The Littlest Nazis

aren't they just sooooo cute.

someone needs to take his internet connexion away...

the internets, as Wuh calls them, allows us unparalleled access to the entire (wired) planet at the touch of a button. or two. and as warren ellis so oft demonstrates, this is not always a good thing for the entire (wired) world. for example, his mailing list just got this little tidbit of joy:

There's a band on MySpace called ONE ARMED ANAL.

I felt it was important to share this with you.

As you can probably tell, I am home alone for the next two days, and therefore drinking.

I have a lot of whisky. Don't you wish you had a lot of whisky? I have a lot of whisky. You could have had a lot of whisky. But you didn't like it when I turned up at your house naked. You should have asked for whisky. But you threw up. And so I shat in your socks. And kept all the whisky.

mwah ha ha. all your bandwidth are belong to us.

Momus Kicks Ass Again

i read iMomus daily, but i haven't mentioned it on this blog. however, today's post, Susan Ciancolo, has a bit in it that resonates hard with me. Here's an excerpt:

I think this issue of safety in Japan is very much overlooked when people talk about the status of women here. Much is made by foreign observers of the problem of Japanese train gropers and the fetishistic mindset of many Japanese men, but the big picture is often overlooked: that this is an overwhelmingly safe place for women to walk about in. The very sexy and expressive way that Japanese women dress is a direct result of their sense of ease and security in public places. Safety and expressiveness go hand in hand. It's also important that Japan doesn't have the West's big race and poverty gaps. The New York assaults I mentioned were the result of one group of people feeling that acts of almost random violence in public places were justified by racial and economic injustice.

Since the gaps between rich and poor, black and white are being increased by the current US administration, American cities will only become more dangerous in the short term. That means less expressiveness on the part of the citizens of American cities; restrictions on liberty of movement, restrictions on women's freedom. It might also explain the sharky menace, the brooding aggressive mood I noticed in the foreign magazine section of ABC the other day: in stark contrast to their Japanese equivalents, American magazine covers featured images of men in black walking through sheets of flame carrying machine-guns, dark-helmeted heads with hard cold light reflected in their visors, menacing rappers oozing "don't mess with me" attitude.

The gentle imagery that Susan Ciancolo produces - delicate drawings of deer, plants, girls, clothes - could easily be found on a Japanese magazine cover (I bought a copy of Relax for Girls yesterday, a magazine which very much embraces this style). But it's getting increasingly hard to imagine it featured anywhere in an American magazine. Neither America's left nor its right wants girly girls or "girly men". In an unfortunate cultural pincer movement, the US left (in the shape of feminism and the ideology of equality of opportunity) has masculinized women just in time to co-incide with the right's masculinization of the streets and the world by sending in soldiers, increasing social tensions, upping hatred and resentment.

The paradox is that the more the US becomes an Israel-style security state, the less secure it becomes. You address security by working on its root causes - hatred, resentment, poverty - rather than filling your cities, and the world, with machine-gun-toting gooks. In a recent column for RealTokyo magazine, Maeda Keizo describes what it's like for a Japanese to visit New York now:

I'm in New York once again. Even though prepared to find security measures being drastically re-inforced since 9.11, the endless lines at the customs and the fingerprints and facial portraits they're taking of travellers don't exactly make entering the USA a nice adventure. Once in the city I find policemen with huge dogs all over the place, and although I understand that this is the price people have to pay for an almost impersonally clean subway and safety in everyday life, I have the feeling that it's a bit too much. Due to the watching eyes I'm constantly feeling in my neck I'm getting slightly depressed. But somehow the people I meet and the usual cafés I visit again this time help me clear up.

this resonates with me because it is such a nice upsumming of the "social anaconda" effect we are experiencing here, and it is a disturbing trend that seems to increase our similarity to socially restrictive countries such as Iran. consider what michelle bryant says in her review of Dr. Faegheh Shirazi's book The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture:

Although the custom of veiling is typically associated with Islam, the practice actually outdates Islamic culture by thousands of years. Veiling and seclusion were marks of prestige and symbols of status in the Assyrian, Greco-Roman and Byzantine empires as well as in pre-Islamic Iran.

Throughout history the veil has been used to promote political agendas, to demonstrate political protest and even to show political support. For instance, when the French dominated Algeria, the women of Algeria substituted wearing the traditional white veil with wearing a black veil as a non-verbal form of protest.

Some countries, such as Iran, have gone from being unveiled to being veiled and back again. Shirazi's book The Veil Unveiled gives an account of the significance the veil has played in Iranian politics.

The Iranian women were forced to unveil to fit Reza Shah’s delusions of grandeur, and forced to reveil to fit Ayatollah Khomeini’s visions for true religion [...] Women in Iran during the Islamic revolution in 1978 were told by donning the veil they would fend off the assault of Western culture, and by sending their sons to fight the Iraqi army and becoming a martyr they would help save the Islamic Republic of Iran and support the defense of Islam. Ten years after the war with Iraq, she was told that by not veiling according to the guidelines of the clergy she would cause the downfall of the Islamic Republic. In Iranian politics, the veil has proved to be the most effective weapon of the rulers, secular and clerical.

During her yearly visits to Iran, Shirazi finds that the hijab is still a controversial topic conjuring many emotions. While conducting research for her book, Shirazi viewed graffiti plastered on the walls of houses and factories bordering the roadway. It conveyed slogans such as “Death to the improperly veiled woman" and "If unveiling is a sign of civilization, then animals must be the most civilized."

so, like in The Handmaid's Tale, we are slowly being consumed by fundamentalism, militarism and apocalypticism, all rolled into one, and the japanese stare at us like the lunatics we are, dressed as they want and free as we once dreamt of being. Is Iran our future, our rights lost as persons, as women, as intellectuals?

Blessed Are Those Who Know How To Be Good

i suppose you could say i have a lifelong chip on my shoulder regarding organized religion. since my teens, my attitude has changed a lot. i'm a liberal after all. i _try_ hard to overcome my biases. that's an everyday struggle because i value my own beliefs as much as any other human being. that's the thing about people. they're frequently stubborn, prideful, self-absorbed, and self-righteous. when they are fearful and anxious in addition to all of those other things, people are horribly obnoxious at best and dangerous at worst.

religion has the power to inspire people to be flexible, humble, and generous. it can teach them that faith is about courage. for a vast army of human beings, faith is about learning to shun inner moral conflict by always doing the right thing. faith at its best acknowledges that deciding what the right thing is can be brutally difficult and emotionally wrenching.

i've been fortunate to know devoutly religious people who do their best _not_ to judge. they don't advise or encourage anyone who seeks their counsel to do something they think is wrong. their expression of faith has nothing to do with organizing society into a moral police force that aggressively shames 'sinners' into obedience. instead, they forgive. they believe in second chances and acknowledge that a person's relationship with god is personal. they understand that human beings are weak and fearful.

i've always been humbled by such people. i'm often astonished at how many there are. despite my lack of faith in a 'god', they give me faith in humanity. they give me faith in religion as a instrument for the advancement of human rights and economic justice. we need people who refuse to run away from the most difficult of moral battles -- to accept the humanity of those deemed 'evil.'

My Fun Game Result

My text comes from Jablonski N G (ed.) 2002: The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World (Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, 27), ISBN 0-940228-50-5.

There is a generally coherent group of findings on Beringian paeoenvironmental conditions, resources, hazards, and opportunities; Arctic steppe with patchy Beringian resources, but megafauna present (Guthrie 1990); mountain forest-steppe and steppe (Laukin 2000); and coastal maritime (Laughlin & Harper 1988). Finally, there is a small but challenging class of ideas concerned with learning why the colonization of northern Siberia and Beringia ever occurred in the first place, and why it seems from most archaeological evidence to have been so late in the Pleistocene history of human dispersal (Fagan 1990; Soffer 1990; Yesner 1998).

Each of these major and minor domains, be they based on diachronic or synchronic evaluations, or both, has been championed by workers using primarily a single line of evidence.

good book.

condi the domme

am i reading the washington post or gawker?

Speechless

this poem was posted at daily kos in a discussion thread about this post.

