"king of the world!"

not in the dicaprio sense, but in the cagney sense...

compare and contrast

something i have in common with lileks sr.:

"he’d rather drive. Really: he’s never happier. A wheel, an engine, a road..."

something i do not have in common with lileks sr.

"There’s not a moment in his day he thinks “I could be on a computer, doing things.” Because he’s out, doing things."

dreamland 2

last night i dreamed i had to go back in time to rescue some artifacts from the early history of electronic music, including an analog sequencer and a laserdisc of wendy carlos' soundtrack to tron.

when i got to work today, bill and ted's excellent adventure was on tv, and an amazon order had been delivered to my desk, which included a dvd of both tron movies.

coincidence?
.
.
.
.
yes.

not stuck in an closet with vanna white*

I try not to dream-blog much, and I wouldn't have blogged last night's dream except for the way it... ended... you'll see...

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At the beginning of last night's dream, my sister called me to explain that she and her husband had needed to fly to England suddenly for some emergency. She was in too much of a hurry to explain; she just wanted me to take her minivan to go pick up my nieces and drive to meet them there.

So I drove my car over to their house, but their van wasn't there. It also wasn't at any of the other usual places like their office, church, or anywhere else I could think of. After looking around town a little more, I stopped at a convenience store to use a pay phone. Just as I got out, their minivan pulled up beside the building and honked. My nieces and another girl were in the back, and Zooey Deschanel* was driving.

She had already picked up my nieces from school, so I got in the front passenger's side. As she drove, she told me that my sister had called and explained the situation: an anonymous call had been made to my sister pleading with her to mediate a crisis at a Unitarian church in Hirtshireville (not a real town as far as i know), England.

We drove for a long long time - through Bryan TX, Houston TX, Memphis TN, and Washington DC. The kids got very restless on the way, and we had to stop often.

(Of course, all of you know as I do that it would be impossible to get from north Texas to central England only by driving. My subconscious placed the town in an imaginary England vaguely in the vicinity of Newfoundland.)

When we arrived in the cathedral parking lot, my sister was just leaving, so my nieces went with her while Zooey and I walked in to meet with the assistant bishop. In a small office in the back, he explained to us that the previous bishop had retired, and one particular bishop wanted to take over the cathedral without any discussion, but the assistant wanted to confront him and force him to call for an election. Somehow, Zooey knew of a legal loophole to fix everybody's problems, but couldn't explain it to us (for our own safety) - we just had to hide out in the back while she fixed the problem. She walked out and the assistant locked the door and blocked it with a chair.


Then I woke up...


and went back to sleep...


and dreamed the entire trip again...


except...


...at various moments during the second trip, we discussed ways for us to improve the course of events for everyone involved. We remembered to pick up more games for the kids, we avoided a traffic jam in Memphis, we helped the assistant maintain his anonymity better, etc...

?!?!?!?!

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* Weird Al is partially to blame for the title of this post. Dustbury's Zooeypaloozas are partially to blame for the dream ;)

p.s. the whole thing was g-rated

hijacked email

update: i just set up another email for comments from here. so i'm un-top-posting this.

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somebody has been sending out spam using the email address i use for comments here, and hotmail has now blocked the account (frustrating but understandable).

1) i apologize if you get a spam with my address.

2) i won't be reopening that address, so if you sent anything since march i probably didn't receive it. please use comments here until i set up another address for hatless in hattiesburg.

3) this is not near as frustrating as a previous hijacking...

stating the obvious...

...in a world not inclined to hear such things:

Pastor Jones (notorious koran burner) lives in the United States, not Afghanistan; that we enjoy the protection of the First Amendment... it is not Pastor Jones’ fault that Muslims are so frickin’ deranged as to go all apesquat over the burning of a copy of the Koran and that their doing so pretty much proves his point.

update: see also

abu ghraib redux

the sequel is worse

changing meds

the black dog
got lost in the fog
and slept like a log

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will try to resume regular posting when things stabilize...

chiropractic care

i have now personally seen chiropractors who believe in their profession at five levels. the numbers i assigned are according to hierarchy of belief, but are arranged for effect, not in chronological or numerical order.

