's child stars] says his fears are two-fold - that the film will worsen relations between Hazaras and the dominant Pashtuns (both the boy rapist and the principal character Amir are Pashtun); and that his own family may be in danger when the film comes out, because of Afghan concepts of dishonour."

bbc article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6992751.stm

nytimes article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/movies/04kite.html?ex=1192161600&en=b1e4724533d2e44e&ei=5070&emc=eta1

npr story (which i haven't listened to yet and which may give a more in-depth report): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14556301

word of the week: insipid

2007-05-31T17:17:00.000-07:00

triggered by a re-viewing of 'shakespeare in love'.

every time i remember that that film won an academy award for best picture i get a ball of totally irrational furious frustration in the pit of my stomach, very similar to the feeling i get when i hear about racial injustice, police abuse, or the vegetarian options on the menu at subway.

catholic doctrine vs christian values?

2007-05-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

i just read an article on something called 'liberation theology', a branch of catholicism that focuses on christ as liberator of oppressed people rather than just christ as redeemer. basically, it's catholicism that wants to improve social justice situations. it encourages activism and can get entwined in political issues. the current and most recent past both have both objected strongly to parts of the theology, to the point of calling it heresy.

here's the nytimes article. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/world/americas/07theology.html?th&emc=th

and here, since the previous article didn't do a very good job explaining itself, is the wikipedia entry on liberation theology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology

imo, the most tellingly awful quote i saw in the article, was from a conservative theologian in brazil. '[Y]ou continue to be incorrigible, poisoning the people with the theology of liberation, which...annihilates the true faith and subverts the gospel of salvation.'

'subverts the gospel of salvation', huh? don't worry, oppressed masses--heaven awaits! so don't do a goddamn thing to improve your life on earth.

a similar rationale (i.e. HEAVEN!) is used by other religious entities to discourage environmental protection. it's generally just about the worst and most upsetting wide-spread message, well, ever.

despite knowing that the vatican is much more conservative than the catholic tradition i grew up in (one that focused quite a bit on social justice and community action), i am startled to find that liberation theology is considered such a threat to the church. i am saddened and angered to see that catholic leadership hasn't found a way to reconcile social justice and social justice activism with church catechism.

yuri's night.

2007-04-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

just being thorough with my promotional efforts. if for some reason you haven't heard off this thing yet, goto: www.worldspaceparty.com.

hope to see you!

smudged

2007-03-16T12:01:00.000-07:00

i really like this idea. the idea of a national day of ritual to cleanse the country of the bush mess. sure, it's a wee bit cheesy. but i think we'd all feel a whole lot better :)

[I]t is becoming increasingly evident that a great national purifying ritual is just about exactly what we need. We are, after all, almost at that point. The Great Bleakness is nearing its end and you can veritably feel the swarm of uptight BushCo demons and malicious energies swirling around the country like happy karmic leeches, like a giant intellectual rash, like black raindrops of dank sweat from Karl Rove's evil mealy thighs.
...
Here is what we can do: We shall burn a bush. Ten thousand bushes. Maybe a million. Bushes laced with sage, lavender, pine, incense, with eight years of warmongering and intolerance and those beady squinty vacant eyes. We shall gather in parks or street corners or fire pits at the beach sometime next year, and ignite.

We will burn bush. We will burn away Bush. We shall purify and rinse and cleanse the nation of this horrific and banal poison, once and for all, and it shall be Good.

really.

2007-03-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

i was told the other day that an acquaintence of mine is going to be on a 'pirate REALITY show'.

the way i figure it, there are two options:

a) they are making a REALITY show about REAL pirates, in which participants carry and use dangerous weaponry against innocent people, board vessels to steal cargo, and otherwise participate in highly illegal activities.

b) they are making a REALITY show about an old and now non-existent class of sea-faring people whose alleged activities have been romanticized and mythologized to an extent that there is likely very little factual basis for any currently told stories, making this REALITY show a show about something FAKE.

for the sake of semantic accuracy i am, of course, rooting for option a).

update/clarification on the global warming statistic

2007-02-24T18:23:00.000-08:00

the exact phrasing of the question that allegedly led to the conclusion that 13% of americans had 'never heard of' global warming does not, imo, lead to anything of the sort. the wording seems to have been

'Have you heard or read anything about the issue of global warming?'

13% is much more realistic if you're talking about americans who have never read an article or listened to someone talk about the subject.

source: au.acnielsen.com/news/GlobalWarming.shtml

ignorance

2007-02-23T11:30:00.000-08:00

Main Entry: ig·no·rance
Pronunciation: 'ig-n(&-)r&n(t)s
Function: noun
Definition: lack of knowledge, education, or awareness

13% of the american population has never heard of global warming.