[WARNING]
the post contains a photograph that _might_ not be safe for work. of course, you probably shouldn't be reading *this* blog at work. ;-).
[WARNING]

on the rarest of occasions, in the vast roar of white noise on the internet, i am exposed to something that i will never forget. this is one of those things. i wonder if i ever would have known about this poem if, by chance, i _hadn't_ been following that particular thread today.

the category of 'things from the internet that i will never forget' mostly contains things like goatse [<== no image, just a wikipedia article] and tubgirl [<== no image, just a wikipedia article]. do yourself a favor and do not search for those at work. in fact, don't ever search for those. i am a survivor of an assault on top of an assault. goatse and tubgirl were cruelly sprung on me by probable asshole teenagers who, instead of trying to get laid, delight in twiddling away the finite and precious hours of their lives finding ways to trick people into looking at those revolting images.

stumbling upon an astounding piece of writing in the midst of what is mostly forgettable in the long term is a sublime experience. surfing the internet is all about devouring enormous quantities of text. the signal to noise ratio varies from community to community, but the noise is _always_ noticeable. the old pre-internet-boom BBS communities were no different.

one could argue that BBS communities were 'local' and that my small sampling of those operating in eastern tennessee in the early nineties is hardly sufficient to make such a claim. i chuckle at that objection. the fidonet backbone [there were other systems like this, but this is the only one i remember] tied a lot of BBS communities together. the 'conversation' progressed at a much slower pace than it does now because a BBS had to shut down for several hours each day to download new messages from the fidonet chain and upload the new posts from its own users. usually, only one person could log into a BBS at one time.

despite the obvious technological restrictions, there was a fair amount of dialogue between people from all over the country. i don't recall any international crosstalk. i think that would have been too expensive for most sysops. computer equipment was outrageously pricey, and so was intercontinental phone service. a BBS required at the very least a second phone line. one BBS in my area had 4 lines, but they were constantly busy. i imagine that it was a bitch to operate and maintain. the complexity of that responsibility grew quite a bit faster than the number of users and phone lines.

people were just as pig-headed and stupid online back then as they are now. the online dialogues regarding abortion, homosexuality, the drug war, liberalism, conservatism, feminism, poverty, welfare, race, racism, sex, sexism, gender, religion and the wisdom (or lack thereof) of legislating 'moral' behavior haven't changed in the fifteen years that i have been reading and participating in these debates.

A Fun Game

angie of Ang's Weird Ideas wants us to play a fun game:

Rules:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

the nearest book is emily0's copy of Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, a fun book about gay wildlife. it has gay gorillas, gay owls, and even gay manatees.

Significant numbers of zoologists are willing to concede that same-sex courtship, copulation, and pair-bonding are indeed "sexual" or "homosexual" activities. However, they commonly propose alternative explanations for these behaviors premised on the notion that this activity is still in some way "anomalous" or "aberrant." Ultimately, most such attempts to find an "explanation" have failed outright or are fundamentally misguided.

Good Things: Pretzels

1) 'pretzel' is a cool word.
2) the word 'pretzel' has a 'z' in it which makes it pure gold for scrabble.
2) i love to lick the salt off before finishing one off.
3) they taste good with mustard and soda.
4) at least one pretzel didn't like george bush.

andy ihnatko done kilt me

with today's yellowtext tidbit:

I was leafing through a copy of Reader's Digest at the grocery store when I encountered a feature that the magazine had apparently added recently. Or at least at some point in the eleven years since I used to read it at my grandparents' house. They still run jokes that were sent in by readers, but now they also print a really lame one and solicit a better punchline. Email an improvement to the magazine and you've got a shot at a hunnert clams.

This month's problem child:

Q: How is an elephant like a tomato?

A: Neither one can wear a wristwatch!

Well, bravo to the RD. Yes, they remain the unapologetic mouthpieces for the international Freemason conspiracy to add fluoride to the money supply, but they know sucky comedy when it bursts from the chest of a crewman and starts killing Colonial Marines after a bafflingly short gestation period.

I jotted down the email address. When I got back home, I sent them my improved version:

Q: How is an elephant like a tomato?

A: They both create a big, red, pulpy mess when you throw one at somebody.

And then I ordered $100 worth of books and DVDs off of Amazon. In retrospect, I might have been a bit hasty. It's important for any freelance author to know one's market, after all; I'm not sure how well this joke will play when it's read in the bathroom of a recreational vehicle.

that's the kind of snappy, snarky response to which i aspire: Yes, they remain the unapologetic mouthpieces for the international Freemason conspiracy to add fluoride to the money supply, but they know sucky comedy when it bursts from the chest of a crewman and starts killing Colonial Marines after a bafflingly short gestation period.

dizzam, bizzotch! he mixes metaphors so fast it makes me puke from the vertigo.

summertime... with my kitty.

well, ginmar may be fainting for her sun porch and enjoying attempting to dress with three kittens pouncing, but i have no porch. i do, however, have a crappy old couch that i have placed asswards in my 8x10 bedroom - that is, facing the window with its ass towards the rest of the room. it looks like a infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of drawing boards almost came up with a decent layout for my room, but faced the couch the wrong way.

but this allows me to sweat profusely in the increasingly powerful sunlight every morning, an experience that does leave me feeling recharged and happy. we like sunlight on our pineal gland. however, it does attract cats like, erh, a sunny spot attracts cats, so i am also draped with 1d3 cats each round i spend here. i can usually herd them so that i can both type and drink my lattè, but usually this entails spanky the wondermuffin sleeping on my left arm, thereby limiting any other movement on that side of my body. please recall that her nicknames are "the grenade", "the landmine" and, more recently, "bouncing betty" for her particular skills:

photo of an authentic "bouncing betty" (SMi-35) with a few of its people-shredding ball bearing innards from the US airborne museum at ste.-mère église

Schrapnellmine 35 (SMi-35): The SMi 35 was buried with just its igniters protruding above ground or connected to trip wires. When tripped, the SMi 35 ejected a small cylinder that scattered some 350 small steel balls over an area of 164 yards. The Allies dubbed these the "Bouncing Betty". (weapons of the italian campaign (WWII)

a fairly accurate description of spanky's response to any attempts to move while she is lying on you comes from the battlefield: vietnam website:

trigger a Bouncing Betty and you've got nowhere to hide. the mine springs up to roughly torso level and then detonates, usually killing the target immediately.

this is a relatively accurate description.

but i digress. i was discussing my asswards couch, which no two-leg but i will sit in becauses it requires the hand-foot coördination of an evolutionary throwback such as myself: i be clumsy with the fingers and nimble with the toes, which is why they passed a law disallowing me from attempting to ever touch a basket-, soft- or baseball ever again, but i started varsity soccer despite being the shortest fullback anyone ever done seen. i can nimbly raise my leg over the couch-back and accurately place my foot on the spots where the couch will not disintegrate, stab me with springs or flip over (it weighs all of eight pounds) and just step on over and fold down like a flower at night into a cross-legged position. wearing an ankle-length silk skirt.

perhaps more crucially, once in this seat, i can then leave the couch in mirror-reverse, levering my leg over the couch-back and into a flat-foot stance on the open spaces on my book- and paper-smeared floor without tossing myself, the cats or the couch into a death-lurch, and then just lift the other leg delicately over and into a standing position, two feets on the floor. i can do it without moving anything above the waist, so i often do this with a laptop in one hand and the remains of my cup of coffee in the other, which admittedly causes mighty consternation among my two-legged roommates. (i've already dealt with the four-legged roomie who dislikes all movement of her living furniture above.) still, it's bin months without a single incident, so at least i know i'll do well if ever i need to climb over waist-high obstacles quickly with my arms bound behind my back.

well, it's good to know i've got marketable skills. maybe they need a new actor for alias? i dunno, i can hope.

warren ellis rides again

our lord & master warren ellis is reposting some of his fiction that was lost from the web when his old webserver died. this is from 2003 february, searchlight:

The hotel is beautiful, and so is the room. Boobytrapped with fashion magazines, however, and the TV was tuned to The Fashion Channel, a constant parade of skeleton sex zombies (Ray Harryhausen doing softcore) stalking towards the camera in an infinite wardrobe of unwearable art, backed with ambient audiowash.

THE FACE magazine confirms that zombies are once again Cool, and informs that Celt-ambient Enya-style is dans la vent somehow. I have sudden visions of zombies eating live flesh in a huge mall to the strains of "Orinoco Flow".

wookiepocket and warren ellis. our beautiful, scary future.

nancy, philo...

i scooped ya. :)

ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ (cree)

let's take a moment to examine the abo policies of the early US and Canada, or rather their result.

once the atlantic seaboard as far south as south carolina were speakers of closely related languages of the algonkin branch of the algic family, the most widespread aboriginal language family in north america.

in the united states, we have endless placenames, mostly yankee and the surrounding "early states" regions, taken from those languages. for anyone familiar with the family, the mississippi transparently means big river, illinois is a french spelling for the word for [native] peoples - reflected below - and that's just the two biggest. ohio, connecticut & massachusetts are algonkin, as are all those crazy placenames from miami (OH) to usquepaugh (RI). the original name of "the state of rhode island & providence plantations" was aquidneck, which swamp yankees still use when in-state, though more recently it has come to mean the large island on which the world-famous city of newport is located (as opposed to the mainland or the islands of jamestown, prudence & cet.).

we wiped these peoples out almost to total extinction; while they visibly live on in our national character (perchance accounting for the distinctly non-caucasian tinge of the 'white' american - more'n a little abo and black blood runs in allegedly euro veins here, and vice-versa) and foodstuffs, their languages are almost entirely extinct. have you ever heard an algic language spoken? i grew up a five-minute bike ride from the main narragansett reservation, with narragansett classmates, and the only words i know are topographical in nature. the only algonkin peoples from what is now the united states whose language remains vibrant are the kikapú, who fled from their home near ohio and currently live in mexico.

if, on the other hand, you live in canada, the first nations are a visible presence. the subarctic algonkin language grouping called cree is living, and in great variety.

