Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish has been writing on the torture that the Bush administration/regime purposely approved over the last five plus years, today he asks/states given the results of a poll on how do American Christians view torture:

So Christian devotion correlates with approval for absolute evil in America. And people wonder why atheism is gaining in this country. Notice the poll does not even use a euphemism like "coercive interrogation"...But it remains a fact that white evangelicals are the most pro-torture of any grouping. Mainline Protestant groups were the most opposed. A mere 20 percent of non-Hispanic Catholics believe that torture is never justified.

If one is a Christian, one follows Jesus Christ - right? Didn't Jesus espouse turning the other cheek? The way I read Matthew 5:38-48, is that we are to love our enemies, not torture them.

As a Chrisitan, I ask my fellows and fellowess American Christians - How did you all get so enchanted by Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield that their words mean more to your life & beliefs than Jesus Christ, the God-man you call Messiah? Please do tell...

Sources:
Pew - The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate
Poll shows support for torture among Southern evangelicals

If you are the sort of human who likes to have a really good panic every now and then and / or enjoys conspiracy theories, I would like to give you a good humorous cross section on the Aporkalypse to help trot you out of too much routing around in the slops of the swine flu hysteria [1]:

Apokalypse 2007 - A Flickr Photoset that involves a piglet and a BBQ spit. It does not end well... for the piglet.

Making Light commenter, albatross, makes reference to the Four Hogs of the Aporkalypse.

How to survive the Aporkalypse by Aaron at Tygerland.net:

Carry a pack of bacon at all times. If someone annoys you simply rub it in their face and watch them freak out.

Start ill-informed superstitions. For example: I heard that, if you wash your genitals in rose-oil after having full-sex with a pig, you won't catch the flu.

Further Signs of the Aporkalypse (from BoingBoing in 2001! How prescient!)

Last, but not least, The Ham of Darkness, which features a photo of a small blonde child french kissing a pig...

Notes:
[1] If you think I am not taking swine flu or *gasp* Avian Flu or **GASP**ZOMG**GASP**GASP** SARS seriously enough, I would like to trot out that you are much more likely to expire from an automobile accident, heart attack, stroke, or domestic abuse this year than you are of a fairly rare "epidemic" episode that happens once every few years to less that a couple of tens/hundreds/thousand folks world wide. I would really worry about how your local bus driver drives. The Flu is not even on the list of Causes of Death, but TB is. Have you been tested for TB recently?

I wish I had a great photo for you all tonight. Or a big written post chock full of juicy tidbits or meaty ideas. But I don't have either for you all this evening because today was Tax Day.

Actually, my activity towards the eventual goal of the 11:59pm tax filing deadline this evening started yesterday. Back when I expected a refund every year, I couldn't get my taxes done fast enough in late January or early February. Now that I am not teaching, nor do I have a day job, but instead all my working efforts are those of the self-employed, it is all I can do to drag myself to Turbo Tax to get my taxes done in time.

The last two years, I knew before it all started that I had a loss or close to a draw, thus my incentive to do my taxes early was slim to none. This week I cut it very close, close in time and close in dollars.

I do not begrudge paying my taxes - as I do like paved roads and the like, nor do I begrudge giving a full accounting of my fiscal activities - it is a good discipline. But to sit down and do it, that is the hard part.

Luckily for me, TurboTax has really stepped up their game and rather than struggling a bit with the software or explanations or the user interface and then panicking that I would be audited by the IRS due to the bizarre TurboTax interface & lack of clarity, this year was easy with TurboTax 2008, unlike the evil 2005 TurboTax adventure.

TurboTax just worked this year. I had a choice of doing it online at the turbotax.com website or downloading the software on to my computer - or in my case, as a repeat customer, using the cd that came in the mail months ago. Rather than TurboTax walking me through tons of evil details that not even tax accountants understand at first glance, this year the program got smart enough to let me know when I should pay attention and when the details did not pertain to my situation. I love it when I am not drowned in details that make me panic.

Best of all the user interface allowed me to hop back and forth in between sections, finish bits, save and then hop somewhere else without complaint. And it was worth it to get the Home and Small Business edition, as it really was able to breakdown all the categories that as a small business owner / freelance / self-employed person would need to know and had expanded pop-ups to help explain each category of expenses that one is allowed to take for a business expense. There was only one time where I had to guess where to list an expense (domain name registry fees).

Big thanks to the design and development teams at Intuit for a good tax experience, rather than a panicked, evil one.

Intuit, I do have one big request: Please make a Quickbooks Simple Start for Mac OS X. Just sayin'... not all of us small business owners out there are MicroSquash junkies. I know I need to keep track of business expenses during the year, but I am not going to shell out $199 for the Mac edition of Quickbooks before I know if I like it & it will work for me. How about making Quickbooks Simple Start as an online service that is device agnostic?

Even though my exposure to Kalpen Modi's (aka Kal Penn) acting career was in the excellent but more literary movie, "The Namesake", and not any of the Harold and Kumar movies, I am still excited to see that he is leaving Hollywood behind for an even weirder town: Washington D.C.

Good luck, Mr. Modi.

Sepia Mutiny on Oh my God they killed Kutner. Bastards!
8Asians on Kumar Goes to Washington

Yesterday, walking into a bathroom at a Starbucks triggered the most bizarre 24+ hours of migraine I have ever experienced. Mind you, I have been getting migraines since I was 9 or so years old and I am no stranger to the experience. The usual migraine for me starts with a fluorescent light trigger (evil evil evil energy savers) and/or consumption of an allergic food substance (usually egg plus dairy) that causes a sense of unwellness that descends into light phobia, nausea, and twenty thousand evil hammer elves pounding at my skull and eye sockets for a day or so.

A couple of times in my life, I have had sound trigger a migraine. I learned early on, aka 1991, that I cannot go into a club that plays house or bass 'n' drum electronic music with a light show unless I want to exit with a migraine. Sound, repetitive loud bass sound that I can feel on my skin plus lights equals a migraine trigger, thus my love for the good old fashioned high trebled rock'n'roll.

Bizarrely enough, smoke of the mary jane is also a migraine trigger for me. I can't smoke the stuff or be around anyone smoking hash or pot at all. Neither can my brother. It triggers migraine and nausea for me, and just nausea for my brother. I am all for legalizing the weed, just do not smoke that sh*t within 50 feet of me.

Back to the sound trigger, I have read about folks who have aural / audio / optical migraines that are triggered by sound or flashing lights. When I was in my late 20s, I worked in Boston and was in an office with fluorescent lights and a CRT computer monitor. My doctor helped me work out that the flicker cycle of the fluorescent overhead lights was competing with the 60 cycle/minute flicker of the CRT monitor which was causing my brain to GACK into migraine land. She told me to turn off the fluorescent overhead lights, get a desktop incandescent light, and spend at least 1 hour outdoors every workday. This prescription worked.

I walked at lunch and home from work. I turned off the fluorescent lights and got an incandescent desktop lamp. No more migraines at that job. I now make sure that my house & work environments have lots of natural light and no fluorescent bulbs of any kind. I avoid electronic music. I avoid any combos of egg and dairy in food (thus my joke about being a gluten-free vegan carnivore). I spend most of my time now, gratefully, migraine free. Except the one off odd migraine here and there.

Yesterday was that day. I walked into the Starbucks bathroom, which had bare walls and a concrete floor with a very very noisy overhead fan. The fan was very loud and I could feel the sound and air pulse out of the fan, echo around the concrete and hit my skin. My first thought was, "Oh no! I need to get out of this bathroom now. Yikes, I have to pee!" I tried to get in and out quickly, but I didn't do it soon enough.

Within 30 minutes I found my eyes struggling to focus and the road in front of me pulsing. My hearing was starting to pulse as well. By the time, we made it to Erika & Thomas' house, I had a hard time remaining steady enough on my feet to walk up the stairs. I was having a hard time thinking and I was giggling for no reason.

Normally, by this time, the crushing headache pain and attendant nausea would have descended, but this migraine was different. My head felt off, but not achy. Erika gave me a cold pack and a black shirt to put over my eyes as I laid on the floor to try to get the world to stop pulsing. Within 20 minutes of no light and the ice pack on my eyes & forehead while lying on their living room floor, I started to feel more normal, though all the sounds I heard were still lightly pulsing.

I waited until I felt calmed enough to go home. Once home, I put myself to bed as my limbs felt weak and disoriented. I kept waking up feeling more than a bit off. Due to the fact that the headache and nausea did not arrive, I didn't take my migraine meds, but instead took a benadryl thinking that maybe the dim sum lunch that Erika and I went to contributed to the completely off kilter day.

I woke up this morning feeling like I needed to stay in bed with my eye mask on. My day was very touch and go. I walked the dogs but half way through the walk I started to feel a bit weak and the world got a bit visually wavy again. We went home and I went to sleep for the late morning and early afternoon. Since then, I have alternated between about 60% on and about 85% normal, with bouts of weakness, visual fuzziness, and feeling like my body took a half step over and left me here.

I went and read various folks' stories about optical and aural migraines online and my experience is in line with theirs. What has been so odd about the last 24+ hours is that the pre-migraine or first hour of migraine disorientation that I usually experience has now lasted for over a day.

I really hope that I wake up normal tomorrow. Well, as normal as I ever am.

Take a stance. Even for a minute or two or a month or longer. Do it publicly.

One of the conversations, however briefly, I got into today on Twitter with Jonathan Greene was about John Gruber's iPhone post, "Complex".

While I agree with Gruber's initially stated premise that starting with a simple problem or solving a problem (just one) is a great way to begin any project. Once the simple has been defined, then build on it. Gruber goes from strength to strength to Apple fanboi kool-aid drinking by the end of the post.

In one of my Tweets, I pose the question:

"Gruber is very much in the Apple fold. That is why I ask if he is making a theoretical stance rather than an accurate assessment"

I think it makes great articles to take a stance and argue from it. I think it makes great art when one decides to take a stance, even if briefly, know where one resides in that theoretical space as one creates and practices one's art. But it is also important, whether one is writing articles or creating art to clearly acknowledge the stance and space that one is standing in, so that the reader or viewer can also know where to stand.

What do I mean by this? In Gruber's piece, his lack of a disclaimer or acknowledgment to the audience or even to himself of his US-centric and Apple-centric position makes the ending arguments of his piece fall flat if the reader falls outside of the concentric circles that Gruber is assuming that everyone is agreeing on. Many of the ideas in his article are intriguing, such as basing a series of devices on a software/firmware platform first rather than the function of the device, but this assumes that all the readers have drunken deeply of the iPhone kool-aid and are devotees at the shrine of Jobs. But what happens to the cult when Jobs retires and the powers that be don't carry on the same way? What happens if Gruber is looking at Apple's strategy from a theoretical stance or from a critical (in the academic sense) 20/20 hindsight review of the last eight years of strategy rather than what may or may not have happened?

This year at SXSW, Andy Budd and I had two very fun rounds of debate about Apple, the iPhone and anything that Nokia is doing. We were to have round three but never got to it. Andy is a User Experience professional, not only does he blog about it, run a whole web firm predicated on UX (clearleft), writes books on it, and speaks on UX, but he also firmly lives it. I thoroughly enjoy engaging Andy on topics of UX as it intersects mobile, as it is a great place for my great passion of mobile to cross his of UX. Andy and I disagree on the iPhone. While I agree with him that it is the "game changer" of 2007/2008, I don't think we can assume that it will be going forward.

I argue that Nokia and other firms cannot be discounted in the wake of the iPhone, as not every user/customer/person will be satisfied by the iPhone's features, functions, and OS. I have a number of non-web-design LA area creative friends who tried the iPhone and returned it before the 30 days were up for an Android G-1, a Sidekick 3, or for a Crackberry. I also have a number of friends and colleagues in LA and other places, who prefer Nokia Nseries phones to the iPhone, of which I am one of them. Most of us in this category want camera phones that take great photos.

On Twitter, I summed up my statements with on Gruber's article:

"It can be easy to forget culture & sub-cultural usage patterns as well as differing personal usage. The US is not all."

To this end, both in Gruber's article and in my own conversations with web colleagues who are passionate about A or B or C or X or Z device, I think we all have to remember that different mobile devices are not just fulfilling a cultural zeitgeist of the moment (like the iPhone in the US right now), or a sub-cultural niche (like the Sidekick 2 in the North American punk scene from 2005-2007), but also individual's differing usage patterns.

I do think it is important to state, even if briefly where one stands in that moment within the frame of the discussion so that the reader/viewer knows what one's theoretical stance is.

This is why I always encourage my friends who are excited about digital photography to write about and publicly dialogue about whether they are most interested in the act of shooting the photo or in the act of processing it later on their computer. Do you post your photos as is or do you process them? It is not an inconsequential factoid, but a record of your artistic / photographic journey that helps your viewers to know where you stand right now.

This is why I try to be clear that, for now, I like to shoot photos with camera phones, as I like the immediacy, I like the constraints, and I like to send my photos to this blog or to Flickr unprocessed, as is. And on the other side, for my friends who the great pleasure comes in the hour or two spent at their computer later processing their DSLR photos, good - many beauties upon you. Let us know about your process.

Why do I talk about theoretical stances or spaces in conjunction with John Gruber, the iPhone, Andy Budd, Twitter, Flickr, and camera phones this late in the evening after a long day? Well, in my recent post on the Nokia N95 vs. the Nokia N97, I was outright that my interest is in the camera capacity of the device and in response to some comments, I made a few comments that went deeper into the the territory of the quality of the camera being preeminent. I didn't make these comments to inflame but to iterate that my theoretical space and concern as an individual user of mobile devices is that of a photographer first and foremost.

From what position or space are you standing in right now?

This week when the press was nattering on in headlines about Michael Phelps getting caught smoking a bong at a party, I thought, "Michael who?"

This shows you how much I pay attention to sports. It took me about 2 hours to remember that Mr. Phelps was an Olympic athlete. My next thought was, "Why does anyone care if he smokes pot? Isn't he like 22?"

I would be more concerned if he was shooting steroids to improve his athletic performance than smoking a drug that is known to make folks couch potatoes. Really, people, think of the headlines, "Famed Olympic Swimmer Caught on a 3am Run to Dunkin Donuts for a 24 Pack of Donut Holes." vs. a headline like "Famed American Male Swimmer Looking Oddly Like 1970s East German Women's Swimming Team."

While I do not like marijuana and I really don't care to be around anyone smoking it, as the smoke is a migraine headache trigger for me; and as the daughter of a parent who has smoked it for years, I don't tend not respect regular users, but... but... but...

Really, America, it is time to legalize and tax this stupid-making herb. If we allow Colt 45 to be sold at liquor stores and the state of California makes a tax off of it, then a dime bag of pot should also be sold and taxed.

Why do I think this? As long as this drug is illegal our prisons are full, our national parks are being raped by greedy drug farming capitalists, and we are losing tons of tax dollars to drug lords and cartels who are holding many cities north & south of the border hostage.

We have not set up Sequoia National Park to be a place for the Mexican Cartels to grow marijuana and trash the land, we set up Sequoia to preserve a unique biosphere on the western Sierras. When I first read in 2005 in the LA Times of the cartels slashing & burning oak forest to grow marijuana for the illegal drug trade, I was FURIOUS.

I was even more furious that the US government has known about this since at least 2003 (from the LA Times article), even though they chose to ignore it:

Sequoia Kings Canyon spokesperson Alexandra Picavet thinks the drug debate has kept the problem from getting traction. "People get blinded by the marijuana issue.... We don't want people planting asparagus on the land, either. This is agricultural assault on a national park, no matter what they're growing."

Lawmakers say the issue is crowded out by more pressing matters. This year's federal drug-control strategy did not address pot cultivation on public land. And the Sierra Club acknowledges other priorities than drug bandits.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare), whose district includes Sequoia National Park, called hearings on the marijuana incursion in 2003. He says the issue is under the radar for most lawmakers in Washington.

"They don't even know that it exists.... People don't think about it," Nunes says.

The pot growers are no longer the stereotype of hapless hippies. They are part of sophisticated criminal organizations schooled on the Colombian cartels' economy of scale, says Ruzzamenti. "They do things big. Even if you lose a little here, you'll make it up in the long run. They've taken this lesson to another level," he says.

Most of the ringleaders, say investigators, are U.S. nationals based in Southern California with connections to cartel families in Michoacán, Mexico; field workers are well-armed Mexican laborers.

"We've found AR-15s, shotguns, rifles, knives strapped to poles, crude crossbows," says J.D. Swed, chief ranger at Sequoia.

It is high time that we allow American farmers to legally grown the herb - let's help set them free from Monsanto & Number 2 corn - and for the US & various states to make a little tax money. Let's make it cheap enough that there is no incentive for drug cartels to rape our national parks and to be involved at all.

If folks want to get high, let them. Tax the shit and then change the DUI laws to include both alcohol and marijuana influenced equally. Take the tax monies and place it into education and health care. We tax alcohol and cigarettes, let's tax the herb.

We need the money more than the drug cartels do. As for Mr. Phelps, we put him up on the hero pedestal, let's not knock him down off of it for anything less than steroid drug abuse that will effect why we put him on the pedestal in the first place.

Sun. Feb. 1, 2009 - It has become quite the thing to tilt-shift one's photos and make them look like architectural miniatures. Recently, I came across a tilt-shift maker and decided to try a photo or two.

Due to my style of photography, most of my photos were not successful, at least to my eye, when rendered in the tilt-shift mode. Except the above photo of a red white & blue curb in Kilkeel (or possibly Ballymartin - sorry I didn't geotag this photo at the time due to driving when I took it).

This photo was taken during the Around Ireland mobile / geo-photo project in the summer of 2006. I made many trips to Northern Ireland that summer, as I was attempted to suss out as much of the real NorIE from all the tales as possible.

Frankly, the Unionist towns CREEPED me out. They mean to. All that red, white and blue is meant to give the viewer a big case of the creeps. It is meant to keep you in line. It is meant to let you know who is boss.

The painted curbs and buildings, the Union Jack flags, the flags posted on light poles and painted on bridges in certain towns. It is all meant to send a sign. To the let the viewer and visitor know who rules this town.

Thus, the tilt-shift is perfect for this photo as the whole perspective becomes even more tilted than the drive by tilt already in the photo (taken at driving speed) and the tilt-shift technique blurs/focuses, and miniaturizes the objects in the photo. Just like sectarianism does for people's perspectives and lives.

Most of Northern Ireland is delightful. I have been back since 2006 to take my mom to NorIE, as her grandfather was from Ulster and much of my father's people were from Newry and surrounds. This is the land many of my people came from. I felt at home in much of the north. Except the towns with the red, white, and blue.

Fast forward to the recent U.S. election season. All the red, white and blue this election seemed darker and slightly creepy this past year, as if America was blurred and focused on a small dot, tilted in all the wrong places, and miniaturized in all the wrong ways. The emphasis on patriotism with out reflection, lock step to the party.

America, we have fought long and hard for our freedom, let's not fall down the dark, myopic hole of sectarian, partisanship. The flag is only a sign, a symbol, not an idol to worship. Let's take the opportunity of a new beginning to work together.

Original photo taken by Ms. Jen on 07.15.06 with her Nokia N80 while driving north in County Down on the Newry Rd to Belfast.

As a small note: I am neither Republican of the Irish or American variety, nor am I an Unionist of the Irish or American variety.

Tonight at dinner, Erika and I had a long talk about my Facebook post from last night: how each of us use it, why I hate it, and why it is the first social network site that she has really gotten into. We talked at length about synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, public vs. private, the open web vs. the closed web (like MySpace or Facebook), preferred modes of communication, and which worked better when. It was a great conversation over excellent food at Fu Rai Bo in West LA.

All the while we were discussing Facebook and styles of communication an early 20s-something couple next to us was on a date and the whole time the girl kept taking phone calls and texting, all the while she was leaning across the table to smooch the fellow. When they left, I pointed out the extreme difference to Erika.

Not once during dinner did either Erika or I touch our mobile phones, I did not take photos or check my email, she did not take any phone calls. We talked. Then again, we weren't on a date, just having a fun debate over issues. Yet, the youngsters were completely ok with continuous partial attention and smooching in between communicative interruptions.

One of the things that Erika pointed out to me during our discussion, of which she should know as we have been friends for over 18 years now, is that if I strongly don't like something then it is a guarantee that 80% of the rest of the planet will strongly like it. I have a problem with intuitively not being mainstream. Thus, if I don't like Facebook, you should probably go buy stock in it. Well, if they were public that is.

I got home tonight and found this post over at The Spittoon and have concluded that I must not be "Miss Con-GENE-iality":

If Facebook is starting to take over your life, maybe your genes are partly to blame.

While I am good at keeping up with a wide circle of networks, I don't enjoy nor have I gotten sucked into Facebook. As I stated to Erika tonight, it really comes down to the open web vs. the closed web and how services like Facebook & MySpace encourage folks to remain in the closed web and get dumbed down by the confined space. Erika argued that folks like the convenience of the closed web spaces like Facebook & MySpace that allows folks to do everything in one place.

I don't want the internet to become an slightly more interactive version of the brain dead Boob Tube (TV), but a place where folks can grow and become more creative and alive.

I have social networking fatigue and I have had it for years.

I jumped on my first alt.music board/list in 1994 and have been full bore ahead on mailing lists, alt.music, bulletin boards, message boards, groups, friendster, myspace, flickr, twitter, facebook, jaiku, ad finitum, ad nauseum ever since. Fifteen years later, I alternately love the online spaces that allow me to really connect and be fed by others, and I am overwhelmed by the ones that sap my attention and energy.

I hate chat/IM/AIM and text/sms is not far behind in my book, as they both demand that one reply immediately and in a shallow fashion. I really do prefer asynchronous communication in which I can take the time to reply in depth if necessary to instant now chat. I prefer to be able to check in on [insert name of service] when I have the time and post / reply at my leisure. It is for this same reason that I only pick up about half of the phone calls I receive. As a bouncy adult who is easily distracted, I have learned that I need to think before I respond.

As a creative who has had her own consultancy / freelance web design & development business since August of 2000, I have learned that if I want to be a good little citizen and pay my bills on time I really need to focus on the task(s) at hand when I am working.

While continuous partial attention may be a great catch phrase for the current cultural zeitgeist, if I practice it at any length it will toss me out of my house and I will be living in my car. My car, while wonderful, does not have a comfy bed & a hot shower. Thus, I need to focus and concentrate on work and the online leisure activities that feed my life and soul - like blogging, researching, creating, and communicating in a constructive manner.

Ok, so that is my explanation for preferring email & phone calls and avoiding chat & texting. Now let's talk about social networks....

Mon 01.26.09 - Happy New Year, the Year of the Ox - Ji Chou, the year 4706 or 4707 depending on the source.

Happy New Year!

Ever since this past weekend's Punk Rock Bowling adventure, I have had a hard time going to sleep before 2am. Given that I am at my Mom's and am supposed to be up nice and early in the morning to go skiing, my idea for a big blog post has been thwarted by the late hour and Rio the large black lab with a cuddle affliction.

In the meantime, while I continue to ruminate on Tuesday's inauguration, here are a few links:

From 3quarksdaily, From Books, New President Found Voice:

Finally, after eight years, you do not have to apologize for being well read. Smart, in fact, is the new cool. Congratulations to all 3qd readers on this special day.

I say Amen, Amen, Amen! I am so glad to have a President who is not just well read, but is an open intellectual. Relief.

From the BBC, Obama 'set to close Guantanamo'. Further Amens.

I have previously written about how it is completely unethical for us to detain folks without due process in a military base that is on the land of a stated enemy. Given that we have made peace and/or diplomatic connections in recent years with other stated enemies (Libya, Vietnam, China, Russia, etc etc etc), maybe it is time to completely close Guantanamo and give the land back to Cuba. And while we are at it, reinstate relations with Cuba. We have brought more change to the communist countries we trade with then the ones we embargo.

From Politics and Culture, David Schmid nominates Slavoj Žižek! a recommendation for a bit of cultural whimsy.

Mon 01.19.09 - The last few weeks have been odd: sad at times, waiting, and mostly a feeling that I have outgrown my skin, making me think of Eustace desiring his dragon skin removed in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

The last eight years have been a steady downward spiral at the hands of a power hungry administration and I am ready for change. On Friday night, I was awoken half way through the night with the most beautiful dream of change, a new day for America where beauty, aesthetics, and compassion triumphs over power, war, and depression. This was an odd dream to have at a punk rock bowling tournament in Las Vegas.

Then last night, Vicki Pepper was so overcome by her excitement for tomorrow's Inauguration and shouted about it in happiness at the bar at the hotel. Today as we drove home from Vegas, I found myself voiceless due to a smoke-full Vegas, unable to really talk to my car mates and fretting. Fretting about tomorrow. Worrying about the safety of the Obama family. Worrying that America won't be able to pull out of the spiritual and cultural pall we have been under for the last eight years. But fretting amounts to a hill of beans and lost miles on the road.

So starting tomorrow, I will be letting the fretting go, looking forward to change, looking forward once again, looking around in my world to see what I can change, and not just hoping for Aslan to come cut us, America, out of our dragon skin. It is not one person or one new Administration but ourselves as a culture who will make the changes and shuck off the old skin for the new one.

Wed 01.14.09 - Actually, Steve Lawson speaking on social media for musicians at The Olde Ship in Santa Ana.

During and after college at least once a month, I would work at having a Big Sleep. Basically, I would sleep for as long as possible, at least 10+ hours, and then stay in my nightgown/sleepclothes until at least 5pm on the day of the Big Sleep In. The post-Big Sleep always included reading a good novel whilst hanging out and about with no plan until 5pm.

Over the years as time and stress of adult life has creeped on, the Big Sleep has reduced to sleeping in once a month or once every two months and not getting dressed until noon. In the last few years, I have not really had a good Big Sleep and have gotten much more involved in working at my computer at all hours and all days.

This weekend, after many weeks of sadness, stress, back pain, and holiday family fun, I decided to stay off my computer and enjoy hanging out with friends. I returned home last night from Ryan's exhibition and dinner with Lauren and determined that I would settle in for a Big Sleep.

I took a shower, finished reading a book, and then went to bed around 11pm. I woke up at 7:04am and determined that I needed to turn over and sleep more. I took a drink of water, went to the rest room, put on my sleep eye mask to take away the sunlight streaming in my windows, and turned over to attempt to sleep another hour or so.

The best part is that I woke up again at 11:56am this morning! Yay! I stayed in bed enjoying the relaxed happiness of waking up after a Big Sleep. While I did not stay in bed until 5pm, I did make it until 1pm - and then I went to lunch and took the dogs to Dog Beach.

Now I feel reset. This is very good.

I need to get back in the habit of turning off the computer for the weekend, settling in with a good novel, and have a good Big Sleep at least once a month.

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

Tues. 12.30.08 - The International Year of Astronomy 2009 - go out and truly watch the night sky. (Video via APOD.)

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Much like the famed Humpty Dumpty, the larger extended family appears to have shattered into too many shards to be put back together again. Our family's egg did not fall off of one wall to only to shatter, but many, of which some of the walls and some of the falls were spectacular, like all of 1990, Thanksgiving 1992 or 93, again on Thanksgiving 1994, and then the first weekend of May 2002 was the dilly.

With each fall off of a wall, has come more divisions and separations. More of the family troops have sub-divided into camps. The camps have further sub-divided. A once large, boisterous, albeit dysfunctional Irish-American family is now in silent, walled off pieces.

It is only now that it has become obvious how the events at the birthday dinner on that Saturday in early May 2002 were the final nail in the family togetherness coffin. Even though 97% of us were not involved in the row that bloomed that night, much like a dot of mold on the cheese, it has now spread to almost all of us, even the one's of us who are not at war.

I am tired and sad by all of this. I came home last night and both Tweeted/Jaiku'd that I want to move to another continent. Preferably the London or Helsinki continent.

Yesterday's Christmas dinner was the echos of the evidence of how bad it has gotten. Two of my mom's sister's and their families were in town, but they had Christmas' completely separate from our immediate family and the grandparents who are not involved in the May 2002 event at all. My mom was agitated and our dinner was subdued. I cried as I drove home. Christmas felt like a struggle not a celebration.

I am sad that family members who live on the east coast and I have not seen in years were within 15 miles yesterday yet we did not get together. Sad that one family member who called while we were over at my grandmother's didn't even recognize my mom when she answered the phone, yet invited me to come visit in January.

