action figures sold separately

• i liked how body and soul talked about nothanksgiving as “quiet, cardless, and presentless.” indeed.
• despite possilbe overlinking, i thought i’d point to the fairly funny bush speech generator.
• thanks to veganporn for just putting it right out there: “if you go vegan, you’ll get laid!”
• first there was the bike messenger in maryland with my name (whose page seems to be down), and now i’ve discovered a whole other Rosenblatt family, full of artists, with an Eli like me and a Joshua like my brother, and a Sarah like my niece. What a cool family - check out their great work.
• also to add to the list of sites gone bye-bye: come to my senses.
• a poingnant site A linked to which got broken but is back up and worth a look: the roadside memorials page.
• i’m bumming heavy because we will be out of town for the local appearance of get your war on! so go if you can.

um. yeah. about a week ago, i was infected by george duke’s deepest groove, a tune called black messiah. i have been reeling in a thick fog since then. here’s a couple of things i’ve found on my way out:

• why is this happening? the indonesia human rights network is alerting us to a nurse and an academic who are being detained and whose health is failling.
• ben brown!
• the dissociated press seems to still be rockin…
• but in the what happened to them dept., there’s kill your tv and wolf 359
• and has anyone seen We Don’t Live Under Normal Conditions? seems cool. Rhonda Collins’ page on it doesn’t seem to say if one can rent it through mainstream or indy video stores
• lastly, the indie rock librarian and sandbox automatic (the underground hip-hop vortex) will no doubt distract me too much now that i found them, very cool.

on the web at least, but does it exist in the real world? my new collection of googlebummers [a new term for searches that truly should have yielded results but yielded none] starts with:

what’s yours?

in the face of a spiralingly horrific political economy, there’s a slight bit of good news in that oregon voters (barely) selected ted kulongoski over kevin “screw the workers” mannix. it’s interesting to see, given how they compared that mannix got any votes at all. but then of course, the repugnicans got and stole offices all across the country. folks are more asleep than i thought possible. as A and i were walking the other night, we saw the headline showing the final results. i sighed, and quipped rather sardonically, “well, that’s good. but you know, it’s just kind of that subtle difference between being basically screwed and totally fucked.

this past week we finally picked up a copy of the amazing found magazine. read it and you will laugh, cry, and just be filled with wonder.

and since we are still unpacking boxes (i know…) after our move north, we’ve been finding our own little oddities and pieces of lost personal history. does it count as “found” if you wrote/made it yourself?

well as it happens, exactly 10 years ago this evening, i was writing a letter to an old flame, a woman i’d met in activist circles who had moved to south africa to further the grassroots solidarity efforts she’d begun here in the states. we had a rich and gripping correspondence, made all the more compelling because we could share most of our thoughts and feelings (the ones we didn’t put on actual paper), across the wires, in a matter of moments. that was so novel then.

it was a letter telling her about a new affair, an affair that would become a sometimes sweet, but overall deep and very difficult six-year entanglement. it’s just the definition of bittersweet to read this old stuff. here’s a tiny sliver:

So anyhow, dear, i’ve no doubt that this new relationship will be a further opportunity to unravel those quandries within me, to break open those scary boxes, to work on those issues, to grapple with those feelings.

“comes a rainstorm, put your rubbers on your feet.
comes a snowstorm, you can get a little heat.
comes love, nothin’ can be done…
don’t try hidin’, cause there isn’t any use
you’ll strart slidin’ when your heart turns on the juice
comes a headache, you can lose it in a day.
comes a toothache, see your dentist right away.
comes love, nothin’ can be done.”

sing it billie.

despite a certain cloud of angst, during many of those times in my early/mid-twenties i was riding high. but lemme just say that without a doubt, i wouldn’t trade any of it for even a moment with my dear A. the doc that rocks the house; the loveliest badass healer-woman you’d ever care to meet; the person that makes me smile even when she comes home tired and cranky from battling with the man. you go babydog.

yowch. as if the best game ever wasn’t already over the top, folks had to go and make this.

Breast feeding is still the best way to nourish an infant. But are there really no consequences of starting life on a diet of dilute chlorinated solvents and pesticides, as all children do today?

Nearly wrapping up several years research on hormone disrupting chemicals, Peter Montague at Rachel’s Environment & Health News breaks it down again (so to speak…)

among the many phrases my grandparents never got to hear, but which i have, this is perhaps one of my favorites: “We’ll have to outsource the download of the upgrade for this plugin.”

what a silly, silly, silly world.

woah. to prove a point, activists in palestine staged a wedding ceremony day before yesterday. the israeli army attacked it like it was a battalion.

the ISM site, normally a good source of info on solidarity efforts, is down at the moment due to a hosting problem. they expect it to be back up on the weekend. in the meantime, see our links and the press release from the International Solidarity Movement:

[Falami, Qalqilya] Tear gas and sound grenades have just been thrown at Palestinian villagers and international civilians engaged in a wedding celebration out in the olive groves of Falami.

Traditional dress, singing and dancing was part of the villagers plan to change the mood on the ground and assert their presence on land that is being destroyed by the Israeli military. This nonviolent act of protest is being attacked by Israeli soldiers who have already used tear gas, sound grenades, and now have their weapons aimed at the unarmed civilians. The group of Palestinian villagers and internationals are refusing to be dispersed.