Canadian Census lists 97,230 Cree speakers, while according to Howe and Cook, there are 80,000. There are 775 speakers in the United States (U.S. Census)

this group of speakers historically lived from saskatchewan in the far west to the labrador coast in the east - and they remain in these territories. i make no claim that life has been painless, but the fact is that their language(s) are thriving, as are the other algonkin languages of canada: ojibway, ojicree, naskapi & innu ("montagnais"), for starters. speakers of cree alone have a dazzling dialect continuum: consider the names these dialects have for their language (most of which are cognate with the US state name illinois, if you note):

ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ Nēhiyawēwin, ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᒧᐏᐣ Nēhiyawēmowin, ᓀᐦᐃᖬᐍᐏᐣ Nīhithawīwin, ᐃᓂᓃᒧᐏᐣ Ininīmowin, ᐃᓂᓂᐎ ᐃᔑᑭᔗᐎᐣ Ininiwi-Išikīšwēwin, ᐃᓕᓖᒧᐎᓐ Ililīmowin, ᐄᔨᔫ ᐊᔨᒨᓐ Īyiyū Ayimūn, ᐄᓅ ᐊᔨᒨᓐ Īnū Ayimūn

the proto-algonkin word for a human being was *iriniw, plural *iriniwaki, and characteristic of all the algonkin languages is how each treated the phoneme *r. for example, the southeastern new england subbranch of algonkin show the same kind of variations by tribe in this sound as do the cree and ojibway: in narragansett, the word became iynu or innu; in pequot, it was iynu; in loup (western mass), it was ilnu; on long island and the continental side of long island sound, it was irnu. all of these groups have lost their language, though some groups are trying to restore it. in cree, we have everything from iyiniw to iinuu: that *r shows variation all across the spectrum, from th (as in the) to n and r and y and l. and these groups are still all speaking their languages. in fact, they publish books in cree using a geometric syllabary.

i have no point to make except that my grandfather's language and society was stolen from him, and hence i feel that loss. he wasn't from an algonkin-speaking people; he was an off-rez cherokee, one of the once-mighty "five civilised tribes" against which attempted genocide was committed. repeatedly. but as a swamp yank, i've run with the only natives i've known; indeed, i discovered while living in san diego that one of my dyke friends, a west texan emigrée, was a narragansett: her family's home plot was right where i grew up, her close kin were in my schools.

my grandfather was estranged from his people and his native tongue, but he lived his life in a traditional cherokee way: he farmed small plots, hunted and bred hunting dogs, and had the skills familiar to any person raised in the rural south. he was not a religious man, but he was a rôle-model for me, and his influence on me far outweighed his genetic potential, that's for sure. i wish he hadn't been adopted, that his own family hadn't succumbed to alcoholism and poverty and, finally, old age. i wish i had met mahaelia keaton, his nana, who passed down stone tools from the time when they were used to him as heirlooms, and from him to me. i wish my own family wasn't so ignorant of the native blood and culture in our lives: before he died, my grandfather said the same to me, and i was shamed and bitter i hadn't been with him more.

i wonder how much my own life reflects what he brought into our family. i've taken to studying native north american languages, and i'm attracted to those that make sense to my upbringing. there are no cherokee speakers here, and cherokee is an exceedingly difficult language and the books and tapes insufficient without help (for instance, they do not treat tonality, which is phonemic in cherokee and the other iroquian languages as well). i have done some work on the reconstructed pequot - the narragansett firmly refuse to speak about cultural or linguistic issues to outsiders - and on the other languages in the family, such as the well-attested cree and the nearly unknown and long-dead powhatan. they have a lexicon that is native to my birth-region. they are its native tongues. when i speak the names of towns and rivers, i want to know what i am saying. the dead from the massacres of the colonial era are under our feet, but students learn nothing about their lives or about the fact that native peoples remain alive and their cultures vibrant even here. i need to do my piece to make this right, not out of some misguided liberal postmodernism but out of my own search for the history of my own self, my own land, my own languages.

HP fucks their clients

so bOINGbOING (come è usuale) has got the Bad Word on technology DRM stuff.

HP BIOS Locks Out All Cards Save Those on a Whitelist

Ian Hogben discovered that his HP laptop stores a whitelist of allowed Mini-PCI cards in its BIOS. If the WiFi card you buy isn't on the whitelist, your laptop won't boot. The anticompetitive implications for this are stunning: if you don't go to HP on bent knee before shipping your cards, they'll lock them out of their hardware and none of their customers will be able to use your card. Not to mention what happens when new cards are invented after your laptop leaves the factory: sorry, no modern hardware for you, your laptop only works with museum pieces.

here's the link to the original hogbender.blogspot entry they cite about this problem.

a theory on why people are more lonely nowadays

here - i would write my own commentary but i'm late for a meeting. discuss!

random musings

hold on a second. something slipped past me, something that was so obvious i can't believe i missed it. remember michelle malkin's book about racial profiling? why is "racial profiling" even relevant in the war against terror, and i suppose if you extrapolate, the war againt islamofascism? and i'm going to pull out the little p.c. disclaimer, because i know that word is thrown about by many conservative-bordering-on-scary blogs and it has a bad connotation - what i mean is that there are a few crazy fascist motherfuckers who pervert the idea of islam and use it to fuck with disenfranchised people's heads and teach them to do bad things to other people, not that islam in and of itself is bad, okay? it is a war of ideals - western ideals against really extreme, misogynistic, civil-rights hating, violent, and oppresive ideals present in islamofascism. any dope can join an islamofascist movement, regardless of race. john walker lindh, jose padilla - anyone. this isn't against any country that is comprised of one "people"; this war is without borders encompassing people of many nationalities.

so really, this is a war against a really really extreme and perverted form of an otherwise harmless religion. it is against a violent cult. what does ethnic or racial background have to do with this? if you simply do a little research and figure out who these extremist religious leaders are and find out who they are preaching to and go after suspect terror cells masking as "religious groups" - doesn't that make more sense? why would racial profiling even work? have an answer to that, michelle malkin?

p.s. yes, i know about the first amendment, and the obvious concerns if this solution were to be implemented - i'm merely just stating an observation.

A Day In The Life Of A Computer Geek

a few weeks ago, when i had a little extra money to spend, i bought a 200 gigabyte hard drive on ebay.

[digression]

the subject of this tangent is an increasingly brazen and highly annoying tactic that ebay merchants use to inflate the price of their goods while sheltering the extra padding from ebay fees. what the fuck is up with these ridiculous shipping charges?! do you people think you're fooling anyone? $30 dollars to ship a hard drive? for that much money, i ought to get a free greyhound ticket to your home town and a gift certificate to city sports. if i'm gonna pay thirty dollars in 'shipping' charges for a piece of hardware weighing less than 5 pounds, i'm going to get a baseball bat and ship myself to where you are so i can beat the living shit out of you.

the best deal i found was a total of $110 dollars -- $95 for the hard drive and $15 for the 'shipping' costs. that shit shouldn't cost more than $5 bucks to pack and ship. _priority_ mail is $3.

[end digression]

so whatever. i'm happy with the hard drive, and the price i paid to get it. i just hate cheaty bastards.

it has been two long years since i had a second hard drive in my computer. for much of that time i was running windows 98 SE. to put it mildly, it required endless nursemaiding to function adequately. expressing my real feelings would require a lot of profanity. it needed to be cleaned of spyware infections constantly. often, it would just 'stop' working. and always, always, it settled into a state in which shutting it down involved the dreaded Ctrl+Alt+Del sequence. every time. without fail.

i reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled windows 98 a couple times a year. it was the one fail safe thing i could do that would ensure smooth functioning. for a few weeks i would even be able to get the operating system to shut down properly.

at that time, i had two hard drives, so backing up my data was fast and easy. then two years ago, one of my hard drives died. within months, i installed suse because i wanted to try something new without throwing down a hundred bucks for admission. this fall, i went completely linux. no spyware and the 'just stops working after 6 months' problem disappeared. i still like to try out different flavors of linux from time to time, so having the second drive is a huge relief. i will no longer need to invest three hours to backing everything up to cd before i can reformat and reinstall. i also need somewhere to store all those digital photos i've been taking.

the new hard drive has also made possible my dream of the household 'jukebox'. i am busily ripping every cd i own. then i will rip every cd that emily0 owns. then i rip every cd that our roommate, the invisible emily, owns. when this project is complete, i am going to set up a household network consisting of an ibook running OS X, a PC running Linux, and a PC running Windows ME. yes, this will be a bitch to do, but it shall be done. once this frankenetwork is complete, all three of us will be able to access the jukebox.

i have decided to embrace the linux way. the music will be encoded in ogg vorbis format. it delivers better quality sound for less hard drive space than mp3 does, and it's an open format.