I know that it is considered natural in modern America that big families don't stay in touch after the grandparents pass on, but all of the grandparents in this case are still alive and so are the step-grandparents. And I know of families in the US and in Ireland that are even bigger than mine and they still get together for Christmas.

Part of me wants to pick a neutral park, sometime next summer, and invite them all over for a family reunion BBQ and include all the Kilroys I can find on the West Coast to diffuse the tensions (really how bad can one behave if Walt's side of the clan comes?). Another part of me wants to write a big letter naming names and calling out bullshit, but that will just inflame the ashes. Another part of me wants to write it all off and be done with it, Hanen family style (Hanen's never ever get together for anything. Well, maybe once a decade in groups of 3s & 4s).

The best black humor part of all of this, is that most of the prime pushers of the egg off the wall of our family and stompers of the egg shells into more shards are nice good family values Republicans. God bless America!

Wed 12.24.08 - Just after a delightfully real Christmas Eve service at St. Mary in Palms church in Culver City.

Katrina and Sam invited Erika and Thomas who invited me. I am glad I went.

Dear Yahoo Executives,

If you are wondering why your company is failing, it is because you don't get the internet.

What were you all thinking last week when you decided to layoff one of the founding employees who is now one of the two most public facing and world popular employees of your most important property?

After this bonehead move of exceedingly bad strategy and timing, everyone involved in the decision to layoff George Oates should be fired asap.

Sincerely, Jenifer Hanen

*******
Update from Tues 12.16.08:

Jeremy and Jeffrey both weigh in on George getting laid off.

It seems to me that the media (TV, newspapers, radio, the internet, etc.) and several people I know are thoroughly enjoying the current fearmongering fun of "hard times!", "Recession", "Depression".

Everyday I hear radio ads for how to beat the current hard times, all the NPR news presenters are starting their segments by mentioning how rough things are, and in the last month the LA Times has more ads and advertising supplements folded into the paper on a daily basis than there has been in the last five years.

I have friends and family members who can only talk about how "bad" it is. Only problem is that none of these folks have lost their jobs, nor their homes, nor any real lifestyle differences. I called two of them out on it recently, as they were talking about how "hard" it is.

I said, "You are saying that with glee. Are you enjoying this?"

Both were shocked into silence and then kept talking about the doom and gloom.

Yes, people, America is enjoying this. We love our horror. We love our shock. We love our End Times. We love our big budget Hollywood Thrillers and Action flicks. We love our apocalypses. We love prophesying THE END.

Funny thing is that the end never seems to come. Well, except individual death. And the credit card bills keep showing up every month. And once a year, in April, the taxes are due.

As Americans we love fear. FDR told us that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. No, in 2008, there is nothing quite as enjoyable and gleeful as fear itself. Why do we enjoy the fear? Is it a nice break from our optimism?

But hey, the LA Times food section just did a whole Wednesday section on Depression era cooking, shopping, and articles on how to make the food budget stretch.

Back in 1991 - 1993, everyone was really gleeful about the mini-Depression we were going through, esp. here in SoCal where the AeroSpace Industry was collapsing due to the end of the Cold War. In '91-93, the big gleeful fad was Depression era Prairie style dresses, long flowing print dresses with clasps to cinch in the waist. Dang it all if we didn't wait out that recession in Doc Martens, dreadlocks, and flowing flowered dresses.

Be as gleeful or fearful/gleeful as you want about this Recession, but what I want to know is where are all the fun dresses?

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent.

If you are like me, Advent has little meaning other than a fun little calendar in your childhood of the days in December that you opened a colorful little paper door and there was chocolate or surprise in side. I grew up vaguely Presbyterian. Vaguely.

As a young adult, I found myself at charismatic churches were ritual is of little to no import. Since the 2004 election, I have been allergic to going to church, unless it is an ancient church in the UK or Europe with ritual. Oh, St. Bartholomew's, how I love you.

I still know very little of Advent, about as little as I know of Lent. The seasons of the liturgical calendar are a mystery to me, a mystery that I am somewhat intrigued by until my interior protestant gets in a big fight with my interior anti-authoritarian rebel. Not pretty, I assure you.

If you, like me, are Advent-curious but a little afraid to step out and experience it in an out way, then Ken Collins' Advent Wreath tutorial may be for you.

I have looked at pine wreaths for days at the market trying to determine if I will make the leap away from Calvin and the like and try out a Sunday advent practice starting tomorrow, but I have been unable to commit. I have 2 purple candles and a bunch of beeswax candles, but it seems a bit too heathen for me.

Silly me.

How do you celebrate Advent?

Compliments of the nice folk over at 3 Quarks Daily, late last week I read this article on The Imprinted Brain Theory by Christopher Badcock who writes on the genetic, gender, and environmental causes of mental disorders / diseases such as autism and schizophrenia, or how it may not be nature vs. nuture but nature + nuture.

Badcock breaks down not only genetics and brain development, but also how environmental factors such as good maternal nutrition can contribute to more cases of autism and famine can contribute to more cases of schizophrenia. Also, there is implications in less extreme cases of non-mental disorders such as tendencies to a scientific / rational persuasion versus folks who tend towards intuition, the arts, and faith.

I have been interested in the recent research of the last few years that is showing that one's belief in religion or lack thereof may be influenced by the processing of one's brain. If Badcock's research and theory are found to be correct, then may the decline of religion in developed countries may be a result of increased maternal nutrition and pre-natal care? Before you get all up in your biscuits defending rational secularism or religion, read the article and think about the implications.

Photo of the Taj Hotel and the Gateway to India taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82 on 02.19.08 from the Mumbai Harbor.

Thurs 11.27.08 - For 2.5 days in February 2008, I stayed in the Colaba district of Mumbai at the end of the Urbanista Diaries adventure in India. I stayed a little less that 2 blocks from the famed Taj Hotel. I ate a small supper the second night at the upstairs bar at Cafe Leopold. I enjoyed wandering around on foot the southern part of Mumbai.

Most of all, what I did experience of Mumbai made me love it the way I love Los Angeles and London. A big sprawling vibrant world class city. The kind of city, like LA or London, that you either love or hate. After being in Mumbai for 15 minutes, I was deep down happy. It was love on first sight.

Yesterday, my heart went out to Mumbai as the news of the terrorist attacks on the Taj Hotel, the Oberoi, Cafe Leopold, the Jewish Center, and the CS Railway Terminus.

I first heard of the attacks on Twitter when an Indian friend wrote a cryptic anguished tweet, I went to the BBC and saw no news, 10 minutes later there was. The news and crisis has continued to unfold over the course of the last 36 hours, getting worse. And made worse by having been at 3 of the 5 places that have been attacked. And worse for loving the city.

Oh, Mumbai, I am dreadfully sorry. Words are failing me to express the upset.

So most of today, I have been singing the chorus to the worship song, "Give Thanks" in my head, "Give thanks to a grateful heart, give thanks to the Holy One, give thanks..."

And then I forget the rest of the lyrics.

Today was a seesaw day. I had the opportunity to have an early supper with some old and dear friends - Mike and Kim from Channel Three (CH3) plus Kimm's wife Kelli. I have known and been friends with these folks for over 24 years. It was a blessing to hang out, have a few glasses of wine/beer and some food over good conversation.

But this was deeply weighted by some very bad news I received beforehand.

Therein lies the crux or the paradox of life, the good and the bad many times are entwined. Entwined some times in the same hour. The big challenge for me is how to digest it, what to make of it, and how I will choose to respond to the circumstances of life.

One of the things that I have learned in the last 15 years is how to count my blessings or count the things that I am grateful for, even if very small, each day. Write them down if necessary to make the things that I am thankful for more concrete.

Today, I am thankful for dear friends with whom I have walked the miles with, in good times and in bad and in mundane times. I am also thankful for all the folks who did not get shot today in Mumbai. I am praying that peace will reign today in Mumbai. I am thankful for Scruffy and Belle, even when Scruffy had diarrhea inside in front of folks (oops) this afternoon. I am also thankful for the rain that SoCal received last night.

Rather than go on, I would like to link to Mary Beth Crain's essay in the SOMA journal on "Reasons to Be Grateful":

My great-aunt Lillian was a real pill--a stern spinster-type who made a loud practice of going around doing good and letting everybody know about it. And she was always lecturing you. One of her favorite admonitions was to "Beee grateful!" Whenever she caught you complaining, she'd deliver an unsolicited sermon on everything you had to be thankful for. Unfortunately, she was so sanctimonious about it that all you wanted to do was kill her.

As a result, Aunt Lil and her "Beee grateful!" became a standing family joke. We kids were always going around imitating her. If my brother stubbed his toe and let out an expletive, I'd respond with "Beee grateful! At least you have your toe! There are some people who don't have any feet!" Then we'd all crack up.

Well, it took me about 40 years to realize that Aunt Lil was actually right.

Ms. Crain does not only recommend taking stock of what one is thankful for but also what one is angry at or un-thankful for. She hopes that the thankful list will be longer than the other list.

I think it becomes a spiritual discipline to choose to find more things each day to be thankful for than not. Let's start today and tomorrow to enumerate out our blessings and what we are thankful for and keep doing it each day from here on out.

Ok, so I have failed the last 3 days to write something substantial in the morning for my NaBloPoMo challenge to myself. I am writing but...

Due to the headache and the nearness to the midnight hour, you all will be getting a few tidbits out of me.

1) The new Nokia viNe update for alpha/beta testers, Nokia viNe 1.02 (11/20/08 release) is FAST! Yay! Instead of the upload time taking forever, my 5 photos of this evening's sunset went so fast that I thought viNe was lying to me when it announced the upload was done. But it wasn't, all my photos were up on my Sports Tracker account and up at the nseries.com Nokia viNe flash viewing thingy. Yay!

The Nokia viNe 1.0 was supposed to be released to the wild last week, but they have delayed it and I will let you know when it is out.

2) As for MOCA's economic failure and near collapse of the institution, I have a few things to say. I bent Tammy's ear about tonight, but it can be all summed up in the fact that I think they have been way to rock star-y high brow about the contemporary art they were showing and did not really interact with the community over the last decade.

The Hammer museum has done a *great* job of involving the community by putting on annual group best of shows (best LA MFA graduates, best of LA young artists, etc), as well as having lectures and other community events that draw folks in. I would love it if MOCA were to have a best of LA young artists or best of Downtown artists or best of east side taggers or best LA mid-career artists that haven't had a one person show yet. Etc. etc. etc.

MOCA, I would rather drive downtown to see great local events at either your Main MOCA space or at the Geffen then drive to Westwood. Give me a reason to care about you. Give me a reason to want to participate. The Hammer does. The Getty does. So, why don't you?

The LA Times' art critic, Christopher Knight, has an Open Letter to MOCA.

Anyone who has known me for any length of time, knows that I am not a big movie person and that I eschew TV completely. Due to the lack of TV, unless I rent a DVD and watch it on my computer, I don't see movies.

But this last year, in an effort to join the rest of the human race, well - at least be up on some movies, I got a Netflix subscription to be able to watch some of the films that I have missed out in the last 25 years of luddite behavior. I have mostly received a movie or two a month from Netflix of which are either art house movies of the last two decades or movies of Jane Austin books or adaptions thereof.

Tonight, after the movie sat on a shelf since August unopened, I watched Mira Nair's "Mississippi Masala". I love Mira Nair films, esp. "The Namesake" and "Mississippi Masala", as well as lighter fair such as "Monsoon Wedding". Mira Nair hits the mixture of family, displacement, life changes, tradition vs. modernity, and identity on the head in her movies.

I have spent most of my life in Southern California, born here to folks who have been in SoCal for 3-5 generations. For all of my living in SoCal for most of my life, I come from a long line, on both sides, of folks with itchy feet. Folks who move frequently, both in&out of California and within California. Folks who travel. Folks for whom settling is really something that other people do. Even though we keep leaving, we always come back to California in one way or another. I love this big, crazy sprawled out cities within the city / metro area with all the people in the world who have also made this city their home.

While I love Los Angeles, I have always felt not of this place. I love the land fiercely, but am also fiercely frustrated by the transient nature of this space which causes folks to abuse it so badly or attempt to mold it into what they had before they moved here. I have spent most of my life not feeling like I match any of the majority cultures or sub-cultures.

As a short, brown haired, brown eyed woman in a region that celebrates the blond beach bunny or blonde starlet du jour, I have felt culturally displaced most of my life. Did I mention that by and large, I dislike Hollywood? Maybe it is my dislike of the stereotypes that Hollywood pushes out to the rest of the world that makes me so fiercely reject watching or consuming their products. More than just maybe.

Most of my Netflix watching this last year has been British, Italian, or Indian films or films made by British, Italian or Indian folk who live in other places. Not so odd that.

What I like about Mira Nair films, is while they celebrate the Indian expatriate or migrant experience, she also keenly shows us characters that are trying to navigate cultural spaces that are not always home. Ms. Nair's films focus on the experience of characters who are navigating the waters of cultural otherness all the while they are fighting for their own space in that place and discovering their identity between two worlds.

When I watch a Mira Nair film brings into sharp focus a question that I ask myself almost every day, really where is home?

I haven't found it, yet, I yearn for home with all my heart.

When I was very young I was a serious early bird, popping up each day around 5:30am and going to bed by 8pm. My best hours of energy and alertful-ness was between 5:30am and 10am. As I aged into teen-twenties-hood, my body clock flipped where my best hours were in the evening and I struggled to wake up any time before 8am, even for school.

Now as an adult, I find that I like to go to bed around midnight and I wake up, depending on the light & the situation, between 6:30am and 9am. When I wake up, I am usually up and peppy. Sometimes I wake up wanting to sing, and I do.

Over the years, my energy levels have somehow melded between my childhood early bird and my teen-twenties late bird. In the last few years, I have lots of energy and concentration from 7am to noon and then again 5pm to 9/10pm. Even more interesting, to me, is that I do my best writing in the mornings and my best designing/coding in the evenings. Afternoons are a bit of a loss for any task of concentration other than talking and reading.

When I was writing my masters thesis, I did my draft writing in the mornings, my further research/reading in the afternoon, and my rewriting in the evening, with insertions of 15-30 minute procrastination/fun breaks at odd times.

I have a list of things that I want to write "longish", thoughtful blog posts about, but I keep telling myself that I can't blog until I have finished my allotted work for the day/evening. If I let myself blog when I am most "on" for writing, I feel guilty, as if I am cheating a client or myself or some schoolmarm in the sky. If I do like I have done for the last week and wait until after 10pm to blog, I know I have a whole *real* post in me, but I can't concentrate long enough to do anything other than vaguely think of the title of the topic and certainly I have not been able to write about it.

I can write about writing late at night. I can write about funny stuff or what happened that day. But if I want to write about, flesh out, and make a good argument for an idea or larger essay, well that is morning work.

I need to get over my blogging vs. real work guilt complex and start allowing myself two hours every morning or at least four mornings a week to write out all the big ideas in my head. Starting tomorrow. Maybe Sunday...

A few weeks ago my brother went to a funereal of a fellow* we both knew in high school. At said event, another fellow that we had gone to junior and senior high school asked after me. When my brother reported that so&so asked after me, I was very surprised.

Me: "Really, he asked after me?"
Joe: "Yes, he did."
Me: "But he was SO mean to me in school and even at our 10 year reunion."
Joe: "Well, I guess he got over himself."
Me: ((disbelief))

Fast forward to this evening's family pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner** with the family. Me, wearing my favorite pink sweater and a pair of comfy (read roomy) black jeans.

My Aunt: "I love your sweater... Have you lost weight?"
Me: Looks down at said comfy/room pants and pulls out waistband to show lots of room. "No"
Aunt: "But you look like you have lost weight!"
Me: nonplussed, "No, I just like these jeans because they are roomy."
Aunt: "Oh, with your figure you must always have room at the waist." (Aunt is not being a witchy here, she is just referring to the fact that my figure is hour-glass and modern fitting jeans never fit).
Me: "I am used to pants not fitting, it has been this way for years, nearly 30 years now."
Aunt: "You are over yourself now."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, 40 years old must be the official demarcation line, not between youth and middle age, but between being full of oneself and being over oneself.

Notes:
* Somehow a fairly simple procedure descended into MRSA-flesh-eating-bacteria-dead-at-39.
** At my mother's mother's house and conducted because we are all going to separate places on Thanksgiving.

While the news has been doom and gloom about the economy in recent months, and specifically this last 6 weeks, I have not noticed much change in my immediate world other than a few small signs. Bizarrely enough, clients still need web work done and are paying on time. Only one of my friend's has lost a job and it was in a vulnerable industry (construction). So far, knock on wood, the financial crisis has been an abstract explosion many thousands of miles away that has made my stock portfolio crash significantly.

The only major change I have had to make is that I *was* planning, for months if not for over a year, to depart in two days to London for the Future of Mobile 2008 conference and my yearly trip to a northern place to experience a real autumn. Unfortunately, due to said financial crisis, the place I had stored my funds for this trip is now only worth 1/3 the amount I saved for the trip. So rather than cashing in on my air miles and hying off to London on the 13th, I am staying home. I am jealous that many of my friends will be in London next week and I will be at home in Seal Beach. Grumpily staying home.

The one thing that has effected my world in the last six months is that the Credit Union I have belonged to for over eight years is starting to behave a bit erratically after years of stellar service. First odd to do was that they redesigned their website for the much uglier in the spring. I called up a friend who also has an account with them and said, "Yikes! What do you think of _________'s new website?" "Yuck. I hate the yellow, red, and blue." She thought it was ugly, too.

Then in late spring, early summer they changed their name for the worse.

In June, a bizarre event occurred where for no reason whatsoever the credit union decided to but a "security hold" on a largish client check that I had deposited about a week before all my automatic payments were to hit my account. They held the deposit for over 2 weeks causing all my payments to bounce. Then to make matters worse, they decided that I had attempted to fraud them with a bad check. Except the check wasn't bad. It cleared with no problem, though it took another two weeks before I could convince the credit union that it had cleared. They had no explanation and decided to blame me. Very very very odd and very frustrating.

Mid-summer I received a letter informing me that the Credit Union was closing all business accounts to focus on personal accounts and that we had until Sept. 15th to move to a commercial bank for business accounts. Hello?!??!???

Up until the name change and the mortage crisis, my Credit Union has been a dream for me. They believed in my fledgling web design business back during the last crunch and helped me get started in 2001 & 2002. They were great when I was in Ireland for graduate school and made it very easy to do all my banking online from Dublin. When I returned from graduate school and had barely got my business back online, the Credit Union gave me an auto loan for my Prius with no questions asked. I have been faithful back to them by paying my debts on time and putting my savings at the Credit Union.

Thus, the increasingly small erratic behaviors since the summer have been more keenly felt.

After the closure of the business accounts, I moved my business account to a large commercial bank of which at the beginning of every month, I have to transfer money from the commercial bank to my Credit Union to make sure I cover my automatic payments. As the credit crisis has progressed this fall, I have noticed that the large commercial bank has honored all of my client's checks within a day or two but when I transfer monies to the credit union it will take 3-5 days to be actionable on my account. Not just a few times but every time since September.

This is a problem. Items are bouncing or not clearing, even though I put monies in up to a week beforehand. I am getting phone calls from unhappy creditors. I am unhappy. And I am surprised that my highly rated, 1937-founded, locally large Credit Union is being stingy, holding funds beyond what is necessary, and treating all comers as if they are out to do the Credit Union wrong. This is not why I signed up with them in the first place.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that I will need to have three accounts: a business account, a personal checking, and a personal savings at the large commercial bank just to get my monthly personal financial business done until the credit crunch eases and the Credit Union decides that they are going to go back to behaving like a real credit union and not like a scared grinch.

Come on Wall Street and the Banking System, let's get the system moving and stopping panicking. That goes for you, too. People, stop panicking. Let's get moving. Forward.

Sun 11.09.08 - For various reasons, my local Whole Foods market is the worst store in the chain in SoCal, I won't go into all of it, but let's just say 2 things on the matter : stock & employee morale. It is not fun to shop at a market where one gets guff from the checkers & baggers about one's purchase choice and general bad attitude. On the stock issue, even before it switched from Wild Oats to Whole Foods, it has been hard to convince this local (was Wild Oats, now) Whole Foods to carry items that would be of interest to folks with multiple food allergies. Thanks for the gluten-free bread you carry, but Glutino is corn & yeast full, how about carrying a lot more of the gluten-free, yeast-free rice bread that sells out very quickly, obviously I am NOT the only customer who buys it*.

Thus due to the idiocy of the local Whole Foods employees and purchasing/stock management, I find myself driving at least 2 times a month to south Huntington Beach to the Mother's Market to purchase a much wider and deeper range of gluten-free, yeast-free, dairy-free, egg-free, canola-evil-oil-free, and corn-free items. My local Whole Foods is less than a mile away, the closest Mother's Market has been over 30 minutes away.

No longer, the genius' at Mother's have decided to do battle against the corporate bloat that Whole Foods has become and they have opened a branch in Santa Ana, that is technically farther away from me but is actually much easier to get to due to easy freeway access. All hail the nice Mother's Market folk.

Now, our family of food allergy sufferers has been frequenting the original Mother's Market health food store mothership in Costa Mesa since the early 1980s when we were first diagnosed. I am over the top excited that Mother's is expanding and is now in a lovely big store in Santa Ana, just across the street from the Westfield Main Place Mall on Main St, just north of the 5 fwy and just south of the 22. Great location, big wide aisles (all the other MM stores have very crunched aisles due to trying to fit as much stock as possible into a small store), and a great selection that far outstrips the average Whole Foods in the variety department.

Whole Foods only real distinctives over Mother's has been their butcher & fresh meat, wine department, and multiple locations. This new Mother's is the first store that has a good selection of packaged meats and not just frozen meats. Yes, there is no wine, but I can go to BevMo. What Mother's lacks in meat & wine, they more than make up for in vegan, raw, allergy-free, and just plain selection of multiple brands of local or health food over the ever increasing corporate organic banality that is Whole Foods.

Here is an example of what I am talking about, beyond gluten-free bread choice: My local Whole Foods only carries one brand of Japanese styled nori and seaweed products, only one brand. The BIG problem with that one brand is that it is grown & produced/made in China. HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! Wake up Whole Foods! I don't care what you say, you need, if you want to retain your indy/organic/wholefood reputation to provide a non-Chinese grown/made brand. I don't care if you have had an organic certification on the brand, HELLO! China is poisoning its own children in the name of profit.

Whole Foods did you test the nori and the water that it is grown in to make sure it is pollution free? HELLO! Now Mother's Market, even in their tiny-ish, cramped Huntington Beach store, has a selection of 4 Nori brands of which 1 is made in Japan and 1 in Canada. Whole Foods in a huge store only offers one brand made in a country which is terribly polluted and has crooked producers that add plastic additives to extend food. Nice, how marvelously whole food of them.

I want more than a label that says "Organic", I want to see that the company and the individual stores are putting thought into their purchasing decisions. It has become more and more obvious that Whole Foods is buying in bulk at the corporate level and not thinking about why they started the Whole Foods stores for in the late 1960s/early 1970s in Austin for in the first place. Additionally, I would like to go to my local Whole Foods and think that the employee type folks I interact with care enough to remember what customers want and do more than mock me, yes I have been mocked for my purchases more than once, when I get to the check out counter.

Dear Whole Foods, get your act together. Remember your roots. Do something about employee morale and attitude, while you are at it, please train your lovely college-aged employees on why insulting customers is bad and why folks would want to shop at your store.

Dear Mother's Market, thanks for staying independent and expanding into Santa Ana. Thanks for still hiring dreadlocked, tattoo'd vegan kids** rather than well-scrubbed college kids, cause vegan kids understand odd diets and don't mock. You rock.

Notes:
* The obnoxious, bad attitude employees always say to me when I inquire, "It just sells so fast." Me, "Why not carry more of it then if it is so popular?" WF employee, (brain explodes), "ahhhh.... Well, you should check back next week." Idiot. How to sell groceries in an upscale, speciality store & keep your job => keep popular items in stock. And furthermore, be nice to the customer who is merely making a request.
** Much like you can tell a good restaurant by who works there, a good health food store should always have an employee ratio of 60% vegan/hippy/punk/crusties/tattoo'd folk over straight/clean/oblivious folk. The local Whole Foods when it was Wild Oats had a good ratio, but with the advent of the Whole Foods takeover, the vegan/raw/hippy/crusties have fled leaving cranky CSULB students as employees. Damn folks, its Long Beach, y'all should be able to find a vegan, LGBT, crusty somewhere in town... And the fact that you can't only puts the final nail into your corporate coffin. Or at least demonstrates the incompetence of the store manager***.
*** Who by the way has the worst attitude of all the employees at the Long Beach Whole Foods.
</rant>

Either I have a box or two of books that are lost up in the further, black widow guarded, reaches of the loft in my brother's garage or the box(es) are propping up furniture in my storage room, but I am missing books.

A box or two of books that I did not find the last 3 times I have scoured the loft, side sheds, and back shed at my brother's for my books. A box or two of books that I have not found the last two times I took everything out of my storage room, except some of the big furniture in the back.

I have been having an itch to start at the beginning of the Charles de Lint Newford Series and work my way all the way through, as I have all the books and have read most of them at least 3 times before. I keep thinking of the the stories and having bits reverberate in my head, so it is time to re-read all the way through the Newford (loosely termed) series.

I know that "Spirits in the Wires" is currently visiting on Thomas Bertling's bookshelf and another 4 are here at my house, but where are the rest?

There are a minimum of 12 novels & story collections, not including the young adult books, in the Newford series that should be living in one of six bookcases in my apartment but aren't.

I can't have loaned that many out. So a box of books must be hiding from me. It must. I hope they are findable, somewhere. Must drag out the big ladder and go through the loft again in mid-winter when the spiders are in semi-hibernation.

Fri 11.07.08 - We celebrated Scruffy's 5th birthday at Dog Beach this morning.

Today I am going to combine my photo and text of the day into one post rather than two.

So, Mr. Scruffy McDoglet was born five years ago today in North Carolina, whether to a reputable Maltese breeder or to a puppy farm- we don't know, but he was the runt of the litter with a few "defects" that precludes him from being AKC. The truth of the matter is that is doesn't matter because Scruffy McDoglet is the best.

Scruffy is so full of personality, gumption, and pure sheer bloody mindedness, it doesn't matter that he has thin hair and too many skin spots. Who cares if he doesn't match some ideal that the AKC has set for pure-bred Maltese, as he is perfect as he is. I can't imagine him being smaller, more hairfull, and dumber.

Scruffy has truly been a joy and after growing up with lots of dogs, he is the first dog that I have truly grown attached to.

Happy Birthday to the best 12 lb bundle of squirmy, poopy, running, barking, sleeping joy!

Today, my dear friend George Kelly wrote on Twitter:

"California voters who voted for Obama and voted yes on Proposition 8: I need to hear you explain why."

I do know at least one voter who was passionate about both voting for Barak Obama and voting Yes on Prop 8. This person is an immediate family member.

After all of the conversations that I had with this person about why we were both going to vote for Obama, it was a shock last Sunday evening at dinner to find that this person was going to vote Yes on Prop 8. At the time, I felt betrayed and we talked about the Bible vs. discrimination and true love. My sister kindly brought up that we should not be burdening the State Constitution with non-structural/non-governmental moral issues.

But the person remained steadfast that it would be wrong for a Christian to vote No on Prop 8. I held my tongue after I made my arguments and walked away from dinner quite disappointed. A couple of days later, I had a long talk with Erika about the subject, as we are both Christians who were voting No on Prop 8.

Here's my stance: I have wanted to get married since I was a little girl. I had hoped for years to find a man to love, to have, and hold who would also want the same with me in return. An equal in intellect, faith, reason, reading and passion for life to make a life with and have a family with. I now stand before you at age 40 and somehow by the roll of the dice of life, I have yet to meet such a man. I have yet to fall in love. I have yet to get married. I have yet to have children. And it breaks my heart.

Given this, I can not any way or fashion deny another human the desire to marry their one true love, I am too much of a romantic to do such a thing. I have for years joked that it is everyone's right to get married, get a mortgage, and grow boring together. Everyone's right.

Not just the right of the ultra-more-perfect-than-thou Biolan's I went to college with who not only were virgins at marriage, but many of them were saving their first kiss for the wedding*. Not just the right of the folks who met their one true love and married them right away just after high school. Not just the right of middle class people from undivorced, unbroken homes**. Not just the right of the righteous.