96% of latin america has heard of global warming, and 75 percent think it's a "very serious" issue.

an article on the report, summarizing a 46-country poll of more than 25,000 internet users, is here. (and some commentary with a few extra numbers is here.)

google is broken.

2007-02-16T18:24:00.002-08:00

i just typed in 'MBUAPCD' and they asked if i meant 'BCSD'.

today

2007-02-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

is my first day of spring. (it's also, not coincidentally, an anniversary of a death that changed me a little bit.) there should be some blossoming trees around town today. and sourgrass. and if you're driving over the 17 to santa cruz, you should be able to see all the acacias in bloom.

tears

2007-01-26T12:45:00.000-08:00

another set of words from mr huxley.

He stood there motionless, gazing, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and ever-profounder significances. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last onto his cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away.

"I can't help it," he apologized.

He couldn't help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness.

bodies have myriad ways of expressing negative emotions, and these methods are often (or at least can be) emphatic. but positive emotions are much harder to express in extremes. smiling is just so *common*; a smile that truly expresses happiness is of course possible, but it can be hard for an onlooker to gauge the degree emotion being expressed. disgust is easy to display; joy is much more challenging.

the beauty of tears is that it is the one instinctual positive reaction that a human has available to demonstrate positive emotion--the one way that a soul can force the body it inhabits to show joy--and that it is a demonstration of emotion that is almost impossible to feign.

yup.

2007-01-18T18:50:00.000-08:00

still have those headaches.
wooo-EE.

burning man oO7

2007-01-17T10:52:00.000-08:00

i think it's going to be a good year on playa. everyone's thrilled about the theme, my friends have been talking about art projects for a couple of weeks, and everyone i know seems to be buying tickets even if they're not sure they're going to go this year.

vera posted a beautiful story today about why burning man is so special.

I was walking on 24th Street the other day. I was wearing yellow sun glasses, green gloves, a candy-striped scarf and a poofy green prom dress. A woman was walking in front of me, carrying a little girl. The girl was looking at me, and she kept looking. Not taking her eyes off me, she turned towards her mom's face and said "Turn around.." She wanted her mom to look at me.The mom turned around and then immediately whisked the girl away to look at a display in a window. ...

At Burning Man, the woman would have looked at me. She would have listened to her child, and she would have turned around and looked at me. She might even have said something like "Yeah, she is wearing a poofy green dress! Look at that!" She would have been open, and she would have taught her child that it's okay to be open.

that's pretty much it in a nutshell.

[note: stated publicly, to improve accountability, my simplest resolution for the year is as follows: i vow to actually get my version of 'the grinch who stole chrismas' out to the playa this time.]

no pants

2007-01-16T13:57:00.000-08:00

6th annual No Pants! subway ride.

and yes, i know several people in the picture. and yes, i now love them even more than i used to. especially the one who wore pink briefs with his necktie.

more pix.

note to self:

2007-01-13T21:16:00.000-08:00

some words from aldous huxley's 'island'.

"The medicine takes you to the same place as you get to in meditation."

"So why bother to meditate?"

"You might as well ask, Why bother to eat your dinner?"

"But, according to you, the medicine *is* dinner."

"It's a banquet," she said emphatically. "And that's precisely why there has to be meditation. You can't have banquests every day. They're too rich and they last too long. Besides, banquets are provided by a caterer; *you* don't have any part in the preparation of them. For your everyday diet you have to do your own cooking. The medicine comes as an occasional treat."

"In theological terms," said the other man, "the medicine prepares one for the reception of gratuitous graces--premystical visions or the full-blown mystical experiences. Meditation is one of the ways in which one co-operates with those gratuitous graces."

"How?"

"By cultivating the state of mind that makes it possible for the dazzling ecstatic insights to become permanent and habitual illuminations."

ruminations on the sF underground eDm scene

2007-01-11T12:40:00.000-08:00

syd gris recently posted a spiel that presents observations and predictions regarding the electronic dance music scene in sF (http://www.opelproductions.com/archives/000182.php).

his view primarily encompasses realms of the scene that most of my friends and i don't inhabit too often these days, but we still go to get freaky and we still go to mighty, and i personally still like to go to opel parties once in a while. also, i think a lot of his observations are applicable to all parts of the scene, and at any rate they affect friends of ours around the city.

syd's gotten a lot of shit for some of the stuff he wrote, but imo he was spot-on with a lot of his assessments. a lot of the crews he mentions are a bit outside my sphere, but for the realms that i play in i generally agree with his thoughts.