Why Are Women A Medium For Conflicts Between Men?

riverbend's recent posts confirm much of this report on violence against women in iraq.

the story that won't die.

we - and anyone with an internet connection - all know that paris hilton's cell phone has been hacked, and people all over the world have been calling eminem and christina aguilera's private lines -- and even those crazy canadians are trying to claim a piece of the action. it is also interesting to note that, even in candid photos on her personal cell phone, it looks like she is posing for a softcore porn shoot: how many people do you know use their t-mobile sidekicks to take shirtless pictures of you tonguing your female buddy friend (not safe for work)? if these pictures were on an online server, it meant that she was sharing these photos with people -- the only way these photos could have appeared online is if she chose the "share" function. hasn't she learned by now not to take naked pictures of herself? *sigh*

no duh.

the simpsons: marge's sister is a lesbian. who saw THAT one coming? heh.

"in the navy!"

They want you, they want you
They want you as a new recruit

If you like adventure
Don't you wait to enter
The recruiting office fast
Don't you hesitate
There is no need to wait
They're signing up new seamen fast
Maybe you are too young
To join up today
Bout don't you worry 'bout a thing
For I'm sure there will be
Always a good navy
Protecting the land and sea

fun with hormones

so mr. heathen, who is an attractive and femme-y woman, has decided to undergo an experiment. let me quote her 14 february post for clarity:

question of the day

i just found a wayward dose of T. you know what i'm thinking. brilliant social experiment or fucking stupid idea?

don't tell me to do it just because you want to see me with (more) facial hair.

well, she did do it, and the experiment is proving very interesting. here's a funny pic of her asserting her "manly right to piss down my leg":

damn, she's cute.

the funny bit is that she's not 'going transman'; she's a femme-y bisexual who's just kickin' it with some T for some reason.

wild.

free arash & mojtaba!

for those of you wondering about the line at the top of the page about arash lotfi & mojtaba saminejad, 22 february (22 Şubat) is free mojtaba and arash! day. there is an article about them at reporters without borders. for thou lazy, lazy blogreaders, here's what is says:

Appeal Court Confirms Prison for Cyber-Dissident while Blogger is Reimprisoned

Condemning the imprisonment of two Iranian Internet users in the past 10 days, Reporters Without Borders said Iran was undergoing the Middle East's biggest-ever crackdown on online free expression.

Cyber-dissident Mojtaba Lotfi was imprisoned on 5 February after an appeal court confirmed a sentence of three years and 10 months in prison for posting "lies" on the Internet. Blogger Motjaba Saminejad, who was freed on bail of 500 million rials (43,000 euros) at the end of January, was reimprisoned on 12 February when a judge doubled the bail, making it impossible for him to raise the money.

"How can Iranian officials parade at a UN summit on the Internet at the same time as they are jailing bloggers?" Reporters Without Borders asked, referring to Iran's participation in a preparatory meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in two days' time.

"We will go to this meeting to ask them to free the cyber-dissident and two bloggers who are in prison in Iran," the press freedom organization said. "We will also remind them that they will have to respect the undertaking given during the first WSIS stage, namely respect for article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

The sentence of three years and 10 months that was upheld on appeal was originally imposed on Lotfi, a theology student from the holy city of Qom, by a lower court on 14 August. But he was allowed to remain free at the time after paying bail of 650 million rial (55,000 euros).

Lotfi used to be a journalist with the pro-reform daily Khordad, which the authorities closed in 2000. He was arrested for the first time in May 2004 and imprisoned in Qom after posting an article entitled "Respect for human rights in cases involving the clergy" on naqshineh.com, a news site about Qom. Naqshineh is also being prosecuted, above all because of its articles on the last legislative elections, and it has been blocked since March 2004 on the orders of the Qom authorities.

Saminejad was told his bail had been raised to 1 billion rials when he was summoned by the Tehran prosecutor's office for a hearing on 12 February.

He was first arrested in November 2004 for reporting the arrests of three fellow bloggers in his former blog (man-namanam.blogspot). While detained, his blog address was transferred to the blog of a group of hackers linked to the Iranian radical Islamist movement Hezbollah (irongroup.blogspot). After his release, he relaunched his blog using a new address (8mdr8.blogspot), which may have the reason for his re-arrest.

The other blogger currently in prison is journalist Arash Sigarchi, who was arrested on 17 January in the northern city of Rashat for keeping a banned blog called Panhjareh Eltehab (The Window of Anxiety), in which he reported the recent arrests of cyber-journalists and bloggers.

The second stage of the WSIS is being organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) under UN aegis in Tunis in November (see the official site: WSIS.org). A preparatory meeting (prep com) is taking place in Geneva from 17 to 25 February.

so go out, do something about it! contact the WSIS people, show support for freedom of the press. stop just bitching about it and do something positive.

A Moment Of Silence

rest in peace, hunter s. thompson.

Central Square: On The Way To Trader Joe's

Central Square: On The Way To Trader Joe's
Gate
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February 20, 2005

Central Square: On The Way To Trader Joe's
Door
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February 20, 2005


Central Square: On The Way To Trader Joe's
Tree
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February 20, 2005


Central Square: On The Way To Trader Joe's
Porch
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February 20, 2005


Central Square: On The Way To Trader Joe's
Blue
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February 20, 2005

okay, you shits...

if i bust ANYONE with a cell phone jammer, i will report your ass to the authorities, and if they don't do anything about it, i'll just rip it out of your hand. yes, cell phones are annoying, but hardly anyone i know in new york city has a land line, and sometimes, people use cell phones to get around the city, find directions, meet up, and even call in crimes, etc. and more often than not, pay phones are broken.

what is so difficult about turning to someone and saying "hey, can you keep it down?" are you so socially retarded that you can't face someone directly as ask them to stop talking on their phone? you have to sneak around with a zapper?

or better yet, we should find someone to develop "zap the zapper" technology. that would be excellent. like creating a force field around your phone that makes it immune to the zapper.

good fucking lord. i don't understand the difference between someone speaking on a cell phone in a restaurant and someone speaking to the person across from him/her at a restaurant. i find a person speaking in a normal tone of voice on a cell phone to be less irritating than a party of ten - or even a five year old kid - sitting next to you. if you're going to ban cell phones, ban all talking. ban kids. ban people. ban breathing. jeez.

people are seriously weird. and yeah, don't TOUCH mah phone, punks!!!

la rivolta!

wicked!

La Rivolta! on March 5-6 in Boston is a two day anarcha-feminist festival celebrating International Women's Day with music, workshops and solidarity across borders.

the la rivolta! banner

Saturday, March 5, 11AM-11PM at the YWCA in Cambridge will be a full day of workshops and music.

The workshops will focus on women's radical activism and struggles both locally and internationally. While providing information, the workshops are meant to inspire us to action, debate and bring our work together.

The punk concert that evening will feature women in bands that have both powerful music and lyrics - a good time to celebrate!

There will also be a self-defense class, information tables and more during the day.

Sunday, March 6th will be a more relaxed social day. A People's Kitchen will serve brunch and there will be an open atmosphere of discussion and debate. After will be another evening of music to dance to!

For more details, check out the full schedule.

dood. i love a good anarcha-feminist festival!

i'll have to miss sunday, tho - going to the rental units' house for my birthday.

birthday good. missing large anarcha-feminist social gathering right by my house bad.

can anyone find this mp3?

melissa etheridge and joss stone's tribute to janis joplin - i think chemo actually made melissa etheridge's voice BETTER. "don't try this at home," of course, but damn!

hybrid ape-human patent denied

thanks to monkeydaynews, we've got this lovely gem to appreciate:

Lab Creature is Too Human for Patenting

Rick Weiss, The Washington Post

Washington - A New York scientist's seven-year effort to win a patent on a laboratory-conceived creature that is part human and part animal ended in failure Friday, closing a historic and somewhat ghoulish chapter in American intellectual-property law.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected the claim, saying the hybrid, designed for use in medical research but not yet created, would be too closely related to a human to be patentable.

Paradoxically, the rejection was a victory of sorts for the inventor, Stuart Newman of New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y. An opponent of patents on living things, he had no intention of making the creatures. His goal was to set a legal precedent that would keep others from profiting from any similar "inventions."

But in an age when science is increasingly melding human and animal components for research - already the government has allowed many patents on "humanized" animals, including a mouse with a human immune system - the decision leaves a crucial question unanswered: At what point is something too human to patent?

Officials said it was not so difficult to make the call this time because Newman's technique could easily have created something that was much more person than not. But newer methods are allowing scientists to fine-tune those percentages, putting the patent office in an awkward position of being the federal arbiter of what is human.

"I don't think anyone knows in terms of crude percentages how to differentiate between humans and nonhumans," said John Doll, a deputy commissioner for patents. Yet neither is the office comfortable with a "we'll know it when we see it" approach, he added: "It would be very helpful... to have some guidance from Congress or the courts."

