action figures sold separately

before we leave town for A’s 30K:

1. haven’t had a chance to listen to them closely enough, but i did like the bit i heard on the radio not too long ago. who likes the hissyfits? why?

2. improving our vocabulary:

• enrongate etc: we have been utterly hornswoggled!

• A and i trade off huge cleaning jobs, impressing each other with our supererogation.
• are you a misocapnist? don’t go to bars in chill or nyc!
• but perhaps this is all a pleonasm.

3. if you do not have personal dogs, just borrow your neighbors!

The mediahog clearchannel is being taken to task by DC attorneys who are saying, “Hey, FCC, look what they’re doing!! That’s naughty!!” (via mediageek).

now that we’re done with prodigal summer which was freakin amazing, like i can’t recommend it enough, i’m getting into Vonnegut’s Bagombo Snuff Box, the Poetry Speaks collection, and the shatteringly good study, White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture.

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Dar Williams was on Democracy Now today. When I Was a Boy is one of those songs i can’t hear without crying and the slightly crackly realaudio from wbai version was no exception. Damn she’s good. Cool (if slightly flash-heavy) new site, too.

survey: if we got around to it (yeah right, maybe in the late summer), would folks listen to audio commentary on this page, like jish.vox?

hello, can one of my radical lawyer-type pals (sarah, katya, scott, seguin, anyone, please chime in here…) please explain the rationale behind what seems to me to be the hideously anti-democratic and backward rules made by judges for juries? more specifically, A had jury duty yesterday, from which she was dismissed and the judge told the potential jurors that they couldn’t ask questions and couldn’t get info from any other source than what they saw and heard there in the courtroom. They were told they could not even look up a word in the dictionary. how whack is that?!!

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only 212 days to go!!!!!! (until the mn state fair, of course…) i didn’t think that my pals nicola and susan were lyin, but i just had no idea of the extent of the antics such as dairy princesses and everything on a stick. (more on the butterheads here… wow.)

i’m so psyched about the existence of skirtman (via the often hilarious uffish thoughts). (a says, “that’s so great, he’s just a dude… in a skirt!)

the mainstream webpress giving fair props to indymedia (finally) in a piece by theta pavis at the online journalism review (via the ever-helpful mediageek.)

hey i’m no superpro linuxdood, but i’m learning fast, and (of course my buddy john, and) scott hawkins (the atlanta sysadmin, not the video game developer at codefire) is helping with that a lot. the linux desk reference just rocks.

back home after about a week up north, getting ready for the likely move to that wonderful green land of no sales tax, pdxOR.

i think i agree with dj about the broadway bridge being the coolest. decades vintage and powell’s and powell’s tech captured a bunch of my attention. i got and finished megan kelso’s awesome queen of the black black and A brought along jessica abel’s wonderful first artbabe collection:

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so rockin! we also read to each other on the drive down: barbara kingsolver’s prodigal summer. wow. so freakin great. her writing is so rich and subtle.

oh, and a good bit by george carlin was reposted over at tearitalldown.

our dinner tonight included a fabulous Romanesco cauliflower. there’s a few little things that have been put on the web about this amazing food and its fine fractal form (see the 8th paragraph from the end, especially for how these veggies fit in) but someone out there should really say more. i’ve never seen anything else naturally occurring which is fractal on the macro scale in just this way. see, the nubs on the nodules are conical, and the nodules that make up the flowerettes are conical in just the same shape and proportion, and then the whole head of flowerettes mimics that again. YOW! stop the bombing, stop shopping, stop everything and check it out!! it tastes real good too.

last night while hanging with my sister’s kids (aged 9 and 12) we played my new made-up game: “chaos-town monopoly.” after four rounds of play, before you roll the dice you can buy a new rule for $250 that would last for two rounds (and to keep the rule going you’d have to put $100 in the pot). we had a few guidelines so it wouldn’t get totally out of control (though coby’s final rule brought a crushing defeat upon himself, his older brother, and me, and gave amanda a tremendous victory, where she ended up with all our money and all our properties (mwooah-haa-haa-haa!!)). some rules were fun and instructive, like a’s, which was that first we had to pool all owned properties and divide them equally amongst everyone, then after that if you wanted to buy a property, you had to buy one of equal or lesser value for all other players as well. other rules were just silly, like mine that said if you land on community chest or chance you had to take three cards in a row and do what all of them said, while standing on one leg (and no tickling allowed!).

• since the report was first put out in the alternative press, the civilan victims of u.s. bombing in afghanistan site has been hugely upgraded, added to, and organized. compelling and worth a read.
• the unamerican activities site, which so far appears to be pretty cool, should not be corn-fused with unamerican activities (who did this cool stuff:)
  
  
  

• listening to ani’s new (and i think among her best) recording, i’m reminded that i forgot to blog on the epicpoem she wrote post 9-11. but she’s touring (when has she not been touring?!) and will hit 3 western spots this spring.
  
  

we miss Stevie Ray.