i think it's important to do assessments like this every so often--both as someone who wants to be a member of a community i can be proud of, and as someone who wants to throw innovative events. in order to stay dynamic and awesome, we need to have foresight and notice change.

and the general observations are intended to be taken by an audience as just that--general. trends and scene-wide movements don't preclude good parties and hard work.

anyways. i find this sort of thing massively intriguing. comments encouraged.

dog diet

2007-01-09T18:39:00.000-08:00

diet meds for dogs.
side effects include vomiting, diarrhea, and loss of appetite.

i could use more words, but it'd be lamer than this posting. so read that instead.

desalination, part the second

2007-01-09T18:01:00.000-08:00

got this article at work a while ago. it's about a proposed alternative to on-shore desalination. the idea's pretty interesting, and it's feasible, but it leaves me with a bunch of questions.

Company floats offshore desalination plan
Fleet of conversion vessels would process water while out at sea

by kevin howe
monterey herald, 10.12.06

Water Standard, headed by founder and CEO Andrew Gordon, holds patents for turning seawater into fresh water that provides environmental protection for marine life with the intake of seawater and a system for deterring "plumes" of brine and heated water emissions. They say their approach provides a reliable, safe water source while avoiding many environmental issues that crop up when a land-based desalination plant is proposed. ...

An oceangoing seawater conversion vessel doesn't need intake and outfall lines on the seabed, Gordon said. It draws its water a short distance through a telescoping snorkel that can be set to the optimum depth to avoid damage to sea life and get the best-quality water.

Brine -- water with a concentrated salt content that is left after freshwater is processed -- doesn't get pumped out of an outfall onto the near-shore seabed, he said. The proposed ships would be able to mix the brine with raw seawater and discharge the diluted brine in the deep ocean, where it would be further diffused.

There would be no need to pair the desalination plant with a power plant, as most projects do, Gordon said. The ships would generate their own power with jet turbine engines of the type used on jumbo jets, fueled by clean-burning biodiesel oil or marine gas oil, neither of which produce sulphur emissions. Such engines, he said, have demonstrated their reliability on aircraft, ships and land-based electric power generating plants. With their own power source, Gordon said, the ships would be immune to power failures, could operate at cheaper rates than land-based plants because of fuel costs, and operate over the horizon to avoid visual impact from the shore.

They aren't vulnerable to earthquakes or tsunamis, and can sail away if a heavy storm looms.

The freshwater would be brought ashore in "food-grade" tankers similar to those used for bulk transport of orange juice concentrate or wine, Gordon said, or by modular tug barge tankers. ...

The group is looking to build ships capable of processing 20 million to 200 million gallons of water a day, he said. Such a vessel could be built in two years. Plying the coast of California, a Water Standards seawater conversion ship could provide water to a consortium of companies and relieve pressure on land-based water supplies, Gordon said, such as the Carmel River. If their product isn't needed in one place, it could be delivered to another. ...

Water Standard Co., Gordon said, would be willing to deliver a ship and recruit and train crews, then sell it to the water management district or other public agency if the area wants the water plant under public ownership. ...

myriad(s)

2007-01-09T15:14:00.000-08:00

merriam webster sez: myriad isn't just an adjective!! which is good, because i think the adjective version is ridiculously counterintuitive.

Main Entry: 1 myriad [noun]
1 : ten thousand
2 : a great number <a myriad of ideas>
Usage: Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.

Main Entry: 2 myriad [adjective]
1 : INNUMERABLE <those myriad problems>; also : both numerous and diverse <myriad topics>
2 : having innumerable aspects or elements <the myriad activity of the new land -- Meridel Le Sueur>

totally nonplussed.

2007-01-05T12:09:00.000-08:00

i've been meaning to look this up for quite a while: why is the word 'nonplussed' commonly used to mean 'unimpressed' when it in fact means 'puzzled'? i would venture to guess, even, that most folks, when asked, would give you the first definition and not know about the second.

i want to know two things.

1. why did it end up being misused?
2. am i allowed to use the wrong definition in formal writing and speech without fear of being chastised? because i really like the wrong definition.

first, here's an acknowledgment of the situation:

"In standard English nonplussed means ‘surprised and confused’. A new meaning, ‘not disconcerted; unperturbed’, has developed recently in North American English, probably on the assumption that the prefix non- must have a negative meaning; this is not yet accepted as standard usage."

and here's another, more lengthy response that negates the legitimacy of the new meaning.

wikipedia, however, in it's omnicience regarding modern truths, gives an assessment that is imo likely closest to what will end up as 'accepted', if it's not accepted already:

"Nonplussed is a state of confusion or bewilderment. It is also a neologism meaning unimpressed."