Are you righteous? Are you really that perfect? Judge not, unless ye be judged.

Tue 11.04.08 - Jackie and Alex on Election Night.

Since I choose to live without a TV, I am "watching" the online election results until 6:30pm when I go out for drinks with Judy and other friends, whereupon, I will start watching the mobile web results.

Here are the most entertaining results, commentary, and stories:

Twitter (I recommend watching Skeskali's feed as she has took the day off from work, is on west coast time, and has started drinking Jack & Coke. Her tweets should get good in about an hour, as drunk tweeting is the best.)

The Daily Dish : Andrew Sullivan has been hitting the ballpark home all day with notes from his readers and links to other stories.

Making Light - Bruce Schneier
is guest posting as the election progresses.

FiveThirtyEight - a blog that is bringing the various polls together in a statistical manner.

There is also the Daily Kos map.

Various News Networks: CNN | BBC | MSNBC | LA Times | NY Times | The Guardian | NPR

And if you need a good laugh, Stewart & Colbert's Indecision 2008.

California's polls are open for another 2.25 hours, so if you haven't voted, get thee to your polling station.

Tomorrow I will be voting in person at my local polling station. I did not vote by mail or via early voting in any one of the places that one could vote early in my county.

Early this morning on twitter, Dan Benjamin asked:

"For those of you who are voting but haven't yet (neither early or absentee) I ask you: why? Is it the in-person/on-the-day thing?"

A bit later this morning I replied:

"@danbenjamin it is for me the vote in person at the poll experience."

And just a couple of hours ago, I tweeted to the world:

"Tomorrow is going to be a circus, so I am going to line up to vote at the local poll at 4pm w/ camera & notepad in hand, then go to Walt's."

I spend all day and most evenings in my apartment on my computer both for a living and for the pure, shear joy of my love for the internet. I, the borderline introvert/extrovert who needs both a couple hours every day to myself & time with folks, have had quite enough of being all by my lonesome and doing things "virtually".

Early on in my freelance web design / development career, I discovered that the best way to keep from going completely nuts with feelings of isolation was to spend my mornings, when I had social energy built up, doing errands and then go out to lunch, and then to spend my afternoons and evenings working*.

To counter all this on the computer time, I have made sure that I talk to friends on the phone (not IM) or get together with them in person frequently, as well as attend all manner of fun community events - from the mundane (botany) to the cool (concerts) to the bizarre (house movings & demolitions) to professional events (SXSW and other conferences**) - in person and experience them with all of my senses and all of my person.

The very idea of even more time online or diverting communal activities in real life so that I have more time to "work" or be with my family is rather bizarre and revolting to me. Humans, be we introverts or extroverts, are social creatures. Getting out and about, even if only on a occasion is good. Different folk have differing needs for social activity, but I do think it is important that we gather together as a community more than once every four years or so.

Much as been lamented about the decline of civil involvement and civility, much has also been lamented about the decline of community involvement and the like. I get it if you don't want to go to church/mosque/temple/whatever & teach Friday/Saturday/Sunday school on top of attending every other event on the docket. Neither do I. Or if after a long day of work or school, plus commitments to your family & friends, that you don't have a lot of time to volunteer or attend civil / community forums every week. But I think it is important to get out and about and involved in the greater community, however you define it, at least a couple of times a month.

There is a good reason that we humans have, regardless of culture or religion, a wide range and a rich tradition of gathering together for festivals, holidays, elections, fairs, games, and sports. In these events, we bond in community and build culture.

I am not going to miss the community and spectacle that will be the election tomorrow. I want to go to my new polling place in Seal Beach, The Little Church (whereas our previous elections have been held in a living room on 15th Street). I want to stand in line. I want to participate in my community. I want to have a chat with the folks I know from our mutual dog walking. I want to be inconvenienced. I want to experience this once in a lifetime election viscerally, not virtually.

Notes:
* If you have clients who have a strict 8am - 5pm schedule, it drives them nuts that I don't get to my "desk" until 1pm at the earliest (one savvy client copped on to me and started calling me before he went to bed at 11pm to discuss what was needed before 8am the next morning).

The Great Hack by Heather Gold (a complimentary parody of Sarah Silverman). Heather encourages us geeks to open source marriage.

And for further argument, Anil Dash's excellent blog post, "In Defense of Marriage."

If you are over 18 and a citizen of the U.S., vote tomorrow.

In my last 1.5 years of university and the first year of being out in the big world, I purchased quite a few household items. I belong to the set of folk who would rather spend good money for objects that will last, rather than the purchase objects for as cheaply as possible at Walmart/Ikea/Target/Costco and then discarded a few years later when the object is unusable.

To that end, most of what I purchased in that time period, I still use daily 18-15 years later. My towels, my kitchen knives, my dishes, my Reed&Barton flatware, my Chantel blue enameled cookware, etc, etc, etc.

In the last year, I have noticed that my towels, which are lovely and don't shed, are starting to fray. My good Gerber knives are now, even though I take them to be professionally sharpened, starting to have dings and dips in the blade and small rust spots are forming, although those are attacked with Bon Ami. My lifetime guaranteed Chantel enameled pans have a few dings in them, also with some spider cracks in the enamel.

Everything is still very usable and in good condition, but I will have to replace the towels soon unless I like having frayed towels hanging in my bathroom and getting stuck in the washer. I don't mind the idea of upgrading my knife set to Wüsthof or the like, but I do mind having to buy new towels.

New towels, no matter if you buy the cheap ones at Target or the more expensive ones at Macy's, shed. They shed all over you when you are drying yourself. They shed when washed. Shedding of the new towels lasts for up to a year, though declining after each wash & dry.

New towel lint is more pernicious than Black Lab fur scattered around the house. I wish there were pre-washed, lint-free, 100% cotton bath towels available for sale.

Now I could only get an upgrade on the gray hairs that are breeding like rabbits on my head... I suppose I will shortly be forced to dye all my hair purple.

;o)

Fri. 10.31.08 - 'Tis the end of a season and the beginning of another. Here in Southern California, we had our first real rain early this morning and expect some more tomorrow, hopefully this is the beginning of a good rainy season that will break our drought. If the saying that we follow New Zealand is true, then all will be well, as NZ was quite wet the last few months.

For others this is the end of summer and the beginning of winter. It is the end of the harvest season for many parts of the northern hemisphere and the beginning of the fallow time. A time where each night grows darker until winter solstice. It is a time to remember and look back, as well as a time to look forward and up to something greater.

Be it a candle in a pumpkin, a bonfire, or a five stared lamp, however you celebrate this week, Happy Halloween, Samhain, Diwali (Deepavali), All Saints Day, and Dia de los Muertos to one and all!

The G-dcast's first CartoonCast with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner on Genesis 1. Delightful.

Rather than torture you all with more photos of small white dogs* this evening, I am going to direct you to several great articles:

1) The ever fabulous and bright, Malcolm Gladwell has alerted his blog readers of his new New Yorker article, "Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?".

This is one of the best articles I have read in a while, as Malcolm digs deep into a phenomenon that I have noticed for years: it is not the precocious or prodigies that you want to watch in life, but it is the late-bloomers who are most interesting. Malcolm weaves research into creativity and age v. output with historical references and current anecdotes into the lives of contemporary writers.

Excellent. A must read.

2) The ever fabulous Ariel Stallings Meadows, aka Electrolicious, has the best summary of the Black Mondays & Fridays of the recent Stock Market crash that I have read to date. Her analogy may shock the squeamish amongst us, but it is words to take to heart and live by. Listen to Ariel, Just don't look down there. Really, don't look at your stock portfolio until after the new year.

Just don't look.

****
* Just so y'all know, I already have it worked out with Erika that if I die suddenly by accident that she will post photos of Scruffy & Belle for 365 days after my death. I am compiling a stock of photos for her. So, y'all should darned hope I don't die suddenly, as after a year you will be darned glad I am gone. So here's to the hope that I have the longevity of all my other elderly family members who are currently in their 80s & 90s and doing things like golfing a few times a week (great Aunt Babe, aged 94) or flying to Uruguay for his holiday (what my 86 year old grandpa did on Sunday), etc. Just sayin'.

Hi Y'all.

I have not fallen into a pit of despair and longing since Helsinki, only into a pit of work. I am slowing climbing out. When I get out, I have about 7-10 blog posts that I want to write for y'all and me. In the meantime, please content yourselves with the photos I have been moblogging up.

Also, can I just say that I am angry & frustrated at politics, greed and my email.... Yes, I said it.

Mon 09.29.09 - Today's 2/3rds of the House Republicans' revolt against the Republican Administration's bailout bill signifies the definitive beginning of four months of George W. Bush's lame duck presidency.

Dear Greenpeace,

Please note that I think you are a worthwhile organization, but due to the Chuggers you employee or who volunteer I can't or won't ever donate money to you.

Greenpeace, there are a variety of ways for you to convince me of the rightness of your cause, but having college aged, highly earnest young people assault me outside of the supermarket ("Think about the Polar Bears!") or walking down Grafton Street or in London or ... or... or...

Greenpeace, a public place should not become a place of fear and loathing in the name of a liberal charity. A public place should only be come a place of fear and loathing if a government has murdered or abused its people in that place. So, why would a charity organization want to instill the same feelings in potential donors as the people that same organization is trying to stop from instilling such feelings in the public? Really.

Greenpeace, I realize that there is a big difference between Guantanamo and the exterior of the local market, but your Chuggers make me nearly as angry as the US Government. I don't want to be mugged in the name of charity. Why in the HELL in the world of idenity theft would I ever give my bank or private info to some earnest young person outside of a supermarket?

Greenpeace, why do you put me in the place of having to turn down said young person outside the supermarket and thus create feelings of liberal guilt for turning down said young person which causes me to hate you for setting up said young person to go out soliciting in front of my local supermarket.

Greenpeace, due to being chugged (charity mugged) each time I buy my groceries, I greatly dislike you. I don't have sympathy for your earnest young employees/volunteers. Because of your publically invasive chugging tactics, I don't even have sympathy for the polar bears.

In fact, Greenpeace, I was down right mean last week to one of your Chuggers. The poor young lady was about 21, earnest, and REALLY believed in the plight of the polar bears. After I pointed out the futility of her signing up suckers outside of the local supermarket ("But think of the polar bears."), I told her that Greenpeace had been ticking me off for 3 years in a variety of locations - Long Beach, London, Dublin, and Huntington Beach ("But the polar ice caps are melting, and think of the polar bears"). Then I defined a chugger to her and then asked her how her conscience could allow her to mug people in the name of polar bears.

Yes, Greenpeace, in your name, I crushed the innocence of some poor defenseless college human who wanted a summer job they could believe in. Please Greenpeace, stop the madness, stop forcing young, idealist folk from whoring themselves out in front of supermarkets. Please just send a direct mailing to all of the local Democrats via the US Postal Service instead. Rather than paying the local chugger to alienate your potential donor base, why not do a little demographic research and refine your fundraising to efforts that don't piss people off?

Greenpeace, if you had sent me a piece of paper spam via the USPS with a nice polar bear photo on it with an option to give $5-10 a month, I may have signed up. But instead you assaulted me with a chugger, so no $5-10 a month from me to you.

We can, if we work together help idealist, earnest young folk not whore themselves out in the name of charity. If we work together, we can stop the plague of chugging. Don't give to Chuggers.

Not even for the polar bears.

[Forgive any cranky tone here, but this post has been building for nearly 3 years now.]

Now the Presidential campaign gets interesting.

Let the games begin... See you in November at the polls.

I am currently sitting in the lounge of the local Toyota dealer/service place waiting for my car to be done. And I have my earplugs in, the earplugs that are rated for 34 decibel sound reduction. And it is still loud enough to hear everything clearly.

Agh!

Either my earplugs are failing or my local Toyota dealership is one loud place, piped in muzak, big widescreen tv in the lounge area at full blast, and people trying to talk over all of this. How does anyone get any work done here? How do they cut deals for cars in this noise?

I am one of those folks who can't work or read or code unless it is quiet. I can't listen to music, even low instrumental music, if I want to read and comprehend what I am reading or if I want to code and not make mistakes. If I try to write while a bunch of stuff is going on around me, I will end up transcribing whatever the distraction is, which makes me a great live blogger at conferences but makes it hard to write while there are distractions.

In my immediate family we have a joke about Hanens and TV that basically goes along the line of if you want the Hanen in question to listen to you and look at you and comprehend what was said, do NOT turn the TV on or walk anywhere near a TV.

Yes, people, I come from a long line of amusing, creative, very bright, but easily distractable people. My Dad calls it being ADD, I call it that we are curious and are interested in a wide variety of inputs.

I am constantly astounded that folks can get much done or remember what is said in the noise that pervades so much of modern life. I make a big effort to have a quiet and peaceful house, I don't own a TV or a stereo or radio. Thus, going out in to the big wide world can at times be a aural and visual assault.

Conflicting TVs & piped in music (both at once) are now common while at the supermarket, gas station, car service lounges, outdoor malls, etc.

Does this bug anyone else?

Video link via TheBrad.

And in other Notes:
Gedblog on "100 Reasons Why McCain Won't Be President of the United States".

A year ago, if you had told me that Barack Obama and John McCain would have been running for President as the nominated candidate for their respective parties, I would have had a hard time choosing between the two. But as Gedblog details out above, Maverick McCain has become Republican FlipFlop Biiii-atch Boy McCain. Fare Thee Well, Mr. McCain, when you rediscover your Maverick Bipartisan side, email me.

In the meantime, when is Michelle Obama running for President?

Today Scruffy and I were driving out of the local CVS parking lot (I had to buy Draino to unclog the kitchen sink - a monthly occurrence in a 65 year old apartment building), when a man pulling into the parking lot in a large white van rolled down his window and screamed at me, "It's Illegal!"

My first thought was, "What is illegal? You, Mr. Nosy, driving a large white vintage van that is rusted & bleching black smog?"... if it isn't illegal, it should be.

What he meant was that Scruffy was sitting in my lap. Both of my hands where on the steering wheel, my mobile phone was in my purse, and Scruffy was not obscuring my vision.

But, and a big but, is that a Californian state legislator is attempting to pass a bill through the State Assembly and Senate to make it illegal for small dogs to sit on their owner's laps while driving. I don't know if it has passed, but with all California driving laws, if it has already passed it will mostly likely go in effect on January 1st or July 1st of the next year with much fan faire and public education.

I have heard of the bill being up for vote, but I have not read that it passed (I read the LA times every day) nor have I seen public notice as to the date it will be in effect if at all. So, I am not worried.

I am not a person who likes to borrow trouble before it happens. Thus, I am not going to worry about a law that may or may not have passed both houses and been signed by the Governator. A law that if it did get passed has not been activated and publicized yet. If...

Scruffy likes to sit in my lap while I drive, most of the time he lies on my lap and naps. Sometimes if we are driving slow and the window is cracked he likes to put his nose out the window. I don't let Belle sit on my lap while I drive, as she is too tall and obscures my vision. I don't let Magnus sit on my lap the few times he has been in my car, as he is too young and bouncy and does not respect the fact that I need both hands/arms need to be on the wheel. Scruffy is well-behaved, most of the time, and does not cause trouble.

But you know about those small lap dogs... nothing but trouble, which is why, I surmise, the Nosy Legislator from Fresno is trying to pass a law to ban Scruffy from sitting on my lap.

More importantly to the point I want to make, all of us have broken the law or a law of some sort in the last week or two, be it not stopping for a full 5 seconds at the stop sign or driving through that yellow light as it was turning to red or not using a hands-free while talking on your mobile and driving (I saw you) or you took office supplies home with you or you used your office computer or phone for personal use ... or ... or ...

Sorry folks, I have a lot to blog about, but due to a rocky last few days I am just plain tuckered out, so I am about to close Chick-a-Poo the Wonder computer and go read a real live book-type-object and then go to bed.

As a note to me, here is what I do need to blog about before Wednesday (this week, hold me to it):

1) Jabba the Hut, or how I am really over the public fascination with 'girl on girl action'. Bah! What bullshit, esp. when you are the one being devoured by a drunk chick whose friends are holding you in place. Yes, a drunk married woman with kids molested me last night in the name of titillating men, who laughed but no one helped me out. If a guy did this, it would have been molestation, but because it was a girl, everyone laughed. Bah!

2) Write about how amazing and wonderful SpinVox is. SpinVox has set me free from voicemail. Thank God.

3) Write about the Opera Web Standards Curricula. Write about how funny it is that your two articles are not about mobile, but on Tables and Forms. Ha. ha. ha... eek!

4) Encourage folks to vote for my Mobile Creativity panel for SXSW 2009. Go vote.

5) Hubris.

Things that happened this weekend not to write about:

a) Inviting a friend and his wife to a show at Alex's and then they show up with 3-5 knuckleheads in tow who proceed to embarrass me with their trailer of a trailer of a trailer from the depths of Murrieta behavior and throwing gang signs the whole evening. Ugh. Ugh. Did I mention Ugh?

b) The amusing encounter yesterday whilst at a nice restaurant in deep south LA county suburbia with a movie / tv star attempting to be incognito all the while he was staring at me, as if he wanted me to notice him and be impressed. Note to said movie/tv star: Ditch the beanie, Dude. No one fucking cares, Artesia is not Hollywood. Either drive south of the 10 freeway and be a normal human or just stay up in the West Side and be a *star* but leave the beanie and your paranoia at home, esp. when eating at Udupi Palace.

Fifteen Years!

15 YEARS!

Fifteen years ago this summer, I was in the midst of the summer of weddings.

On July 10, 1993, Vicki married Rick in Brea, Ca. I was a bridesmaid.

On July 24, 1993, Annemiek married Ken in Gouda, Netherlands. I was a bridesmaid.

On August 7, 1993, Kimberly married Dave in Long Beach, Ca. I was a bridesmaid.

On August (something, 2 or 3 weeks after K & D), 1993, Naomi married Stephen in Shaver Lake, Ca. Blessedly I was NOT a bridesmaid. I had some other function of which I can't remember.

I ended that summer a lot poorer in dollars, but richer in bridesmaid dresses. By the time the summer of 1993 ended, I had been a bridesmaid 6 times. I swore that after that, I would only ever be a bridesmaid for Erika or my sister. When I moved to Boston in 1994, I sold all the above bridesmaid dresses at a garage sale (except the one for Kimberly & Dave's wedding, which bizarrely is still in my closet).

After the first wave of marriages within 2-4 years of graduating from college, there was a lull for about 10 years. Now the second wave of mid-to-late thirties marriages seems to be subsiding. With the big 40 birthday this year (yikes!), I have been doing a lot of reflecting on my hopes & dreams since college, as well as my friends and their hopes & dreams. I have thought about who we were and who we are now. I was so hopeful then.

Last Friday, Kimberly and I walked Scruffy down to the River Beach and let him run. I did the numbers in my head, and announced, "OMG! You and Dave will have your 15th Anniversary this year!" [[BRAIN EXPLODES!!!!]]

To all my friends who got married in the summer of 1993, Happy Anniversary! May you look back at 15 years of married life with pleasure.

I have posted my restaurant review of India Sweet & Spices over at The Happy Tastebud:

India Sweets and Spices is the main place for my Pea-a-Palooza festivals as they regularly serve peas & cheese (Mattar Paneer), as well as Potatoes and Peas. Most of all I like the surprise of showing up and looking at the six lunch hot choices, choosing two for my $4.99 plate which will also include rice, raita, fresh crunchy veg plus a lime pickle or two.

Due to my gluten-free life, I usually get a rice/lentil papad or two instead of the wheat-ful chapati or poori. The nice folks who run the lunch counter at India Sweets and Spices in Tustin are very accommodating about substitutions.

If you are not up for a great veggie lunch, then there is always the Beef Palace in Huntington Beach..

This week a big brouhaha burst out on the web about BoingBoing's taking down any and all links / posts about Violet Blue the San Francisco sex columnist / blogger.

And the web commenting folks reacted. And reacted. And reacted.

Upon, first reading about this to do, I wondered why such a big brouhaha now - given that the about Violet Blue posts were removed a year ago at BoingBoing - when not a peep has been written about KT's whole section of Blogher Editor posts from the last year or two being removed lock, stock, and barrel over at Blogher.com over the weekend of June 14-15, 2008.

Now, I don't think that BlogHer is as highly ranked as BoingBoing, nor do they have the readership, nor do I think that KT was getting it on with one of the BlogHer management in a way that would feed salacious gossip, as Violet Blue was getting it (supposedly) with BoingBoing's Xeni.

What I do know is that BoingBoing's moderator, Teresa NielsenHayden, did address the issue today and that she is a by far more astute web moderator than just about anyone else out there.

What I also know is that BoingBoing has a better designed site that is easier to navigate both on the website and over time then the BlogHer site, which seems to be redesigned every year before the summer conference and get more unusable than the year before.

Furthermore, what I also know is that BlogHer had a prominent post on the top of the front page to allow readers comment on the new site redesign on Monday, June 16, 2008, but it had no mention of the departure of a good daily editorial BlogHer. And all the comments about the redesign of the site were only gushing, positive comments by other editors of the site. I was the first, and apparently the last, to make a few critiques of the redesign & its usability in the comments. The post announcing the redesign disappeared off the front page within the day.

How do I know that KT's posts disappeared? I have BlogHer on my feed list, and day in and day out 365 days a year for at least the last year if not longer, including holidays, KT's daily astrology post would be on the RSS / Atom feed, as well as on the BlogHer website as the editor post for the Astrology section. KT's posts stopped on Fri. June 13, 2008 and have not reappeared in the feed since.

More telling a few days after the BlogHer redesign was announced and launched on Mon. June 16, 2008, all of KT's posts were deleted from BlogHer.

Now I am not going to make a big to do about the why or wherefores, but what I would appreciate is some editorial / leadership transparency on the part of the BlogHer folks about KT's departure. Whether this is in the style of Anil's metafilter comment about how to deal with a split or TNH's BoingBoing post today it doesn't matter, what does matter to me for BlogHer's credibility is that they acknowledge the departure (good, bad, neutral) of an editor and her daily column.

I don't care if BlogHer chose to take down all of KT's posts or if KT took down all of her own posts, nor do I care about why or the personal politics about the departure, just make an announcement. Say goodbye.

Why should BlogHer say goodbye? Well, BlogHer's whole premise is an all inclusive community of women bloggers that values diversity, transparency, and honesty. Blogher, live up to your explicit and implicit values.

BlogHer, in the meantime, please please please please hire someone to re-architect your website, it is unusable and I am only viewing posts in my feed reader to be able to see if the content is worth while, as my reader sorts everything nicely. I am very sad to see last year's design go, as it was the only one I enjoyed clicking through to and seeing the content on the site in, this year's site is very vanilla corporate.

As a side note to wrap up this post, amusingly enough, I have noticed that Xeni's sex posts have declined over the last few months. I do think Valley Wag may have hit the whole brouhaha on the head.

In the Fervor to be Green and Do Your bit to Stop Climate Change Morality Play that is Contemporary Life (or how to be a good little Green who will go to Arcadia when you Die), the BBC has published an article today on "The Bulb Hoarders". Horrors.

"The government (UK) wants your old-fashioned energy-hungry incandescent tungsten light bulb gone, and gone soon. But some people are willing to go to great lengths to hang onto the lights they love.

Incandescent bulbs - that's the traditional kind to you or me - waste 95% of the energy they use, according to Greenpeace. They calculate that phasing them out in the UK will save more than five million tonnes in CO2 emissions a year.

And yet some households are so attached to them that they not only keep buying them - they're stockpiling them ahead of the day when they're no longer available.

In September last year, the UK government made a deal with major shops for the supply of traditional bulbs to be turned off. Some higher energy bulbs will be gone by January 2009, and all incandescent lights will be off by 2011.

The agreement is voluntary, but other countries have announced legal bans, including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the US. "

Ok, so the British government has legislated that CFL bulbs are to be sold and that energy hogging incandescent bulbs are to be banned and taken off the shelf. Sounds reasonable right? ((cough cough cough...nanny state... cough cough cough))

But isn't life a give and take? Many of the folks interviewed for the BBC article and who commented think so.

Can someone please give me three good reasons why I should renew my AIGA Membership?

My first year of $295 - really only good for email spam for events that are completely irrelevant to web design and you have to pay more money to attend the event that the email spam was promoting - AIGA membership has seemed quite useless. At least once as week, I become beyond irritated by either the AIGA mothership or AIGA Los Angeles for sending yet *another* email for the same event that they have already emailed me about four times in the last month.

I have a hard time defending a $295 fee to join a professional organization that is so web clueless. The mothership in New York recently sent me a very designed professional packet on why I should renew, of which I looked at and thought, "Oh, that is where the membership fee is going to... High end printing. Huh."

Where is the web related events? Where are the free events for folks who have already spent their $295 for the year? Where are the just plain networking get togethers?

I am not interested in driving up to LA to see some ultra special human speak on (fill in black here) design and pay $25-40 for the privilege on top of my $295 yearly fee. I would spend $5-10 for a happy hour cocktail party to meet other SoCal designers of all stripes, but those types of events are never organized.

Web professionals who are also AIGA members who don't live in NYC or SF, please tell me why you are a member or remain one after the first rip off year?

If you can't give me a good reason, should we maybe form a professional organization for web based designers?

Everybody has at least one, even if they will never admit to it. Some people have a lot more than one. Most of them are mild and not to life altering or disturbing, but sometimes they can stop life its place.

I am talking about phobias.

I have two phobias: Acrophobia and Parasitophobia.

My fear of heights is not too bad, just an occasional bout of vertigo if I am too close to a ledge or walking across a narrow bridge. I still can ski (go on ski lifts) and rock climb (with harnass & rope) without too much trouble, although bouldering does give me the creeps if I have to leap across a chasm of more than 8 inches.

Basically, I just force myself to just do it and then when I am past the height part, I am fine. Heights do not haunt me. Though, due to my acrophobia, I will not parachute, jump out of a plane, hang glide off a cliff, or bungee jump.

But parasites, well that is another story.

I don't know if anyone else feels the same, but the last few days I have felt more than a bit off kilter. Life is fine, no extenuating circumstances, nothing really wrong (well, other than air laced with smoke from 842 fires in my home state), but I just feel off. My intuition has been lightly vibrating that something(s) is off.

Fires in June, rather than the usual October, check.
Missed communication with several family members, check.
Finding it hard to concentrate to work, check.
Feet feel hot to the point of distraction, check.*
Sleeping at really odd hours, check.

Can I go on holiday to somewhere chilly, slightly damp, and calm?

*****
* While lots of folks suffer from cold feet at the first sign of chilly weather, I suffer from hot feet (quite uncomfortable) at the first sign of warmish weather. Odd but true.

Another odd but true about me is that while may people react negatively to barometric lows with sinus headaches or a slightly depressed mood; I react negatively to barometric highs, I get jittery, can't sleep, and a bit angry. I can tell a Santa Ana wind before it shows up by my lack of sleep and build up of jittery nerves.

Bill Moyer gave the keynote speech at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis this morning. This is an excellent speech on the importance of a free press in a free society, not a media monopolized by a few corporate giants. Watch it.

Bravo, Bill, Bravo!

***

In other areas of opinion and politics, John Scalzi writes on Hilary Clinton's concession speech today:

"People have hinted that Obama needs to avoid having Clinton as VP to avoid being tied to the Clinton legacy, but it's really the other way around: I'm not sure why Hillary would want to tie herself to Obama's legacy and policies so concretely when she has so many opportunities now to stand on her own. She's was second banana to another man for years; it's not trading up to be the second banana to another. Let Hillary be Hillary now, on her own, in her own spotlight, and let's see where she goes from here."

As other folks have noted, previous to Mr. Scalzi, rather than this being a loss for Hilary, she now has the opportunity to carve her own path.

Now if only Michelle Obama would run for President...

Now here is a movie I can get excited about, Mongol.

I love all things Silk Road, Ancient travels from East to West or West to East, Eurasian, the art, the cultural exchange, and even the conquerors of the Silk Road: Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Tamerlane. It is all Dr. Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis' fault. Well, at least the bug bit me in her Art of the Silk Road class in the fall of 1994 at Boston University.

I have at least five books on the Silk Road in my bookcase and another three on A. Hun, G. Khan, and Mr. TransOxiania himself, Tamerlane.

