So I'm not a "pro"...

Let's be honest, a blogger with a properly professional attitude would have been cranking out verbiage about the "Blizzard of Ought-Five", and what has now, officially, turned into the snowiest January in Massachusetts' record books.

I'll apologize right now to both of my readers (if they're still checking in) but I don't always feel that I have anything worth your reading, even by MY flexible standards of what I think will be interesting.

Recap: It snowed bigtime, I shoveled 2+ feet of snow off of the sidewalk, then scraped off the result of the (fortunately smaller) followup storm two days later.

Hey - This is New England... snow isn't really news, y' knowwhatImean?

Nor is a week or more of sub-freezing tempertaures. It's annoying, but it's not news.

And it's not really news that so many people DON'T clear their sidewalks, forcing me out into several of the busier streets in town when walking to work, and walking home, and walking the dog.

Now SHE is cranky about the weather and the sorry state of the sidewalks in the neighborhood!

Caper, my 4-year-old Pug, is just not a winter fan. Understandable, really, when you are traversing snowdrifts that are taller than you are, and are bounding from one previous passerby's footprints in the snow to the next, all while looking desperately for a clear patch of ground where you can Bush and take a Nixon. (Pugs seem to be very particular about where they do their thing.)

But I am trying to be more philosophical about the Putzim who don't shovel, or shovel from the driveway to the front door and nothing else, or shovel everything except the last foot to the property line, because they don't want to accidebtally shovel any of the neighbors' snow, or who do the whole length - in a trough of exactly one shovel's-width. ..

See how philosophical I am...? I didn't even mention the ones who shovel to the corner, then don't clear the last two feet to the crosswalk, so that you have to lurch over the two-foot high pile of compcted snow, onto the slushy residue that the snowplows left in the street, because people were parking their cars like complete and utter MORONS, making it almost impossible for the plow-guys to get through... I mean...



...TWO vehicles, almost across the street from each other, and parked DIAGONALLY INTIO THE STREET?!!?

ARE THESE PEOPLE FRACKIN' IDIOTS, OR WHAT??!!!??

...Okay... So I haven't got my "philosophical mode" down, yet...
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On that note, I'm reading an excellent book on dealing with the aggravations of urban life:

City Dharma by Arthur Jeon (2004; Harmony Books, New York; ISBN:1-4000-4908-3)

I have difficulties with some of the concepts - I'm not sure that to know all is to forgive all, but I'm willing to consider it as a possibility.

I'll give you two snippets of Jeon's writing, and leave it at that.

"At the core of most religions, sometimes well buried, sometimes hiding in plain sight, is usually a nondual idea. Christ's main teaching of the Golden Rule, 'Love your neighbor as yourself,' is often interpreted as 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' But this is quite different from 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' This positive command can be literally interpreted: love your neighbor as yourself because that person is a manifestation of consciousness, the same as you. To love him or her as yourself is simply to see this reality, ending the illusion of your isolated identity. This is almost exactly echoed by Buddha in the Dharmmapeda when he says, 'Consider others as yourself.'"

"Psalms 41:1 says, 'Blessed is he who considers the poor.' It doesn't say, 'Blessed is he who gives to the poor.' ... So much about what it means to be human is to have choice, and sometimes offering that choice to a person in need restores his or her sense of humanity."

Side note: It just happened that the two bits that I picked here referred to the Christian Bible. It is NOT a Christian-Zen book. Jeon mentions a number of other religions or philosophies to make his points.

Good reading and food for thought.
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Last weekend I was spending Saturday afternoon with Guin in Boston running errands before the storm hit. We were in the Harvard Square subway station and saw in incident to which I'm still not sure how we should have responded.

I blind man was waiting for the same train as we were, and was singing along to the music on his earphones. (Living proof, by the way, that blindness alone does not a Ray Charles make!) Alongside of him was his guide dog. Coming down the platform towards him and us, was a blind woman with HER guide dog.

As she started to pass him, the two dogs greeted each other, as dogs will, and both dogs were scolded by their owners for reacting to the other.

The thing is, I'm not sure if either of the humans involved knew that the other was also blind and that their dogs were simply greeting a "Lodge Brother", as it were. I mean, it was literally the equivalent of the professional courtesy of two people in the same line of work exchanging business cards.

I found myself wondering whether I should go up and explain the situation to them, or not...

In the end, we did nothing, but I'll probably always wonder.

Closing thought for today:
"When things go wrong, don't go wrong with them." -- Anonymous

Fun With Google

Okay; it's January 20th and the Sock Puppet has been sworn in for four more years of (mis)government that brings new meaning to the term "Bush-league".

But I'm NOT going to go there, today. I've got just LOADS of time to rant about Bush's Bizarro Robin Hood act. ("Me steal money from poor so me can give to rich mans!")

Rather, I'm going to try to mess with Google's head again.

Now anyone who knows me knows I'm a Macintosh Geek and an iPod junkie; I own several of the former and one of the latter.

