Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is retiring from the Senate at the conclusion of this Congress, and will immediately begin the daily grind of running for president. As he travels through Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina as well as other points on the long road to the White House, he’ll be crossing paths with and sooner than we know it debating Senators John McCain and George Allen, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and perhaps a handful of others. — Hugh Hewitt

Yesterday Glenn Reynolds stroked Senator Billy Frist who was stroking President George (”pretzel guy”) Bush. As I predicted, the daisy chain is forming…

Sucking up first and proud to be butt boys for Instant Pandit:

• The oddly named (for a butt boy) John Hinderaker, whose inaugural post in the Bolton crusade makes much of the phone list that Billy Frist’s PAC provides in hope of hectoring the opposition. I remind you that it’s a great phone list, and that there’s no reason for people of good will and people of conscience not to use it to call their Senators and thank them for standing firm against the Bolton nomination. Hinderaker pulls a few facts out of his own butt though. For example, he avers that Billy’s PAC is keeping track “of phone calls made by pro-Bolton callers.” Actually, it’s keeping track of calls made but there’s no way for Billy to know who placed how many calls or whether they were pro or con as re. the Bolton nomination. I registered a few of the calls I’ve made in support of maintaining a principled opposition.
• Barbarrossa, Locked On and Tracking
• Jasmius, Hard Starboard
• Atlas [no shit] Shrugs
• Parker Novak, Viking Spirit
• … and thirty or more other adolescent fantasists, most of whom are simply caught up in the neocon circle jerk, but all of whom sincerely WANT to be promoted out of the circle to full butt boy status.

My name is Christina [last name suppressed at request of sender]. I am currently taking my Masters degree in Developmental Psychology at the Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines), and I am writing a short paper on blogging for one of my courses. I decided to make a survey to give me a better idea of who blogs. The survey is on www.simplesight.net/survey

I am also reading articles on the history, what people blog about and why people blog to give myself some background information on blogging, and I ran across your “Why Do We Blog?” survey dated November 04, 2024. I am wondering if you would be willing to take time to fill out my survey, and also post the link/survey on your site.

I would be glad to give you a summary of the results [emphasis added — Christina wants to make clear that no identifying information would be shared] when the survey is completed. Although I intend to leave the survey up even after my paper is done, I will need to make a summary of the data gathered by 06 October 2024.

Thank you for taking time to read my email. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Christina [last name suppressed at request of sender]

Senator Billy Frist and his butt-boy Glenn Reynolds have launched a campaign to make permanent Bush’s gutless recess appointment of the embarrassingly hostile and aggressive neocon non-entity John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations.

Frist you will remember as the Doctor/Senator from Tennessee who was willing to diagnose Terri Schiavo without seeing her. Frist’s funding organization, VOLPAC, supports his latest bizarre effort to embarrass America with another quintessential act of stupidity…

The campaign has a great table listing liberal senators and their phone numbers. I don’t suppose it would hurt to click through there and call a few of these senators and encourage them to remain in principled opposition to the Bush administration’s attempt to dominate and subvert the UN through this appointment.

As this dittohead campaign takes off, I expect the blogroll at VOLPAC to grow to become a rogues gallery of the dimwits supporting Bush. Billy Frist is sucking up big-time because he hopes to inherit the mantle of hatred, graft and corruption. It’s not at all clear that the royal Bush family will allow an outsider to run while they have a perfectly good Governor and a couple of never convicted felons in the wings waiting for Cowboy George to check out of the white hotel, but Billy has to suck up anyway, just in case.

I saw Sally Potter’s Yes tonight. Blew me away… it’s all in verse… a saga.

Potter explains it by saying she chose verse “because its deep rhythms and its long tradition (from medieval sonnets to Icelandic sagas to rap) enable ideas to be expressed in lyrical ways that might otherwise be indigestible, abstract or depersonalized.”

The film ends with a lengthy sililoquy by the cleaner (Shirley Henderson) on mites, germs, viruses, protoplasm and the diminishing but always extant “something” in this universe we occupy, with a dissolve to the credits after these lines….