While Attila was the first, and Tamerlane was the last of the great conquerors to wreak havoc for many thousands of miles on horseback, Genghis Khan was the greatest. He and his army conquered the most land (China to Poland and back), they were known for being incredibly bloodthirsty, and prolific (.5% of the males in the WHOLE world descend from Genghis. If that is not successful breeding, then I don't know what is).

"In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the motorway contractor Mr. Prosser is (unknown to himself) a direct patrilineal descendant of Genghis Khan. This manifests itself in a predilection for little fur hats, a desire to have axes hanging above his front door, and occasional visions of screaming Mongol hordes." - Wikipedia on the Descendants of Genghis Khan.

Basically, a bunch of folks on horseback conquerer the known world. You try it some time.

Who wants to go see the movie with me?

The movie "Sex in the City" was released today. My reaction is "meh." A friend sent around an email to a group of us asking if we wanted to go to lunch or to see "Sex in the City". I voted for lunch. Date to be determined.

Now let me make a few caveats:

1) I have not ever owned my own TV. In fact, I have not lived in a household with a TV since college. That is nearly two decades of TV-less living. I am VERY behind in my TV watching by choice. So, I have never, not once, seen the HBO TV series "Sex in the City".

2) In recent months, to not appear to the the serious computer savvy luddite or jacobite that I can be at times, I got a Netflix subscription of 2 movies a month, of which I watch on my MacBook Pro with headphones. My Netflix movie subscription has most comprised of Bollywood romantic comedies (no kissing, no real handholding), Jane Austen movies (Extensive handholding in the countryside), an odd happy indy foreign film, and a few indy cinema classics.

Basically, I did not grow up in a happy, intact family in the 'burbs, so I really don't like horror movies, film noir, serious complex indy films, and throw away sex movies. I grew up in a constantly divorcing & moving family in the sometimes burbs and now I like nice, happy movies with redemptive endings. Mock me all you want to, I lived the shit and now I want a happy ending.

3) New York is a foreign country to me. London and Mumbai are much more familiar cities to me. I have been to NYC a number of times and could not wait to get out. My last visit, I stayed for only four hours to go to dinner & see a band, and then got out as fast as possible. I love London, I go there all the time. I fell in love with Mumbai this February and plan on going back soon.

Movies and TV shows about New York are odd to me. It is another culture, a bizarre one at that, that I really don't get. Los Angles, London, Istanbul, and Mumbai, I get and like. I will watch films about those cities.

4) If you have met me then you know a very important fact about me, I have a case of terminal nice girl. Forget the funny colors in the hair (honey, that is all about art & color), forget the tendency towards loud & fast music, forget the tendency towards outrageous stories (I am a Hanen after all!), but remember I am a nice girl despite the colorful external trappings. Viva extensive handholding in the countryside!

End of caveats.

One thing I have done for years, to make up for my lack of TV watching and movie attendance, is to read the LA Times' film review section in the Friday Calendar so that I can at least know some of the plot and the critics' opinions on the latest movies. I surprise friends with my skimmed knowledge of the latest flicks at times even when I have no intention of seeing them at all, not now in the theatre or later on DVD.

After my friend's email and all the hype about "Sex in the City" to women of my age group (post-25, pre-60), I made sure that I read today's LA Times review about the movie. It was glowing. It made love to Carrie, Samantha, et al. The LA Times critic, Carina Chocano, seems to think even though they would deny that they ever stepped into the theatre that men would like the movie. The LA Times asserts that the film is quite revolutionary for Hollywood, in that it depicts middle-aged women (40-50) having a complete, fulfilled independent life.

"Sex and the City" can't rightly be called a romantic comedy in the dismal, contemporary sense, though it is at times romantic and is consistently very funny. It's also emotionally realistic, even brutal. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), now in their 40s and 50s, continue to navigate the choppy waters of urban life, negotiating relationships, work, fertility and friendship, only now the stakes are higher, the risks are bigger and decisions feel more permanent.

For a film that delights in indulging in frivolity at every possible turn, it examines subjects that most movies don't dare graze for their terrifying seriousness. And when it does, the movie handles them with surprising grace, wit and maturity. In other words, it's a movie for grown-ups of all ages. The press and industry screening I attended was uncharacteristically packed with women in their 20s, and my guess is that their interest had zero to do with the inclusion of Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's personal assistant -- though her character, Louise, is likable and allows the writer to expand the scope of the film from a story about four friends living in New York into a tale about the contemporary lives of urban women from early adulthood to maturity.

After I read this review, I thought, "Hmmm... maybe I will put it in my Netflix queue to watch much, much, much later."

But then the New Yorker's film critic, Anthony Lane, panned the movie as an extendede TV show on steriods, ending his review with this quote:

In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don't be a mother. And don't work. Is this really where we have ended up--with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life? On TV, "Sex and the City" was never as insulting as "Desperate Housewives," which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after "All About Eve," which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did--by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits--but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we're not worth it. It's true that Samantha finally disposes of one paramour, but only with a view to landing another, and her parting shot is a beauty: "I love you, but I love me more." I have a terrible feeling that "Sex and the City" expects us not to disapprove of that line, or even to laugh at it, but to exclaim in unison, "You go, girl."

I really am not interested in watching a movie about NYC consumerist fashion obsessed women. If I wanted to watch something vaguely similar, even if the West Coast version, I could go to any upscale bar or restaurant in Newport Beach or the Westside of LA and watch it live and in person. Bah.

What ever happened to hand holding and true love or at least love that is concerned with others as well as self? I guess I will be missing "Sex in the City" and I could watch a Jane Austen flick or a Mira Nair movie. Or maybe I will read a book instead.

LAX -> DEN -> LHR

The following post is brought to you by a layover at the Denver airport and Joiku Spot wifi via my Nokia N95.

After a long drive home from Arizona last night, I found myself at home backing up my work computer, charging the old school 12" powerbook, targeting them together to transfer needed files and mail, and going to bed way too late. Seven-thirty a.m. came much too quickly and the rush to walk Scruffy, pack, and then get out of the house by 10:30am. Done.

There was trouble at the United counter at LAX, as the person who booked the gift ticket for me was not with me upon check in and the United folks would not check me in without the giftor and their credit card. Really. Truly. Very frustrating.

Interwebs, please note the following, United's system is currently such that if you purchase a ticket or gift a friend with your extra miles and then you pay the taxes on the phone or in person, then the giftee can check in without you.

But if you purchase a ticket online or gift your miles online to a friend and then use your credit card, then you either need to call United to get the "fraud" hold taken off the reservation and paper tickets issued or go to the departing airport before departure (even up to a month beforehand, I was informed by the 1st check in agent) to prove to United that you really do want to gift these miles to your friend or purchase the ticket for them. <sarcasm>As we all know, fraud only happens online and a company must protect itself</sarcasm>

After an incredibly unproductive conversation with the check in agent who was convinced that United was protecting my friend from me the fraudster, and she kept saying that because the ticket was booked over a month ago that gave my friend ample time to come on down to United at LAX to show her credit card (said friend was in Turkey & Germany most of the last month earning more United miles). When we reached an impasse of which neither of us wold budge and I was on the verge of losing my temper, she informed me that I should go to ticketing who could refund my friend her "substantial" ticketing fee & taxes and they could use my credit card instead.

The "Future Ticketing" agent was much more helpful. He took my passport & reservation confirmation number, looked at the file on his screen, and asked me how he could help me. I explained that the trip was a gift from friends who used their miles to book the ticket, said friends were at work and could not come to LAX to prove that the reservation was legitimate. He told me the rules and that anyone could use anyone else's United frequent flyer mileage number to book a ticket with a miles reward and that the credit card that paid for the fees and taxes was needed to prove that the miles were not used fraudent. He asked if I would be willing to have my credit card charged and my friend's card credited. I said yes and handed over my card. He took it and continued to stare into his screen.

A minute or two lapsed, the agent passed my card back to me uncharged and said, "Over a month has passed since this ticket was issued, so I can let it pass because if it was fraud the person would have complained about a wrong charge to their card." He issued my ticket, weighed my bag, put the bag onto the conveyor belt, and told me to have a good trip.

Many kudos to the Future Ticketing agent who used logic and reasoned out the situation, but minus kudos to United for having a system that allows anyone to cash in miles as long as they have a person's mileage number and then put the security check at the airport which harasses the travellor and not where it should be in the first place - which is at the time of ticketing.

A possibility for United, if they are concerned with online fraud, is to call the frequently miles holder to confirm that they were the person to book the gift ticket or miles transfer ticket rather than harass the giftee at the airport or force their frequent flyer miles holder to take extra steps (like take a day off work to go to the airport to present their credit card). I have a credit card of which they will call me every time a purchase is made over a certain amount to confirm that I made the purchase, once they even called while I was at the Apple store to confirm the purchase.

The upswing is that I know my friend and someone at United is going to hear all about this. The other upswing is that United did not gain another customer today but after this bit of making my birthday gift a trial, I will make sure I fly American even if United is a tens of dollars cheaper.

Why American? Well, American does not quibble with you if someone has gifted you a ticket and can't accompany you to the airport, they check you in without a half hour of hassle and raised blood pressure.

Sun. 05.04.08 - Happy Sunday to you from four local iris-type flowers making their May debut into the big bright world.

Last Sunday I made a note for myself of four things I wanted to blog about this week, but due to busy-ness I have not gotten to a single one of them until tonight.

Let's talk about work vs. rest or how to take a day off when you are a freelancer:

I have blogged a few months ago that I have spent the last year traipsing down a variety of career avenues in search of the perfect post-graduate-school career position but there has been no perfect path, only the path to being overwhelmed and over-committed as I have found myself involved in a wide swath of interesting projects and working many days in a row without a true day off. Then I get frustrated with spending all day every day with my computer and then I start to slow down & procrastinate about finishing things up with the excuse that I need time off.

Add it up and you get....

A desperate need to catch up, finish up, and actually take a day off. But the worst part is that when I do take time off, I feel too stressed out and guilty to enjoy it. This is bad.

Enter Ryan's article on the 4 Day Work Week. Carsonified says the 4 day work week makes their office more productive as folks arrive on Monday actually rested.. The 37 Signals folks found that they were honestly only productively coding a certain amount of hours every day so why not distill that time into 4 days and have 3 days off.

There also is the guy writing/talking about the 4 hour work week. The trick to this is outsourcing every task in your life and then writing a book about it and it selling well.

I don't think that I will want to whittle my life down to a 4 hour work week, but I would like to set a goal to a productive 4 day work week rather than a stressed out with productivity falling 7 day work week.

Where to start? Just do it? I love being online and on my computer, my work merges with my passion. My computer is also my main tool, next to my mobile camera phone, for my creativity and art. When I create art with these tools, the Protestant Guilt Ethic creeps in and asks why I am playing instead of working.

How do the Carsonified & 37 Signals folk walk away for 3 days? Or do they separate their job work on their computer with their love / passion for being online and creating?

If you are freelance or your work & love are on a computer, how do you manage the work / life / creativity balance?

Thurs 05.01.08 - Happy May Day or Beltane! May your spring be overflowing.

I woke up early this morning from an involved dream fresh in my memory that included a river flowing under my house / apartment, and the back room opening up into a wide staircase that went down into a grotto with a Virgin Mary on the riverside.

The river was clear, fast flowing, and deep. The statute of the Virgin Mary was in a light blue robe with a white robe underneath. The grotto was well lit, of which people freely came and went. The house / apartment was a mash-up of my last few favorite historical places I have lived in: shaped two rooms in a row like the 1860s brownstone apt. I lived in in Boston, hardwood floors (Misty's side of the duplex) and the back room of the Victorian in Orange, and the plaster & lathe walls of my current 1930s/1940s flat.

It was a peaceful dream and even in it, I yearned to live all the time in this 2 roomed apartment with its subterranean river of life and stairway of people come and going. This is the first ever dream I have had with Mary in it. I did not grow up Catholic and tend to find the veneration of the Virgin to be a bit bizarre. Upon research today, see links above, I found out that May is considered the Virgin Mary's month.

Fare the well to my thirties, I didn't like you much.

May the next decade be much better.

On Friday night, circumstances evolved that I invited a friend of a friend to join me for Happy Hour at my favorite local restaurant/bar/grill. For the sake of the story we will call the friend of the friend - QBB, call the bartender - Devi, and call the place/bar/grill - Freddy's. All names & relationships have been slightly altered to protect the innocent or guilty as the case may be.

Upon arriving at Freddy's we both ordered the Friday Happy Hour Spice Shrimp special and a glass of wine. Conversation proceeded. As the evening proceeded, things got weird. Most of the other patrons around us at the bar/grill part were well-to-do beach-bleach-blond-Americans of indeterminate ethnicity in their 40s and 50s. As the Happy Hour progressed it became highly evident that every man within a 15 foot radius was going to come and talk to us, with his date / female companion's permission or not. As time wended on the females went from friendly to claws openly bared.

Why? Well, the friend of a friend, aka QBB, is a woman in her early forties who has made several set of choices to conform to the highest standard of Southern California's Culto de Corpo through a rigorous and disciplined regime of lack of eating, extreme exercise, and visits to the plastic surgeon. QBB is the Cali-Puerto-Rican Barbie Doll - tall, thin, tiny hips, big boobs, big eyes, hair extensions, etc, etc, etc. Fill in all the stereotypes of LA bimbos.

Except QBB is more complex than a bimbo. By choosing to go out with her it meant that for 3.5 hours all of the explicit and implicit gender theatrics played themselves out. QBB is very intensely involved in her current relationship but due to sub-conscious need or a lifetime of sending out sexual signals or both (ding ding ding), she attracts men and women in droves. QBB is inordinately proud of this, which is why I came out of the evening thinking most of those folks got pnwed by QBB.

I have been in India for 9 days and 8 hours so far on the Nokia Urbanista Diaries adventure and will be here for another 2 days and 16 hours before departing for Vienna. Here are some of my initial random thoughts on India:

People: So far everyone has been very friendly, good to talk to, and helpful. In Chennai, Bangalore, and Kerala were delightful for the folks I met, both Indian and other folks. In Goa, I seem to be getting a lot of giggles. Apparently my hair is amusing.

Dogs: Lots of street dogs in Chennai, of which the number of dogs and general scruffiness has decreased in each city since. Of the walked, leashed, pampered pooch set, Pomeranians are popular. I would hate to be a Pom in the summer here. The street dogs almost down to the dog have nice short hair.

Power: In most places that I have visited so far (Chennai, Bangalore, and Goa), both American and European power adapters will work in the electrical power ports/sockets in the wall. British/Irish ones, no, unless there is a special adapter. In Kerala, only European ones would fit, but that was fine as I brought my European Nokia charger in anticipation of Vienna.

While the power is 240V, all my adapters are rated 110-240V and have been doing an admirable job of holding up on the highest end of the scale. The trick I learned in Ireland (220V) when charging my Powerbook is that if the battery gets too hot, prop the laptop up in a triangle formation and allow the battery and the whole back of the PB to face the air and other other side to have as much air as possible. That trick has come in handy here.

Electricity: India and other South-East Asian countries have a great energy saving device in hotel rooms that the US and Europe would do well to imitate in hotels, offices and homes. When you walk in the room, you insert your hotel key into a slot near the door and then all the lights, A/C, and power comes on. When you leave and take your key with you, all the power turns off and the A/C or fan is switched to lowest fan setting automatically. No leaving the lights on. The only wrench in this lovely economy plan is when you want to leave a device charging, but this could be easily gotten around by having a a set of power ports that are not killed by the key switch.

Pollution: Um. What to say. Time for a clean air and water acts with serious back up behind it. The skies from the ground and from the airplane look like photos of Los Angeles from the 1960s or worse, nothing like a good clean air law and strict regulators to clean up a city's air. Look how LA got whipped into shape by OSHCA over the last 17 years. Now I am off to Mumbai where weather.com reports recent days as "smokey" rather than sunny.

All photos taken by Ms. Jen on Feb. 4, 2006 with her Casio Xlim40
digital camera at the 'new' St. Brigid's Well in Kildare, Ireland.

Yeah! This weekend is the time for my two favorite, highly under-appreciated holidays! St. Brigid's Day today and Ground Hog's Day / Candlemas tomorrow!

Go out and celebrate the transitioning of winter-spring and the increasing daylight by giving your local Ground Hog a big kiss... ;o)

A prayer:

Everliving God, we rejoice today in the fellowship of your blessed servant Brigid, and we give you thanks for her life of devoted service. Inspire us with life and light, and give us perseverance to serve you all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, world without end.

At dinner last night, it came out that various members of my family think I am a vagabond.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a vagabond.

In my seven years and four months as a freelance web designer and developer, there have been many ups and downs to working as a "consultant" rather than cube farming as an employee at an established company. Over the years, I have attempted to solve many of the major pitfalls of freelancing by purchasing my own health in-sewer-ants (Kaiser), opening my own 401k, and working at even-ing out the cash flow, etc., but I never thought of public perception as a pitfall of freelancing.

In web design and development, I know more folks who are freelance than who work at a company. Of the friends who do work at a firm / corporations, I only know of one who is truly satisfied and the others keep talking of going back to freelancing or at least entertain the idea of it or are jealous of friends who are freelance. Of my freelance friends, many of us toy with the idea of steady cube farming, but instead have started to form informal partnerships with other freelancers or small design/dev firms to have greater reach than just one person could.

But to be called a vagabond. Really.

Now to be fair the person who said this is in their late 80s / early 90s and this may be a generational gap issue and a lack of understanding of contemporary work practices & realitites more than an insult, but I was still surprised.

In the web design & dev world, I am a moderate stay at home freelancer compared to some of my compatriots who are on the conference speaking circuit or have clients spread far & wide. I do get out and about a couple of times a year, be it for conference speaking, conference attendance, or just plain travel. Heck, I haven't even reached the gold status, let alone platinum super-flyer, with my frequent flyer program.

How can I be a vagabond if I am not even recognized by my fave airline as a frequent frequent flyer?

All jokes aside, I have reached the stage of life of which in some folks' expectation I should have bought a house, started a family, and otherwise "settled down". So when the news hit the family that I would be spending a great deal of the month of February trotting about on the Nokia Urbanista Diaries project... vagabond!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I will be out and about from Feb. 6th to 24th participating in the Urbanista Diaries project / challenge with Nokia N82. Now one of the glories of having a freelance web design career is that I can say "Yes!" to Nokia and not have to worry about not having enough vacation time. As a freelancer, I just need to get my work done, give warning to my clients and folks I contract with, and then off I go.

More on my destinations in a bit... I first need to find my tin cup, red kerchief, a hobo hat, and suspenders of which to deck myself out for my trip!

Hello Kenya,

I love you, please don't fall to pieces.

Kenya, I have admired you from afar for many years. Even though I prefer chilly, mountainous places and am inordinately fond of snow for a woman born and raised in Southern California, I have dreamed of visiting you for years. Even though I take most of my non-California holidays north of the 50th parallel line, when folks ask for me to list my top five places I must visit before it is all over, besides Iceland, Alaska, Greenland, and Lapland, I always list you.

It is not just Mount Kilamanjaro and its lovely glacier. It is not just your rich, deep heritage and landscape. It is not just the animals and safaris. It is not just Nairobi, a city that has been widely recommended to me. It is your people. Some of the best, truly best humans I have ever know where born and raised in Kenya before they came to California. Rosemary Mwangi. Mark Fredrickson. Among many others.

Dear Kenya, please don't devolve into unrest and murder.

Please Kenya, pull yourself up. Shake the hand of the man or woman next to you. Give them a hug. Sit down together and figure out how to make the government work for all the people of Kenya, not just one tribal group. Representative government for all. Justice for all.

Please, no eye for an eye. Instead, love one another. Or at the very least, peace for the common good.

Please, dear Kenya. Please.

Photo taken on 12.31.07 by Ms. Jen with the Nokia N82.

Brewster's Rockit has the best summary of the year 2007 to date. There have been many blessings in this last year, esp. all of my travels, visiting with friends near and far, as well as the opportunities that 2007 has presented itself, but I am ready for the new year. I like even numbered years and am particularly fond of leap years.

2008, I look forward to visiting with you for 12 months. May you be a delight.

Mie at Kokochi linked to this TED talk by Larry Lessig as the best so far of the TED talk videos that she and Dav have watched. I have watched a few of the Ted talk videos and agree with Mie and Dav on the above Larry Lessig talk.

I saw Lessig speak on Copyright and CreativeCommons at SXSWi 2003. He is amazing in person, on topic, on track, personable, convincing and knows how to pack a punch. Per his style, Larry gives great examples in the above video, stays on topic, and really convinces one that read/write or (re)creativity is the way to go. I agree. To an extent.

I returned home from SXSWi 2003 all fired up about the brave new liberal world of creative commons and set most of my websites to a "Share-Alike" Creative Commons "copyright". All was well until this last year when I have noticed a number of for-profit folks violating this charter with my photos and text, ie using it for their website that they are making a profit from (either it is a business where the photos are a part of a sold product or a website with a lot of ads) and not asking permission for the use of the photos or text.

I don't mind if folks remix/reuse small bits of photos or text if it is for fun/art and they give attribution, or for fair use, but the wholesale lifting of photos and blog posts with no links back has forced me to drop the Creative Commons attribution on this site and my Flickr page and revert back to an "All Rights Reserved" copyright. I don't like it, but after consulting the two lawyers and one US Patent Agent in my life, it is the only way under the current law that I protect my claim.

I would love Lessig's ideas on the creative commons to come into widespread use, but it means that all of us have to agree to respect the Creative Commons and unfortunately there are many who willfully abuse it or are ignorant to the contract and under current US and EU law the only way to really protect it is to have a copyright.

In the beginning of this video, Lessig talks about his attempts to change ideas and laws at the governmental and legislative level but that he is no longer doing so as it is un-effective. For Creative Commons to be more than a lovely idea-set for the liberals and creative-minded amongst us, we do need governmental and legislative back up so that over time we can protect our art from the occasional or rare case of abuse.

****
Update: Sun. 12.16.07 - Tara Hunt of ::HorsePigCow:: more accurately gets at the essence of what I was trying to say in her blog post the "Tragedy of the Commons".

When I first started traveling in college, I loved the "Let's Go" series of travel guides as they led to one to the cheapest of the cheap all over Europe. Sometime in my mid-to-late twenties they failed to satisfy and I moved my travel guide book loyalty to the Lonely Planet series. Lonely Planet had a wider range of budget, moderate, and higher priced options for each town, as well as write ups on more of the history and points of interest, less of "Let's Go"s nightlife and ultra-cheap focus.

I find Fodors guide books to be too stuffy, the DK guides to be very broad in terms of photos and visual diagrams but missing in actually moderate priced places to stay. So, I have kept my loyalty the last ten years to Lonely Planet. In 2004, I purchased the Lonely Planet Ireland guide and it was my faithful companion on Erika & I's 2004 Thanksgiving trip to Ireland, as well as my year at Trinity College, Dublin. But most of the Lonely Planet guide books I have used are written mostly by locals, not travelers, thus big bits are left out, the bits that locals wouldn't care about but travelers would.

Here is my list of things that I would love Lonely Planet to change, fix or cover in their otherwise excellent travel guide books:

1) No hotels near the major airports are ever listed. Not in the Ireland LP, not in the London LP, not in the Spain, nor Andalucia, nor Scotland, nor... Sometimes the most practical thing when you have an early departure or late arrival is stay within a mile or two of the airport. Lonely Planet, please put in a few airport hotels or B&Bs for each major airport. Thanks.

2) Area codes or Full Phone Numbers next to listings: The Lonely Planet guides list country phone codes in the back, and major area codes at the section head, but not next to the listing. While driving two nights ago, we were flipping to 3 separate section trying to get the full number to dial from my mobile to find a B&B to stay at. Very frustrating, esp. when one' mobile's sim chip is not from the same country as one is in.

3) Lonely Planet, please list wifi (wireless internet) locations, free wifi and for pay. This matters. Not just internet cafes or which places to stay have a stand alone computer, but please list wifi for every one of the listings in your books that has wifi. One of the hotels we stayed at in Ireland this last week had free wifi, one had none, and one had paid wifi. I would have booked my stay with preference for internet connection. All the better to blog with and finish up the client loose ends. kthnxbai.

4) Please list more neo-lithic, bronze age, and iron age or other non-major historical sites in the UK & Ireland. If you are a local writer for these guides, you probably think Americans or Germans or Italians are nuts for going to visit old hunks of rock out in muddy fields. These old sites are delightful and really worth exploring. Please list with some directions and explanations.

I am writing this from the Dublin airport where Mom and I are waiting to fly to London Heathrow to start our week in Southern England. I went to the big bookstore in the Dublin Airport mall to get a Lonely Planet England or UK guide so we can know where we are going and where we are going to stay. In an interesting twist, the whole section of travel guides at the airport had Mexico, California, Peru, Egypt, New Zealand, and many other smaller countries, but did not have a single travel guide for the UK, England or Wales. London (3 different publishers), Scotland (2 types) and Edinburgh, but no England or UK...

Hopefully, a bookstore at Heathrow will have a Lonely Planet England. ;o)

Thurs. Nov. 8, 2007

Flying through the Air with the Greatest of Ease
or The small, bouncy child version thereof
or the non-Twitter but NaBloPoMo version

Approx. 4:30pm (PST) or 12:30am (GMT) - After a long and stressful week that included a scheduled small nervous breakdown from 5:05 pm to 5:07 pm on Tuesday afternoon, I am on a Boeing 777 flying over the Great Lakes en route to London. London Calling, the November edition.

Due to completing tasks and finishing my Jane Austen-a-thon, I did not get to sleep until 2am. When the alarm rang at 6:04 am, I was hurting from too little sleep. No matter, zip bags up, and get them out to the car. I drove over to my brother's house and together we drove up to LAX.

My first flight was uneventful as I cat napped. The plane landed in Chicago a bit early and I miscalculated time, I thought I had an hour and a half until boarding my next flight to London, it was really 45 mins. I had a bit of steamed rice and mixed veg at the Manchu Wok place at the food court and a lovely chat with some folks from Yorkshire who had just visited their grandkids in Houston. I then went for a walk, got a little lost, and kept hearing "Last boarding call for London gate K-12" over the paging system. Oops. Last one on the plane.

The flight to London is going well so far. I have the "H" right aisle seat and the block of the middle 5 seats is occupied by a woman and her three children under 6 years old, of which the two boys are bouncing off the seats, walls, aisles, etc. Should be interesting. The Simpsons movie has them somewhat quieted down but the oldest is still kicking the seat in front of him. The lady in front of him is watching the Transformers movie.

The best part of seat backs with video screens is being able to vaguely watch the various movies in one's view, partial attention with no sound. The best way to watch a movie. Unless one is having a Jane Austen-a-thon or Kevin Smith-a-thon, then it should be one movie at a time with sound.

The meal service is now coming by and it is the very first time I called beforehand and ordered a gluten-free meal. I am quite curious what it will be.

While waiting for the Pogues to go on last night, Julie Wanda, Wes, and I stood in the beautiful art deco lobby of the Wiltern Theatre and watched the world go bay. Wes and I both wanted to get a drink and Wanda warned us off, "The drinks are bad and expensive. DON'T do it."

Now wine is really the only alcohol I can consume without getting sick, really sick, due to allergies to brewer's yeast, wheat, rye, corn, and barley, as well as gluten troubles (no beer). The grape is my friend. Except many wines are not my friend, as wineries use a lot of hidden ingredients that are not listed on the bottle and I am allergic to some of them. The worst of it is that many wineries use oak chips with wheat gluten to give that oak-ey taste, and that becomes a celiac problem. Given that the US does not require all the wine additives to be listed on the bottle, drinking a glass of wine can be a crap shoot. When wine is good, it is very good. When it is bad, it is very bad.

The cheaper the wine, the more likely that it will be a dreadful headache in a bottle. Wineries add a variety of sugars, flavors, and chemicals to non-vintage grapes to make the wine tasty and higher in alcohol, thus the evil wine headache. American wineries do this (avoid any wine labeled "California" rather than a county or a wine region). Chilean wineries do it. So do the Australians. etc. etc. etc.

I have had a ton of folk tell me they don't drink wine due to the fact it gives them a headache. If you go to a reputable wine shop, like the Wine Country, and attend one of their tastings, you can learn more about vintage and regional wine and which ones are drinkable and which are not. In my experience, the drinkable, no-headache wines, tend to be over $10 a bottle and are usually not sold at my local grocery store, or if they are at the local grocery store they are over $15 a bottle.