Law slips behind

The Newman case reveals how far U.S. intellectual-property law has lagged behind the art and science of biotechnology. The Supreme Court has addressed the issue of patenting life only once, and that was 25 years ago.

It also raises profound questions about the differences - and similarities - between humans and other animals, and the limits of treating animals as property.

"The whole privatization of the biological world has to be looked at," Newman said, "so we don't suddenly all find ourselves in the position of saying, 'How did we get here? Everything is owned."'

Newman's application, filed in 1997, described a technique for combining human embryo cells with cells from the embryo of a monkey, ape or other animal to create a blend of the two - what scientists call a chimera. That's the Greek term for the mythological creature that had a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail.

A loss is a victory, tooOthers had used similar methods to create a "geep," part goat and part sheep. But Newman's human-animal chimeras would have greater utility in medicine, for drug and toxicity testing and perhaps as sources of organs for transplantation into people.

In collaboration with Jeremy Rifkin, a Washington biotech activist and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, he challenged the patent office: Issue the patent, which would keep others from pursuing such work for 20 years, or reject it, effectively accomplishing the same thing.

The two had until Friday to appeal the latest rejection, but they decided to let it pass and declare victory.

For Rifkin, the case was deja vu in reverse. When U.S. scientist Ananda Chakrabarty applied for the first patent on a living organism, a genetically engineered bacterium able to digest oil spills, the case ended up in the Supreme Court because the patent office did not want to patent life forms. That time Rifkin filed the main amicus brief supporting the patent office.

'Anything under sun'

They lost. In a 5 to 4 decision, the court declared that patents could issue on "anything under the sun that is made by man."

The office has obliged, issuing patents on bacteria, yeast and, as of last fall, 436 animals.

In 1987, the patent office announced it would draw the line with humans, but it offered no legal rationale or statutory backing.

The paper trail created by the Newman claim offers perhaps the best explication yet for that ban. One rationale in the documents sent to Newman is that such a patent would be "inconsistent with the constitutional right to privacy." After all, the office wrote, a patent allows the owner to exclude others from making the claimed invention. If a patent were to issue on a human, it would conflict with one of the Constitution's core privacy rights - a person's right to decide whether and when to procreate.

Patents on humans could also conflict with the 13th Amendment's prohibition against slavery. That's because a patent permits the owner to exclude others from "using" the invention. Since "use" can mean "employ," officials wrote, a patent holder could prevent a person from being employed by any other, which "would be tantamount to involuntary servitude."

Finally, the office noted that it is illegal to import products that are made abroad using processes patented in the United States. To show how that could cause a problem in a world where people are patentable, it gave an example in which a person goes overseas and undergoes one of the many surgical procedures patented by U.S. doctors. Simply by returning to the United States, the office said, that "surgically altered human being" could be guilty of patent infringement for illegally importing herself.

Not all those concepts hold water with legal scholars. But the general position was greatly strengthened two years ago when Rep. David Joseph Weldon, R-Fla., added a rider to an appropriations bill - renewed this year - barring patents on humans or human embryos.

Still unresolved by that wording, however, is what is human and what is not.

Last week, patent officials conceded they lack a good way of defining the "human" that Newman's patent supposedly too closely resembles.

The decision letter to Newman notes that many people have heart valves from pigs. A patent has even issued on the use of baboon cells in people to aid in organ transplantation. Those procedures, the letter says, "did not convert the human patient to a non-human."

Similarly, mice that have up to 1 percent human brain cells in their skulls are clearly mice, said Stanford University biologist Irving Weissman, one of the scientists who helped make hybrid rodents.

The tricky part, all agree, is what to do with the middle ground. Weissman and others, for example, have talked about their desire to make mice whose brains are made entirely of human brain cells.

Hank Greely, a professor of law and director of Stanford's Center for Law and the Biosciences, said even those animals would not seem very human to him. "But a chimp brain with human neurons...."

That's exactly the kind of scenario that makes Rifkin, Newman and others want a total ban.

"If the U.S. Congress and president are not willing to do this now, then there is no door that will remain closed to an era of commercial eugenics," Rifkin said. "We'll be on our way to that brave new world that Aldous Huxley warned us about."

Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, agreed that Congress should at least get involved.

"The patent office is not the place for society to make its moral decisions," Kass said.

Weldon, the Florida representative, said he is interested in providing such guidance - and believes the public would favor restrictions.

"There's instant public revulsion when you start talking with the average person about this stuff." For starters, Weldon said, "I'd like to ban the creation of human embryos with animal genes in them."

But many scientists fear that Congress is likely to overreact.

"There are chimeras out there that serve very valuable purposes in medical research, such as mice that make human antibodies," said Michael Werner, chief of policy for the Biotechnology Industry Organization. "This is sufficiently technical scientifically that it should be left to scientific bodies like the National Academy of Sciences to decide."

That organization is now preparing a report, due in April, that will address scientific and ethical issues relating to human-animal chimeras. And although it will not probe deeply into intellectual-property issues, it may at least offer the patent office - and the nation - a modicum of the guidance it craves.

jesus fucking christ, they're patenting the human genome.

Friday Cat-Blogging

Friday Cat-Blogging
Emily0 and Fat Bastard, aka Mittens


Friday Cat-Blogging
Emily0 and Fat Bastard, aka Mittens

wha...

the national hockey league cancelled the entire season? and hardly anyone makes a peep. maybe i just have weird friends, but i thought hockey was gaining popularity in thie country. the entire season goes kaput and no one says anything?!

i wonder why the players didn't take the deal. "something" versus "nothing at all" doesn't seem like rocket science to me. if the lack of news surrounding this cancellation indicates anything, it indicates that interest in the league wasn't too great and the league probably didn't have any more money to give out to players, and they were trying to squeeze water from a stone.

ah well. blame canada i guess. ;)

au contraire!

i believe in free inquiry, but i don't believe in unqualified people making inquiries at improper times and improper venues. yes, summers is the president of harvard, but that does not make him an expert in everything. he is an economist, not a geneticist and not a social scientist.

for example, i should never be expected to make commentary in a professional gathering about derrida, because i have never come closer than ten feet at the most to anything he wrote; i only know that he is a philosopher that passed away recently and has made some people froth at the mouth, people who feel that his ideas were removed from reality. i leave professional commentary made in public -- or even in closed conferences populated by professionals -- about derrida to experts.

likewise, i feel that summers was unprofessional, and i cannot cheer for someone that has made off-the-cuff remarks that were not thought out and laud it as a display of "academic freedom." to do so is simply ludicrous. if a geneticist were to have made those remarks and had studies to back them up, then all hail the geneticist! i don't shy away from provocative or controversial ideas as long as they are conveyed by a reliable and responsible source. however, if i came into a conference of say... engineers and said, "gee, maybe derrida shouldn't be taught in schools. his philosophy sucks. what do you guys think?" it would be out of place, unnecessary, uneducated and unprofessional. summers should have known better.

i was asked by time magazine for a quote on the subject, and since it wasn't used (i think they wanted something more "feminist" or something, but hey, what can ya do...), i guess my thoughts are above.

lady...

let's just make this a little easier for you. if you don't want your kids to be exposed to speech and expression that is protected by the first amendment, take your kids out of public school and put them in a parochial school, like say... an all-girls catholic school. i've learned that parochial schools have a lower tuition than non-sectarian private schools anyway. however, i must warn you, girls at these schools often "experiment" with one another due to the repressive environment and well... availability of other bored, adventurous and hormonal female teenagers - and there aren't any boys at these schools are there? so really, if you are that paranoid, home school your kids and get out of everyone else's face.

greenland is melting and might actually turn green!

from this article:

Greenland's ice cap, which contains enough ice to raise sea levels globally by 23 feet (7 meters), is starting to melt and could collapse suddenly, Curry said.

Already freshwater is percolating down, lubricating the base and making it more unstable.

okay, so does this mean that florida and texas will sink into the sea? i guess it means manhattan will too, but this will just give me an incentive to get a penthouse suite. but joking aside... this is WACK! WACK i say! if all of this is true -- i'm not a geologist or a meteorologist -- then all i have to say is "wow."

the lone ellis rides again

today, warren barked forth another hysterical threat:

If one more person sends me the link to supermanisadick.com, I'm going to have you all raped by a million bees.

That is all. Return to your duties.

damn, that is cold...

but one thing is for certain, superman is, in fact, a dick.

the little "jap" pick looks almost like a simpsons head innit.

south dakota house panel approves measure to make abortion a felony

here.

i am the haunter in the dark

i am nyarlathotep!

called the crawling chaos, nyarlathotep is the disembodied ego of azathoth and thus the universal "i" of all reality. the 999 forms of nyarlathotep are a point of meditation for the true initiate. it is through these manifold faces that the secrets of the universe are made known.

some of its many documented forms are the father of knives, nephren-ka, the black man, the beast of the lashing tongue and the haunter in the dark.

which great old one are you?

i replaced the image this quiz had for the haunter of the dark with the plushy version available through give me toys. because the plushie 'baby haunter' was way cooler. incidentally, the haunter in the dark's dark cult was based in a providence, rhode island church near my house. it is known from cult days as "the church of the starry wisdom".