so then. the answer to 1. is that there doesn't appear to be any good reason for the misusage. and the answer to 2. seems to be that i probably shouldn't use it for a couple more years, unless i'm willing to spout websites in my defense.

english, e-comm, and the battle betwixt the two

2006-12-20T19:01:00.000-08:00

amy sent me an article entitled Bad Lingo: Blog-Media Cliches.

and i don't know the last time i've jumped down a throat more thoroughly.

my response (which i'll truncate to include a jump if i can figure out how):

i disagree with the premise of that entire post, to say nothing of my obvious disregard for their tsk'ing at individual phrases (except for '-gasm'. i super-much hate '-gasm'.)

e-comm, which imo includes blogging [note: debatable; see paragraph below], is allowing for the creation of a new vernacular. the phrases and expressions that the post calls 'cliches' are in fact nothing of the kind; they are new habits of speech and, more importantly, new ways of expressing connotation, emotion, tone, intent, and opinion.

the most effective e-communicators are, in my experience, the ones who have figured out ways to integrate their spoken speech habits and their personalities into their writing. e-comm is most commonly an extension of personal expression and is specifically attached to a personality, as opposed to writings in most conventional expository venues; and in e-comm venues, a piece of writing that conveys personality is more readable and digestible than one that is formal or dry. the increase in effectiveness with the use of softening language can be particularly true for e-communicators who are clever, verbose, and/or prone to a large vocabulary, since integration of slang and popular expression into an otherwise dense piece of writing can improve readability and make the e-comm more approachable.

also, i would argue that a successful e-communicator is probably going to be consistent over time with the way that they use slang and popular expression. this consistency allows for more accurate readings of the author's tone and intent.

on the subject of consistency, i would also like to point out the usefulness of standardized slang in a set of forums where speed and brevity are often useful and where tone is constantly being evaluated. many expressions are linked to widely-perceived connotations, which makes their use helpful in deliberately establishing tone within an e-comm. (the best example of this that i can think of off the top of my head is the continuing usage, even among our peers, of simple emoticons. :) ;) ;P and :P are used intentionally--and helpfully--to ensure that tone will be properly communicated.)

i do wish to disclaim that there are a few phrases the post mentions that are becoming hackneyed. ('[x] is the new [y]' is beyond irritating, and '[Argument], wait for it, [rhetorical flourish]', while i still find it amusing, is losing its edge.) however, it is no more of a crime to use a hackneyed comment in e-comm than it is to use slang or a passingly trendy phrase in one's casual oral communication. (while one might be able to successfully rant against slang and loose use of the venerable english language for several solid hours, i doubt that one would be given much stage time for arguing that the use of the words 'whatevs, yo', 'dude', or 'oh my GAWD' is 'cliche'.)

aside from these few examples, though, i think that the post listed legitimate examples of e-comm slang and expression that don't need to be killed off, and in some cases i would say that their deaths would be detrimental to the new vernacular.

the post (probably for want of content) unfortunately combined some items from a few different categories of e-comm grammar and usage. 'What's next? [outlandish scenario]?' does not belong in the same category of e-comm grammar as 'btw'.

before i do the point-by-point irritated dissection, a word on blogs: blogs are a part of the new universe of e-comm. some are more formal than others, but your run-of-the-mill blog is going to commonly use first person singular perspective, occasionally direct questions to its audience, use less-than-standard english, and be exceedingly self-conscious. blogs are therefore entitled to incorporate some (if not all) of the slang and expression that have become acceptable for other e-venues--most notably the trends acceptable in email and on bulletin boards. also, tone is often just as important in a blog posting as it is now indisputably acknowledged to be in email; and tone, as mentioned above, can be read more clearly with the use of informal language.

okey. that's my main spilling of thoughts. a couple of the phrases also warrant some strong defense, though. i've cut it down to focus on the ones i think are most useful.

Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar.

the dismissal of this phrase might be the one that makes me most irritated. given that ALL CAPS is uncouth, and that the use of *asterisks* or _underscores_ is often problematic, and that verbosity does not necessarily translate directly into high levels of excitement, we need another standardized way to express hyperbole. also, i am a huge supporter of poetic license with respect to punctuation in e-comm. creative punctuation is an excellent way to convey phrasing, makes a piece of e-comm more readable as a flow of thoughts, and often demonstrates aspects of the writer's typical oral communication style. it conveys personality.

[undesirable counter-example], not so much.

'The punchline that ends a thousand million columns and blog posts. Weak as the lightest of lite beers, or the puny farts you get from such beer.' dude, whatever. this is a common spoken slang phrase right now. and it still works. this isn't an example of a written cliche.

FTW, O RLY, lol, FTL, OMG, FWIW, btw, PWND, ROTFL, etc.