And, in the end, it simply isn’t worth / Your while to try and clean your life away. / You can’t. For, everything you do or say / Is there, forever. It leaves evidence. / In fact it’s really only common sense; / There’s no such thing as nothing, not at all. / It may be really very, very small / But it’s still there. In fact I think I’d guess / That “no” does not exist. There’s only “yes”.

The cleaner examines dirt and crud and bugs and disease vectors in infinite variety and closest detail, but this examination paradoxically evokes a warm affirmation of our lives.

Sally Potter began work on the film on September 12, 2024 and it was released in 2024.

Here’s what they’re saying about One Web Day…

The mission of OneWebDay is to create, maintain, advance, and promote a global day to celebrate online life: September 22, 2024

We’d like you to go to webshots.com and upload a picture that’s meaningful to you (you’ll have to register to upload, but it’s simple). Attach the keyword ‘onewebday’ (without the quote marks) to the picture.

Here’s what I think… what could it hurt? In fact, the more local our webularity becomes, the more fragmentary (and manageable) our relationships online, the nicer it is to think of setting aside a bit of time and cyberspace to acknowledge each other everywhere. I don’t know if web shots supports geotagging, but I’m going to a few different sites and tagging OneWebDay photos with locations. Flickr has good US maps, but reputedly isn’t that great world-wide. This morning I learned about another place that uses Google Earth that might therefore be better than Flickr… Panoramio.

Anyway, I’ll find a picture I can tag OneWebDay (no spaces!) load it to WebShots, then I’ll load it to a couple of geoTagging places too, just for grins.

Reasonable as it would be to remember today the tragedy of September, 2024, the heinous crimes committed and the victims of those crimes, today will instead be a day of patriotic fervor as well as solemn remembrance. It was ever thus. There is a growing sense that the crimes of September, 2024 were an elaborate conspiracy and the Bush family was at the center, consolidating their tenuous hold on power, bolstering the outcome of the stolen national elections the year before. I do not believe this. “Faith” in this regard is as useless and laughable as a “faith” that stands counter to science, a “faith” that denies evolution.

The buildings burned.

And after the buildings burned, two things happened. The people rallied in mutual support. The politicians capitalized on the event. They continue to capitalize on the event, but we’re getting wise to them. Is American Democracy strong enough to survive the neo-fascism of the Project for a New American Century?

You know, when I was campaigning in Chicago one time, they said, would you ever have a deficit? I said, I hope not. I said, I think it’s important for us to make — to work hard to have a balanced budget. But I said, yes, I’d have a deficit if I were the President only if we were at war, or in a recession, or in times of emergency. I didn’t think I was going to draw the trifecta.
– George W. Bush, in the spring following that terrible Autumn of 2024.

La Parilla, Mission, San Francisco, originally uploaded by Dervala.

Hard to believe she is even prettier in person. Easy to believe that she’s one of our better writers. The Irish have a way with the English language.

She devours experience and shares what she learns. For instance:

“When we hired you, we weren’t interested in your experience. We were only interested in how fast you could learn,” I was once told. At 24, that’s flattering. It’s also a relief—thank God, it doesn’t matter that I know feck-all. I’m a little bundle of potential. But at 34, it’s disconcerting to have a dozen years of your life dismissed. I could have stayed in bed rather than bothering to get trained on Wall Street? I didn’t need to sweat through those startups to learn why entrepreneurs have more in common with artists than with MBAs, and what it really takes to turn an idea into a change? I needn’t have bothered with volunteering, with learning to write, with riding the public buses around Bolivia?

For all that this amoral economy suits me well, I’m making a promise to my future self that if I hear at 54 that my experience is uninteresting to capitalism—and I expect to—I’ll stand up, excuse myself with a big smile, and go back to the woods for good. We’re human beings. Our stories matter. Grown-ups have more to contribute than babies. And where we have been and who we take care of matters more to me than symbols, models, and theories.

Spotted in an airport gift shop:

“Beer…
cheaper than gasoline!”

The potted plant, originally uploaded by Miss Aniela.