Central Square: The Middle East

Central Square: Local Flavor
The Middle East
Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February, 2005

Automation Comes To OS Development

holy crap. i introduce the OSKit. build your own OS from components!

I Haven't Been Blogging, So Forgive Me

um, i would think of something clever and witty to say, but i'm fresh out of ideas. therefore, i will simply post the links i meant to post before, but didn't.

go read this post from Father Jake Stops The World. that one brings back memories of attending church when i was a young urchin.

and this post from Suburban Guerrilla really nails writers for what they are.

Yes, I Think I Shall Post Today

yes, i've been so very unfaithful. apologies to all our regular readers, including my own dear sister, shysterb. dry your eyes and halt the funeral proceedings because i most certainly have *not* encountered an untimely end. nay, i have taken only a brief vacation. i shall soon return to my acid rants and pathetic hand-wringing. i will continue to practice my characteristic unfairness towards bush voters, including but not limited to, blaming them for every murdered iraqi innocent and every pointless american military death. because, i'm just a bitch that way.

school has started, in case you didn't know. yes, _that_ business is again afoot. the cs department has dwindled. those remaining are the battle-hardened, experienced few. now that the degree doesn't promise easy riches and fistfuls of stock options, the fair weather programmers have fled to greener pastures. wimps.

unfortunately, this latest development has resulted in the untimely cancelling of two my classes -- Real Time Systems and Networking. i nearly cried. not only had i already purchased used books via amazon resellers, i did not have any other options in the cs department owning to my pathetic lack of education in mathematics. so, i was forced to drop to half time status and swap one math class out for another, resulting in the payment of over a hundred dollars for the textbook for the new math class. end result: purchased books for three classes that i ended up not taking after all.

i began volunteering with a community organization based in roxbury. the group is a bit more ideological than i am. it is quite the lefty organization -- a white guy with dreads answers the phone between declarations that "The government wants us to be divided!" and that "A system based on profit must fail!" they obtain medical services, emergency heating assistance, and affordable housing for their members. their hearts are in the right place even if the sweeping political generalizations make me wince from time to time. because, well... i'm *never* guilty of such generalizations. ever. i'm always fair and balanced. really.

dessert and drink recipes!!

drink tip: okay, you know those fancy fruit blend juices you can get at corner stores? you can use any of them with champagne, and it will make an excellent mimosa-like drink - not the "smoothie" varieties, but the actual *juice* blends. (and if you have red wine lying around, you can pour these juice blends in, add fruit bits and make an impromptu sangria.) lychee juice is also recommended for the mimosa-like drinks.

1) champagne coconut sorbet yummy thing
- two scoops high end coconut sorbet'
- champagne
- raspberry sauce (pureed raspberries with sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice, strained)

pour a small amount of champagne over the coconut sorbet and then drizzle raspberry sauce over it.

2) dark chocolate sauce - 1 serving
- 1 section ghiradelli (sp?) unsweetened chocolate bar
- 1/4 cup water
- sugar to desired taste
- pat of butter
- vanilla extract

in a small saucepan, melt chocolate in water - then add sugar. when mixture starts bubbling and looks uniform, turn off heat and add butter and vanilla extract. serve over ice cream. you can also add peanut butter to the above recipe if you're feeling exceptionally un-diet-conscious and/or high.

also, the mussel sauce in the previous recipe is excellent for dipping lobster.

all i have to say is that my girlfriend ate well last night for valentine's day -- and so did i!!! go me! :-P

super secret mussel recipe - now in the public domain!

i figure something this good shouldn't be a trade secret - it should be used often by as many people as possible without restrictions:

my recipe
olive oil
1.5 lbs mussels
3/4 cups shallots
1/2 cup dry white wine
3/4 cup merlot
6 crushed garlic cloves
1/4 cup chopped parsley
2 plum tomatoes, cored, seeded,chopped
black pepper
4 springs of thyme - chopped
pinch red pepper flakes
2/3 cup chicken broth
juice slightly less than 1/4 lemon
2 tbsp butter

saute shallots, garlic, thyme in olive oil
pour in merlot, white wine, chicken broth, lemon juice, red pepper flakes - bring to boil
throw in mussels steam for 3 minutes (until mussels start to open)
then throw in tomatoes, parsley, black pepper, butter
steam one minute more, remove mussels immediately
cook sauce until tomatoes slightly cooked

pour over mussels

serves 2

we love maya keyes (unlike her parents)!

maya keyes strikes out on her own, after being tossed out on the street after taking off a year from college to work on her father's ultra-conservative bid for senate. and she still says she loves her parents. ya know... i have a gay friend, an attorney, who was kicked out of his house as a teenager by his bible-thumping parents. he started a business before the age of 18, and it ended up being successful. he then employed his family in his business, the same family that tossed him out on the street.

really, some of these bible-thumping twerps should learn from their kids what love really is. and the ironic thing about bible-thumping is that the whole premise of the jesus story is one of forgiveness and unconditional love - a man who stood by all people, including the outcasts of society that no one would touch with a ten foot pole - literally... martyrs himself for all of humanity. did anyone miss that one, or am i trippin'?

Central Square: Zuzu

Central Square: Local Flavor
ZuZu
Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February, 2005

making the world safe for the patriarchy

baghdad burning, a female blogger in iraqi, recounts her most recent run-in with the Muslim Thought Police:

Last week my cousin needed to visit the current Ministry of Higher Education. After the ministry building was burned and looted, the employees had to be transferred to a much, much smaller building in another part of the city. My cousin’s wife wanted to have her college degree legalized by the ministry and my cousin wasn’t sure about how to go about doing it. So I volunteered to go along with him because I had some questions of my own.

We headed for the building containing the ministry employees (but hardly ever containing the minister). It was small and cramped. Every 8 employees were stuck in the same room. The air was tense and heavy. We were greeted in the reception area by a bearded man who scanned us disapprovingly. “Da’awachi,” my cousin whispered under his breath, indicating the man was from the Da’awa Party.

da3wah is the word for '(muslim) missionary', which gives you some idea of the ideological origins of this party.

What could he do for us? Who did we want? We wanted to have some documents legalized by the ministry, I said loudly, trying to cover up my nervousness. He looked at me momentarily and then turned to the cousin pointedly. My cousin repeated why we were there and asked for directions. We were told to go to one of the rooms on the same floor and begin there.

“Please dress appropriately next time you come here.” The man said to me. I looked down at what I was wearing- black pants, a beige high-necked sweater and a knee-length black coat. Huh? I blushed furiously. He meant my head should be covered and I should be wearing a skirt.

I don’t like being told what to wear and what not to wear by strange men. “I don’t work here - I don’t have to follow a dress code.” I answered coldly.

The cousin didn’t like where the conversation was going, he angrily interceded, “We’re only here for an hour and it really isn’t your business.”

“It is my business.” Came the answer, “She should have some respect for the people who work here.” And the conversation ended.

I looked around for the people I should be respecting. There were three or four women who were apparently ministry employees. Two of them were wearing long skirts, loose sweaters and headscarves and the third had gone all out and was wearing a complete jubba or robe-like garb topped with a black head scarf.

here's a man wearing a jubbah.

the jubbah is the origin of the 15th CE French jupe "tunic" and jupon "undertunic" and Portuguese gibão. these were borrowed into Japanese as jiban "underrobe for a kimono" and zupon "trousers". (thanks to shukr for this pic of the jubbah they have for sale right now.)

My cousin and I turned to enter the room the receptionist had indicated and my eyes were stinging. No one could talk that way before the war and if they did, you didn’t have to listen. You could answer back. Now, you only answer back and make it an issue if you have some sort of death wish or just really, really like trouble.

Young females have the option of either just giving in to the pressure and dressing and acting ‘safely’- which means making everything longer and looser and preferably covering some of their head or constantly being defiant to what is becoming endemic in Iraq today. The problem with defiance is that it doesn’t just involve you personally, it involves anyone with you at that moment - usually a male relative. It means that there might be an exchange of ugly words or a fight and probably, after that, a detention in Abu Ghraib.

If it’s like this in Baghdad, I shudder to think what the other cities and provinces must be like. The Allawis and Pachichis of Iraq don’t sense it- their families are safely tucked away in Dubai and Amman, and the Hakeems and Jaffaris of Iraq promote it.

recipe time!

cherrystone clams are badass. they can live for a month out of water just chillin' on the supermarket counter, which i suppose is frightening and would dissuade any normal person from eating them, but they taste GUUUUUUUD. anyhow, they are the big 3 inch clams (not the littlenecks, which are the 1 inchers).

here is my steamed cherrystone recipe, which is part of the valentine's day seafood dinner i'm cooking for my girlfriend (sorry, but the mussel recipe is secret!):

CHERRYSTONES STEAMED IN BEER

6 live cherrystones
1/2 bottle (6oz) of sam adams lager (sam adams white ale would be ideal, but whatever, my supermarket ran out of it)
1/2 cup (4oz) of chicken stock
6 cloves crushed garlic
1/4 cup parsley
pinch red pepper flakes
pinch black pepper
pinch sugar
pat of butter
olive oil

saute garlic in olive oil for a couple of minutes
then pour in the chicken stock, beer, red pepper flakes, black pepper, and sugar
bring to boil
toss in the clams and steam until open (approx 4-5 minutes) and NO MORE!
somewhere in the middle of steaming toss in the parsley and butter

serve immediately.

bush will win a grammy for a spoken word album...