'These are borderline acceptable if you're...' 'Even if your audience uses these expressions in daily life, such practice should not be encouraged. Self-consciously peppering normal discourse with geekspeak acronyms (especially when used in conjunction with non-geek subjects) no longer rescues your words by way of anti-coolness.'

with regard to--specifically--btw, fyi, and omg, see entire diatribe above. they're slang. they're useful. also, they have new meanings beyond what they're used to abbreviate, each of which has a different connotation than the original phrase. 'btw' and 'fyi' are used as quick indicators that the associated piece of information is intended to be useful as an addendum to some general topic. consider the difference if you saw typed 'btw' versus 'by the way,' or 'by the way...'; the two longer phrases indicate a more serious topic, and are generally followed by a piece of bad news or another form of negative communication, whereas 'btw' has no such negative connotation. and 'fyi' does not hold the bossy tone of 'for your information'; instead it's been appropriated to mean a much more casual 'just so you know'. 'omg', while a bit more tongue-in-cheek than the previous two examples, is still a concise way to express a common sentiment, and is useful in that it is known to generally carry a flippant tone.

the lol, rotfl, ad nauseum, however, i am willing to concede. they're appalling. no one should ever, ever use them, unless in extreme circumstances. and even then no one will believe you, so the point is lost and gone and we're back to never ever using them. ever.

See also: "teh" anything.

why does the author of this post object to fun new meme-like phrases? maybe he or she just never got told what any slang meant as they were growing up, and hence want to take it out on the universe now by pronouncing that all slang is just dumb.

[purposefully non-ghetto statement], yo.

'Often used in conjunction {with} other ghetto nonfabulous phrases like ... "The [object or situation] was mad [obscure adjective],"...'

as a constant and devoted user of the word 'yo', i wish to announce to the world that i have no intent of conveying anything about any ghetto anywhere. 'yo' was appropriated into californian speech ages ago, and as a california native i am allowed to use it whenever i want. it's totally just like 'hella' and all variations thereof. also, on a totally different vein, i heart bc's intelli-ghetto speak and recognize, due to his efforts, that it takes mad skillz to pull it off proper.

oh, and 'yo' serves a grammatical purpose by making a sentence deliberately more self-conscious and therefore pulling the reader into a closer relationship with the writer.

[undesirable conclusion]. Oy.

'fake Jewspeak'?! huh. that's a new phrase i must incorporate into my social commentary. whatevs--i don't feel strongly about the use of 'oy' as an expression of exasperation, but it *is* a concise expression with a widely known connotation, so again i hold that it's fine. BUT, more importantly, i wish to point out to MY readers that i only use 'oy' as fake SCOTTISH-speak, which is entirely different.

What's next? [outlandish scenario]?

how is this a cliche particular to blogs, exactly? but at any rate, if this is done with tongue in cheek it's still totally possible to be mildly or even majorly amusing.

Um, [condescension]?

'As a verbal tic in conversation, "um" is perfectly acceptable and often auditorially invisible. Written in prose, it signals a level of smarmy superiority that would get you rightly punched in the face if you dared behave like that in person.'

i'll admit that as a means of expressing condescension, the use of 'um' is less than perfect; but not because it's cliche--just because it's risky. the tone of a phrase like that is pretty strong.
mostly, though, i wanted to comment on this item because it is veering dangerously close to condemning the use of the term 'um' in e-comm entirely. not okay. 'um' is a terribly useful word in e-comm for expressing indecision and sarcasm, among other things. it is an excellent tone indicator.

[adjective]-y goodness

this new trend of descriptors, which would perhaps also include all superfluous use of the suffixes '-ish', '-ness', and '-y' and the prefixes 'uber', 'super-', and 'super-much', is not, i would argue, an attempt to be 'high-larious'. it is merely a style of description that conveys degree-of-feeling with better variance in tone than repeated use of the words 'very' or 'really'. again (again again), it's just slang.

to live by:

2006-12-20T15:40:00.000-08:00

'observe their weak human behavior and tell them nothing of you.'

~lobsterrocket

A Sentence

2006-12-15T17:29:00.000-08:00

or, As We Approach the Pinnacle of the Civilized English Linguistic Ability
by orange smiling

"no, i was yay good for you getting to have fun times."

thank you. thankyouverymuch.

one of our best holidays

2006-11-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

buy-nothing day is friday.

even if you can't participate... don't forget that it's there.

what the world is coming to

2006-10-27T11:13:00.000-07:00

i'm not sure i will ever reach a point at which seeing the words 'arnold' and 'schwarzenegger' at the top of my official work documents will cease to cause sharp pangs of surreal shock.

i love my friends! i love my life!