Yesterday the French Consul General visited Falami and attempted to negotiate with the Israeli authorities over the destruction and isolation of this agricultural land, which is the source of livelihood for thousands of Palestinian farmers in this region. The French government, which is invested in an agricultural irrigation project on this land, failed to persuade the Israeli authorities to halt its destruction. The Israeli military accompanied bulldozers to the olive groves this morning to find the wedding celebration in full swing.

Video footage and digital pictures available.

For more information, please call:
Chuck - +972-52-574-462
Heidi - +972-67365-669
Huwaida - +972-67-473-308 or +972-2-277-4602

i’m just gonna say it, let ‘em try to sue me: “racial profiling is being practiced by the cops.” in toronto, in new york, in LA, all over. duh. the cops in toronto anyway, have gotten their undies in a bundle about the truth being told. so much so that they are bringing a two billion dollar lawsuit against the newspaper that ran a story on it. yep. that’s billion, not million. they claimed that “the Toronto Star series has injured and disgraced every member of the police service. With one brush, they have all been individually tarnished.” whatever. it’s the daily racism and criminalization of poverty that the police practice and allow, institutionally, that is a disgrace.

and let’s be clear, they aren’t tarnishing the badge, cuz that bullying and scapegoating is what it’s for. they are disgracing the communities from which they come and in which they operate.

in the florida vote today, MSNBC is saying there were a few glitches.

Voter David Templer of Miami told The Associated Press that when he reviewed his touch-screen ballot, he saw his vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill McBride show as a vote for incumbent Republican Jeb Bush. “You’re never going to have a flawless opening,” said county manager Steve Shiver. “The backup system worked.”

hmm. apparently, folks who called the Neil Rogers Show said their votes were actually cast wrong. hello? steve, buddy. tell us, on what planet, exactly, do votes being cast for the opposing candidate constitute the “backup system working” ?????

and 28 more new links made today. super!

If you are like me, you are waiting for the paperback version of Stupid White Men. well, don’t wait to see Bowling for Columbine. such an amazingly well done film. i cannot recommend it highly enough. he deals with gun violence, racism, poverty, and the dominant media in such simple yet effective ways. i was simultaneously floored and energized.

if you were paying attention to underground media in the 80’s and early 90’s, and/or you were an activist in the SF bay area during those years, you likely developed a keen appreciation for the humor and incisive political and social commentary of Processed World. Well, in (the amazing and worth the trip) Reading Frenzy the other day i discovered they put out a special 20th anniversary issue last summer. Wow. a must read.

in the introduction, they remind us of where PW is coming from:

Our social lives are as tightly scheduled as our work lives. A chance to see an old friend and catch up over lunch or dinner can easily take a half dozen communications by email, voice mail or phone tag attempting to juggle schedules. Few of us can drop in on anyone, or easily accommodate anyone dropping in on us. Fewer still have time to stop and remember that we didn’t always live this way. The radical reconfiguration of everyday life over the past generation is what we call “The Great Speedup.”There are so many aspects to this phe-nomenon that it is difficult to quickly sum-marize the changes or to offer a simple or clear explanation of its causes. The great speedup encompasses much more than the greater number of hours we work, both as paid wage-workers and as free humans grasp-ing for meaning and fulfillment.The dramat-ic intensification of work, ostensibly because computers have made us so much more productive, is one example.

then in the opening piece by R. Dennis Hayes, “The Promise of Leisure in the Computer Age,” work and our social relations to technology are broken down in very compelling ways:

Chief among the casualties of computerization is computer literacy. Far from the static category still promoted by policymakers and business leaders, computer literacy is a changling. It presumes continuous training to match the twists and turns of the latest upgrade, training that, for most, is rarely forthcoming and timely. It also demands time, effort and patience to appropriate the arcane, informal knowledge that even seasoned programmers affirm is required to function in computer environments. Computer literacy has become a moving target with which few can keep pace. “You can never master your job because things change so often,” as a 12-year veteran of a large Silicon Valley firm put it. Instead, we are slouching en masse toward a perpetual state of occupational apprenticeship. Compounding the impact of upgrade cycles on the workplace is the astounding lack of reliability of computer software. The uncertainty of chronic, unpredictable change is trumped by the unreliability of tools that resemble prototypes more than products. Never before have so many tools with so many defects been sold to so many workplaces.Technology firms, in their rush to the market, overlook product quality, scale back testing, and routinely ship mischievous software full of “known bugs.” Once a source of pride for American capitalism, workplace tools and technologies have reached historic lows in quality—and, of course, longevity: just as tools get patched and systems fixed, fresh upgrades are issued and a new round of wired alchemy engulfs the workplace. Taken together, rapid technological obsolescence and defective software are leading causes of overwork in the white collar workplace. Those of us who work with computers now have a second job: keeping them patched and upgraded and responding to their intricate cues, messages and glitches. “Each user, an administrator,” lamented the chief net-work officer of Sun Microsystems.

Back issues are available on line. check it out!