...when pigs fly. bill clinton, on the other hand, has done it again! he and hillary combined have three grammies under their belts.

why there are no unicorns

my friend jay (who lived in the same House as me at harvard college but graduated exactly 40 years earlier) just sent me this little tidbit.

Biblical scholars have discovered an ancient text that explains why there are no unicorns today, even though they are mentioned in the Bible.

The two unicorns on Noah’s Ark were gay.

Central Square: MBTA Bus Stop

Central Square: The Main Drag
MBTA Bus Stop
Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February, 2005

Central Square: HI-FI PIZZA & SUBS

Central Square: Local Flavor
Hi-Fi Pizza & Subs
Intersection of Brookline Street and Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February, 2005

my two cents

this article was in the new york times last year. since we're coming up on the anniversary of the first same-sex marriages in san francisco, i'm going to tear this one apart. something about the slant of this article stuck in my craw... no, this isn't a diatribe against right wing loonies (that's too easy!). this is a gripe against queers who want to stay in the margins of society and want to keep the rest of us there.

Gay Marriage? How Straight By BOB MORRIS

Last week, my boyfriend's best friend, a lesbian, told him she was taking her girlfriend to go tie the knot in San Francisco the first week in April. She wanted him to be there, absolutely. He got all worked up about it, but not the way you might think.

"This whole gay marriage thing is so annoying," he said. "It's aping a bourgeois lifestyle that I've lived my life trying to avoid. I feel confused and betrayed."

what is so annoying about giving people a basic civil right? as a straight member of society, you have the option NOT to "ape a bourgeois lifestyle" (who uses that phrase anyway - you sound like an irritating black turtleneck wearing hipster/whimpster with a useless liberal arts degree) - that is YOUR CHOICE. however, gay people do not have that choice. the state of non-marriage is imposed upon them by society. no one is forcing YOUR ass to get married, so quit whining; it's in your head. you remind me of women who refuse to get married and want to spend their lives avoiding monogamy because marriage "is a patriarchal institution." bullshit. get your head out of 1805. this is 2005 - women hold high end executive jobs and are even senators and secretary of state - that whole dowry and "good wifey churn butter for man" crap has gone the way of the buffalo - at least in the united states. the inequities in salaries and social status are closing more and more, so quit defining an institution by roles that were in place 200 years ago. basically, these are all excuses. live the lives that you want to live, but don't blame the institution of marriage for your problems.

He is not alone. Many gay men and lesbians - in fact most of the ones I know - are not jumping to jump the broom. They like their status as couples living between the lines, free of all the societal expectations that marriage brings. But since they don't want to feed politicians using gay marriage as an election issue, they are largely mum.

no... many gay activists and gay citizens like you and me pushed the issue. SOME of us queer folks don't want to live in the margins of society, okay?

"It's very hard to speak freely right now," said Judith Butler, a gender theorist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "But many gay people are uncomfortable with all this, because they feel their sense of an alternative movement is dying. Sexual politics was supposed to be about finding alternatives to marriage."

you can find alternatives to marriage even if marriage exists for your demographic group. a lot of straight people are in no rush to get married. what are you people so afraid of?

"I've been with the same woman for 13 years," she continued, "and she jokes if I ever tried to marry her she'd divorce me. I know many people who feel the same way."

good then. when marriage becomes available, don't get married. simple.

That's not to say that there isn't a reason to fight for a basic civil right. But ask around. You'll find more than a few gays questioning an institution that mixes property rights with love, church with state. Some also complain that a legal and legislative process that should take time to evolve has become a media circus. They even wonder if they will be forced to marry to receive domestic partnership benefits from their employers. And of course, given the present divorce rate, many feel that most civil unions are more civilized than marriages.

so you'd rather not be able to visit a dying parter in a hospital, not remain in your home if your partner dies without a will, not automatically retain custody of your kids if your partner dies, not be able to get the tax exemptions that could help your family, or any of the 1,000+ federal rights available to married couples. and boo fuckin' hoo about not getting domestic partnership benefits from your employer if you don't get married. my straight friends who live in committed relationships without getting married don't get those benefits! the reason why those benefits exist in the first place is because society has denied us the option to get married. think about it.

"We have a right to be as miserable as straight people," said the playwright Paul Rudnick, who has been in a gay relationship for 11 years and has not thought about marriage, "especially if we want the gifts." Mr. Rudnick's current play, "Valhalla," at the New York Theater Workshop, makes an argument for the gay contributions to society that have more to do with a passion for beauty and extravagance than propriety and social standing.

so you'd rather be the court jester instead of the king. that's fine, but some of us want to be king (or um... queen!! ;) :D).

But beyond just the "queer eye" contributions of taste and the more substantive one of art commonly associated with gay people, there is the valued point of view of the outsider. "The idea of being different is in itself beautiful," said Jack Waters, a downtown filmmaker in a 22-year relationship, who finds that not having children with his partner, Peter Kramer, lets them serve as mentors in all kinds of ways to younger people.

being "different" is fine. being in the back of the bus is not. can you imagine if the black folks in the 50's said "hey, it's nice having different water fountains! it makes us feel special!" or are you so brainwashed by skewedlefty(tm) ideology that you can't think straight?

Who's to say that there aren't other important rights associated with being gay that aren't exactly on the books?

"I like being an outlaw," said Roz Lichter, a lawyer who won't marry her partner.

out of respect for roz (who is an excellent attorney), i will not say anything here, except that she and her partner would make great outlaws in a western film. but still, permanent "outlaw" status is NOT GOOD!

"We don't have any of the typical social roles imposed on how we live," said Philip Galanes, a novelist in a long-term relationship with no wedding plans. "We have the freedom to be husband and wife rolled into one. If there's so much creativity among gay people, maybe it's because we're allowed to be freer in life in all kinds of ways."

no, you are not ALLOWED TO BE FREER. you were forced into thinking up creative ways to substitute for something you were not allowed to have. again, even if you have the option to marry, which is available to straight people, you can still CHOOSE NOT TO. you can still "have the freedom" to do anything you want, including getting married... or not!

Or maybe it's because we're allowed to be single without being stigmatized.

so you'd rather be stignatized in general. i see.

At least we used to be. These days, with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund publishing an "educational guide" stating that gay people are "very much like everyone else," mowing lawns and having children, and that not allowing them to marry keeps them "in a state of permanent adolescence," you have to wonder if the freedom to define your own life in your own way is going the way of cigarettes in bars.

i wouldn't say "in a state of permanent adolescence." you can still stay in a state of permanent adolescence if the option to get married exists. you can also "mow lawns and have children" and not be in a state of permanent adolescence if the option does not exist. however, the lack of marriage rights keeps us on a separate and not very equal plane from straight people.

"Being gay and single is the new smoking," Mr. Rudnick said. "It won't be socially acceptable anymore, and you will have to go outside." Or as Michael Musto, the Village Voice columnist, told me: "It used to be that the whole point of coming out of the closet was to get people to stop asking you when you are going to get married and have children."

no, the whole point of coming out of the closet was to stop living a lie. to stop hiding from your friends and family. the whole "getting married and having children" thing is irrelevant.

Those days are just about over, for better or for worse.

i suspect some of these old folks are just having sour grapes. you can't have it, so you say you don't like it. well, this is the new generation, and we're going to be kings (and queens!), not court jesters, and we're not going to revel in the fact that we are "outsiders." we're taking over, so MOVE BITCH, GET OUT THA WAY!

oh, and let the flames begin.

Central Square: The Middle East

Central Square Artwork
The Middle East
Intersection of Brookline Street and Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February, 2005

one of my favorite cambridge landmarks is The Middle East, a live music club, a bar, and a restaurant. this beautiful mural adorns its outdoor wall, one of many public works of art in cambridge, and central square in particular.

turn up your speakers, part 2

so, i located the real music video of "dragostea din tei" - the happy eurodance track behind the fat guy dancing at the computer.

here it is. second gayest video. ever.

the track is also available for download from itunes: the mix in the fat guy dancing at the computer video is the "original romanian version." oh yes, it has mixes. bunches of mixes.

official website of the band o-zone - i love the mangling of the english language on the web site. check the description of the song "dragostea din tei": "The song is specificly like O-ZONE , lots of happyness and smiling." [sic] HAHAHAHAHA.

update: another flash movie spoof from japan - it appears to be a few cartoon felines getting each other drunk. (i think it might be a home video of spanky, toby and mittens while em0 and em1 were out.)

how freaking sexy is this?

dude. a laptop bag hand-made (-carved?) from cedar and lined with linen.

seriously.

