Thanx to Chris Locke for the pointer to “do it yourself despair,” and to dervala and tim from whom I swiped the photo.

i’m flying over morocco i’m hugging a whore i extend a friendly hand.

We debated the platonic form for an ass-basket, to cradle the main concern of our journey downriver. And what would it take to build a floating spit, for barbecued chicken? Gareth tied on our mascot, Ducky. Next-door, they made sparkly blue superhero capes and bikinis, and tarted up their tubes with paint.

Among the questions British police are studying is whether any of the suspects had links to last year’s London suicide bombers and how many visited Pakistan in recent months. They also are examining Internet cafes near the suspects’ homes, looking into the possibility of tracking Web based e-mails or instant messages, Scotland Yard said.

technologist can become aware of the fact that the show must go on, then I think we can expect not only interesting art, but we may just very well expect an interesting change in social order. The most important aspect of this is the position of the engineer as a possible revolutionary figure. And it may very well come as a result of the artists and engineers collaborating, because the artists, for years now, have been the repository of revolutionary thought, whereas the engineers, in their recent history, have been the employees of

http://www.fondation-langlois.org/flash/e/?NumPage=306

So…..that obsession I talked about before, with the long-board? Why would that drive me to thinking I could handle going down a hill on said board? Hm? Well, I couldn’t. The worst part is that I didn’t really even fall off the board in a cool way at all. I actually started freaking out and stepped off the board and, you know what? I found out that my body was not moving the same speed as the board. Then I ate it. My hands, elbow, hip, and knee are all jacked. My one hand worse than the others. The pain sucks and everything, but worse than that is that things that I always do, normal everyday things, are painful.

I ate a horrific item called “falafel” yesterday from a cart near Mt. Sinai Hospital. This seems to be some kind of awful fried bean item which tasted much like small pieces of cloth which have been dipped in gasoline. Today I must endeavor to be healthier and eat only items that are good for me like hot dogs.

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.

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.

It’s not about the shallow nature and the greed of the second generation brass-ring boys seeking to spin straw into gold. It’s not even so much about the immutability of the straw, although that’s a big part of it. What it’s about is the commodity nature of the widgets that the brass-ring boys seek to capitalize.

In the good old days — say 1997 — there was so much unlaundered mob money floating around in Silicon Valley that no good idea could go unfunded. Since they moved the Bank of America deeper into Christian fundamentalist country and closer to the Florida operation and the off-shore banks, there hasn’t been that much money to launder.

Of course, there are only so many drop shadow logoed, productized widgets with omitted “e”s available to fund, so the decline in drug money to launder matches the decline in products seeking funds, so the burn rates remain about the ame, although the general contribution to global warming has declined.

Most of these products are like green beans. They’re tasty with a little buttr, and you can get them anywhere, cheap. Unlike green beans though, they’re mostly based on the characteristics of a current generation of browser and a sense that the whirled wide web is the internet. It’s not, and as tele-immersion applications and the like emerge over the next few years soaking up bandwidth in ways undreamed of by the brass-ring boys, their little dreams of wealth will be dashed. Fortunately for them of course, there will remain a huge market for green beans and they’ll continue to rake a little off the top of every sale, adding value with attitude.

[This pointless little parable contains a few germs of truth, a few fantastical projections, and should be assumed to be generally meaningless, until it’s not.]

Earlier this week when I read Joi Ito’s post about pruning his Shii tree I was struck by the intentionality and the meditative quality of the Shinto ritual he described.

Some connections I made after I read that post… my gingko tree has a similar spiritual value. It was a young tree sixteen years when we moved here. Now it is quite mature, large and dropping more fruit each year, its branches spreading wider over the driveway, over the lawn. While I do not approach the pruning with any particular reverence, this is a tree that demands study and intentionality. Later in the week, my friend Joanna’s kitchen popped up in the San Francisco Chronicle. She gave us some of the marble that she salvaged from the Crocker bank remodeling and we used it in our Berkeley kitchen when we remodeled in the late eighties. Our kitchen was trimmed by hand by a carpenter who had training in Japanese building techniques. Our Berkeley bungalow was not exactly four-square. Each corner of the room was a different height, floor to ceiling. But Nicholas and his team were able to trick the eye when cutting the moldings and the trim in such a way that the irregularities were absorbed by the irregularities they designed into the dimensions of the wood they used.

When he was finished, Nicholas drilled one extraneous hole into the countertop near the sink. He didn’t want to burden us with a creation that was perfect.