And I am hear to tell you that due to economics in food & beverage business, the likelihood that any of us will find a drinkable, no headache wine by the glass at a bar or restaurant or concert venue is very very slim. Most bars can get [Name Large Company Swill Here] for under $4 a bottle from their distributor, pour up to 5 glasses of wine on the bottle, and then charge you $5-7 for your headache. Do the math, it is too good for them to turn down.

Even the *supposed* "premium" wines like BV, Chalone, Kendall Jackson, etc., sold by the glass at many restaurants also are mass produced by very large companies and have many unlisted additives (BV is a huge headache in a bottle for me). The LA Times earlier this year in its weekly Food section reported that there is a movement afoot to get legislation passed that would require all wine in California to label all ingredients and additives. It is not just the big producers but also little wineries have piped up in opposition to this movement as they say it takes the "mystery" out of wine making. I call bullshit on this. Your mystery is making me sick.

I have poured over the big distributor's catalogs while in the office at Alex's, I can tell you many of the non-headache wines start at $9 - 11 per bottle via the distributor, even if you or I can buy that same bottle at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods for $12 (TJs is using economies of scale to make a slim profit). What bar owner is going to get the good wine when they can make oodles off the cheap wine?

But it is a self-defeating loop, as then customers won't buy the wine after a while due to it giving them a headache, the bar then says, "We don't really sell wine, so we should only get the cheap stuff." The bartenders are skeptical and when you ask, "Do you have wine?", they make a face and thus sell less wine.

We have broken the cycle at Alex's by finding a decent priced, decent tasting, not-too headachey wine (Sangre de Toro), that customers like a lot and the bar sells before the open bottles go bad. So, when I am out at another concert venue, I am always hopeful that they too have taken the plunge to get better wine... I am also hopeful for world peace, too. I am an optimist.

Last night, at the Wiltern, they were serving a mass produced Australian white and red. Julie warned me off of it, and I foolishly hoped it might be decent. $7 later, I had a glass of wine in hand. It tasted decent on the first few sips and then degraded from there. Halfway through the headache started and I today I have had a huge headache all day. A headache from less than one glass of wine.

And I was charged $7 for the headache. Nice.

Wiltern, you are a great concert venue, you can serve good wine and still make a profit without gouging your customers. Thank you.

" A Dark Sky Over Death Valley " - Photo by Dan Duriscoe, U.S. National Park Service

Amongst several of my "Recovering Evangelical" friends we have a running joke that we now attend the Church of Krista. Ever since I hit my personal wall of dealing with religious institutions in late 2004 / early 2005, I have been searching for clear, equitable voices on faith and religion. In 2005, while driving to the market one Sunday afternoon, I heard the Speaking of Faith public radio show on KPCC.

Most Sunday afternoons, I am not near a radio, so I have taken to listening to Speaking of Faith on podcast and truly appreciated the show's far ranging points of view. I have learned about faiths and perspectives that I had not been exposed to before, as well as being reminded of author's who I would like to read their books. Most of all, while I walk through the valley of questions and exploration, I appreciate the company.

In today's podcast on "Beyond the Atheism-Religion Divide", Krista delivered:

"I haven't interviewed Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, for the same reason I never interviewed Jerry Falwell, which is he had all the answers for himself and everyone else." - Krista Tippett

Recently, a few friends who I greatly respect have become devotees to the Cult of Dawkins. What I have read from Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens has been just as definitively dogmatic and toxic as anything spewed out of the mouths of James Dobson or Tim LeHaye.

To this end, I am very surprised that my friends are falling for this style of atheism that is verging or already verged on dogmatism. If you are going to be a devotee, why not pick Sam Harris who at least can laugh at himself, point out various perspectives and encourage the faithful to consider how atheism can fulfill or at least consider the spiritual?

Folks, modernism is over, we are now in the digital age of multiple connections and convergences, why do we still feel the need for apologetics and dogma? Can we not have discussion and community? How about Open Discussion and Thought 2.0?

;o)

I love the hustle and bustle of airports, TSA security theatre of the absurd aside, I like the engery and people watching. I like flying, but I don't like taking off or landing, esp. landing, in the plane. Most of what I like about flying is that one is set apart from home or your destination, it is a passage of sorts. If one uses the time wisely, be it an hour to Vegas or 11 to London, one can have all the time in the world to de-stress, to catch up, to catch a nap, to daydream, to get bored and restless.

I have had a few pretty intense weeks recently with a lot of thought, prep, work, networking, new allergy rotation diet, and stress. I welcomed getting on the Boeing 777 to London Heathrow at 10pm on Monday night. Last night's plane was 2 hours late out of the gate giving me time to read the whole of the LA Times and have a chat with a fellow passenger. Once the plane lumbered off the runway, I had a decent chicken and rice dinner, and off to sleep I went. I woke up after about 5-6 hours, still feeling a little sleeping and with 3 more hours of the flight to go.

Before departing for the airport, I loaded a bunch of blog posts and articles into browser tabs so that I could catch up and read them whilst waiting for the trans-Atlantic flight to be over. As I read, I am still mildly comatose and have my laptop screen set on the lowest brightness. Yeseterday's tea at dim sum must of been gunpowder green tea, as I have had a nasty sore through since lunch. Stages of awake and allergies aside, it is delightful to be flying under Greenland and Iceland on my way to London-town. London calling...

And for the record, while I was sleeping I did not attempt to open the plane door to let the pixies out, I did ask them to curl up around me to share a bit of heat as it is danged cold in this cabin...

Over the course of my life, I have stayed at a wide range of hotels, motels, B&Bs, hostels, from high end luxury hotels for extended family holidays all the way to roach motels in Lost Wages with punk friends. Over the last two years, I have done a lot of traveling and have stayed in a fair share of hotel rooms for business purposes where an internet connection is not desired but necessary.

The Hampton Inn Downtown in Austin, Texas, has spoiled me for all mid-range hotels. The hotel is fun, nice and roomy, and best yet FREE wifi and FREE ethernet. Yes, free. Not $9.95 a day or £5 an hour. Free. Thus, when due to circumstances, I find myself at a Marriott, Westin, or other mid-range business class hotel and I am charged a minimum of $9.95 a day for the internet, I get cranky.

On the other hand, I have had the opportunity to stay at several Best Westerns and a few lower end Microtels as well. While Best Western tends to be about $50 dollars cheaper a night than Marriott, Westin (at its cheapest), and Hilton properties, the rooms are nice, decor a little chintz-y, but the wifi at Best Western is FREE. Now, if you don't mind yellow & white rooms with ugly bed spreads, Microtel will deliver a nice clean sleep and FREE wifi all for about $59 a night! And you get to share the parking lot with trucks!

In May, while in Denver, I could not see why I was paying the Marriott $159 a night plus $9.95 for a bad internet connection, when I could move over to the local Microtel and save $100. I did move and the wifi connection was faster at the Mircrotel.

Expecting the lower end hotels and motels to have free wifi doesn't always hold true, as while I was working on our entry for the Rails Rumble, I stayed at an Extended Stay America. The rooms where cookie cutter, even more so than Microtel, the bed was concrete block hard, and the internet connection was for charge. A recent stay at the Travelodge in San Jose, while the wifi was free, the environs were not so nice.

The upswing is that unless my family is kindly paying for high end accommodation or I am in Austin at the Hampton Inn Downtown, I will be choosing my hotel options based off of whether the wifi is free or not. Sorry Marriott & Westin, your beds, rooms, and in hotel restaurants do not add that much more value to my stay that I will be grateful to pay for an internet connection. Instead of adding value, the for charge wonky internet connection adds anger. Do you charge a surcharge for the FluffyWhiteBed™? No. Do you use the FluffyWhiteBed™ as a way to pull in customers? Yes. Do the same with consistently good internet connection that is complimentary to your paying guests as a distinctive.

Until the mid-range hotels see the wisdom in complimentary wifi in the rooms to accent the FluffyWhiteBed™, Best Western and Microtel have my business for their combination of good value, clean rooms, and their free wifi. La Quinta Inn's have my business for the fact that they are consistently one of the few pet friendly hotels.

Since I will be traveling to London twice this fall and finding decent priced accommodation in a safe neighborhood is a difficult task to start with, I was shocked to find that the mid-range business hotels start their wifi prices at £5 an hour (nearly $10) not a day and even the budget hotels charge a minimum of £5 a day for wifi or internet connection. After much searching, I found a nice studio stay place in Bayswater with free wifi on a street I know is safe and within walking distance to the two Tube stations in the area. I will let you know how it goes...

In the last few months, I have received a few comments from friends and acquaintances about how white the decor in my apartment is and how little wall decorations I have up. Over the last 15 years of having my own places, with or without roommates, I have noticed that while I love American pioneer antique furniture (1790 - 1870, preferably in cherry or mahogany wood) and contemporary art, my interior design sense prefers lots of interior white space, be it white walls or curtains or just plain space.

In my current 224 sq. foot apartment, any space at all is a premium. Half of my belongings and furniture, including my treasured 1820 cherry pioneer carved bed, are in storage. I have worked hard the last four months to make my new cubbyhole of a place appear spacious while accommodating my stuff, esp. my books and corner cabinet. To this end, I have purposely chosen white curtains and cheerful accents, but I have no art up on the walls.

It is scandalous amongst artists to have bare walls, especially when one owns and has in storage as much artwork as I do. Dan Callis has already given me trouble three times now for my bare walls.

But. but.. but... My house is so small and more importantly I have realized that some of my favorite visual moments, the ones that have burnt the images to my brain, are the ones where I am inside, relaxed and looking out onto a visually saturated out of doors, be it looking through a window or a door.

I don't mentally record this visual stimulus when I am inside a visually compelling or overwhelming space nor when I am in an industrial or office space, only when I am in a home space where there is a great deal of white of which to contrast with the colors outside.

Thus, my reluctance to paint or over decorate my home space. Fine wood furniture in shades of brown and red or fabrics of red and gold make nice accents to the white, but the interior white makes the blues, golds and more muted colors outside shine even brighter.

Thus, I wait for the golden hour to record such external vividness whilst inside with my camera. My interior is acting as a blank canvas for the spectacle outside.

I find the amount of paper spam that my new neighborhood gets everyday to be very disturbing. Every morning sometime between 5am - 9am, multiple someones drop off flyers, coupons, magazines, magazines on to all the door steps in the neighborhood all without permission.

All of this is on top of the stack, sometimes up to an inch thick, of "direct mailing", flyers, coupons, etc. that companies pay the U.S. Post office to put in my mailbox. Our mail lady gets mad at us if we don't pick up our mail everyday. Except it is not mail, it is paper spam.

Between the paper spam left on my door step and in my mailbox, I make a trip or two a day with a stack of papers to the recycle bin in the back of the apartment building. Just like the spam I get via email, the paper spam goes straight to the bin unread.

Are companies desperate for my business or are local marketing / print shops / design firms desperate for their business? People, you are killing trees and ANNOYING me to the point that I don't want to use your service, read your cheesy "upscale" magazine - oops, I mean 4 color glossy excuse to sale ads, or go to your business if you are going to spam me like this.

Next door neighbor Earl just walked around the complex picking up all the paper spam that arrived today, walked back to the recycle bin to deposit said spam, and he is furious.

Direct Marketers, local print shops, franchise businesses, etc: STOP PAPER SPAMMING US!!!

Thank you.

Made in West Germany.

In January of 1990, I returned from a month long study tour of Israel to find myself in need of pots and pans. In typical Jenifer fashion, but non-college student fashion, I bit the bullet, went to Williams and Sonoma at Satan Coast Plaza and bought a good set of pots and pans. When I got back to my Mom's house after the shopping expedition, she was astounded and got quite mad at me for spending $299 on a pan set when I could have gone to Kmart or the like and spent under $20 for some cheap aluminum.

I said, "I bought a Chantal enameled set that will last a lifetime."

The folks at my dormitory back at school were even more astounded. Really, why would I buy a WHOLE set of pots and pans when the Caf was just around the corner?

Today, 17 years and 3 months and some weeks later, I unpacked my lovely blue Chantal enameled pots and pans from their boxes (I kept the original packaging & reuse it every time I move), washed the dust off and put them away. As I was unwrapping the boxes, I noticed that each one of them said, "Made in West Germany".

Several thoughts popped into my head in rapid succession:
1 - "Hey, I really did buy a good set of pots. They are still here and I still like them.
2 - "Wow, the mark Roommate K. made on the bottom of the saucepan from steaming broccoli with no water is still there."
3 - "Made in West Germany?"
4 - "West Germany?"
5 - "Wait... when did West Germany ... oh yeah... 1989. Wow. West. Germany. West Germany."
6 - "God Bless the Germans and their good quality products."
7 - "Shit, has it really been 17 years? AGH!"
8 - "I wonder if Chantal enamel ware is still manufactured in Germany or if the new sets from Williams and Sonoma or Macy's say 'Made in China' on the bottom?"

According to their website, Chantal is now manufacturing the enameled parts in Germany, the lids in Japan, and assembling them in Houston, TX.

But West Germany!

Denver appears to be inflicted with Californization.

Yesterday, my great aunt Babe, hosted the annual family "Easter Saturday" dinner at her house in Palm Desert. She cooked a fabulous lunch of ham, green salad, potato salad, and broccoli salad. Great aunt Babe is 94 93 and still goes golfing every week. She is a quiet dynamo.

I had never eaten broccoli salad before and Babe's version was amazing with broccoli, red onion, thin crispy bacon, golden raisins and sunflower seeds in a thin tangy mayo based dressing. Possibly one of the top 5 best salads I have ever eaten in my life. I wanted the recipe. So, I asked for it after lunch.

Great Aunt Babe said, "No."

Me, "No?"

Great Aunt Babe, "No."

Me, "Oh... Are you sure?"

Great Aunt Babe, "Yes, it is for Lynn."

I sat back down on the couch bewildered. My 2nd cousin-in-law, Pat, asked, "Did she give it to you?" "No. She said it is for Lynn," I said. "That way it stays in the family," Pat said. Me, "Hmmph. Well, I will google it. Surely the internets will have the recipe."

I clicked on my Nokia's web browser, opened the bookmark for Google, and typed in "broccoli salad". As I was typing, Pat said, "I always forget about Google. Look, your phone already has all the links."

One by one I read the linked recipes and lo and behold, the first 7 recipes listed were versions the salad we ate that day. I read the recipes to Pat and she said, "That's it, it needs to sit overnight." "Hey, look Elise has a recipe for it with peas." I then sent Pat the link to Elise's recipe from my phone and we were both happy. No one else noticed our conversation, nor my looking up the recipe on my Nokia's browser.

Thirty minutes passed I took the remainder of my dishes into the kitchen when great aunt Babe rounded the corner, picked up a piece of note paper and a pencil to write "1 c. mayo, 2 teaspoons cider vinegar, 1/2 c. sugar" on the paper. She hands it to me and says, "Here is the dressing, use cider vinegar - that is the secret, and then whatever vegetables you want." And walks off.

I went back to the couch and told Pat what had happened. We laughed.

I am of the internet generation. Why not share your favorite recipe? A version of it is most likely already up on the 'net, so no reason not to. But when you are 94, maybe the open source world that I am so used to is not what Babe lived or what she grew up with.

Have you had anyone deny you a recipe when you asked?

Happy Easter!

Thinking about Tony Campolo's "It's Friday, but Sunday is Coming". Today is the day we celebrate that Sunday is Coming!

The above letter was mailed on Jan. 11th from Dublin, arrived in California on Jan. 25th (today). Deadline for the Feb. 16th graduate commencement was Jan. 19th, exactly one week ago. I was told that we would have received our letters by mid-November and our class voted to graduate on Feb. 16th. Even if I were to Fed-ex the commencement application back this afternoon, it would be a week and a half late.

I guess I will have my own party here in Calif. on the 16th. Who wants to join me?

We can go over to the Chapman University chapel for the dark wood university chapel ambiance, we will need someone with gray hair in a black robe to intone in Latin, all at 8am (to be in time sync with the 4pm graduation in Dublin), and then we can go over to pub (O'Hara's?) and get drunk after.... Or maybe we can stay in bed and go to Walt's at 5pm for happy hour instead... ;oD

Yesterday, Thurs. Jan. 4, 2007, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) was sworn in as Speaker of the House of Representatives for the United States of America.

A woman of my mother's generation, a woman who got married at 20, a woman who was a stay at home mom, a woman who entered the work world as a congresswoman at age 49, a woman who has been married for 43 years, that woman, this Nancy Pelosi is now second-in-line for the Presidency of the United States of America. The third most powerful person in our nation.

Thank God. Thank God. Thank God. The marble ceiling has been broken.

To my mother, the woman who in her twenties, in the early 1960s, was repeatedly told that women could only be teachers or nurses. To my mother, the woman who was denied entrance into the family business in any capacity other than a secretary due to her gender. To my mother, the woman who was born the same year as Nancy Pelosi. To my mother, the woman who has been a mother, a teacher, and a activist, I dedicate this post.

To all the women of my mother's and Nancy's generation, Thank You All for breaking the Glass and Marble ceilings!

A quote from Rep. Pelosi's acceptance speech from SFGate.com:

"And I thank my constituents in San Francisco and to the state of California for the privilege of representing them in Congress. Saint Francis of Assisi is our city's patron saint, and his song of St. Francis is our city's anthem: 'Lord, make me a channel of thy peace; where there is darkness may we bring light, where there is hatred, may we bring love, and where there is despair, may we bring hope.'

"Hope, hope, that is what America is about and it is in that spirit that I was sent to Congress.

"And today, I thank my colleagues. By electing me speaker, you have brought us closer to the ideal of equality that is America's heritage and America's hope.

"This is an historic moment -- and I thank the leader for acknowledging it. I think you Leader Boehner. It is an historic moment for the Congress, and an historic moment for the women of this country. It is a moment for which we have waited over 200 years. Never losing faith, we waited through the many years of struggle to achieve our rights. But women weren't just waiting; women were working. Never losing faith, we worked to redeem the promise of America, that all men and women are created equal. For our daughters and granddaughters, today we have broken the marble ceiling. For our daughters and our granddaughters, the sky is the limit, anything is possible for them.

Why is it that my two favorite products, St. Ives Collagen Elastin lotion and KMS's Daily Shampoo, after years of excellent, consistent products, both decide to reformulate (for the worse in both cases) and repackage their products? On top of the fact that both St. Ives and KMS have replaced excellent lotion (SI) and shampoo (KMS) with gross, candy-esque smelling "New", "Improved" reformulations. Yuck.

Obviously, both companies have nose / smelling dead formulators. On top of the bizarre smells like fruity jolly rancher "New" "Improved" scents, both the lotion and the shampoo were repackaged into pearly organic shaped bottles that look just like Suave products but cost 2-5 times a much...

On top of the upgraded "Salon" pricing structure, KMS got rid of a daily shampoo for normal hair and now only has sickening jolly rancher cotton candy shampoo for Moist/damaged/repair, smoothing, straightening, and volume hair. I have plenty of volume, thank you. I do not want to straighten my hair, it has a nice wave, thank you. I do not want my hair oily within the hour from the Moist shampoo, thank you. KMS, I don't want to smell like a jolly rancher candy. Thank you, I will start buying Biolage or Whole Foods brand, half the KMS price, all the normal/daily shampooing with no extras.

KMS and St. Ives - Pass go, do not collect my $200, go straight to bad marketing / product design jail.

Metafilter at its best yesterday, "Pony Express for the Damned" Me-Fi'ing on The Post-Rapture Post:

I am hiring myself out as a post rapture cat-sitting service for the saved. Seriously. You wouldn't believe the Venn diagram intersection of suckers, cat owners, and Christian fundamentalists. - Slarty Bartfast, commenter

I am officially outing myself as a Panmillennialist. Yes, folks, it will all pan out in the end.

What up with the obsession for the end of the world? Premillennialists*, why your desire, nee desparate need, be apart of your own cool crowd - overriding Jesus's call to first love the Lord, your God, and then love your neighbor?

A great quote on Thomas Merton from today's LA Times article on Huston Smith, "Religion 'rock star' turns his eye inward":

And he [Huston Smith] recalled the time he asked Christian mystic Thomas Merton to explain what the life of a monk was like.

"It's very nice," Merton responded.

"I'm surprised by your response," Smith said, "given what I know about the three vows."

"Oh, those," Merton said. "Poverty is a snap. Chastity more difficult, but manageable. But obedience — obedience is a bugger."

Preach it, Brother Merton, obedience is a bugger.

Screenshot from latimes.com Tues. 11/7/06 at midnight.

Complete and absolute relief. I am so glad that we as a nation have returned to a medium / center. I am also excited that 2 Independents have won Senate seats. Thank God.

And even bigger excitement is our first ever woman Speaker of the House. Big Yeah!

Do.it.today.before.8pm. Go Vote.

Last night I went out to dinner at Utopia on First Street in downtown Long Beach with Lauren and two of her work colleagues from the "Ad Agency". Dinner and the company were delightful. Afterwards we moved two doors west to the House of Hayden where I was to meet up friends celebrating Kimm's birthday and more of the "Ad Agency" folk were having a lovely time.

During the course of dinner and cocktails, Lauren and her friends offered many ideas about my job search, told tales of a career in advertising, made recommendations and offers of help to get a job in the advertising agency world. I stated that I preferred to work at a technology company or design firm, but the others argued that things were riding high in ad world and that I could easily get a job. Stories were told of agencies in New York, San Francisco and LA.

I got home and felt off. Not due to the wine, nor the duck dinner, nor the dogs going crazy upon my arrival, but something was off. I woke up at 4am with Belle wanting to play ball (having a small dog dropping a tennis ball on your chest at 4am is hard to ignore). It was in the time that it took to go back to sleep that clarity arrived.

As I took Belle's ball away, put it out of her reach on the mantle piece, and then turned back to my bed, I realized why I am very ambivalent about ad agency work. Yes, it is creative. Yes, it is a great opportunity to work on high profile websites for large companies with large budgets. Yes, it is an opportunity to work with a team of highly intelligent and creative folk. But... but...

My main reason that I want to give up my freelance business and go to work for a tech company or design firm is that I want to participate in the creation of an interface, device, or software that could impact or make easier a small or large part of someone's life. Whoever that someone or someone's life may be.

I have watched several techno-phobic friends and family members who wanted nothing to do with computers or cell phones come alive to the technologies and possibilities when a program or device came out that helped them do a task easier than they could do before, and they went from hating the technology to loving it in less than an hour.

* Blue would never ever touch her email the whole time I worked with her. I would read her email and call her to let her know that she needed look at it. Then I invited her to gmail, she moved, and now she loves email and uses her gmail account daily.

* Alex hated email and really had no use for computers. His cellphone was the bane of his existence, as he hated answering it. Then he got a Sidekick and I watched him in the course of one afternoon go from a playa hater to a Sidekick lover. And he returned his emails from his Sidekick.

* My mom recently threw her cell phone at the dashboard of her car out of frustration, it bounced and shattered her windshield. She could not see the screen nor navigate the interface even with her glasses on. She went over to Verizon and demanded a new phone, they up-sold her to a smart phone, and now she is moblogging. Really. She figured out MMS on her own and I was stunned to find a picture message from her when I was in Ireland, and when I returned, I set her up on Vox. Even more shocking for my luddite parent, she ordered cable broadband this week so that she can spend more time on Vox: writing captions, making comments and otherwise enjoying her new blogging adventure.

* My friend Shawn in Dublin is fully deaf in one ear and has only 25% hearing in the other with a hearing aid. He is a Ph.D student at Trinity and he conducts most of his non-face-to-face communication via text messaging. One can't leave him a voicemail, as he can't hear it. Shawn would really like it if his voicemail could send him a text or email that is the voice message all typed out. Wouldn't we all?

All that said/written, I want to participate in a team that creates a program / software, an interface, website, or device that changes lives even if in a small way that creates joy. I want to make a difference and I heard Vint Cerf when he spoke to the TCD computer science grad students on changing the world, even if in a small way. Some may claim that an ad agency can and does shape the way individuals and cultures behave and thing, I am reluctant to join that world and ambivalent about it. I would rather brave the tech world with all of its flaws. I would love to work in mobile, as most mobile interface and menus are difficult at best and windshield shattering at worst. I would love to help my mom and Shawn be able to communicate to the best of their abilities.

A shop on First Street in downtown Long Beach is all dressed up for Christmas. Once again, can't folks wait until the day after Thanksgiving?

While I like Halloween, I don't love it, and in recent years I haven's really gotten into it. I much prefer Groundhog's Day over the other 3 solar cross-quarter days (May Day, Aug 1, and Halloween).

Halloween last year found me hiking around the hills above Glendalough and that evening sitting in my room amazed at all the fireworks. Halloween in Ireland includes lots of bonfires and fireworks and not so heavy on the costumes/fancy dress and/or trick or treating. It is a good old fashioned fire holiday. Goodbye summer, hello winter.

I am a fan of All Saints Day, even though I did not grow up Catholic. In college instead of throwing a Halloween party, I had an All Saint's Day party on Nov. 1 where everyone had to come as their favorite saint. The best part is when the "Hermans" came dressed as the 80s metal band, Saint.

As I am a day late on a post about All Saints Day, I shall celebrate All Soul's Day or Dia de los Muertos today by going to lunch at El Camino Real and then attempting wake Alex from the dead mid-afternoon... ;op

"It is possible to live a good life, even if it is not an easy life." - Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen

Heard when listening to Speaking of Faith today.

I am not a fan of bagged lettuce, greens, or carrots and I have been a non-fan for a few years. If I have to get them or use them at someone else's house, I wash all the contents at least two more times. But the bag says pre-washed, why wash again? Hives.

Yes, I get hives from eating veggies that come from a factory to the market in a bag. Even worse are the pre-peeled carrots in a bag, as I get hives and stomach troubles.

I much prefer to buy loose carrots and loose lettuce or greens that are still in their own bunch / ball. I can then use the carrots or greens as I need them and wash them as I need them.

Over at Chez Pim, guest blogger Andy Griffith has a good and point essay entitled Spinach!?:

A psychologist might be able to do a better job than I in telling you why so many people feel comforted when they see their food coming to them in sterile looking sealed plastic bags covered in corporate logos, nutritional information, legal disclaimers and “use by” dates. “It’s convenient,” they say. It is true that the open piles of washed baby greens that were once the norm in supermarkets and farmers markets were vulnerable to post harvest/ post wash contamination. Those sneeze guards over the pizza parlor salad bar aren’t there for nothing. But I’ll tell you that every sealed bag of pre-washed greens is like a little green house. The greens inside are still alive, as are the bacteria living on them. If the produce in the bag is clean, great, but if it isn’t the bacteria present has a wonderful little sealed environment to reproduce in, free from any threat until the dressing splashes down and the shadow of a fork passes over. Frankly, I think convenience is overrated.

The LA Times has reported today on E. Coli Pervades Harvest Area:

The bacterium that has sickened people across the nation and forced growers to destroy spinach crops is so pervasive in the Salinas Valley that virtually every waterway there violates national standards.

Monterey County's Salinas Valley is one of the world's most intensely farmed regions and a major supplier of lettuce and spinach to the nation. The current outbreak of food poisoning marks the 20th time since 1995 that the dangerous E. coli strain has been linked to lettuce or spinach.

The source of the pathogen has not yet been pinpointed, but tainted water is considered a likely culprit.

Many creeks and streams near the region's spinach fields, including the Salinas River, Gabilan Creek, Towne Creek, Tembladero Slough and Old Salinas River Estuary, are known to be carriers of the E. coli strain implicated in the food poisonings. When consumed, people experience cramping, diarrhea and, in severe cases, kidney failure.

Although the growers do not draw water from creeks to irrigate their fields, their crops could be tainted by runoff from nearby livestock operations or Central Coast urban areas.

According to the LA Times article, only one stream in the Salinas watershed is E. Coli free, the stream that goes through a state part with good riparian "natural" vegetation. All the other streams and rivers are contaminated by livestock and urban runoff (dog & cat shit).

California agricultural and livestock landowners in conjunction with state and federal authorites need to take better care of the streams and stream buffer vegetation in areas. Keep livestock at a certain distance from the streams and encourage natural vegetation to grow around the perimeters of the drainage.