Monacca bag is made of Japanese cedar. The designer selected the best material as far as the grain of wood and complete the products beautiful. Because of natural wood that have variety of thickness and hardness in every part, artists cannot use the sewing machine, so they sew carefully each bag by their hands. The designer put canvas on the edge, and leather for the handle.

One of the points in design is that you can put POWERBOOK G4 17INCH, the popular laptop among the designers, fitted perfectly in it. This is environment friendly, the skill of Japanese artists and design make it possible to provide great cost performance and work.This is very unique with comfortable aroma of a Japanese cedar. Also, it can be the only one bagin the world based on the individual texture of each wood.

i know what i want for my 30th birthday (aside from my perennial wish).

dänke bOING-bOING.

turn up your speakers!

forget william hung... send this guy to hollywood! funniest. clip. ever. [via andrew sullivan]

southerners go barking mad. again.

oh yes, virginia is for lovers. lovers of oppression.

The Virginia state house has voted to outlaw the trend of wearing trousers so low that underwear hangs over the top.

Delegates said the habit, popular across the US and in other Western countries, was "coarsening" society.

this from the people whose recent ancestors thought keeping black people like cattle was a sign of refinement...

i mean, please. i don't appreciate the spandex monstrosity but please. why don't we just dress all the women in veils. seriously. c'mon, think of how it'll spur the fashion industry. and all those jobs freed up for men once the women are taken out of the scene. barefoot, veiled & pregnant and locked in the home.

That Sinking Feeling

over fifty warnings.

fifty.

say that number out loud: fifty.

_fifty_ warnings. FIFTY!!!

UPDATE: Actually, there were over a _hundred_ warnings. the fifty warnings cited were only half of the total available to those fine, america-loving patriots in the bush administration.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: My bad. there were a hundred intelligence reports, of which, over fifty were related to the september 11th attacks.

A Vote For Bush Was A Vote For This

These are the stories that will continue to emerge from the rubble of Fallujah for years. No, for generations…

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the doctor sits with me in a hotel room in Amman, where he is now a refugee. He’d spoken about what he saw in Fallujah in the UK, and now is under threat by the US military if he returns to Iraq.

“I started speaking about what happened in Fallujah during both sieges in order to raise awareness, and the Americans raided my house three times,” he says, talking so fast I can barely keep up. He is driven to tell what he’s witnessed, and as a doctor working inside Fallujah, he has video and photographic proof of all that he tells me.

“I entered Fallujah with a British medical and humanitarian convoy at the end of December, and stayed until the end of January,” he explains, “But I was in Fallujah before that to work with people and see what their needs were, so I was in there since the beginning of December.”

When I ask him to explain what he saw when he first entered Fallujah in December he says it was like a tsunami struck the city.

“Fallujah is surrounded by refugee camps where people are living in tents and old cars,” he explains, “It reminded me of Palestinian refugees. I saw children coughing because of the cold, and there are no medicines. Most everyone left their houses with nothing, and no money, so how can they live depending only on humanitarian aid?”

The doctors says that in one refugee camp in the northern area of Fallujah there were 1,200 students living in seven tents.

“The disaster caused by this siege is so much worse than the first one, which I witnessed first hand,” he says, and then tells me he’ll use one story as an example.

“One story is of a young girl who is 16 years old,” he says of one of the testimonies he video taped recently, “She stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were killed in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home with her father, mother, 12 year-old brother and two sisters. She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father directly, without saying anything.”

The girl managed to hide behind the refrigerator with her brother and witnessed the war crimes first-hand.

“They beat her two sisters, then shot them in the head,” he said. After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead.

“She continued hiding after the soldiers left and stayed with her sisters because they were bleeding, but still alive. She was too afraid to call for help because she feared the soldiers would come back and kill her as well. She stayed for three days, with no water and no food. Eventually one of the American snipers saw her and took her to the hospital,” he added before reminding me again that he had all of her testimony documented on film.

more...

[link via suburban guerrilla]

Downtown Crossing: Below Ground

Downtown Crossing: Below Ground
Downtown Crossing T-Stop: Entrance
Boston, Massachusetts
February 4th, 2005



Downtown Crossing: Below Ground
Downtown Crossing T-Stop: Stairwell
Boston, Massachusetts
February 4th, 2005



Downtown Crossing: Below Ground
Downtown Crossing T-Stop: Subway Platform
Boston, Massachusetts
February 4th, 2005

hot for teacher.

let me just preface this post with the following disclaimer: i find the concept of schoolteachers seducing their much younger students into sexual acts to be reprehensible, and i think statutory rape laws should remain in place (with some exceptions such as the disciminatory romeo and juliet provisions in the kansas statute, but i'm not going to get into it - if you're interested, check out the matthew limon case via google).

but right now... i need to take a break from common sense public policy and make an amoral statement, because damn... there is one happy little 13 year old in tennessee right now.

check out the teacher. that kid must be bragging to all the little kiddies at school. from the cnn photo, the teacher "pamela turner" bears a faint resemblance to the genre of women comprised of a certain other "pamela" of baywatch fame... and britney spears. really, that kid must think he is the pimp daddy.

another photo:
"hey, madonna, this is britney. i'll be over at 8 after kevin leaves."

happy lunar new year

the term "chinese new year" has fallen out of favor, because folks like the koreans celebrate it too, and since the koreans drink more per capita than the chinese, we figure they should have a say.

my mom e-mailed me a holiday greeting telling me "happy new year!" and also to watch out for germs that can be spread via gym equipment and also gym shower stalls. i don't even belong to a gym. *someone* is trippin'...

anyway, the next couple of months will bring a whole slew of holidays where you're supposed to engage in gluttony and get toasted. yesterday, if you missed it, was mardi gras. today is chinese, oops i mean lunar new year (which basically continues all weekend). st. paddys is in a little over a month, and purim as well.

and of course, valentine's day on monday. if you have a special someone, eat a decadent dinner, drink a lot of wine and make sweet love. if you don't have a special someone, get trashed with your friends and join in your mutual hate of people like me. i did it for most of my adult life. mutual hatefests are fun, especially if they involve alcohol.

happy holidays!

little poots.

look! it's not just bush's brain, it's president rove!

also, as to my old website being banned by the chinese government... it's true. basically, in 2002, some old balding dudes in beijing decided to cut more than 20% of the world's population off from my mindless ramblings. 1.3 billion people, folks. most of my other friends' weblogs remained uncensored. maybe they thought i was a threat to national security or a homicidal lesbian terrorist. who knows...

stop the fauxhawk!

on my old website i spoke of the travesty known as ugg boots. fortunately, that blemish in an otherwise inoffensive year in fashion has more or less gone the way of the buffalo and has either found homes in various salvation army outlets or as canine chew toys.

however, one irritating urban curiosity has not yet been phased out from public display: the fauxhawk. the fauxhawk appeared en masse in the last couple of years and has continued to greet viewers with its tenuous message: "i am almost edgy. i think."

either shave the sides all off, or go corporate, you fence-sitters! call it the great lukewarm hair gel revolution. viva la half-ass! the fauxhawk was, at one point, ubiquitous at gay clubs, where abercrombie-clad men would hop around looking like demonic kewpie dolls. the fad entered the lesbian scene as well, with the younger butch members sporting the do. one girl even wore it to school, and i swear, i had fantasies of attacking her with a norelco electric shaver (after which my fantasies became nc-17 material, so i won't go there). "CUT THAT DAMN RODENT OFF OF YOUR FUCKING HEAD!"

anyhow, i still see the almost-gravity-defying just-short-of-corporate fauxhawk every day. i suppose one day fauxhawk adherents will come to their senses. until then, i can entertain fantasies of razor vigilante-ism.

howard stern and the british parliament condemn hot97

for real.

howard stern is funny, sometimes:

Howard said he heard the song and it was lame, unfunny and poorly produced. He also said the song was really out of line for mocking people who are dying from a natural disaster.

Howard said because he's leaving terrestrial radio, many of these "shock jocks" are tripping over themselves to replace him by being as shocking as possible. Howard predicted that once he's over at SIRIUS, we will hear about a lot of DJ's getting in trouble because they'll be trying to be as shocking as possible to get headlines.

Howard listened to a clip from the Miss Jones Show the other day and said that Miss Jones just screams a lot, it was really annoying to listen to.

What he found almost more offensive than the Tsunami song, however, was the promo the show ran going into a break. In the promo, they claim to be the "#1 morning radio show in New York." Howard wondered how they were able to claim that distinction since he's the #1 morning show in NY with an 8.0 while the Miss Jones show was #9 with a 3.7. Howard said if everyone can just say they are #1, what's the point of actually being #1?

Robin wanted to know why Miss Jones wasn't fired after she played the song on her show four times! Howard said it looked like someone else had to take the fall for her.

HAHAHAHAHA.