2006-10-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

bex has been doing this wonderful thing where she captures amazing moments that we hadn't even noticed were amazing. looking at her pictures is making me as happy as anything else in life right now. the shots from last night--just another thursday at the soap factory--were particularly coo-inducing. unfortunately, they're part of a huge album she's been adding to (although the whole album is fantastic), but if you click on this picture, this'll take you to the middle of last night in her photostream.

thank you bex.

lake county

2006-10-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

"Why we have always made fun of people from Lake County”

(who WAS it that i was trying to explain this to?!?)

music-in-movies

2006-10-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

(reposted from again! again!. can always count on magellan for the quality music links.)

i am terribly distressed at the fact that the end of garden state, with the oh-so-irreproachable use of the frou frou song, was not mentioned. but 'tiny dancer' is at least in the ballpark of where it should be, and there are a bunch of others that got good props.

There’s nothing better for someone who’s a fan of both music and movies to sit down in a theater, watch a film, and find yourself in awe of how the director has utilized a pop song to set a scene or convey a mood. It’s easy to know that you need a romantic song for a romantic moment, but finding the right song…? That’s the hard bit, and it gets even harder as you have to provide the proper sonic backdrop for just about every key moment in the film. Bullz-Eye polled all of our movie and music writers (and then some) to get their favorite uses of pop songs in movies.

The only real criteria we set was this: The song couldn’t have been written specifically for the film or have made its debut on the film’s soundtrack. This was pretty rough on us at first, because it meant we had to say so long to Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” (“The Breakfast Club”), bid bye-bye to O.M.D.’s “If You Leave” (“Pretty in Pink”), and offer a fond farewell to Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” (“She’s Having a Baby”).

Fortunately, we had a lot of great songs – and movie moments – waiting in the wings. But be advised: our descriptions contain spoilers galore.

http://www.bullz-eye.com/movies/features/2006/movie_tunes.htm

this STILL HAPPENS?!?

2006-10-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

toxic waste dumped on the ivory coast, seemingly without much attempt to hide the actions.

that's it, i guess. i'm pretty upset about it, though.

the rest of the dancers

2006-09-28T19:55:00.000-07:00

these words are from blacklight, an inspiration in most categories and a wonderful friend:

...the most interesting thing to me was that they caught me, and my kindred. This got me to thinkin about the phenomenah of dancefloor kindred. The way I've experienced it is they are the ones, correction, WE are the ones, who in ANY large group where there's a buncha people and dancing, especially with electronic music, [although it happens no matter what the music is], who recognize eachother no matter where we are on the dancefloor as those mufuckas. the ones who are like a pulse for the floor. the ones who are driven beyond the love of dance to a place that looks a lot like NEED. we fucking HAVE to move. we HAVE to shake down and give homage to the gods of Rhythm and Bass and Tone and Note. like, there is no choice. I don't even remember their names, my kindred from Boom, but I will forever remember their faces, their energies, their beauty and acceptance and generosity. ... that morning, I had stumbled out of my tent down onto the dancefloor, not even really in the mood to dance, and then the two of them, who up until then I had only had the mutual recognition with ..[YOU your'e one of them, yep, you are too.. all this through our movements and eyes, no words..], greeted me with a raucous cheering and exhorted me to immediately lose my mind.. which I did poste haste, and the three of us just fuckin raged it for the next however long... just feelin it HARD the entire time. this is...a HUGE shout out to all of those dancefloor kindred all over the globe, all over the galaxy. .who will forever be the instigators of inspiration to me, to you, to all their movements and energy touches. Aaaannd, last but not least, this is a shout out to all you who spark us whether you know it or not.. by watching us. by encouraging us, by cheering us on, by complimenting us before, after and during, by filming us and taping us and shooting us and posting us.. I thank the ones of you who are genuinely moved and inspired by us. Know that it is indeed a completed cypher, and though we absolutely HAVE to move.. we have to, it makes it an infinitely more enjoyable experience when we get to inspire you who inspire us who inspire you..

the boy speaks full truth. there are so many moments i have in my head...full communication with no words and full communion without even touching. i've made close friends who speak pigeon english, and smiled and waved and run to embrace people i've never met. these ones, the rest of the dancers, they are full family. always.

part iii of how many people in the world would actually think this is music?!