It is not just the responsibility of farmers, ranchers and the government to make sure our land usage and water supplies are properly husbanded, the rest of us need to do our part, be you in Dublin, LA or a nice rural town: Pick up your cat and dog poo! Urban and suburban runoff effects the health of the streams, rivers and the ocean.

Our project supervisor Feargal Fitzpatrick brought up this article from last Saturday's Irish Times in our meeting this morning, in regards to Neo-Lithic sites (dolmens and the like) and "Celtic" nationalism:

Celtic invasion is pure mythology

World View: Barry Raftery, professor of Celtic archaeology at University College Dublin, admits an enormous problem in justifying his subject: there is no archaeological evidence for a Celtic invasion of Ireland. Squaring that awkward fact with loose talk of a Celtic Tiger, Celtic crosses, Celtic soul, Celtic rock and Celtic art is a difficult task for contemporary cultural understanding as well as for archaeological theorising, writes Paul Gillespie.

Over the period from about 450 BC to AD 450 when it is commonly agreed by scholars that there were Celtic societies and civilisations in western and central Europe, hardly any material evidence has been found here to substantiate the notion of Celtic Ireland.

There is no Celtic pottery - or pottery of any kind until well into the Christian period. Only 40-50 such swords or other military instruments are extant, six decorated brooches, eight scabbards - compared to the hundreds of thousands excavated in western France alone, for example.

There are no chariots in the 20-40 small burial sites unearthed, he told a conference on "European Culture: A Vision for the Future" organised by the British-Irish Encounter organisation in Cork last month. The patterns of burials, settlements and material culture show fundamental continuity with the earlier prehistoric periods which brought the original settlers here 9-11,000 years ago after the last Ice Age. The fascinating new science of historical genetics finds no evidence of a specifically Celtic migration.

And yet by AD 500 certainly and probably much earlier, the Gaelic language was spoken all over the island. It is undoubtedly a Celtic language, and probably a distinctively archaic one. Raftery asked if there is no evidence of invasion, how did the language spread here? Through a small upper crust? Or the kidnap of women over many years? He recalled the remark of one scholar, that "early Celtic art has no genesis", to illustrate the intellectual difficulties involved. Can there be a culture without a people?

Home

Home is a funny word. Not funny ha ha, but funny many layered. Funny painful. Funny good. Funny ironic. Funny you may know what I mean.

I grew up in a family that moved every year or two as both of my parents married, divorced and remarried more than a few times. By the time I was 22, I had lived in 27 different houses. The five years that I lived at the Palmyra Street house in Orange (Sept. 2000 to Sept. 2005) was the longest that I have lived in any one place my entire life by 2.5 years.

Every 5-7 years or so, I get a wild hair up my metaphorical bowel system and decide that I need to move out of California and then maybe I will find home.

In 1992, I lived in Europe for six months and then came home to California.

In 1994, I moved to Boston for education and experience for 3.564 years and then came back home to California.

In 2005, I moved to Dublin and in October of 2006 I will move back home to California.

For as much as I love adventure, travel, and exploring new places, I have found that my home state of California is my heart's home. While I have no house to call home, I have had the same storage place in La Habra since 1989. Does that count?

I love Ireland, I can't live there for good. I knew that this trip home to California would make it even harder to go back to Dublin for the next 2 months to complete my masters degree.

This trip to go speak and attend BlogHer '06 really brought home the fact that both my native SoCal and the SF/SJ Bay Area is the land of my future.

As I sit now at LAX typing this post and bluetoothing the photos of the last 7 days to the Silver Princess, I know, Lord willing, that I will be coming home to California in early October.

Coming home to the golden hills and oak trees. Coming home to the souless strip malls and stucco'd mcmansions. Coming home to 30 some odd other million folk in my native state. Coming home to an amazing assortment of fresh fruits, veggies, wine, meat, and other food staples. Coming home to a state that I love, the country of my heart.

I am a Californian.

Vinod Kholsa presents Biofuels: Think Outside the Barrel at Google's EngEDU:

Conversation in the apartment kitchen this morning:

Roommate's German Girlfriend: Oh, you are rooting for Germany!

Me: Huh??????

Me: ((thinking: Uh, yeah, if Germany is playing the Ducks at Dodger Stadium, sure I'll root for them, esp. if the Ducks get to keep their hockey sticks and play by hockey rules....))

Roommate's German Girlfriend: Well, your hair is black, red and yellow like the German flag. Did you dye it that way for today?

Me: ((completely puzzled as morning brain pre-caffeine sorts through information))

Me: Ha ha ha... no, usually the streak in my hair is purple but has faded to pink....

Me: ((uh... is she talking about soccer? uhhh... I think so... uhhh... my hair is brown, pink and blonde right now... what country's flag is brown, pink and yellow? I will root for them in underwater chess... dang, I don't have any rice dream for my millet cereal... what am I going to eat... oh, look leftover rice pasta and half a diet coke! Yeah!))

I have spent my life in a sports family, a family that plays sports not watches it. And a reading family. Books, books, and lots more books. I can sail, play volleyball, ride a horse, play soccer, play baseball, downhill ski, cross-country ski, hike, ride my bike, roller skate, ice skate, etc. I even like to go to the odd baseball game on occasion (once every 5 years), with binoculars, mostly to figure out which guy on which team has the nicest natural round butt (excellent butt watching at the cheap seats at Fenway Park).

But watch a game on the Devil's Boob-Tube? Fuck that. Boring. Why not have a grass growing channel... If one is going to be a couch potato or lying in bed sausage, it should be done with a good book or a good blog, not watching other people play sports. Go play your own sport.

So to combat my complete lack of interest in watching and following Sport(s) on TV or radio or in the paper or remembering which team is playing which sport let alone the danged stats... I have a running joke with anyone who is sport(s) obsessed, I listen intently and then make the following joke, "So, you are really excited that [Insert Name of Their Fave Team] is playing [Insert Name of a Famous Team in a Completely Different Sport] at [Insert Name of Venue/Stadium for yet a Third Sport, Preferrably in Another State or Country]?"

Rabid sports fans who know me well roll their eyes, rabid fans who don't know me are either shocked into silence by my Blasphemy or try to Correct My Evil Ways by explaining the inner, molecular details of said sport. Well then, I've been known to follow it up by requesting a drunk Brit in the vicinity to explain the rules of Cricket in 2 minutes or less...

I promise to not bore you with a long detailed discussion on the ins and outs of identifying a Black Phoebe vs. a Eastern Phoebe when bird watching, if you promise not to bore me with a long detailed discussion about the stats on your favorite [Insert Name Here] Team.

But if you want to discuss who has the best natural, not enhanced by steriods, butt amongst the lads on the team of your favorite sport, then let's talk!

1) Happy July and Why I like the Fourth of July : Parades, BBQs, homemade peach ice cream, good homemade fried chicken, potato salad, little kid's bikes all dressed up in crepe paper, fireworks, riding one's bike in Huntington Beach on the boardwalk and watching the world go by. And most importantly, it is the only major US holiday with no completed stressed out family dinner!

Fourth of July 1988 was the first time I was out of the country for the 4th and I was very sad. I was studying Italian in Florence and the Mormon missionaries who worked one of the Piazzas did not invite me to their BBQ (Elder Jones & Elder Bolton and I had had a few run ins previously and they were adverse to attempting to convert me after the first run in, but they did later rub in the fact that they had fried chicken and watermelon.).

Fourth of July 2002, I was at LAX and in the airplane flying to London. The post-9/11 very full Terminal 4 at LAX was eerily quiet on that particular Independence Day and my Mom worried extensively that it was a very bad day to fly. It was just quiet. No chicken, no homemade peach ice cream, and no cute kids in parades with crepe paper in their bike's spokes. Just lots of police and a very safe plane ride to London-town.

This year, I will spend the Fourth of July, not riding bikes with my sister in HB, but in meetings in Dublin for our MSCMM project. I am already sad. I suppose I should make some fried chicken, find some fireworks, and invite a few folk over... But the good news is that there will be no stressful family get together. Wahoo!

2) When I read the newspaper, I always start with the comics, move to the weather page, then opinion, and finally the front page news. My mom starts with the the front page news and then moves to the weather, and only later, if she has time, does she read the opinion section. She never reads the comics. When I read the weather page, I love the precipitation charts, the moon's comings and goings as well as global temps. My mom prefers the tidal charts and the Highs and Lows, as she is a surfer and she has her priorities as to what swell it is when.

Yesterday both the Irish Times and the LA Times online version listed the moon as rising in the 11:00am hour and under moonset listed "No Moon Set". How can the moon not set? This morning's Irish Times had the moon rising around 11:40am, so it had to set sometime yesterday.... Inquiring minds want to know what kind of astronomical / meterological laziness is this on the part of the weather page contributors????

3) Go HPV Vaccination! Thank God, it was approved. If you are female and breathing, go get vaccinated! Let's make cervical cancer history.

4) Just in time for the 4th of July, from the NY Times : 10 Days That Changed History

5) Laugh out loud funny post from Derek Powazek for the dog owners and lovers amongst us : My Dog is So Smart.

I am trying to study for the two exams that I have upcoming for this week (Tues & Wed) that cover 6 subjects and am finding myself immersed in an wide variety of primary texts and commentary, as well as academic papers, on design, technology, culture, and narrative. This has lead to some interesting, if not down right amusing, juxtaposition of ideas and writing styles.

For your perusal today, I shall give you two exerpts, one from the introduction to the Futurist Manifesto and the other is from the FAQ at the GNU project.

Exerpt from "The Futurist Manifesto", by F. T. Marinetti, 1909

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel - a guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. `Smell,' I exclaimed, `smell is good enough for wild beasts!'

And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.

And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!

We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under the iron, the watch dogs on the steps of the houses.

Free Software Definition

``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free'' as in ``free speech,'' not as in ``free beer.''

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

I will leave Edward Tufte's principles of information design for another post...

The Thesis is Over and Turned In. Yeah.

Now on to the next bit. We have 5.5 more weeks of classes, 2 weeks of a reading period, 3 weeks of exams, and then a blessed and much needed holiday in the sun to Spain with my mom before starting on the Project phase of the MSCMM. I have decided to start working on the reading now. No, not Lonely Planet's Spain guide...

Last evening, I scoured our course reading lists for each class, as well as the Amazon Wish Lists for several folks whose taste I admire, and then off I went to the Trinity Library to put in requests for the books in question.

Since, I have been thinking of re-designing this site since December and have signed myself up for the CSS Reboot on May 1st, my first 4 books I checked out were design (eyecandy, web, grid, identity) books. This week I am / will be reading:

1) Alan Fletcher's very delightful, to the eyes and brain, book The Art of Looking Sideways

2) Kelly Goto's Web ReDesign 2.0

3) Timoth Samara's Making and Breaking the Grid

4) Per Mollerup's Mark of Excellence: The History and Taxonomy of Trademarks

Last week during an iChat with George Kelly, he asked me, "Who are you bringing?"

Context: We were IM'ing about SXSW Interactive, BlogHer, Jason's upcoming endeavors, and the turn out of women and people of color to web and blogging conferences. Both of us want to widen the circle of association, knowledge, and fun.

Ms. Jen's Answer: I have been trying to encourage various Barflies.net ladies to come to SXSW Interactive for at least four years now, Lauren was the first to take up the offer and come this year, to smashing success. For BlogHer'05, I convinced Lauren and Erika to come, also to smashing success. I am currently trying to incite Julie Wanda, Marti, Megan, and Jessica to join us at BlogHer'06.

Next year, I would like to see Lauren, Erika, Julie Wanda, Megan and some of the ladies from the Trinity MSCMM program join us at SXSWi (yes, Sarah Bourke, Shonagh Hurley, AmyMaryLucy, Fionnuala, and Vicky, I am talking to you Irish ladies!).

Now, I will ask you: Who are you bringing?

Fri 03/24/2006 20:30 - And so the writing goes...

<rant>

For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink...

Yes, the West gave financial aid, but the Palestinian ruling party Fatah was corrupt.

Guess what, for years Hamas fed the poor, they paved the roads, they set up schools, etc. Why do we wonder why a known terrorist group won by a landslide?

If you are frightened by the inroads that terrorist groups are making in the hearts and minds of the poor, ask yourself, "Where was I when the least of these was tired, hungry, and in jail?"

</rant>

In response to yesterday's (Tues Jan. 17, 2006) Irish Times article, entitled " New body to be set up to attract foreign students to Ireland" (Paid subscribers), which starts:

A new body to attract thousands of foreign students to Irish colleges and universities is to be set up before Easter, the Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin, has said.

To be know as the Education Ireland, it will co-ordinate the efforts of third-level institutions to attract foreign students and will care for their accommodation and personal needs while they are here.

.... etc etc etc....

The clincher to this article is that Mary Hanafin is now in Bangalore, India, trying to convince Indian students to pay a minimum of 25,000 Euros for the priviledge of attending understaffed and underfunded Irish colleges and universities. I can understand the government desiring wealthy Irish-Americans to come to the Old Sod to help pay for Irish students' free education, but asking a by far poorer country's students to come and pay 25,000 more Euros than the much wealthier E.U. students are currently paying.... Hello, wakey up-y. Is this not exploitation in the name of budget padding?

Thus, I have written my frist letter to the Editor of the Irish Times:

Dear Madam,

Before Mary Hanafin and the Irish Ministry for Education set up a new body to attract foreign students to third level and post graduate education, Ms. Hanafin and the Education Ministry need to assure that there will be good customer service provided to their cash cows, ie the education provided is what was advertised and that the colleges in question are properly staffed, organized, and administered, and while the government is at it, please do assure that the foreign students and their families in question can get the visas needed to pursue the education that the government would like us to pay for.

Speaking of visas, if the Ministry of Eduction would like to have foreign students come pursue a post-graduate degree at 10 to 20 times the cost of the Irish/E.U. fees and wish us to stay to meet the needs of 6,000 Ph.D.s by 2013, please do make sure that the Guarda and Immigration folks allow us to stay, at the very least, in time for graduation, let alone the jobs you wish us to fill.

I am in my fourth month of a taught masters course at Trinity College, Dublin, and find the venerable university to be woefully understaffed and terribly underfunded for their mission to educate the students that have signed up and paid for their fees. In my program and in many of the other masters and Ph.D. programs that my fellow foreign students are in, what was advertised in the websites and prospectus is not the course or program that we are receiving, we are frustrated to say the least, and in many cases down right angry.

Please, if you wish to make foreign students your cash cow to fund your universities and allow Irish/E.U. students to have free or greatly reduced fees, then please do provide us with a semblance of proper staffing, organization, and administration, as well as truth in advertising.

Sincerly,

Jenifer MooMoo-en
at the Trinity Coral Corral

Of the 30 plus foreign students in my immediate acquaintance, the only two who are not frustrated and angry are the two whose department has admitted that they are cash cows and take them out for weekly drinks on the department...

Update: Wed. 01.18.06 - Woke up this morning, checked my email, and Erika pointed out to me that I misspelled Corrall (place to keep livestock) as Coral (nice sea creatures that build islands) at the end of my letter. Oops... and it was already sent off last night via email. That's what I get for spell checking the body of the email and not the ending.

My Irish friends are complaining that Christmas is not what it used to be here, that it is much more commercial and not about family and tradition. From the point of view of an American in Ireland, the lead up to Christmas here is much less commercial than it is in the States.

Here in Dublin, the town is dressed up for Christmas in the charming way that Orange is dressed up with lights and swathes of street ornaments. Most of the shops have decorations up, only the Brown & Thomas department store has scary window decor. Restaurants have Christmas lunch and dinner menus up for the month of December in anticipation of office parties coming their way.

My classmate Amy tells me that her father's eleven siblings plus 50-60 some odd cousins / nieces & nephews will be coming to her house for Christmas morning (1pm and it is a drinking party - God love the Irish - 70 plus folks over to drink for baby Jesus). Now that's ambitious.

My mom's family of 36 (all total) can't ever seem to get in the same county, let alone city, let alone house, for any reason, ever. We're so fractured that my immediate family couldn't get themselves organized all at the same time for Christmas this year let alone the other 30 plus of us. The very idea of all the California Kilroys in one house on Christmas morning (1pm) drinking and eating cocktail sausages is enough to make one run for Punta Arenas or Nome...

But what I am here to bend your ear or reading eyes about today is Christmas shopping. A couple of years back, during the Port of Los Angeles longshoremans' strike, the big concern was that the christmas goods from China would not be off loaded from the container ships in time for the post-Thanksgiving Christmas shopping rush. At the time, I thought it was incredibly cynical to worry about Walmart's ability to make their Christmas shopping profit and aplauded the strike.

Today, I went shopping for Irish items to take home as gifts to the States and could only find Chinese goods. I was told by friends to go up to Henry Street for good shopping, but everything there is the same as everything at Target or WallyMundo (WalMart for the non-snarky amongst us). Why go cheap if I can wait a week and go cheap at home?

Thus, I consulted the trusty Lonely Planet "Ireland" guide book for places to buy Irish goods in Dublin and they recommended Avoca. I like Avoca on Suffolk Street, they sell lovely gluten free oat crackers. We love Avoca. But Avoca is really pricey. Think Z-Gallery for women in pink.

Avoca's selling point is that they are Irish made. Yep, Avoca Handweavers of County Wicklow, proud purveyors of handmade Irish goods. Guess what. I inspected all three floors of Avoca on Suffolk Street and found only two things made in Ireland. At least 70% was made in China, followed up by the US, Italy and Thailand.

I saw something cute, looked at the tag. Made in China. Something else cute. Made in China. etc. Irish sweaters made in China. Tea mugs made in Thailand. High end soaps, cosmetics, and doodads made in the US. Olives, jams, and oils made in Italy. Oat biscuits made in Scotland. Couldn't find anything made in Ireland.

I guess I should wait to get home next week and buy Irish goods at Macy's for cheap.

Fri 11.25.05 - I have been wondering for seven weeks now where the local Dublin punks, crusties and activists are. I have seen one or two here or there, but not to the level that you see out and about in other major cities, esp. in a city with as many college kids as Dublin has.

Today after class, Jasper, a classmate, and I got into a discussion about why the average Dubliner is a litterbug and not active in local politics. Jasper, a native Dubliner, theorized that due to the structure of the Irish Republic's government - almost all government is at the federal level and not at the county or local level - and due to the corruption of the government, that the average Irish citizen does not see anyway to plug in and make a difference. So they don't, at all.

As I was walking to the Luas, I saw a bunch of crusties / activitists outside a government building with large banners. I walked up to check it out, mostly happy to see more than 10 punks congregating in one place at one time and to see what they were activating for.

I had a nice chat with one of the young ladies who gave me a flyer for the "Irish Friends of Ungdomshuset". They are activating for the right to have public spaces for all, like the Seomra Spraoi autonomous social space in Dublin 1 and the Dolphin Barn and Philosboro community gardens. Good for them.

I told her about Jasper and I's conversation a mere hour before and she told me that she and her friends were out to break the silence and they did believe that one Irish young person could make a difference.

Thank God for the young and the angry.

The other day I was babbling along when my conversational partner asked, "What do you mean by the 'boondocks'?"

"Oh, the boondocks are out near BFE. A place that is quite far away and has a lot less people, like where my mom lives. Bishop is 5 hours from LA and it only has 3,000 people, it is a really cool town out in the middle of the boondocks."

Yesterday, I was in a lecture on Intellectual Property when the very smartly dressed Dr. said in the course of her talk, "Ballybebackwards..."

Something tells me that in her Irish use of the word that Ballybebackwarks is about the inhabitants state of mind and could be next suburb over rather than unpopulated, little town a day's drive a way.

Fellow(ess) americans help me with the word in common usage, when you say 'boondocks' or 'BFE' do you mean a distant sparsely inhabitated place or a rural place with backwards inhabitants?

What is up in the last week? Folks reacting to the Hurricane Katrina tradegy or the memories of 9/11? Or is it high gas and other prices with lackluster job market and no real raises? Or is it all of the above or Fearful Zeitgeist or is it bad juju running around?

Why do I ask? Folks at the Moving Sale seemed sparse and spooked. A good portion of the men walking through the door at Alex's this last week plus have been very short tempered. A lot of anger.

If Lauren is "Dances With Mommy Bloggers", then after Thursday night I am "Kicks Out and 86's Ballistic Troublemakers with No Security Back Up."

Dang, I am GLAD that my rock'n'roll career is almost over. I have met some fabulous and lovely people, but I have met more cretins and distrubed folk than I care to admit. I am deep down over it.

A little less than four years ago you were thought up, three years of billions of dollars of funding, all to prepare us for disaster. Yes, your mandate was man-made terrorism, but ...

Homeland Security, where has all the dollars and preparation gone?

President Bush and Congress, where are the National Guard?
Oh, yeah... in Iraq.
Why have you chronically underfunded the Homeland Security mandates? Underfunded local police & fire & rescue units?
Oh, yeah... you had to fund the Bush dynasty's war of personal vendetta and oil grab in Iraq.

America, Can we impeach these incompetents?

Ok, maybe in 1790 Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky were the Midwest, but why do these states still get called the Midwest in 2005???

All states East of the Mississippi River but not the Atlantic seaboard states ought to be called the Mideast.

All states West of the Mississippi River but not the Pacific seaboard states ought to be called the Midwest.

What happened to geography as an accurate science?

Imagine the best of American youth - bright, intelligent, engaged, clean cut, well-groomed with spikey flattops, nice buttoned up shirts with white undershirts, pressed pants, and shined shoes. Mormons on a mission, you ask? Some of the nice young men who have been in my classes at Biola the last couple of years? No, the Dyke Bloggers at BlogHer. There has been much ado about the Mommy Bloggers, let's talk about the Dyke BlogHers.

Welcome to post-post-modernist America, where nice lovely young ladies at BlogHer are dead ringers down to the crew cuts and patterned button up shirts, except for the tats and piercings, to a few of my very conservative Christian male students at Biola. In fact, last Sat. Barb wore the same shirt that my most white and uptight senior male frequently wore to class last semester.

I love Digital Age America, where the far left and the far right start to bend into a full cirle of gender, attire, and hair cuts...

It is Alex's night tonight (read : noisecoregrungemetalsludge) and I am sitting at the door taking money, trying to make a multiple page php form that I coded last night work.

While Alex and I's musically tastes do overlap about 70% of the time, there is the other 30% that has no overlap. As a team who brings bands into the venue it makes for some interesting debates during office hours and more interesting complaints the night of.

Tonight I am not complaining of the music (blech) but of my lack of ability to find a good tutorial or a post on how to take a php form and make it print (echo) the screen first for viewing/approval and then hit another button to submit it to email. I am finding tutorials on simple how to email forms (got that working) and really complex arrays (don't need that) but nothing in the beginning to intermediate level of stringing two forms together.... bugger. (If you know of a tutorial or info on this, let me know.)

Whilst perusing Webdesign-L for php help, I found a post by a designer who did this site for Flamenco dancers (Producciones Sonakay), and the design made me gasp. Most XHTML/CSS sites are very boxy and a bit boring, but I love the big S that breaks up the form and the images for navigation. Christoph, thank you for the delightful eye candy!

LA Times Calendar feature article today, A witch with a new twitch, but it is director Nora Ephron's quote about idenity that struck me more than the motivations of the actors:

While today, girl-empowerment (formerly known as feminism) seems as natural as Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions, Ephron, for one, remembers the dark days. "If you grow up in America when I did, you always have moments of forgetting that your career might be just as important as his, until you learn that," she says.

She muses about another well-known Hollywood figure who's just made her screen comeback. "I was fascinated reading the Jane Fonda book because she's just such a parody of a certain kind of woman of my generation who keeps marrying her identity and keeps becoming the person she married. It's flabbergasting. I would have never married a Republican or anything, but I certainly remember when I went to college, most of my classmates were going to marry their politics and marry their lives and their geographic destinations, and that's when 'Bewitched' was a show on television."

Life isn't like that anymore. Says Ephron: "It's getting better."

But has it really gotten much better in the minds of women in America? How about the expectations of women?

Oh, dear.

Guess I am stickin' with the Protestants for a bit longer. Anyone know of any good charismatic Anglican churches in North OC / South LA? Where women are an integral part of the leadership? Sigh...

Today, Megan and I went to lunch at Ashoka the Great in Artesia. The buffet was good, where else can you find goat curry in OC/LA?

Towards the end of lunch we got on the discussion of topic of the Terri Schiavo case. She mentioned several bloggers input, of which one stated that they thought that Christians were supposed to be looking forward to eternal life with God, not holding on to the here and now.

I must agree with this. In my "Critical Thought & Art Theory" class, we have been reading Margaret Wertheim's "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet" which examines the concept of space in Art, Science, and Theology in the last 700 years. Wertheim traces Christian thought and scientific thought and how we view the physical and the eternal.

What has struck me strongly in reading Wertheim is how much Christians of all stripes have embraced physcial space and materialism over the last four centuries even while they claim faith in the risen Christ.

When I lived in Boston, my friend Denise told me that if something happened to her that she was "ready to go home to the Lord." I was shocked to hear this come out of the mouth of a dynamic, 30 something. As I reflected on her words, I have realized that was a truly Christian response to life. I would like to say that without irony about my life.

I started to search some blogs and other spots online looking for Meg's quote, when I came across two reponses:

apophenia on Terri Shiavo:

...I want to face god when the time comes, not be kept alive just because it's possible. There is beauty in life and beauty in death - they go hand in hand and i have no fear So, Schiavo died today which gives me great relief. It is her turn to meet god and she should've been given that opportunity 15 years ago. What horrifies me is how her life has been manipulated and used by the most conservative forces for some pretty selfish gains. Of course, everything about it is horribly conflicting. The same agendas who are against universal health care are for keeping people on machines infinitely rather than letting them die in peace.

Jack Miles in the LA Times' editorial section on April 1, 2005 in an article entitled "A Portrait of the Pope As a Dying Man":

In our world, things often work that way. To which I would add that because there is no Christian whose dying is so closely watched as the pope's, there is no Christian better placed to teach again the ancient lesson that earthly life is not to be clung to.

As St. Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 5, "We are well aware that when the tent that houses us on Earth is folded up, there is a house for us from God, not made by human hands but everlasting, in the heavens…. In this present tent, we groan under the burden, not that we want to be stripped of our covering, but because we want to be covered with a second garment on top, so that what is mortal in us may be swallowed up by life. It is God who designed us for this very purpose, and he has given us the Spirit as a pledge."

For true Christians, the culture of life that matters is the culture of eternal life. My mother recalls the death of a beloved nun, far gone with Alzheimer's disease, who refused to eat or drink during the last two or three days of her life, saying only, "I want to go home." For those gathered at her bedside, this was the testimony of the Spirit.

Fletcher Jones Motorcars = SLIMY FUCKS WHO ABUSE ELDERS

Ok. Tonight, on my way to work, I went over to my brother's to walk Scruffy and then I went to Long's Drugstore to get some sunglasses. I pulled into the parking lot next to a beautiful, new silver Mercedes convertible. As I got out of my car, the driver of the Mercedes said, "What are you doing here?"

It was my brother. My brother makes good money, but not THAT good.

"Whose car is that?" I ask.

"Grandpa's." Joe said.

"When did he get that? Before he went to Uruguay?" (Our maternal grandfather does have the dough for a pricey car and is in South America for a few months.)

"No," said Joe, "Our other grandpa."

"WHAT?!?! Grandpa Bill doesn't even have enough money for his rent and prescriptions!!!"

Then my brother told me a sordid tale of Fletcher Jones fleecing bored seniors. Last Friday, Jan. 21, 2005, our Grandpa Bill Hanen, aged 88, was bored and decided to go over to Fletcher Jones in Newport Beach (he lives in Laguna Woods) to look at cars for a way to pass the day. While he was peering at cars, a salesman got him in the office, ran his credit report and next thing my grandpa knew he had a 5 year lease on a brand new Mercedes convertible.

Have I mentioned that my grandpa is 88 and a wee bit addled? When he got home he called my dad. My dad and brother tried to give the car back and were told no go. My brother called Ernie the Attorney, aka Ernie the Pitbull. Ernie is on the case.

Fletcher Jones told Ernie that the lease was signed and for 5 years. Ernie the Pitbull is on the case. Elder abuse.

As Joe and I walked through Long's, we discussed the situation. It is one thing to know that it is time to take the car keys away from one's grandpa for good, but another to have him locked into a $1,250 lease per month when his Social Security is barely that.

