Interesting times…

Dean's DestinyI don’t think I can handle too many more weeks like this. Michelle’s death cast a pall, and the dog’s injury hurt. Dean’s kitty died… good-bye Destiny. BloggerCon left me conflicted as usual. I saw Steve, the Ookles guy, and asked after a mutual friend… got a strange off-key answer… still don’t know what Ookles does, either.

Today Dave Winer reports that Bob Wyman’s company, PubSub, is coming apart. I think there have to be a thousand train wrecks for every winner. There was talk today also about Bob’s criticisms of Dave in the polling versus pinging argument and Dave’s problems getting his prototypes to scale up into large production systems, and like clockwork, Dave reported that the OPML server sucked right now, but he hoped bringing another online would solve the problem.

I hope Bob can dust himself off and get back on the horse. Maybe Technorati could engage him as a consultant right now!

We’re essentially out of oil, sliding down the increasing slope of the diminishing supply curve in a time of rapidly broadening global demand. The corporations are embarrassingly open about the massive fraud they perpetrate from energy and financial services rip-offs to the theft of $200 billion of tax money that was supposed to fund broadband access in America. Rove’s wedge-issue politics continue to trump truth and reason and the administration can whine about journalist’s discovery of SWIFT transaction monitoring when it’s old news and not particularly meaningful… and whatever happened to the Plame game? And Jessica Lynch? And Terry Schiavo?

I dropped off the board of a local non-profit this week… the president and I have nothing in common except our pig-headedness, and she’s the sparkplug of the outfit. Felt like a failure, none-the-less. There’s a hundred stories in the naked country, most of them boring as watching corn grow.

Tomorrow I will drive the tractor north from Mueller Implements to White Cedar farm where I will mow weeds. As the years pass, the mowing leaves me with more and more grasses and fewer and fewer noxious weeds, so it’s not all bad. While I’m mowing Beth will strip our little dwarf sour cherry tree and in the afternoon we’ll make a cherry pie if the birds have left us any. The dog has a week of healing under her collar and she’s spending more time out in her kennel, climbing stairs by herself, and while still visibly mangled and dragging her right rear foot, her irrepressible personality has resurfaced and she’s spending a lot of time smiling and wiggle-waggling.

Maybe best of all, memer and McD, (and Mr. Follymacher himself)are going all out gaming Technorati on my behalf. No, the upbeat dog is the best part, but the ‘rati games rank right up there. :-)

Treaty of Tripoli

Good news!  This just in from our ambassador to the lands of the profit…

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

I be me…

rambling through UBUWEB, ever grateful to wood s lot for leading me through excerpts and links

am I the man with the perpetual Quigley? I have a genre busting suggestion – not every allusion in every post I write needs a fucking link, not every stolen image needs an acknowledgement. Neither great literature nor lit of the more punk-ass variety carries within it the foot-notification of every conceit.

Nerve Personals did so well they sold the whole thing to some massive national service not long ago and it immediately got sucked into a vortex of horrible design and mediocre verbiage and was crossbred with a thousand other tepid, unhip dating sites and it instantly lost roughly 82 percent of its coolness, and now appears to be Match.com for easily drunk twentysomethings who’ve been to Burning Man once and read a lot of David Sedaris and really, really like cats.

Wild Horses

I googled Robin Kaelber… though she died before the web was born. When they killed JFK, I was in the Rathskellar, “the Rat.” I interrupted a chess game to check the TV news nearby. “That’s politics,” I said. People had a hard time measuring my depth from that statement. The consensus was “shallow.” “Heartless” and “immature” were close behind. “Perceptive” wasn’t even on the list. When they killed John-John to shut down George magazine… well, only a handful of memesters, propagandists, and zany conspiracy theorists were even looking in that direction. Lakoff would likely understand. Maybe not, for no grants nor tenure lie on that rocky ground.

A riderless horse, boots reversed… a pale horse…

art for goodness sake…

***************************** INVEST IN ART *******************************

**DO NOT EMAIL, PLEASE … PHONE PHILIP at (510)-395-7814

$350.00 FIRM

FRAMED OIL ON LINEN PAINTING BY KENN DAVIS.

** THIS PAINTING IS A PIECE OF ROCK HISTORY. LISTED ARTIST, CALIFORNIA SURREALIST, KENN DAVIS WAS COMMISSIONED BY THE JEFFERSON AIRPLANE ROCK BAND…( Jerry Kaukonen and Marty Balin specifically) TO CREATE AND PAINT A PORTABLE MURAL FOR ATHEIR SHOW, THAT COULD ALSO BE USED WHILE THEY WERE ON TOUR … .