4) the skeletal system should be aligned so that the body can move properly

3) nerves pinched by a misaligned spine can cause pain (plus #4)

2) nerves pinched by a misaligned spine will prevent the body from healing itself properly (plus #3 & #4)

1) the *only* cause of *all* physical disease is nerves pinched between misaligned vertebrae (plus #2, #3, & #4)

5) skeletal system pain is a source of steady income (assisted by insurance, workers comp, and pamphlets about the other four)

can you fix a cfl?

this site suggests (in slightly-broken english) it is sometimes possible to fix a compact fluorescent lightbulb (via makezine)

Libyan No-Fly / Police Action / War / Airshow / ...?

so is this a bad time to bring up the phrases:

"warmongering cowboy"
"no blood for oil"
"dissent is patriotic"

?

at least when bush mobilized the armed forces, he had a goal in mind...

common ground

it's not often i agree with a leftist-socialist-labor site, but this is one: stop rfid.

and this post brings up problems surrounding "who owns science".

things to remember

two quotes from many via the jakarta globe:

"The timing is not right for political decisions and the spreading of panic," Slovenia's President Danilo Turk told reporters while on a visit to the Czech capital Prague.

"Please don't forget that there are people who are working to protect everyone's lives in exchange for their own lives," said one post on Japanese social networking site Mixi.

Japan Earthquake

Here's the "one-page" of information from USGS, more information on tabs, and a preliminary cross-section.

Here's graphics of the tsunami waves fom NOAA, and one high resolution map of the wave heights.

just raised that way

Viewpoint:

"Most people... agree that the behavior and views of Mr. Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church are contemptible and not deserving of the respect of decent people. Many commentators and cartoonists have reviled and mocked them in print, not just for their awful behavior at funerals, but for the beliefs they hold about homosexuality and American decadence.

But here's an interesting thing. The Westboro baptists are on the fringe of American Christianity, but they're roundly condemned for holding views that are actually in the mainstream of American Islam.

Whether it's their conviction that God hates homosexuals, or that God rejoices in the deaths of American soldiers, or that America is a fundamentally decadent society which deserves to be destroyed, there are a lot of devout Muslims in this country who would fervently assent to all of these."

just born that way*

There's a popular claim that homosexuals should not be ridiculed because they were "just made that way" and had no choice of their sexual preference. So why aren't homophobes accorded the same courtesy, since they were also "just made that way" and had no choice of their sexual aversions?

(*according to the world. some of us were taught better.)

the fall of civilization

maybe:

"The Unanswered Question remains "Why did this cultural collapse happen?" We know that it did, we know that the leaders of Western countries completely lacked foresight, insight, patriotism and concern for their national identities. We know they were willing to open wide the borders of their countries to allow in the hordes. We know all of this, and much more. But we don't know WHY. If the West hates itself, where did this self-hatred come from, what is its source? Was it the shattering events of '68 that brought about an irreversible rupture with the past? Yes it was, but we still don't know why the leaders and the people let it happen. We went to bed one night with our traditions still strong, our values seemingly imperishable. And we woke up in a totally transformed world, the world upside down as some call it."

or maybe not...

another video

...and the winner of the "best use of stock photos in support of environmentalism" category is...

fred vs paul

love vs hate

3/4 time in a bottle

at a chinese buffet today which i do not frequently... um... frequent, the background music was in a style i call "mantovani strings". that may be an incorrect name, but i associate those lush orchestrations of the soundtracks of the fifties through seventies with dad's easy-listening am-fm stations and eight-track tapes back when i was young. of the few oldies i recognized were "tammy's in love", "sound of music", something like "those magnificent men in their flying machines" and some french-sounding filler music that could have been from the 1956 "around the world in eighty days".

there were a few new additions though. in that same easy style were "the rose", "for your eyes only", some nondescript sitcom theme from the seventies, and chicago's "glory of love". but then there was the beatle's "hey jude" and berlin's "take my breath away" - both of which lost a lot in translation.

those reminded me of an ongoing expectation of mine: to someday hear ozzy ozbourne's "no more tears" in a commercial for johnson's baby shampoo, soundgarden's "i awake" for some motel chain's commercial, and nin's "down in it" in a department store elevator.