2006-09-28T19:51:00.000-07:00

i just had this great conversation with ian about glitch, and i wrote some words that i like. basically, the question put to me was: 'what IS it that you people really get out of that stuff?'

before i let loose, let's do some definitions on some undefined genres. there's glitch-hop, which is bassy, a super-dance-able version of hip-hop, with scratching and glitch layered over it. and that actually covers most of what i go out to dance to. (i mean, ish. most of these genres are just trying to provide a term for something that's pretty scattered and diverse.) for glitch-hop, let's say that's boreta, eprom, kraddy, ooah, edit, with some kitty-d on the side and rodman darting in and out. and then there's *glitch*... which is also a problematic genre name, but in this case i'm talking about 'music' that is primarily scratchy beepy sounds. there may or may not be a layer of really smooth melodic sound as a base, and there will be some beats, but the focus of the thing is the straight bEEp beeErP tch skreeeeE tch cLiCK. i don't know the names of a lot of glitch producers, but slidecamp is glitchy, and so is mr projectile, and i think watson and toast. and maybe RD. DISCLAIMER: most of the boys i listed don't really think of much--if any--of what they do as 'glitch'. it's a hard term to get right, right now.

so i'm seeing two categories of people loving this music--the uber-awesome dancers and the music geekhead producers. which leads me to believe that it is awesome for dancing and probably technically pretty fun to ponder and play with.

first, the dancers. glitch is TOTALLY dance-able. even most of the really pure glitch, provided your drugs are working properly. the dancers that i dance with are pretty stoked on music that let's you get creative with your body and move slowly but intricately. so the midtempo breaks stuff that we've been so into for the last couple years is great--loooots of bass, but a slow enough tempo that you can bend over backwards and touch your elbow behind your opposite knee if you want to. now glitch-hop is taking the midtempo breaks and layering some new sharper scratchier stuff on top, right? so then you've got the sloooow bassline to match with your torso, but with this set of sounds on top that you can match with your arms or head or feet or whatever. lots of space for total movement insanity. and there's the little matter of how incredibly well it lets us all dance together... the -hop part is slow, making it easy to move with someone else, and super-sexy, which makes everyone move way hotter; and then the glitch lets folks be more playful.

dancing to the pure glitch is way different, but also fun. it's super *sharp* music, and some of it's pretty spare and sparse, which i like. it's music to test your reflexes :P how many beats can you hit, with how many body parts, in a given short timespan? also, everyone likes to be a robot sometimes :)

and then the djs. the fact that so many producers and dJs that i like are interested in glitch makes me surmise that it's probably fun to listen to from the perspective of how-the-hell-did-they-make-that. also, it must be fun to make or they wouldn't keep churning it out.

and my personal connection... i mean, it's incredible to dance to. just incredible. the first troubled youth mash-up set i heard made me tear up. not kidding. and their set at priceless was even better. i cannotobjectively determine what it is, other than the paragraphs above about dancing, that makes this music resonate with me. but it does. it REALLY does. the glitch-hop, the melodic stuff with glitch on top, the electro-glitch, and whatever else. all of it.

i've never had any genre that reeeeally did it for me before. i like and listen to a pretty broad range of genres, but i'm very artist-specific. i didn't ever get into the jamband scene, despite circumstances that suggested i should. i had a quick little ska phase, but just cuz it was a fun thing to do. i never got into any of the punk or emo or indie shit that people went through in high school or college--i just never heard a genre or subgenre that had more than a couple bands that i really loved. so this is my first time where i'm ready to just completely immerse myself in a type of music, and let myself be okay with the fact that, well, i pretty much listen only to *this* genre now when i'm in the car or cleaning or whatnot. i used to think that that sort of behavior was inCREDibly lame and narrow-minded of people, but now i'm seeing that i just hadn't found a genre that i loved the way they did.

and in response to the argument that it's getting love because it's hip and underground and edgy... yes, it's underground, and it's got the whole too-cool thing that goes with underground. but i'm going to be sweetly naive and be one of the DANCERS, and you can't fake the dancing. have you seen us? i mean, i've seen us, and we are faking NOTHING. so i'll just kick it with my dancers, and we'll go to ruby skye if it's for something that we can't get elsewhere (but if you can get it at nickie's then why in god's name would you go to ruby skye?!), and we'll be happy :)

(my post on the first non-dancing glitch show i went to, and how startled i was at how much i like it, is here:http://orangesmiling.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-many-people-in-world-would.html.)

desalination

2006-09-28T17:32:00.000-07:00

yesterday i got to go to a conference in monterey on desalination. i learned quite a bit, and since it's pretty interesting to me (and SHOULD be pretty interesting to anyone who plans on living in california for the next several decades), i thought i'd share some of my notes.