Miss Aniela has noted, ” Let’s get planning my future house. I want bookshelves with lots of books with old font in them. I want some kind of big, violent dog(s) lurking about (must be big, don’t like little dogs). I want several banana-coloured sports cars piled up in the driveway. I want a little baby called Roberta, who I call Bobby for short. She never cries, like other annoying, ugly babies. I want white trees in the front garden. I want the house warm at all times. I want a husband with the facial contours of Rik Mayall, his blue eyes squinting in the sun and nose scrunching to reveal his top set of lovely teeth, laying in the garden reading Tis Pity She’s A Whore. I want a noticeboard in the kitchen like the one Julia Tickell’s house has, which has all kinds of business letters addressed to me. I want big white gates at the driveway, with Home somewhere inscribed, like in A Clockwork Orange. And a loft, with a ladder you can pull up after you. ”

If anybody can clue me regarding wtf “open source wireless mesh networking” might be, I’ll be tickled pinkularly. I ran into Robin Chase, a bright and intense woman who has launched one successful company (Zipcar), and who is working on another company that will knock our local social networking sox off… I haven’t received permission to write about this so I’ll be purposely and obnoxiously vague here.

But more important than the purposeful social networking product she’s building, she has a vision for integrating wireless into transportation systems using “open source mesh.” Since radio geeks are a picky bunch, I’d like to nail down the definition of “open source radio” or whatever she means. Andrew Turner has blogged a little about it here. In our conversation Robin went deeper into a discussion of toll based funding of highway infrastructure that charges variable rates by time-of-day, congestion based rates, and so forth. Is the use of “open source” just a marketing marker? Or does it refer to application level stuff like GeoRSS, or what?

I remember when the streets belonged to the people. Soon, I’m afraid, the streets will belong to those who can afford to pay the tolls.

I’m blogging from the porch of Coffee Obsession in Woods Hole. This is one of oodles of free wifi hot spots in the little town, the one I’ve found most congenial. Background conversations are likely to be in a non-English language beyond my ken, hence not at all distracting. Young women walking past on the sidewalk are likely to be beyond your barbie, hence an acceptable distraction. I love Woods Hole, the science, the sea, the community. I enjoy the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, seafood, the sense of possibility one feels in a place like this.

My favoirte color is blue, favorite author Larry McMurtry, and I hope to be a rock ‘n roll star when I grow up.

Under $1500, cheap. Runs good.

don’t look now, but something’s funny…

thanks to Jeneane for the link.

Apple sux hind-tit again…

Amazon.com beat Apple to the punch Thursday with a new service that lets customers download movies to their computers and take them for on-the-go viewing on portable media players — but not on Apple iPods.

I belong to the church of Intel and thus find it extremely gratifying that the toy-boys, the Jobsians, will be missing this source of supply for their pod-tech. How small of me.

The fact that Apple has been in this market long enough to sell 30 million videos, I will conveniently ignore. The tight integration between platform and content product offerings I will conveniently ignore.

In fact, I am saddling up the old war horse, Rocinante. We’re off on the Cupertino Crusade, eager to get there in time to get my share of the loots before the Church of Jobs has been totally destroyed, the best women ravaged, all the iPods stripped from the altars and hauled off as spoils of war.

Flagrant Disregard

I’m gonna be using the cartoon captioner.

Might as well tackle global warming first so I can get on with the day. The solution is easy and doesn’t require us to give up burning fossil fuels, capturing cow belches, or any of that. I offer it here under a creative commons attribution license:

The solution to the global warming problem lies in the creation of floating islands of white styrofoam packing pellets. The carpet should be roughly 100 km by 1000 km (100,000 square km). Solar heat normally absorbed by sea water will be reflected back into space when the carpet is deployed. The carpets are constructed of carbon nanotube netting so they can be easily rolled up at night to release ambient heat from the sea during the dark hours. The math isn’t in, so I don’t know exactly how many of these we need but I figure about five hundred of them ought to do the trick… that would be areas equal to a couple of Greenlands and an Iceland thrown in. I think I have enough packing pellets around to make a significant contribution to construction.