There they were, red flags with black swastikas flying, US flags flying, new banners — oddly beautiful in a dark fantastic kind of way — banners hybridizing the black, the red, the red-white-and-blue, and of course the good old blue and gray stars and bars of a racist unrepentant South. The Nazis came to Madison today. They had a permit. They had police protection and ten foot tall chain-link steel barricades to protect them. More importantly, they had the US Constitution to protect them.

The cops wore kevlar. They appeared in full riot drag, gas masks at the ready, a dozen mounted officers, a huge number of state patrol officers, sheriff’s deputies, and Madison police, all positioned to face outward, protecting the savage monkey-men on the marble steps from those who had come to encounter them.

(Beth remarked that this would be a good time to be speeding on the Interstate… all of the patrolmen were at the Capitol). Why were we there? Why weren’t you? Only about 1000 Madisonians showed up, plus 300 police and a couple dozen National Socialist Movement representatives. Five supporters of the Nazis were in a cage near the podium, sieg heiling when the Fuhrer said “Sieg heil!” As usual the AP miscounted… there really were only a couple dozen of the hatemongers, and a thousand or so demonstrators.

“What does ‘Sieg Heil’ mean?” I was asked. I ran it through Babel Fish and came out with… “Victory Welfare.” “Hale victory,” maybe? I know what it means to the Bozos that were giving their stiff armed salute and shouting it out. It means: “We are so freaking alienated that we will dress in thirties German whitebread drag right down to the armbands and a few fetishistic Wehrmacht helmets…” (when I say Nazi helmet, what do you think of?)

But seriously… I was glad to see hundreds and hundreds of young people giving them the finger every time they “sieg heiled,” the students chanting “Boring, boring, boring, boring” in endless repetition while the mindless buffoon at the microphone spewed his bizarre rhetoric about colonial wars and ending immigration and what-not. I was glad to see the not-white group hoisting beach towels imprinted with the Mexican flag. I was glad not to be able to hear any of the nonsense the Nazis spouted and if that makes me close-minded, so be it. I am glad that the five supporters who came to hear the brownshirts were in their protective cage and close enough to hear. The constitution does guarantee freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. The local authorities put such a massive police presence on display that the small group of black clad anarchists who might have added a violent tone was held in check. Fine.

But there is a lot of subtext floating around for me about this. Civic leaders pleaded with the people to stay home, in order not to dignify the fascist assembly. Ignore them, the mayor said. Hope they will go away. I think it is much more effective to point them out, to make fun of them, to shame them; and maybe they won’t go away, but at least their numbers won’t increase, their role as laughable misfits will be obvious.

Another issue I have relates to the expropriation of the terms National Socialism and Fascism. These pansies couldn’t organize the local chamber of commerce, much less achieve an integration of national government with corporate industrial power. While the Bush administration colludes with Halliburton, Bechtel, and big oil… while the Republicans disband the citizen army and rely on professional reserves and mercenaries like Black Water… while the entire public infrastructure is scrapped and private enterprise takes over public education, trash hauling, water supplies, municipal power and light… while two generations’ carefully crafted social statutes are flushed down a toilet and replaced by private security guards protecting privileged classes while poverty spreads and disempowerment of the poor is institutionalized… while the biggest state budget items are for new prison construction and a bizarre proportion of poor, young black and latino males are incarcerated, IT JUST DOES NOT SEEM RIGHT FOR THESE LITTLE PUD PULLERS TO OWN THE NAME FASCIST. We know who the fascists are and it ain’t them. When the few dozen brownshirts left today in their rented school bus (”Adolf has left the building”), protected by a phalanx of riot cops and led by a group of mounted police, horses being more effective at breaking through pickets than men with billy clubs, it was as if they had never been there. But the memory of the huge red banner with the black swastika will be with me for a while.

I’m glad we so out numbered them and that we made fun of them and that many people screamed fuck-you over and over again and held rude signs aloft and generally disrespected them. I was glad to join the hundreds of people who raised an impudent digit when the brownshirts extended their arms in the Nazi salute. But there is a hidden irony here. Beth and I arrived late for our witness against hate. We had been at a board meeting planning programs for the fall. Earlier in the day about thirty activists had been sitting in a non-violent dialog training session. Any of these people could have taught the session, and they should have been walking that talk at the Capitol rather than preaching to the choir in the Meetinghouse. I believe they stayed off the street so as not to dignify the sick twists on parade with an audience, but by staying out of it they lost the opportunity to know that they were there, witnessing against hate, pushing back at something that is so horrible, malicious, and evil that it must be encountered whenever it appears.

UPDATE (8/28/2006):
Isthmus publishing has coverage here, featuring lots of links to blogs around town.

Jesse Russell speaks of the pink bunny invasion and provides more links.

Link whoring will earn you big bucks in the blogging biz…