there are about 12 existing coastal desalination facilities in california, with a total production capacity of about 2.7 million gallons per day (mgd). they're used mostly for emergency backup, industrial supplies, and drought relief. at the moment, there are more than 20 new plants being proposed for california, and they're at all stages of the planning and environmental process. by one estimate i found, these proposed plants would add about 370 mgd of production capacity. [note: 2.7 mgd is peanuts. 370 mgd is definitely not peanuts.] the biggest plant in the world is on the order of 72 mgd. the biggest one in the uS is in tampa bay, and i believe it's about 25 mgd. the existing plants in california are all very smallish. some of the proposed california plants would be on a large scale. a bunch would be bigger than 10 mgd; two would be on the order of 50 mgd; and one would be 120 mgd. i got the impression that 10-25 mgd looks about reasonable and rational for a large plant in california right now. anything larger than that would probably be called 'big' by industry standards.

summary: a bunch of small pilot-y desal projects currently exist in california. lots of desal projects, some of them huge, are proposed for california.

desalination takes a LOT of energy. at the moment, the rate of energy usage to create desalinated water from normal oceanic saltwater is 6.81-8.90 kilowatt-hours per kilogallon (kwh/kgal). 20 years ago, though, that would've been about 30 kwh/kgal, so the technology's come a long way. and it's still improving. at $0.08/kwh (which is low in california, i believe), this comes to $2.37-2.80/kgal (about $3 per thousand gallons of desalinated water). (what's a typical price for water in california? i'm not sure...)

desalination plants cause a variety of impacts. the impacts can be divided roughly into these categories:

-construction – normal construction impacts; not a big deal; but note that pipeline construction is included in this category.
-intake – intake of water can cause impingement and entrainment (trapping and sucking in) of marine species; but some methods are way better than others, and technology is improving while research is being done on the impacts.
-discharge – the water that is returned to the ocean after the desal process is highly saline. this can affect all sorts of marine life. this is dealt with by co-locating the facility (see below) and by careful planning regarding the location of the outfall.
-energy use and emissions – very energy-intensive; using brackish water would be more efficient; emission problem could be solved with alt energy source.
-land use – coastal access issues; sensitive habitats are located in coastal zones; zoning is stricter; etc.
-socioeconomics – it's an expensive way to get water, so rates go up
-co-location issues – in california, plants are generally co-located with another facility, such as a power plant or wastewater plant, so that the brine byproduct can be disposed of into an already-existing plume of outfall water. this makes the salinity impact much lower. however, power plant outfall plumes are bad in and of themselves, environmentally, and california is trying to phase out once-through cooling systems at power plants. if the power plants are decommissioned, the desal plants will have to do much more to deal with their wastewater.

it is important to remember, however, that all these impacts must be balanced against the environmental impacts of all other ways to get water. habitat destruction, species destruction, overdraft, seawater creep, and the various socioeconomic impacts associated with water politics...

that's the gist of the basics, issues-wise. know too that the field is very regulated. one plant under discussion had to get 5 federal permits, 12 state permits, and 7 local permits. that is a LOT of permits.

dayquil: love and hate

2006-09-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

dayquil is GREAT, right? it makes your head work. it makes you functional. it makes it possible for you to get through a day of coldishness without collapsing. it's also very fun to be on with caffeine and alcohol when you're dancing.

BUT-T-T-T-- so this week i've had a series of really intense nights full of AWFUL dreams. long, vivid, disturbing, emotional dreams. i'm not getting very good sleep, and i'm remembering tons of each dream when i wake up. aside from the actual unpleasant feelings at the time of dreaming, this is resulting in additional problems as i try to go through my days with images from the dreams in my head. i've been depressed, emotional, and insecure all week. it's been bothering me and compounding as i've tried to figure out why... so i'm terribly relieved to have noticed this correlation.

dayquil. wow. bad.

if applied properly, success guaranteed.

2006-09-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

i was at beatchurch last night with bex, b2, reagan, benchun, and nevada. we got there early and things were sloooow to get started. i doubt the evening ever got very crowded, but the beginning was particularly dead. neptune was playing some kind of blah mellow something-or-other, and the sound was a little too loud in the front room, so we went into the back room and sat around talking. 20 minutes later... i'm sitting talking to ben and b2; the other girls are standing behind us talking. suddenly, neptune kicks into a random unidentified new track. b2, ben, and i--still sitting down and talking--all start dancing at the same time. behind the boys i see bex and nevada do the same thing.

'twas truly magical.

this, i'm sure, says something very important and profound about the effect of bass on my friends. i'm wondering if this same thing would have happened with every other human everywhere? or is it just a specific subset of the population? could we do a test to find like-minded dancers in which we put a group of people together and the ones that start twitching when the bass hits get culled off and given tribe profiles?

i'm also curious if this can be used as proof that different genres do different things to different people.

oh, and if it can be used as proof that i have rad friends.