Fletcher Jones = Just Say No. Sharks. DO NOT go to their lot.

Needless to say, I am very angry. My brother has the car for safe keeping. This is obscene.

Visit Toyota, get a Prius.

I am overly faithful to a fault.

All too true. I have been attending the same church for over a decade and the same denomination for 18 years. I am burnt out.

I feel guilty for being burnt out, but I am. I am about to nail my own coffin shut...

[If you care about matters of faith, read on. If not, proceed to other entries. Please note that the following rant is all over the place, but I don't care as it has been bottled up in me for years.]

I have lots to say, but I am on holiday, so I shall make the following notes:

1) A persistent family myth is about to be debunked by me. My genealogical research has proven that we are just Irish, with some Scottish, and not anything fancy. Sorry, Great Grandma Carrie and Great Uncle Dick, sorry.

2) I love my new Nokia 7610. Post to Web feature - easy. Ooohh... metadata galore... ooohhhh... I have been inserting metadata on all my photos and then when the phone posts to the Typepad Lifeblog, it all shows up. Lovely. I need a post to my moveable type blog feature that is that lovely.

3) I broke rank and went to Xmas mass yesterday. So happy. So nice. So not protestant. So right. Lots more comments later.

Even though Thanksgiving was over four days ago of which I spent at the Cliffs of Moher in Co. Clare, driving to Kinsale in Cork, and at a lovely steak dinner at The White Lady, here is my list of things that I am thankful for:

1) Life
2) Winter Weather
3) Rain and the re-greening of SoCal
4) Friends and an occasional family member ;o)
5) A fabulous trip to Ireland with Erika
6) Scruffy McDoglet
7) My fun, bright, creative students
8) Music, art, and writing
9) All the good looking, charming men in Ireland (Frank the tour guide at Newgrange, Allen the barkeep, John from Belfast, and others)
10) The marvelous internet black holes of the blog-osphere...

Ok, so what happened to dressing a little snazzy? Or a little or a lot to a fun sub-culture? Or a little off kilter? Right now a fun, sixties-pop influenced rock band is playing at Alex's, and other than a few folk in punk attire, one rockabilly girl and two mods, everyone else is suffering from a band case of faded, neutral colored t-shirts, overgrown facial hair, and jeans.

It is a sea of drab neutrality. What happened to colorful feathers to help one in their mating endeavors? Is the current crop of 20-somethings post-style as well as being post-everthing-else?

Anywhoo, Walking Concert is excellent.

Last night at 10:31pm, at least 3 hours before I normally go to bed, I set my alarm clock for its usual time of 10:32am and turned off the lights. Yes, I slept for 12 hours straight and for good reason. I was exhausted from the night before.

On Sunday night just before midnight, I finished some client work and gave myself 30 minutes to fall down one of my favorite internet black holes: genealogical research. Four hours plus some later, my eyes were burning in my head and I was very frustrated with Ancestry.com.

Ancestry.com has changed their search rubric in recent years to the ULTRA frustrating. I have used the site, in combination with Rootsweb and Google, for over 3 years now trying to piece together my family history. Two years ago, for no money at all I was able to put together a family tree from my Ancestry.com research.

Recently my dad funded a real account with Ancestry.com so I could ferret out the finer details and proofs of the family tree. Can I say RIP OFF? Yes, say it again, RIP OFF.

Two Hundred and some odd dollars later for a year Super Subscription, I know very little less than I knew before paying the money. On Sunday night / Monday morning, I found more on Google for free than on Ancestry.com.

Every time I would type in "Lasourd" to Ancestry.com's search, it would return 3,000 entries for "Lucretia" and "Lockheart". What the ... Hello, for all the money they are making, can't they hire a decent search software engineer or is the purpose of this search engine to trick folks into thinking that Ancestry.com has more information available for just a small fee and then one finds out after the info is unlocked that it is for LUCRETIA and not Lasourd!?!

I cannot even begin to describe my frustration with such completely off search results for all the monely invested, when Google would deliver the correct results for FREE. Ancestry.com fools you into thinking that they have great databases, but they don't, they just recycle free info available in state archives, the hard work of folk transcribing census results, and private websites. I will be calling them to have a chat about this.

Dunstan, a lovely Brit, has said it best. Last night around 1:30am, I gave up and went to bed, as it felt so eerily similar to 1:30am four years ago, except this time the news was delivered by wi-fi rather than dial up. The punchline of this me-fi post by Prince Vallium made me laugh out loud this morning. And then me-fi's Matt Haughey made me laugh even harder when I looked up at the logo banner.

Here are my initial thoughts:

1) Well, Republicans, guess you all, your theories, and practices are really on the proving ground now... Republican president, Republican House, Republican Senate... no more liberal whipping boys for you all now... No more excuses. Time to put the peddle to the metal. God really help America.

2) Well, Democrats, guess it is really time to get your shite together. Hello, wakey up-ey, wakey up-ey! Please get some Vision! Please get some backbone! Please fight the good fight! Can we say Obama for 2008?

3) Well, America, guess 51% of you got want you asked for... the high moral platform of Liar-Liar-Pants-On-Fire and his Neo-Con Puppeteers. Hello, wakey up-ey, wakey up-ey! In terms of sin before God, lying, murder and stealing get top billing on the Ten Commandments, how is that moral? Thanks for selling the whole country down the corporate corruption, neo-con (neo-facist?) high road. Yikes!

Election Day fun facts from Orange County, CA:

1) When my mom asked for a paper ballot today at the Estancia High School polling place because she did not trust a receipt-less computer voting, she was given a Spanish only ballot. Lucky for her, she is fluent in Spanish. Then she gave the poll worker the what for. Apparrently, English paper ballots were premium... or ...

2) At the Orange City Hall polling place, the 50-something woman in front of me in line was very distressed about electronic voting. I told her that she was able to request a paper by California law. Minutes later, a nice Mexican-American gentlemen announced in a loud voice to all the line that they could ask for paper ballots.

3) The best yet, the lame Orange County electronic voting machine that I used today, a good quarter of the time would not check what I wanted it to, but the candidate above or below your choice. To back track, uncheck and the re-check the right one took some doing. The best part was that Leonard Peltier was just next to George Bush on the line up, and Leonard was checking in on over 700 votes in OC last I checked. Wonder how many of those votes were intentional or the mistake of the electronic voting machine? Poetic justice?

4) Did I mention that the Hart InterCivic "eSlate" voting machines are incredibly counter-intuitive and that even for a die-hard computer user quite difficult, let alone for one's technophobic mom? Maybe Hart InterCivic needs to hire a good Product Designer and User Interface Designer.... hmmm...

Samhain (link via PurseLipSquareJaw):

November 1 is the Celtic feast of Samhain. Samhain, Gaelic for "summer's end," was the most important of the ancient Celtic feasts.

The Celts honored the intertwining forces of existence: darkness and light, night and day, cold and heat, death and life. Celtic knotwork represents this intertwining. The Celts observed time as proceeding from darkness to light. The Celtic day began at dusk, the beginning of the dark and cold night, and ended the following dusk, the end of a day of light and warmth. The Celtic year began with An Geamhradh, the dark Celtic winter, and ended with Am Foghar, the Celtic harvest. Samhain marks the beginning of both An Geamhradh and the new Celtic year.

Samhain and the new Celtic year actually begin at dusk on October 31, the beginning of the Celtic day. Oidhche Shamhna, the Eve of Samhain, was the most important part of Samhain. Villagers gathered the best of the autumn harvest and slaughtered cattle for the feast. The focus of each village's festivities was a great bonfire. Villagers cast the bones of the slaughtered cattle upon the flames. (Our word bonfire comes from these "bone fires.") With the great bonfire roaring, the villagers extinguished all other fires. Each family then solemnly lit their hearth from the one great common flame, bonding all families of the village together.

The Celtic New Year starts at 5:00pm today on the West Coast of the U.S. with the sunset. My favorite time of year in SoCal starts about now and runs until mid-April with rain, cool weather, and the return of the northern birds (juncos, warblers, and the white crowned sparrows). Happy New Year.

Two more days until the 2004 Election. Put down your carefully crafted idea of what party you belong to for 10 - 15 minutes and go take the Political Compass test, as you might be surprised.

1) I really wish US presidential elections were MUCH shorter, maybe a max of six months, as I reached my endpoint with this election cyle sometime before the summer conventions. Now I am at the point that I am very turned off by any ad from either side of any campaign or issue. How do I know this? Yesterday I found myself watching a political ad on a tv at Alex's and the only thing I thought was, "Wow, Arnold has been so busy lately, he forgot to get his botox update shots."

Sad, but true. What issue was Arnold stumping for? I don't remember, I just know he looked surprisingly haggard and 60-something. I here thought it was against an LA County law for any movie star or Westside resident to look older than 40...

2) Tonight is the big Halloween bash at Alex's and I have no heart for it. I do like to dress up, but Halloween is not my favorite event for dressing up. I prefer to dress up fun or fancy with current items in my closet for a special event, but dressing up in costume takes too much mental energy and requires the dreaded *shopping*. I would rather plan a fun bowling costume for Punk Rock Bowling, than a Halloween costume.

So, I borrowed my sister's Lady Guinevere costume from last year, and my sister borrowed my Punk Rock Bowling outfit from two years ago. Stacey is going to loan me a stuffed frog and Lauren has loaned me her "Princess" cap. I shall be a princess with a frog who has steadfastly refused to change into a prince...

Update: I just tried on the borrowed costume from my sister, and it is so not going to work. ARGH! What do I do? It is huge! Labelled adult medium, but it is made of stretch velvet and is made for someone much taller and larger. Dang. Back to the drawing board at 5pm. Due to my shopping aversion, I will have to work with what is in my closet. Argh.

3) The victorian I live in is a duplex and people in the front moved out last weekend with no notice and are putting on a garage sale tomorrow as their last act. I called several friends who need a place to see if they are interested, as I would like to have people I know and like in front of me, rather than a random stranger(s). Matt and April came and checked it out today. I would love it if they moved in... ;o)

"We are denied our language, culture and history in school," said Dunbar. "The so-called United Kingdom is well past its sell-by date."

Why not after nearly 300 years? If the United States, Southern Irish, Indians, Zimbabwe-ians, etc., rebelled and went their own ways, why not have the Cornish, Welsh, and Scottish be next?

What will happen to the hardcore Orangemen royalists in Northern Ireland if the English decide that devolution of all the parts of the United Kingdom is an excellent idea? Or if the U.K. devolves the monarchy? What has N.I. done for the home counties (London, Kent, Essex, Sussex, et al) lately? In the 21st century of the European Union, smaller unified states under the larger federal whole may make more sense.

Go Cornwall. Go Wales. Go Scotland. Go California.

or something...

Real Live Preacher has the right of Faith, Hope, and Love...

I have been having a problem with hope of late. The last few years have beat it out of me. I would like to find it again.

Why is the Bush Administration holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay? The longer the prisoners are held without due process and access to counsel the more sick I feel all over for America.

I don't care that the Bush Administration is calling them "Illegal Combatants", it is still wrong to violate our Constitution and their humanity in the name of facist control. If the Bush Administration really believes they are terrorists or enemy combatants, then try them in a court of law, don't hold them indefinitely with no access to others and no charges against them.

Finally, I think the Bush Administration are cowards, yes, cowards, for holding their prisoners of war at an "U.S" military base on the land of a sovereign country that is our supposed stated enemy.

When I was a puppy, about 17, I left the LA punk scene due to its hypocrisy. The stated ideals of the scene were not matching up with the reality. The same thing happened with my breaking politically from my hardcore Republican family (can we say Goldwater?) upbringing about the same time.

If you are a nice person, then be a nice person. If you are deep down inside a greedy bastard, then let the world know, buy the big house and Hummer, then brag about it. If you like to play games, be up front about it, play games, manipulate in broad daylight. If you want the one of the world's largest reserves of oil to control the American market, then say it, don't LIE about weapons of mass destruction to gain the oil. If you love Jesus, then seek to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and spirit, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Be who you are. Consistent. One person.

My longtime buddy, Peter Schrock, has pointed to a Christianity today article, entitled "Salt-and-Pepper Politics", that brings to a head why I can't vote for the Republican party.

Which brings us to Democrats and Republicans, and to why I will be voting this November with, well, fear and trembling.

Justice, in biblical terms, is more than equal treatment under the law—it involves putting power at the service of the powerless and wealth at the service of the poor. My friends who care about justice argue that Democrats have spent 50 years advocating for the vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the youngest, the oldest. And though the party of the powerless also has a curiously strong appeal among the elites of Hollywood and Manhattan, on the whole my friends are probably right.

Righteousness, meanwhile, is more than honesty and fair dealings—it requires the alignment of our lives with God's original good intentions for creation. Like justice, righteousness in a nation especially benefits the poor and powerless, who cannot insulate themselves from the effects of sin. My friends who care about righteousness argue that Republicans have held the line against values that come straight from the maw (or the mall) of individualistic consumerism, where pleasure and preference reign. And while the party of moral character raises lots of money from people whose only interest is making the world safe for consumerism, I can't argue with these friends either.

To make matters worse, each presidential candidate has blind spots even in his area of putative strength. John Kerry declines to see that abortion is not a matter of private morality but of public justice for utterly vulnerable human beings. (Bizarrely, he justifies his position by saying that government must keep out of people's bedrooms. Abortions do not generally happen in bedrooms.) Any public official who professes Catholic faith and is as enthusiastically pro-choice as Kerry does not have, in the words of the Catholic bishops, "a well-formed conscience."

Yet our President's conscience also seems too clear to be true. Asked a simple and predictable question at an April 2004 press conference—to name his greatest mistake since September 11, 2001—he couldn't answer, saying, "I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't—you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one." Is it too much to ask that the most devout President in recent history have a more concrete response to a question about his own limitations?

Such is the state of our presidential politics: an evangelical President flummoxed at any suggestion of his own fallibility, and a Catholic candidate who sidesteps his church's teaching authority. And in both our political parties, concern for justice often serves as cover for self-justification; righteousness curdles all too quickly into self-righteousness.

The Republicans frequently bill themselves as the Party of Righteousness but continually make more mockery of the term than Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker ever could. I can't swallow their Pro-Life stance when they lie, cheat, and steal out of every orifice.

I can't in good conscience fall for the Democrats hook-line-and-sinker either. The other day I received an over the top pitch letter from the Planned Parenthood of American about the evils of the Republicans. Sorry folks, but I refuse to be a single issue voter. For too long, abortion has held American politics hostage. I am pro-life, but not to the point of ignoring every other platform.

How about a viable third party that is pro-life (anti-death penalty, anti-war, and anti-abortion), a good steward of the planet that God has given us (yeah evironmentalists!), pro-balanced budgets, pro-poor, education friendly for all, justice for all, pro-looking ahead more than just this quarter's worth of profits and pragmatic on infrastructure? Anyone want to join? Be you Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindi, Aetheist, Hedonist, TV-ist, Fashionaista, Punk Rock-ista, etc... how about we take American politics away from the blusterers and big business? How about it?

Before I jet (or putt) off to school, here are few things banging around my brain recently:

1) Thank God for SXSW Interactive! It seems to be the ONLY internet conference with reg fees that are reasonable for freelancers. Everytime I see a cool conference, I about die when I see the registration fees that start at over $700 or $2,000, not including airfare or hotel. Yikes! SXSWi is a breath of fresh air at a $195 for a great conference.

The SXSWi folks are now accepting websites for the Annual Web Awards.

2) My local Ralph's grocery store is going downhill. It used to be one of the few "good" Ralph's, but ever since last year's strike it has been cutting corners in all the wrong places. Before the strike, I did 1/3 of my shopping at Ralph's, 1/2 at Trader Joes, and the rest at Whole Foods. Since the strike, I have been shopping 50% at Trader Joe's, 45% at Whole Foods and 5% or less at Ralphs. If Ralphs continues its devolution, I may get my dry goods at Target or Sav-on's and get the rest at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods.

Now if TJ's or Whole Foods would just start carrying good pancetta...

3) A discussion came up yesterday at Alex's about home schooled kids and how they turn out. Contrary to many assumptions, some of my best students have been home schooled. Any and all objections to their naivete or potential conservative indoctrination are out weighed once they are in college by their superior writing skills and preparation for college. If only other kids from public or private high schools were so prepared.

3) Scruffy is 11 months old today! Yeah Scruffy!

Bless the Federal campaign reform acts and the like, as here is a great search to find out how much an individual has contributed to a political campaign in the last two years (link via Metafilter)

You can search on how much and to whom George Bush has contributed to. My big $10 donation to Gen. Clark's campaign last year is not showing up, but my grandfather and uncle's combined $13,000 of donations to various Republican campaigns and lobbyists are showing up.

Last Thursday's OC weekly had an article on Steve Jones' Indie 103.1 radio show, Jonesys Jukebox, entitled: "The Great Rock & Roll Radio Swindle: Is ex-Sex Pistol Steve Jones helping Indie 103.1 become cool or corporate�and does it matter?"

I enjoy Jonesys Jukebox as it is funny, completely unprofessional, and very irreverant. Mr. Jones plays great music and sounds like my dad (drug addled and very ADD) with a cockney accent. Very weird and funny. It is the antithesis of KROQ in all the best ways.

What set me back this weekend was the Mighty Mighty Bosstones' Dicky Barrett shelling VW's for McKenna Volkswagen. Hello!

Folks in my world have been proclaiming that they really like Joe Sib's "Punk Rock Minute" on Indie 103.1. The Punk Rock Minute would be really cool if it really was Joe giving us the news and not Joe's artist Dicky Barrett. Dicky does a fine job at summing up all the at is fit in indie and corporate punk to recite in a quick minute.

But shelling VW bugs for McKenna Volkswagen? That crosses the line. Which one, I am not sure, but it crosses a line.

It raises the big question of What really is Punk Rock, now that Punk is 30 or 28 years old depending on how you count it?

Update: Apparently, Joe Sib does have his own show Thursday nights at 9pm. Listen to it. Joe is the funniest ADD guy around and not drug addled (unless he is traumatizing old folk from New Jersey at 3am with a funny impression of a coke fiend whilst in Las Vegas...).

I don't remember fighting sleep as a kid. I remember liking sleep.

In the last year or two, I have started to fight sleep. I get sleepy between midnight and 1am, I take my shower, do a wee bit of reading, get really heavy eyelids, and then a mild, difuse dread creeps in and I am wide awake. Wide awake for up to an hour.

I can't put my finger on the dread, but I have come to dread it and the moment of getting onto my bed pre-reading. If I skip the reading and just turn off the light and climb into bed immediately after my shower, I feel the dread gnawing at the corners of my mind and gut in the dark.

This does not happen every night, but often enough that I unconsciously force myself to stay up reading blogs or working on client projects until I am almost comatose to avoid this feeling.

Most days I wake up chipper and ready to go, only on occasion do I wake up with the dread in the pit of my stomach.

It is diffuse, no real cause, just.... no explanation that I can find.

Is it due to being single with no boyfriend/husband and children, so I have no physical and mental distractions as I lay down? Is it a fear that somehow I missed something that day? Is it my freelance work and life that I can stay up as late as I want and don't have to wake up at a specific time?

I don't know and I just don't like it.

CNN.com reported the following yesterday:

U.S. officials have discussed the idea of postponing Election Day in the event of a terrorist attack on or about that day, a Homeland Security Department spokesman said Sunday.

No! The Constitution of the United States of America states that we vote on the first Tuesday in the month of November every fourth year. Our best way to combat terrorism or internal GOP corruption is to stand firm, stand straight, and stand tall by voting on Tues. November 2, 2004 regardless. Democracy is waged in all the little precincts all over the nation, democracy is not waged with fear.

To quote Mr. Paul Hewson (aka Bono) from his May 19, 2004 commencement address at the University of Pennsylvannia:

Me, I'm in love with this country called America. I'm a huge fan of America, I'm one of those annoying fans, you know the ones that read the CD notes and follow you into bathrooms and ask you all kinds of annoying questions about why you didn't live up to that�.

I'm that kind of fan. I read the Declaration of Independence and I've read the Constitution of the United States, and they are some liner notes, dude. As I said yesterday I made my pilgrimage to Independence Hall, and I love America because America is not just a country, it's an idea. You see my country, Ireland, is a great country, but it's not an idea. America is an idea, but it's an idea that brings with it some baggage, like power brings responsibility. It's an idea that brings with it equality, but equality even though it's the highest calling, is the hardest to reach. The idea that anything is possible, that's one of the reasons why I'm a fan of America. It's like hey, look there's the moon up there, lets take a walk on it, bring back a piece of it. That's the kind of America that I'm a fan of.

In 1771 your founder Mr. Franklin spent three months in Ireland and Scotland to look at the relationship they had with England to see if this could be a model for America, whether America should follow their example and remain a part of the British Empire.

Franklin was deeply, deeply distressed by what he saw. In Ireland he saw how England had put a stranglehold on Irish trade, how absentee English landlords exploited Irish tenant farmers and how those farmers in Franklin's words "lived in retched hovels of mud and straw, were clothed in rags and subsisted chiefly on potatoes." Not exactly the American dream...

So instead of Ireland becoming a model for America, America became a model for Ireland in our own struggle for independence.

When the potatoes ran out, millions of Irish men, women and children packed their bags got on a boat and showed up right here. And we're still doing it. We're not even starving anymore, loads of potatoes. In fact if there's any Irish out there, I've breaking news from Dublin, the potato famine is over you can come home now. But why are we still showing up? Because we love the idea of America.

It is the responsibility of the Government of the United States of America, be it the Dept. of Justice or the Dept. of Homeland Security or the local police, to make sure that each and every citizen of the US who registered to vote can vote on Tues. Nov. 2, 2004 at their local precinct. If not, then we have to find a new name for this space, because we won't be America.

Local news is getting harder and harder to find. Not just the celebrations and defeats of the high school football teams in the area, but also news on local crime, local accomplishments, local issues, etc. The LA Times has significantly reduced their local news coverage, as the section that was "Orange County" is now "California."

This is just not a problem of large newspapers, but also of the internet. Several times now I have sought news links to relevant breaking local news only to find out that it is not covered for days or at all online. If I eventually do find an online link or source for the news, it is usually a follow up to the original event, not a reporting of the event.

Last night a friend had a severe loss of judgement and ended up in a 4 hour police pursuit. It was reported to me less than a hour after the high speed chase started, as it was on TV. TV coverage ceased after the first hour and we got reports from the friend's relatives. Many of us were greatly saddened and frustrated, as the friend in question had been working hard to get his life back on track.

Today, I have searched the LA Times, OC Register, Google, Ask Jeeves, all the local TV stations for a report on what happened, to no avail. How can a car chase be on TV for over an hour and not be in the paper or internet news?

Does this mean that my friend's actions are entertainment but not news? The man I know is humble, nice, and diligent, but has a lack of ability to say no to his peers. He also grew up in the wrong neighborhood and ended up the "rock star" of a certain gang. Since he got out of Chino in April, he moved away from his neighborhood, got a job, made new friends, started listening to the Briefs, and tried to stay out of trouble.

Around the third and a half hour of the suspense last night, I found myself babbling to two other friends about Charles de Lint's crow stories, specifically Jeck Crow. It was a complete non sequitor to my friends, but to me story explains, story redeems, story helps make sense of the broken pieces.

I think Crow must be Jeck Crow's son. By the grace of God, I pray for mercy and justice for my broken friend. When he got out of the car, he said sorry to all the police chasing him.

From Better Angels of Our Nature on Honor (Via Making Light):

There is no honor.

I saw Don Rumsfeld's testimony today, and there is no honor. Certainly, the other men present at the witness table did not acquit themselves well, but in the end, it comes down to Rumsfeld and the President. And there is no honor.

"Who was in charge? What was the chain of command?" Simple questions, these. Asked by John McCain, an honorable man. Simple questions, deserving of a simple answer. But the simple answer never made it past the lips of the Secretary. There were evasions and dodges, a dance of deceit, if you will.

No one was in charge, it seems--because that way, the only people who suffer punishment are the sergeants and privates in the photographs and videos. And as for the chain of command, well...uh...well, that was left behind somewhere in the recesses of the Pentagon. And there is no honor in that.

From Sunday's LA Times Editorial, Our King George Faces a Reckoning, Jack Miles notes after evoking Shakespeare and Henry V:

Who is responsible for America's abuse of Iraq's prisoners of war? Is it our king, George W. Bush? Is it one of his ministers, perhaps Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld? Or are the individual knights and pawns responsible for their own actions? Shakespeare would answer, I think, that, though the responsibility is shared, the greater portion of it rests with the president, who sent these men and women into an unnecessary war.

Soldiers want to believe in the justice of their cause and of their commander. How can they want otherwise? But read the transcript of Rumsfeld's Q&A with the troops in Iraq. Read the Army Times editorial of May 17: "This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top."

There are more Williamses, at this point, than Bateses in American uniform.

"Is it possible it won't work?" Rumsfeld asked rhetorically at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. "Yes," he answered. And yes is the all-too-evident answer. The ignored warnings of friends such as Norman Schwarzkopf and allies such as Hosni Mubarak were right. America is losing the war. And for the king, the heavy reckoning is about to begin.

Here are the tidbits and links for a Thursday afternoon in April. Enjoy!

1) TNH's Making Light post on "Things I believe" is wonderful. I concur with her list and thank her for the list, although I did have to look up what Burgess Shale is. Also, the comments to the post make an excellent, if not eye boggling, read.

My addtion is: "I believe in the effectiveness of Diet Coke and dark chocolate at 4pm." I believe I need some chocolate right now.

2) Danah has a good and informative rant/post on privacy.

3) My birthday party show will be on Sun. April 25th at Alex's. Come on down.

On Tuesday, I voted in the California Primary with the "eSlate" Voting Machine. Can we say counter-intuitive?

Rather than having a key pad or a touch pad or a mouse or a pen, the voting machine had a dial. Hello! Dials went out of fashion in the mid-1970s with the touch tone phone!

I found the machine very frustrating. I tried to use the screen as a touch pad to start with but soon realized that the makers of the "eSlate" machine did not design with the most common computer usage in mind but some odd left to right - up to down by using the dial method. The buttons were also frustrating.

For over 20 years we have been using an "enter" key and a mouse or touch pad at the ATM, at the supermarket, on our computers, etc. Why can't the voting machine be similiar. New technologies have the shortest learning curve and less errror when they use standard designs rather than designs that were phased out over 20 years ago.

Bah Humbug. And where was my printout???

1) Ralph Nader - Please, Just say no. J.D. Lasica sums it up best:

"This man has neither conscience nor shame."

2) Bless them. Scientists at the University of Minnesota have developed a way to produce a renewable source of Hydrogen for fuel cells that is not based in oil/fosil fuels but in corn derived ethanol. Farmers of America will be happy:

"Researchers say they have produced hydrogen from ethanol in a prototype reactor small enough and efficient enough to heat small homes and power cars.

The development could help open the way for cleaner-burning technology at home and on the road.

Current methods of producing hydrogen from ethanol require large refineries and copious amounts of fossil fuels, the University of Minnesota researchers said. "

3) Lots of lovely, happy rain the last few days. More to come. Orange County is still 6 inches below the normal rainfall.

4) SXSW here I come. I have paid for my Interactive and Music badges, I have the $$ for 8 days of hotel room, now I just need to save $$ for food & misc. whilst in Austin. Yeah!

5) I have decided that I will be upping the speed on my job search, while I love my freelance clients, I am going bonkers at home with just my computer. I would like to get a full-time web design or web master job at a real, live company. If you know of any positions in the LA/OC area, please let me know. Thanks!

"Jumping two-footed into hope" - Now, that's a quote. The story of my life and a good reminder of how to act in the future.

Real Live Preacher is back:

I will never know exactly what Jesus said, how he said whatever he did say, or what he meant when he said whatever he said in whatever way he said it.

You see my problem.

What I have are the tattered words, songs, and gospel remnants from twenty centuries of people jumping two-footed into hope. That�s all I have, and I am keenly interested in these things.

After a discussion with Warren last November, I realized that I am a "left-wing Christian." Alex tells me that I am an "Idealist." Maybe I prefer a Two-footed Hope Jumper ....

'Tis the Season to go screaming into the woods or the concrete jungle.... Yes, the Election Season is upon us. To keep from throwing up every meal whilst watching TV or reading the news, I encourage you to go check out PunkVoter.com. Get Active. Activate.

