Wednesday, January 29, 2003

some speech by dubya huh? he looked real good - and it should help him in the next election.

only because the people have the memory of a goldfish and will not hold him to that long list of things he said he was gonna do but won't.

the speech has to be a new high in political mendacity. but he looked real good.

Monday, January 27, 2003

jan watercolor

recent watercolor. i am checking out for a few days so no updates for awhile. altho maybe i'll post some of the specifics i've heard on the AM talkshows.

Sunday, January 26, 2003

"In my view, art history, the art world, the art market-in other words art with a capital "A"-is less important than the art which is part of all of us, which we participate in by virtue of being human."
from
*spark-online.com >> version 34.0, JULY.2002 >> MAX PODSTOLSKI

sad news today: tommy thompson passed away. he was one of the founder�s of the red clay ramblers and a robust, talented, fun loving presence in a circle of remarkable people many years ago. he suffered for many years with altzheimer�s disease. may he rest in peace.

more about AM talk shows

an interesting thing about the very conservative talk shows on AM is that they refer to the media in general as �mainstream media�. they regard themselves and listeners as an incipient separate nation.

there is a tight-knit quality about this group of people. i am reminded of the 60�s when there was a short period of time when many folks could identify each other as a special segment of the public with values and worldview that was in the minority then, but would prevail in the future. (it didn�t happen).

last night i heard one caller who suggested that the coming war with iraq be postponed until all of the �human shields� - americans going to iraq - you don�t hear much about them in the mainstream press - are in place in iraq. then bomb, ridding the world of pinkos, traitors, and american leftists as a bonus to taking back the oil fields that were developed by the west and then stolen - nationalized - by the people who live there.

more later.

Friday, January 24, 2003

sat morning, white glare outside of the battened down hatches. sun on snow. dunno how cold it got, i was snug as bug in etc.

after such a pleasant and i might say necessary trip, next comes "re-orientation to life", picking up pieces, finding some good ones, throwing a few over right shoulder while facing north for good luck .

am radio
ten years or so ago i spent a little time listening to the AM talkshows. at that time this was mainly rush L. and art bell at night. i learned a lot. i mean i added dimensions to my feeling of what culture i was unknowingly a part of.

for about the last 8 weeks i�ve started again to check in with the these shows.

there are many more of them than there were 10 years ago. some stations run these shows 24 hours a day. i noticed there are many local talk shows on AM, mini-versions of the coast to coast shows, two guys from hendersonville, for instance, discussing seceding from the union.

they just about all have that irascable, curdled indignance. the big guys ssem to be shaun henedy, bill o�reilly, and micheal savage. they all have one thing in common. they are rational. by that i mean they use rhetoric. cheap tricks thousands of years old (aristotle, quintillian) to hornswoggle the marks.

they pick up the phone, bark a question out, and the person at the other end says his piece (quickly) - shaun or bill then reply by hanging up and ranting about whatever they want to.

i got really interested when i found out that 25% of americans get thier news from these entertainment shows. it ain�t NPR, folks.
more to come

Thursday, January 23, 2003

i just got home a little before twilight. great trip, as usual i feel recharged after visiting the Baba Center. new friends, old friends, conversation.

it snowed last night and this morning, but the drive back was fine until around asheville, a little icy. record cold tonight. listened to a lot of local am stations while driving, and i want to talk more about them later.

(to be cont.)

Sunday, January 19, 2003

sun nite. at daughter nicole's house, visiting with family. off tomorrow morning to myrtle beach via wilmington.

went out with eli and saw bench in park dedicated to sally. it is in as beautiful spot, hope i got some good photos.

incipient alzheimers got me here without 2 medications, or short on them anyway, so much phoning drugstores and getting scrips shuffled around. slept in the camper fri. nite, temp 13 degrees and it wasn't bad.

blood sugar got away from me saturday so spent a long day bringing it down to reasonable level and i can think again, altho as bobby d. says'"you7 can't come back all the way."saw outlaw jodie wales" on tv, early clint, very good classic western.

Thursday, January 16, 2003

oil

this is the first oil painting i've ever done. finished a few weeks ago. it's too much fun to stop now.

but i can't seem to load it.

there's a big snowstorm outside.

if it's over by noon i'm leaving and will be back next wednesday.

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

sitting here thinkin bout the government. old friend bill O. is visiting. haven't seen each other for let's see...i'm going to say 20 years. always interesting to see what time has done and how life has gone. we're both still kicking, but a little slower i would say.

Monday, January 13, 2003

what a s-l-o-w monday. i must have the aliatory bluz.

below are links to all things blog-related.

my theory: we are born into a collective culture and as humans have an inate tropism, not optional, to communicate with the collective. only now we don't know what it is, or what it is becoming. so blog away.