YUM YUM! bring on the breakfast insanity!! (a la DBCT)

so in preparation for upgrading a network for an s.f. nonprofit and installing a nice fast server, i’m practice-running, trying to get our new home office linuxbox running samba. now, by all indications, it will someday be rockin. but it’s maddening right now. the documentation, while very detailed and thorough, assumes a level of expertise with linux in general which is way beyond me currently. ug! should i spend the weeks necessary to get up to speed or farm that configuration piece of the work out to someone else? hmmm. in general, i’m loathe to purchase something “for dummies,” but in this case i may have to succumb. any ideas, o helpful readers? (oh, and i’m trying to use swat, but lots of problems there, and ksamba won’t help cuz i’m running gnome not kde. so maybe webmin. it looks helpful but pretty intimidating too. i’d love to hear from anyone who’s had a good experience with that).

check out this rad piece by tim wise at alternet about the officer west toy now available from the l.a.p.d. union. who needs drugs or tv, reality it too whack as it is… thanks, tim. indeed that’s enough with the cop glorification. people, can we re-read tony platt’s the iron fist and the velvet glove and remember cops are really about now?

oh, and while i’m pointing you to important news you need (or being mr. bag-o-downers, take your pick) — and to carry on the alternet linkfest — let’s not forget that the u.s. has killed over 12,000 civilians in Laos in the last 30 years.

after a decently long and fast bike to the post office and to meet A at a really good talk by rachel naomi remen, i found an emergency message from the folks at we interrupt this message. seems they’ve got a crossover problem somewhere between the MPOE and the EMSS (the customer side switching box) that needs to be fixed. so, ug, gotta head back there tomorrow on the early side. and just when my sweetie’s got the morning off. how wrong is that?

before i get too far into this, let me say the rachel naomi remen was awesome, as she talked to A. and a crowd of her fellow very-soon-to-be-actual-doctors about the importance and value of service as opposed to fixing people. and how that’s where meaning is found. i left being inspired by her stories, her positivity, her grace and incredible persistance. but i also left with the strong feeling that while service is of course vital and i’m glad she is such an articulate, profound force in the world advocating for that way of life and that style of practicing medicine, service doesn’t mean much without justice. the fundamental inequalities that are at the cornerstone of our society and that impact the delivery of care in such profound ways will not change in the fundamental ways necessary unless and until there occur revolutionary political and economic changes. yes, i said the “r” word. yes, i do mean upheaval, yes i mean full-tilt boogie in the streets of our cities and the town halls of our wayside hamlets. doctors, and soon-to-be-doctors who mean well, like lawyers and political players and social workers who mean well, cannot acheive the changes they want without grassroots organizers. o.k., so that was my little grassroots organizer rant. truth is, of course, that organizers and activists are so dead in the water without rad docs and lawyers and on and on. the multi-pronged approach, people. gotta hit it from all angles.

so, with A. out meeting with other futuredocs, and knowing i must spend the morning sussing out the subtle sounds and weird signals coming from specific hell (a.k.a. pacific bell), i took part of this evening to kick back with a baked potato, a wolaver’s (yes, the best brew available on planet) and watch the blues masters DVD, which, despite colin james’ hokey video overdub with Willie Dixon, was phenomenal. muddy watters and james cotton and otis spann and the crew just rocked so hard it hurt. they reveal so much depth and intensity and skill and understanding and love and hate and just plain spirit in these performances (in a studio in toronto in 1966), you just want to cry. got me thinking more about representation of race and class in the blues and how blues musicians have been historically exploited and all the vital stuff about the intersections of race and gender that angela davis talks about in blues legacies. time to revisit that, i never gave it my full attention when it came out. more on it and angela can be found at disinformation, nyt, and a harshly critical piece by johnathan gill for the boston review.

angela is still on the advisory board of PARC, and active with Critical Resistance, but i haven’t heard much from her of late. perhaps i’ll try to get a quip from her about the economy and prisons in the new piece for making contact i’m working on. watch this space for more on that, and go to the prison desk page there at radioproject.org for info on the previous shows i coordinated. whew. out. -e.

Grassroots (and even not-so-grassroots) nonprofits have yet to widely start using webcam tech to share info, communicate between offices, regions and what have you. If and when that tactic comes around, putting a cam on the network will certainly be something to look at. The Axis 2100 Network Camera, reviewed so well at StreetTech, has some ups and some downs. Probably more downs than makes it worth investing in at this point, but worth looking into for anyone thinking about cam options. Inetcam’s Ivista technology still seems to be the best for the money, but perhaps others have good info to share…

• amanda got back from the southwest, where in tucson she took these way cool photos of murals about town.
• i’m doing some consulting and contracting for a very cool group of folks in SF, Physicians for a Violence-Free Society.
• sent a package to a friend of mine on the row at san quentin. watch this space for a recounting of the ridiculously long and involved regulations, the hoops they put you through
• a friend from PARC is putting together (with help from a small crew of local activists) an interactive piece called Break it Down: Underpinnings of the Prison Industrial Complex. watch here for more on that as well.