The Bush in 30 Seconds website and collaborative has announced the winners of the film contest.

The Overall Winner is "Child's Pay."

Salon.com reports:

The winning spot in MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest didn't compare President George W. Bush to Hitler. It didn't even call him a liar, or castigate him for deceiving the nation into war. The commercial that triumphed over more than 1,000 other entries -- and that will run 30 times on CNN during the week of Bush's State of the Union address, and possibly during the Super Bowl as well -- was a subtle, elegiac and nearly wordless indictment of the burden Bush is shunting onto future generations with his deficits. It was made by Charlie Fisher, a 38-year-old advertising executive and father of two from Denver, a fiscal conservative who was a registered Republican until 1992.

My personal favorite is "In My Country."

Here are the finalists of the Bush in 30 Seconds contest.

I would like to recommend the following blog posts on Shrub. Please read, please vote the man and his puppeteers out of office. Please.

Do click on the links within each post:

From JD's New Media Musings : Former Cabinet member: Bush used 9/11 as pretext for war

From Electrolite : Wall of death

2004 is an even, happy number. It is a leap year. It will also be the year of the Monkey starting on January 22, 2004.

In a comment to Theresa Neilsen-Hayden's blog post, "Chrono log", Jonathan Vos Post notes the following:

About "2004" as an integer:

2004 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 167

2004 is an EBAN NUMBER. Consider the number's English name: "Two Thousand Four." As Mathworld defines, The eban numbers are the sequence of numbers whose names (in English) do not contain the letter "e" (i.e., "e" is "banned"). The name was coined by N. J. A. Sloane around 1990. Note that this definition is imprecise insofar as special names are sometimes assigned to a few large numbers that do not follow the usual rules for the naming of such numbers.

The first few eban numbers are 2, 4, 6, 30, 32, 34, 36, 40, 42, 44, 46, 50, 52, 54, 56, 60, 62, 64, 66, 2000, 2002, 2004, ... (Sloane's A006933); i.e., two, four, six, thirty, etc. These exclude one, three, five, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, etc.

On New Year's Day morning, I sat in bed trying to figure out why 2003 sucked so bad. A suspicion started to niggle my brain, thus I did division in my head, hopped out of bed to get my calculator, and my suspicion was correct: 2003 was a prime number.

As a lady born on the 24th day of the 4th month on a Monkey leap year, I am especially fond of even integers, and not so fond of prime numbers above 11. Thus, 2003 was a bad year. ;o)

I am looking forward to 2004 - The Year of the Wood Monkey - being a darned fine year.

Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year. I know that I am ready to toss 2003 out the window. I have asked God for a blessing in 2004. Specifically, a delightful and delicious man... ;oD

And to all who are not celebrators of Christmas... Happy Hannukah! Happy Solistice! Happy Festivus! Happy Kawanza! And all other applicable December Hols....

While many bloggers strive to write a post everyday, some days I have a post every day or even multiple posts, but other days I am blocked for blog posts. I write in clumps. Usually, my inspriration comes to me when I am driving on the freeway. Unfortunately, Sugar Plum, the 1993 Honda Civic, does not come with an on board Wi-Fi computer that I can blog from. Maybe I need to get a Treo 600 now that my Palm III is slowly dying a sure death, then I can blog from the road, rather than come home hours later and not remember a thing. Anyone got an extra $499?

1. I would like to recommend Real Live Preacher's "The Christmas Story" as a refreshing telling of the original Christmas story.
2. Good News:
   The native endangered Steelhead Trout are making in roads into South Orange County for the first time in forty some odd years... Wahoo! You don't have to have fake tits, be fake blonde and drive an SUV to live in south OC, one can be a salt water/fresh water fish, live in a stream beleagured by mankind and still make a go of it on no dollars a day... Now only if the trout will re-conquer the lower Santa Ana River.

   Check out Trout Unlimited California on how you can help to re-establish our water ways and native trout.
   The San Mateo Creek, Orange County restoration project.



3. An activism group I can get behind: Cats Indoors!
   The LA Times reported on Tuesday in an article entitled, "Killer Among Us," what many wild bird fans have known for years and what most cat owners don't know - outdoor domestic cats are killing a least one quarter to one half of all wild birds, causing whole species to struggle. Indoor cats live quite a bit longer than outdoor cats. And you will improve your relations with your neighbors who have to shovel cat shit (I clear at least 7 cat shit piles a week from my garden)...

   Be nice to your kitty, your neighbors, and the local birds by bringing your kitty inside. From the LA Times article:
   

   There's a killer on the loose, stalking victims out of public sight and mind. Operating under the guise of the garden-variety house cat, this predator is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of birds every year. So many birds are being killed by cats and collisions with urban America that fully a quarter of the winged species are in decline, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service...

   But house cats are the slaughter machines. One study concluded that free-ranging cats kill at least 7.8 million birds each year in rural Wisconsin alone. And that excludes urban areas. Another study in Michigan concluded that a single pet cat killed at least 60 birds in an 18-month period.

   
   
4. The Parker 425 is the same weekend as 6th Annual DIY Bowling Tournament. Crap. While I love my brother and would like to support his off-road racing adventures, I can't be in Lost Wages and Parker, AZ at the same time. Given that I have already paid for bowling, the hotel, have a deposit on my dress, and I have much flirting to do with cute punk rock men, I will be in Lost Wages from Feb. 6-9, 2004.


5. The new (Oct. 2003) Anti-Flag CD, "The Terror State", kicks serious boot-ay. It is the band's most musically diverse and listenable effort to date, as well as packing a leftist lyrical punch. It is their best CD since "Die for the Government." Forget Justin Timberlake, OutKast, or Blink-182 for your holiday gift giving to your 13 year old cousin, get them Anti-Flag - political punk rock at its 2003 best.


6. Is it just me or is any one else bugged by getting holiday greeting cards with little inserts that say "We have made a generous donation to the _________ (insert name of popular charity here) in your name in lieu of a present for this holiday..." ???

   If someone would rather send money to a charity rather than buy another silly gift for their friends or family - lovely, just don't announce it to me. Self-aggrandisement anyone? What happened to quiet, thoughtful, your right hand doesn't know what your left hand is up to charity giving? Just give, send me a card, don't tell me about it.
   

7. Contribute with your eyes and typing fingers: The Audubon Christmas Bird Count

May you have much laughter, love, and joy in the next week.

After I made my post about my three favorite radio interviewers, I found myself discussing the topic with several friends who had read the post. I realized that I had not fully expressed what I liked so much about Terry Gross, Tavis Smiley, and Kitty Felde.

Here it is: They ask hard questions. They don't back down when the going gets tough. They are not afraid to ask hard questions even when the question would be against their own stated view point.

Now that is good interviewing. Many radio hosts are agressive but not effective or they are pleasing but passive, whereas Terry Gross, Tavis Smiley, and Kitty Felde give the journalism profession a good name.

On a different radio subject, I must also give props to KLOS's night time DJ Jim Ladd, as he is the only free-form FM DJ left in the Southern California market. Jim is not afraid to play Janis Joplin, next to U2, next to an old 1940s gospel recording, next to Social Distortion. He breaks all the rules of the current blander than Wonderbread corporate conglomerate computer generated music radio that is on every channel. May KLOS's corporate overlords not realize that Jim is actually a live human being spinning records and CDs and interacting with his audience five nights a week...

I have been doing the occasional band interview for various rock magazines since 1997. Some interviews are very easy, usually when the musician is bright, has an active thought and creative life. Some interviews are painful, usually when the non-creative, drugged out member of the band is pawned off on the press. And a few are just plain dull.

In an effort to have more easy, sparkling interviews and sharpen my own skills in interviewing even the most dull or recalcitrant person, I like to listen to the interviewing skills of radio hosts. How do they ask the questions? What questions do they ask to illicit a good response? How do they control a babbler? How do they get a civilized answer out of an asshole?

After actively listening for sometime now, I have decided that Fresh Air's Terry Gross, Talk of the City's Kitty Felde, and NPR's Tavis Smiley are my favorite interviewers. All three have great skill and dexerity in their craft and are a pure pleasure to listen to.

Fri. Nov. 28, 2003:

1) My National Audubon Society 2003 desk calendar. Today is a very cute Black-Capped Chickadee. We don't have this Chickadee in California, but we do have the Mountain Chickadee. I love my daily bird fix.

2) Thanks for great live and great recorded music:
Manic Hispanic, Roger Wallace, The Clash, Marti Brom, Dropkick Murphys, Real McKenzies, Flogging Molly, Black Eyed Peas, Daniel Lanois, The Distraction, One Man Army, Throwrag, Fabulous Disaster, Dance Hall Crashers, Avail, Kings of Nuthin' and many, many, many more!

3) Thanks to and for all the Barflies.net contributor crew - past and present - Alex W., Julie Wanda, Yvonne, Lucky, Scarlett, Steve, Kevin, Megan, Erika, Tanya, The Ash, Meredith, Erik, Tink, Dawn, Al, Brian, Sandra, April, Cindy, Bridget, Lauren, Liz, etc... I am thankful for all of our friendships and your creative contributions. You have made me a better person and sharpened my own creative output. How can one little editor & artist be so blessed?

1) I am thankful for the Hanen Family bonding time whilst stuck in traffic between Mission Viejo and Oceanside. What should have taken 25 mins. took 2 hours and 5 mins. Yikes. But the Hanen Family is resourceful. Joe had a scratched up plastic wine glass under his seat, I had a chilled bottle of Chandon (Napa - Blancs de Noir) in a grocery sack next to my feet. Joe, Campbell (a.k.a. - Dad), and I drank champagne while driving past San Onofre Nuclear Plant and Camp Pendleton at 5 miles per hour. We laughed, we people watched, we waved at Marines on duty, and I spilled champagne. Big thanks to the Moet & Chandon company for being there during important stressful moments like in Agra, India on Feb. 2, 1943 when my airman Grandfather was able to procure a bottle of Moet to celebrate the telegrammed announcement of his first son's (Campbell) birth in Iowa or on the 5 fwy. with 105,000 other cars going from Orange County to one's Grandma's in San Diego on Nov. 27, 2003.....

Wed. 11/26/03:

1) My dad, Campbell W. Hanen, has had some form of a cell phone (car phone) attached to his ear since the late 1970s. He is the text book version of an Early Adopter. Today, we were supposed to go to the Harbor House for brunch, but when I picked him up at my brother's house, my dad was chatting on his cell phone, so I was not able to ask him if he was willing to go to Dim Sum instead of western breakfast. Rather than driving to Sunset Beach, I drove us to Little Saigon in Westminister. It was not until the Taro Cakes, 25 mins. later, were placed on the table that he got off the call and asked me what were we doing here.... I am thankful, for the very first time in 25 years, for my dad's phone distraction that we could go to Dim Sum rather than omlettes... ;oD

2) I am thankful for Interscope Records and Terry Wang, U2's Tour Publicist, the best damned PR chickeeta that Brea (SoCal) and Taiwan has ever produced (Terry, you rock!). They sent me the U2 "U2 Go Home - Live from Slane Castle, Ireland" DVD this week. I just watched it. It is very good. It re-reminded me why U2 is the Rolling Stones Plus of my generation without the drugs and scary outfits.... U2 has delivered quality "redemptive" Rock'n'Roll for over 24 years. Thank you, U2!

3) Time off. Four days with no agenda. Thank God.

4) My brother Joe Hanen. Good Man. Gracious. Generous. Thank you.

Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2003:

Today I am thankful for...

1) The weekly bowling gang: Julie Wanda, Tink, Hector, Karl, Lucky, Kevin, and April. Thanks for making me laugh and having fun.

2) The comeback of the endangered Catalina Island Fox. Today the LA Times reported:

A rare fox no bigger than a housecat may be saved from extinction on Santa Catalina Island, thanks to scientists fighting for its survival with traps, cages and a cutting-edge vaccine.

In an age when so many endangered-species dramas star lobbyists and lawyers, this little-noticed campaign 26 miles off the Los Angeles coast may actually be a success story � although ever-cautious scientists will not declare victory yet.

What they will acknowledge is that the Santa Catalina Island fox, nearly wiped out by canine distemper virus, is slowly growing in numbers, from only 100 four years ago to nearly 250 today.

2) The fall weather. Rarely do we have seasonally appropriate weather here in SoCal, but the last few days the highs have been in the 60s and the lows in the 40s with a chill in the air. Very nice.

As the song goes, "Give thanks with a grateful heart." In this week of Thanksgiving, I am going to daily post at least one thing that I am thankful for.

Monday - 11/24/03:

1) The birth of Mike Magrann on Nov. 24th, 1960. Happy Birthday, Mike! I've know Mike since I was 15 and his songs have been a part of my personal in head sing-a-long playlist since 1983, esp. "Manzanar".

2) The Anna's Hummingbird pair who were defending their territory in the backyard of the Doll Hut yesterday afternoon. Just when I thought I was at a honky tonk benefit, standing out in the back patio, smashed along with all the other folks there to see The Blasters, I noticed a pair of hummingbirds racing around our heads. There is a yellow flowering tree growing just outside the fence of the Doll Hut that the hummers were trying to defend from the 50 odd people invading their space and flowers. In all my years of birding, I have never had a hummingbird allow me to get within 5 feet of it, and yesterday both birds stuck around the tree and fence for over 2 hours. I was able to get two clear pictures. Amazing!

3) A good drummer seamless integrates into a band's sound. A bad drummer sticks out like a sore thumb. But a truly great drummer is a joy to watch and listen to. In my book there are three truly great drummers out playing right now:
a) Matt Kelly of the Dropkick Murphys
b) Sally of the Fabulous Disaster
c) Bill Bateman of the Blasters and the Blue Shadows
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of watching Bill Bateman play an amazing set at the Doll Hut. Thank you, Bill.

Perseverance, Fortitude, and Gumption. And the greatest of these is ____________.....

fortitude n: strength of mind that enables a person to meet danger or bear pain or adversity with courage. syn: grit, back bone, pluck

Here is a roster of Presidential 2004 Candidate Blogs:

Howard Dean

Gen. Wesley Clark

John Edwards

John Kerry

George W. Bush

Other Candidates' websites that are not blogs:

Carol Moseley Braun

Dick Gephardt

Dennis Kucinich

Joe Lieberman

Rev. Al Sharpton

And the Greens have not fielded a candidate as of yet.... Tanya, correct me here if I am wrong.

Jim Washburn has an eye opening, if a bit inflammatory, opinion editorial in this week's OC Weekly:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it is flat-out insane for a nation to spend billions on a missile defense shield while leaving itself defenseless against the damage that any nitwit, domestic or foreign, can do to us with a single match. A great many experts will tell you a missile defense shield simply won’t work and that, moreover, none of the terrorists we regard as a threat have a missile that could pester us. Meanwhile, the threat of arson is so palpable that I could instead be writing this article in big letters in the layer of ash blanketing my neighborhood.

Why even mention the missile defense shield at this charred moment? Because we have only so much money and resources. We have only so many scientific minds. We have only so much civic will. And we are frittering it all away on a bunch of fearmongers’ hardware instead of on programs that might ever conceivably do us some good, particularly in weeks such as this.

Do you know how many nuclear warheads the U.S. has? As of February, we had 10,729 operational nukes, and Bush wants to build a pricey new generation of treaty-busting ones.

Do you know how many firefighting tanker planes we have? Thirty.

For a nation that has spent the last two years venerating Firefighters, why don't we allocate them the resources and staff to do their jobs?

San Diego, with a high proportion of tax-cut fervored Republicans, got caught with their pants down. Right or Left or Center, we Americans need to rethink our approach to essential services and infrastructure and tax accordingly.

I don't know about you, but I think I would like a well-staffed and equipped fire department, clean water & air, good roads, and effecient sewage treatement over more warheads.

A 100% Pure Product of American Protestantism - in this blog post Mark Shea tells it straight and links to an article that spells out the extreme results of American Evangelical culture.

"Same with American Protestantism: at it's best you get saints like Billy Graham or Jim Eliot. At its worst, Brother Bubba's Informercial Gospel Hour."

Mr. Shea forgot to mention that American Protestantism at its worst also gives us George W. Bush and his cronies.

As a nice Californian Christian person from a family that is a mix of Catholic and Protestants and Agnostics, as well as someone who attended a conservative Protestant Evangelical college, this post reminded me why it is very important to be flexible, be open to the tenets and emphases of the other major branches of Christianity, and why not to take oneself and one's beliefs so darned seriously.

Christians of all the branches of the faith should read Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's "Good Omens" to loosen up and have many great laughs.

Last week, I left a message on Wanda's machine to the effect of, "My family is in the middle of a huge conuberation. Argh!" Wanda left me a message later that said, "I looked up conuberation and it is not in any dictionary. What did you mean by that word?" Blessings upon my English Masters / journalist/ editor friends for keeping me honest.

I looked in my dictionary. There is a conurbation (a continuous network of urban communities; example: Los Angeles). But no conuberation. I was surprised, as I have been using the word for years, mostly with Erika and my brother Joe. Upon reflection, I realized that Erika, Joe, and I all make up new words all the time, and as a result have no problem with using made up words in context. Some of the words get used frequently, and then become a "word" in our vocabulary.

I called Erika and asked if I made up conuberation or if it is a real word, because I know that she and I use it all the time. She told me that I made it up years ago to describe how crazy my family is and that we both now use it regularly in conversation. She said it is spreading to other people.

Here is the official definition that Erika and I have decided upon:

Conuberation: \kän-(y)u-ber-'a-zhen\ modern Califorian, n: a fit or enactment of crazy, mixed up, hysterical, out of control place, situation or family.

The conuberation is a hybrid of conniption and conurbation.

Notes from the 10:00 pm (PDT) hour on the day of the Recall Election:

1) I must quote Jello, the punk prophet, who called it in 1980, "California Uber Alles". Heil Arh-nold. Arnold + Arrogance + Big Money GOP Backing = Arnold - you are now what you fear most - a whore. Go shoot more steroids, then you will be a real man...

2) (Arrogance + Actor who reads scripts for a living + cult of celebrity) + Calif's career politician legistature = hell hath no fury like a woman scorned + one interesting Circus to come.

Hope Arnold has been coated in teflon, the Terminator may not last through the first one hundred days or so predicts conservative George Neumayr.

3) Can we Recall Dick Cheney? Please?

4) Art and Punk Rock is always best under oppresion and facism. Look at what the Reagan 80's produced.... Bush Jr + Actor Governor = Bye Bye Blink 182, Good Charlotte and the like. Hello Anti-Flag!

5) At the Grisham for Govenor Rally on Sunday night, one of the security guys said to one of the bands, "I like your music, but I hate your politics." Hello! Wake up! Real Punk = Radical Politics. If you don't want radical left politics with your music, go listen to Korn or Brittney Spears or Celine Dion.

Let the Games begin! Shall we all go to the Colesium for bread and circus?

(note to the faint of heart or the moderate: this post was purposefully inflammatory)

Many of my friends and family are highly political creatures and have already planned their day on Tuesday to fit in voting on the California Recall. Last night at the Adolescents' show at the HOB Anaheim, a bunch of us at the Rose Terrace Bar got into a good discussion on the Recall and why Arnold S. cannot be our next Governor.

If you are on the fence, you are indifferent or otherwise don't think your vote counts, please resist your inertia and go and vote on Tuesday. For or against the recall, and whoever you believe to be most fit to govern our state, just go and vote.

Mi Teaghlach Mithear
o
Mi Familia Loca

Whether I say it in Irish Gaelic or Spanish or Californian, my mother's family is crazy. No doubts about it. My great aunt Shirley truly was out to lunch and lived the second half of her life at the Norwalk State Mental Institution. She would send letters to my mother asking how little 5-year old Jenny was, even when I was 30. I rather liked great aunt Shirley, at least she came by her nuttiness due to natural brain chemicals or lack thereof.

Now the rest of them who are not locked up are still not so sane even with supposedly normal seritonin and dopamine levels. There is the overwhelming family obsession with always doing and competing and excercising. And then there is the family "bad picker". Yep, with the exception of my cousin Brian, everyone of them has been married between 2-4 times.

And the family wonders why my brother, sister, and I are still single. We like stability, we like being laid back (even if a wee bit bouncy), we like no drama (ok as long as it is humorous and makes for a good story later), we like no divorces... it must be the Hanen and Hahn influence on the Mithear Kilroy blood.

Why this post? My mom is currently camping in Mammoth with her new beau... Kevin the local bum. Yep, the semi-homeless guy from the park. My sister has lost her composure, my brother is laughing, and I am shaking my head wondering when I should change my phone number.

I have been threatening to divorce the whole lot of my mother's family for years. I may just do it this year. Or maybe I should write a movie screenplay on a large crazy Irish family from LA...

Tonight, when I got home from my annual early fall pilgrimmage to the Eastern High Sierra for hiking & leaf peeping, I boiled some potatoes for a late supper. After 20 mins. of cooking, I needed to lift the lid and check on the little Dutch Yellows, but the lid handle was too hot. I reached for the nearest kitchen towel, lifted the lid with the towel, checked the potatoes and determined that they needed more time in the pot. I put the lid back down, put the kitchen towel down, and returned to the section of the LA Times I was reading.

I smelled burning. I saw sparks. The kitchen towel was on fire and trying to set the wood chopping board on fire. I flung the flamming towel onto the floor and used the throw rug to stamp out the fire. Once everything was under control, I started to yell.

My roommate came into the kitchen, saw the half charred kitchen towel, the floor rug with char marks, and the singed chopping board. She remarked that I should have used the pot holders next to the stove, as they are 5 by 5 inch squares that would not get near the burner as I lifted the lid.

This may be true, but I usually only remember to use the potholders when I open the oven and need to get items in or out or move them around. When I am cooking on the stove, I don't think of a pot holder, I use the nearest kitchen towel. I may need to rethink this strategy, as I have just lost my favorite towel.

Lots of people like to claim that there are no seasons in Southern California. These are usually people who grew up in places with four traditional seasons, and SoCal is a wee bit too subtle for them.

As a native of the place, I would like to assert that we here in SoCal have 3 to 6 seasons depending on how subtle you would like to get.

The Three Season Perspective:

Sun - This season happens frequently and can be cool and bright or warm and bright or hot and bright depending on the time of year.

Rain - This season usually happens November - April and is interspersed with Sun.

Inversion - This season usually happens in late spring/early summer and again in late summer/early fall. The Inversion season occurs when the Pacific Ocean is cold and the desert is hot, thus the middle region (first fifty miles between ocean and desert) is either foggy, smoggy, hazy or all three at once, as the competing air temps duke it out up against the mountains. This is the season that baffles visitors and non-natives the most.

The Six Season Perspective:

Winter: November through February - this season includes Rain and Sun. The temps can drop down in the 60s in the daytime, causing all sorts of folks in flip flops and tank tops to whine extensively about how FREEZING IT IS. Very funny time of year. Also one of the most beautiful times of the year when the mountains are draped in white and it is 72 degrees at the beach.

Spring: February through April - this season also includes Rain and Sun, with some Santa Ana winds. Warm, fertile, snow on mountains, everything blooming, and strawberries in season.

June Gloom: May through June (sometimes into July) - this season is the Inversion time - fog and low clouds roll in and either roll out at noon or stay all day. People get grumpy, esp. my mom.

Summer: July through August - this season is SUN. Can be nice and warm with a good ocean breeze or just plain hot.

Smog: September through October - this season is the late summer version of June Gloom combined with heat & humidity from Mexican hurricane season. This is the season that gets the most complaints out of me. Most likely time of year to have 105 degrees, 100056% humidity, and air that is nearly solid. Yuck!

Fall: October through early December - like fall in many other places just a bit more subtle and warmer. The leaves are more likely to turn brown-red or brown-yellow than a pure red or yellow. Usually sunny, can include inversion or rain and a good Santa Ana wind or two or three.

Clark enters presidential race

Wesley Clark Announces ... Finally

A Citizen's Appeal to a General in a Time of War (at Home):

September 12, 2003

Dear General Wesley Clark,

I've been meaning to write to you for some time. Two days after the Oscars, when I felt very alone and somewhat frightened by the level of hatred toward me for daring to suggest that we were being led into war for "fictitious reasons," one person stuck his neck out and came to my defense on national television.

And that person was you.

Aaron Brown had just finished interviewing me by satellite on CNN, and I had made a crack about me being "the only non-general allowed on CNN all week." He ended the interview and then turned to you, as you were sitting at the desk with him. He asked you what you thought of this crazy guy, Michael Moore. And, although we were still in Week One of the war, you boldly said that my dissent was necessary and welcome, and you pointed out that I was against Bush and his "policies," not the kids in the service. I sat in Flint with the earpiece still in my ear and I was floored -- a GENERAL standing up for me and, in effect, for all the millions who were opposed to the war but had been bullied into silence.

The Wesley Clark Weblog

Here is an exerpt from John Kerry's Announcement speech:

But the threats today don't just come from gun barrels; they also come from oil barrels. The dollars we spend at the pump can too easily fund the terrorists who seek to destroy us. America will only be stronger if we never have to send our sons and daughters into battle for oil half a world away.

We have to disarm that danger by making America independent of Mideast oil within the next ten years. I know that the auto industry has political muscle. But we're in a time of war, and everyone should contribute to the cause. In World War II, Detroit was the arsenal of democracy. Today they need to raise their gas mileage and build the vehicles of the future that use clean, renewable energy like ethanol. I also know there are some in our own party who resist this because they fear it will cost jobs. But it's right for America -- and energy independence will create 500,000 new high-paying jobs right here in this country.

I am glad to hear someone running for President say these words. Mr. Bush and his Puppet Masters ought to have said something to this effect two years ago. Now hopefully a leader in our country will actually follow through with the above!

We Americans are Oil Junkies. We need to go to rehab and then change our ways. Or are we going to continue our crude in a syringe habit all the while we terrorize ourselves and others for our habit?

Thanks to a link in a post at Rebecca's Pocket, I was lead to this article on the Christian Science Monitor's website, All Equal Under God, But Submission For Women?:

Roles in the church should be based on the God-given gifts of individuals, which are without regard to gender, class, or race, they say, pointing to Gal. 3:28: "There is neither Jew or Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

I am glad to see a ground swell of Christians who are standing up against the instituition of fundementalism in American protestantism, of which the Christians for Biblical Equalityis leading the charge.

The Vice President of our nation seems to be a man of many talents and interests, talents that are well hidden and interests that are not necessarily in the best interests of the people but of his corporate friends. At what point do we the people demand accountability from our elected officials? Are we a nation of which sex and scandal much more interesting and impeachable than shady business deals from elected office and bad ethics are?

From the news column at Salon.com and the AP news wire:

Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force appeared to have some interest in early 2001 in Iraq's oil industry, including which foreign companies were pursuing business there, according to documents released Friday by a private watchdog group.

Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, obtained a batch of task force-related Commerce Department papers that included a detailed map of Iraq's oil fields, terminals and pipelines as well as a list entitled "Foreign Suitors of Iraqi Oilfield Contracts."

The current administration has shown itself to be much more interested in helping their friends and former business colleagues in business than in democracy. Are we now a nation run by an oligarchy of businessocrats?

God forbid that the French and Russians could have gotten the Iraqi oil contracts and not US oil companies! Mr. Cheney is not only a shadowy figure, but one with very bloody hands. Blood for oil anyone?

I have been ranting and raving to anyone who will listen, mostly my mom and best friend and the barflies.net message board, about the flimsy reasons that Shrubya took us to war, but Derek Powazek has said it much more elegantly:

So there we have it. Clinton lied about sex, Bush lied about bombs. The difference? In the Bush version, over 6,000 people died. In the Clinton version, there was only a petit mort. So you tell me: Which man is unfit to lead?

Bravo, Derek!

Rusty from Black Monday and Brian from Shot to Hell in Las Vegas, April 2003, photo by Ms. Jen

Last Saturday night I was sitting outside the Doll Hut, enjoying the fresh breeze, Disneyland fireworks and cool air, when Rusty & Jorge from Black Monday came on over and regalled me with lovely tales of the Hootenanny, of boredom, of how they didn't know anyone, etc. Basically, "we have been drinking all day in the hot sun and now we just both had more Fosters" sort of tales.

The upswing is Rusty started teasing me that I was "Irish" racist and putting the brown man down because I don't list his band enough on the Barflies.net SoCal Calendar. Of