"The biggest technology story of 2002, in my opinion, was the exponential increase in the number of bits and bitstreams engaged by Net users worldwide. Not just sp-m mail, which got the most attention, but all bitstreams."
from
Good Experience - Review of Bits, 2002/2003

these links contain current information about blogs:
blogdex - the weblog diffusion index
Daypop Top 40 Links
Technorati: Top 100

Sunday, January 12, 2003

went to tom's bday celebration last night. what a pleasant gathering! met some nice folks i hope to see again. diana had taken a look at this broke-down palace, and had a lot of questions about the world of blogs.

one of them was the same question that i had - and still have - when i started this weblog: what are they for? online journal? place to gather pointers to information? how about posting new poems? last nite's music?

i really don't know. posting daily - or trying to - has been a good thing for me, maybe it brings some structure to the day.

the worst you can say about blogging is vanity, vanity, vanity. adding to the noise of a very noisy world. but i don't think this is valid. most of the noise is institutional and certainly not self-expression (a self expressing it's self to the community of other self's it is a part of). maybe it's practice for the time when we are able to feel like like ourselves and communicate it.

meanwhile, back in the physio-sphere - the monocular world of location and the measurable - a piece of history concerning apple/microsoft:
I, Cringely | The Pulpit

Friday, January 10, 2003

some quotes from an article about Powerpoint presentation software. if you have not been around institutions (corporations, govt., medical, scientific etc.) for the last 20 years, you might not be aware of the profound and negitive effect it has had on communication and the culture in general.

"Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the lights."

"It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies."

"Because PowerPoint can be an impressive antidote to fear-converting public-speaking dread into moviemaking pleasure-there seems to be no great impulse to fight this influence."

"SpaghettiOs is the great example. The guy came up with the jingle first: 'The neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon': And he said, 'Hey! Make spaghetti in the shape of small circles!'"

"America began to go to more meetings."

"This is the most common complaint about PowerPoint. Instead of human contact, we are given human display."

"McNealy's concern is shared by the American military. Enormously elaborate PowerPoint files (generated by presentation-obsessives--so- called PowerPoint Rangers) were said to be clogging up the military's bandwidth."

from
Absolute Powerpoint

Thursday, January 9, 2003

1.9.3

thought i would display a portion of my "notes" to myself which might demonstrate some kind of confusion in the organizational realm:

notes

"The take-home message from this research therefore might be that people should get more involved in campaigns, struggles and social movements, not only in the wider interest of social change but also for their own personal good."
Protesting May Be Good for Your Health : TB Indymedia

Wednesday, January 8, 2003

1.8.3

an interesting cyber-wrinkle:

Slashdot | Prentice Hall To Publish Open Content Licensed Books
"The 'Bruce Perens' Open Source Series' will be available first as hardcopy in bookstores, and the Open Source text will be available electronically a few months later."

what this means to me is that if you're willing to wait, you can print it and read it: print selectively, ie focus on yr interests. also a lot of dead trees i guess.

Monday, January 6, 2003

1.6.3

swampgas

i painted this watercolor last fall at my father's house in arizona..

met some new friends i hope to see more of at the friend's meeting yesterday.

also tuned 2 string chinese fiddle finally, a project i've been working on for weeks. maybe tuning is not the right word, because i also used tape to mark the first octive D scale. hard task for the tone-deaf.

no fret board. in fact no board of any kind. you change notes by touching the strings. i also gathered all the MP3s i have done the last 12 months and archived onto zip drives. starting from scratch, learning mainly opcode studiovision pro, i've done 21. next step is to do 3-5 minute songs that are actually music of some sort.

today i am going to spend formatting book for jeff w. i've got a good start on first chapter. i hope to go to the Baba center around the 20th for a few days and can give him some page proofs.

also finished "beta" of around 100 poems which i will xerox today and begin handing out to folks for any thoughts or comments.

Sunday, January 5, 2003

1.5.3

up early this am, busy busy busy. i'm going to friends meeting - quaker - at 10, missed it last week due to skewed blood sugar situation.

continue to feel that by far the majority of world citizens, and more to the point USA citizens, feel very uncomfortable about gneralissimo bush. at present this is a slow - too slow - swell on the ocean of public opinion. i think it results from the invisible coup-d'etat that has taken place, the corporate oligarchy running things from a teflon bubble. the opposition should sieze the moment to clarify what is happening. recapture the language.

for instance anytime a democrat points out the econmic inequalities running rampant, bush and friends including rush simply reply with one code word:"class warfare". the opposition needs to translate the meaning for us hoi poloi - it means the very wealthy are differant than you and i - me anyway - with proprietary agenda and there are other agendas that need not to be ignored by ivalidating them with that facile phrase.

Saturday, January 4, 2003

1.4.3

fixed FTP glitch, picture below is what i painted last fall, yesterday's pic is same image after FTP suddenly lost ability to transfer binary files.

ftp problem?

talked to some friends today who thought that their mood swings, random bad days, were the result of the bad vibrations and trouble in the collective mental sphere. i can correlate my varied and seemingly random states of mind with this only on a very general level, ie i felt good the morning of 9/11 - until it hit the fan that is.

Friday, January 3, 2003

1.3.3

uh-oh

the image above was one of those surprises. it wern't supposed to look like this.

Thursday, January 2, 2003

1.2.3

sleep is not what it used to be, i either am experiencing advancing age - well of course i am - or the ragged vibrations of time-worlds unraveling - but last night i slept like humans used to and woke up feeling great. may it happen again and often. finished another MP3, working on a watercolor, and various other projects. i don't know if it's good or bad - i just do them.

here is a very long and interesting series of events, evolutions, and dates. it would take me a long time to puzzle over this, but i know i do not agree with all of it.

Timeline of knowledge-representation
imhoFAQ timeline of knowledge-representation

Wednesday, January 1, 2003

11.1.2

have a
true new