DAVIS CREATED THE PIECE IN THREE, … 6′ X 4′ SECTIONS THAT CONNECTED AND WORKED LIKE A (TRIPTIC) SCREEN. THE THEME WAS THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (Famine, plague, war & death) REPRESENTED AS ROCK MUSICIANS. DAVIS FIRST DID A SMALL OIL PAINTINGS OF EACH SECTION AS STUDIES TO WORK FROM AND THIS PAINTING WAS ONE OF THOSE. THIS PARTICULAR PAINTING HUNG IN THE JEFFERSON AIRPLANES’ GROUP HOUSE (ON LOAN) FOR A LONG TIME.

—– THE FULL BACKDROP WAS FIRST USED BY THE JEFFERSON AIRPLANE AT THE MATRIX ON FILLMORE IN SAN FRANCISCO IN THE LATE 1960s. WHERE THE TRIPLICATE SCREEN IS NOW IS UNKNOWN TO ARTIST, DAVIS. … ** THE CORNER OF ONE PANEL WAS A CITY IN THE SKY ON GIRDERS UNDER SEIGE. KENN DAVIS LIKED THIS SECTION SO MUCH THAT HE KEPT THE STUDY ALL THESE YEARS .

SIZE OF THIS PAINTING: 16″ X 20″ UNFRAMED. THE MEDIUM IS OIL ON LINEN. FRAMED, IT MEASURES 19 3/4″ X 23 3/4″.

FINE CONDITION WITH NO DAMAGE. SIGNED BY ARTIST ** WILL BE ACCOMPANIED BY PERSONAL LETTER TO BUYER CONTAINING HISTORY TO ESTABLISH PROVENANCE OF THE WORK. NO PRINTS HAVE BEEN MADE OF THIS PIECE.

If you find the triptych let me know. I could use it for a butterfly effect. So much love, so long gone. We were talking about depression – quite distinct from this sadness I feel. The dog wiggled her butt tonight – lacking a tail that’s what she does – and I was reminded that we heal. That little butt wiggle probably set air in motion that will cause a typhoon in mandalay, but what do I care? i’m here now. But depression is a low place from which the exit is not obvious, a black hole – gravity sucking light down into its event horizon, letting nothing escape until finally not even a team of wild horses could drag you back and the only option really is to just sit there in front of the computer, unaware of what your fingers will look like on the keyboard if you choose not to move.

Siddhartha, hermits, sitars tuned too tight, too slack, life ends in death no shortcut no exit no exit-the-squid is the premier model organism for studying the nervous system and has spawned discoveries … 100 times the size of a human axon, the squid’s axon is roughly a millimeter in diameter and the largest nerve fiber on Earth the Man-O-War gets its name from the float, colonial polyps are attached to the underside of the bladder for digestion and reproduction, with very long tentacles ( sometimes up to 32 feet ) extending Man-O-Wars [not men-o-war] are hermaphrodites; the fertilized egg develops into a planktonic larval form Man-O-War’s main food consists of surface plankton, although it can also take larger prey tentacles have stinging cells capable of killing poison secreted causes respiratory problems and muscle weakness sting … extremely painful … incapacitating … fatal … Man O’ War easily drew away in the final quarter-mile to defeat the Triple Crown champion by 7 lengths … undefeated season of 11 straight wins, the superstar horse was shipped to Faraway Farm “Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes…”

Well when you’re sitting back in your rose pink Cadillac
Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day
Ah, I’ll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon
And another girl can take my pain away

the tongue in the cavity of our mouth is – a gesture of an armless dancer, twirling the air, like a gaseous, dancing veil; as they fly off to the sides, the tips of the veil tickle the larynx; and – out comes a dry, aery, quick “h,” pronounced like the Russian “kh” takh me dawn liggle thujee takh me dawn…

Chittering?

Howz’at song go?  “Twenty years of blogging and they put you on the A-list…”

For Dean…

This has been a hell of a week… this kitty made me think of you. I thought of you on Saturday too, when I met Om who sends his fellow Yankee fan regards. (Photo credit: Henry, aka Kerr Mudgeon)

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Life is sad, life is a bust
All you can do is do what you must
You do what you must do, and you do it well
I’d do it for you, honey baby can’t you tell?