My 'Pod is a 2nd-generation 10-Gigabyte model, and, with 8.3 GB of music currently on it, I'm not maxed out, but that's only because I cleaned up and archived some of my old stuff. But That 8.3 GB translates (for me) to 2036 songs, totaling 5.1 days' worth of continuous music.

Gotta love it!

When I leave the house in the morning, the 'Pod starts up and goes into a pocket for the walk to work. (Hint for iPod owners who live in wintry climes: If you have an inside shirt or jacket pocket, carry your iPod there, rather than an outside coat pocket, or in your hand. Besides making it harder to steal, keeping the 'Pod warm will increase the length of the battery charge. In an outside pocket in the winter, I get, maybe 5 hours of charge; in a shirt pocket (under a sweater, under a (usually) open leather jacket I can get 7 - 8. And that's with the original, now two-year-old battery and almost daily use!) When I get to work, it gets plugged into the AC adapter and into a pair of speakers. If I'm going out for any length of time it goes back in the pocket.

In short, I'm hooked.

BAD!

Now, usually, I have the 'Pod playing a random playlist that includes... well... 'most anything that you can imagine. Rock&Roll with bagpipes? Got it. Big Band? Reggae? Folk? Blues? Soundtrack? Classical? Hip Hop? All of the above. I don't, currently have the Northern Cree festival singers' great Rockin' the Rez album on my 'Pod, or Puya's amazing Fundamental (Think Motorhead trading riffs with Tito Puente - bloody amazing sound!), but they've both been there.

Peple at work seem to be both fascinated and bemused because they can NEVER know what's going to be playing when they walk into my office. There are a few who ask me whether I own any "normal" musc, and I'll click on something from the Beatles' 1, or Paul Simon's Graceland, or something, but nomally I like being surprised by what pops up.

Occasionally, I'll keep track of, say, the first twenty songs of the day, just for the weird amusement value of it.

And here's where the "messing with Google's head" part comes in. I've already mentioned Macintosh and my iPod, several times, and given a couple of album titles and the groups the did them. Now I'm going to run down today's leadoff twenty, and see what Google decides to push in the advertising bar on the right of the page.

Hey, Messing with Google is just good, clean, geeky fun!

Mike's iPod Twenty for I/20/05
(Actually, today's list is kind of boring, but let's run with it!)

Song Title - Artist - Album Title

The Swagless Swaggie - The Original Bushwhackers & Bullockies Band - The Shearer’s Dream
A Tisket, A Tasket - Ella Fitzgerald - The Jazz Collection: Ksw2 1957
Dawn of the Day - Steeleye Span - Tonight’s the Night… Live
It Ain’t Right - Rod Piazza & the Mighty Flyers - The Essential Collection
Happy Days & Lonely Nights - Charlie Fry And His Million Dollar Pier Orchestra - That’s What I Call Sweet Music
Touch of Grey - Grateful Dead - In the Dark
(Lookin’ for) The Heart of Saturday Night - Tom Waits - The Heart of Saturday Night
Grand Prix - Penelope Houston - Tongue
Carolan’s Concerto - Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir & Ed Tricket - The First Fifteen Years - Volume I
Your Own Worst Enemy - They Might Be Giants - Factory Showroom
’Tain’t What You Do - Julie London - Wild Cool and Swingin' (UltraLounge)
Prairie Lullabye - Leon Redbone - From Branch to Branch
Ricercare À 6 - The Swingle Singers & The Modern Jazz Quartet - Place Vendôme
Drops of Brandy - The Original Bushwhackers & Bullockies Band - The Shearer’s Dream
Investigating Liz - Marco Beltrani - Hellboy – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Sonata #1 in B-Minor - Andante - John Sebastian - John Sebastian Plays Bach
On My Mind the Whole Night Long - George Gershwin - Gershwin Plays Gershwin
Banana de Rustenberg - Spokes Machiyane - Township Jazz & Jive
Strange Meadowlark - The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out
Down by the O-Hi-O - Spike Jones And His City Slickers - Strictly For Music Lovers (Disc 3)

Okay, Google; do yer stuff!

Closing thought for today:
"I asked him to summon up the soul of Jimi Hendrix and requested 'All Along the Watchtower.' You know, the guy's been dead twenty years, but he still hasn't lost his edge!” -- Fox Mulder

Okay... So that's vaguely amusing...

I post a screed-Lite regarding the inappropriateness of the idea of "supporting the Troops" with a symbol that says "You're an idiot, but we love you anyway". And Google sees the references to the "Cordon Jaune" (Let's see what Google does with THAT!) and proceeds to serve up ads for companies offering to sell you the very same simulated "strips of gold-colored fabric" that I was grumbling about.

Sorry for the circumlocutions above, but if I actually spell out "Y*LL*W R*BB*NS", they'll just run more ads for them.
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Now THIS is just TOO brilliant!

A police exercise with the stuff of mystery
Q: Where’s the blue suitcase with explosives inside?
A: ??

The Associated Press
Updated: 5:38 p.m. ET Dec. 7, 2004

PARIS - Somewhere in the world, there’s a navy blue suitcase with a small pack of explosives tucked in its side pocket.

Four days after police at Charles de Gaulle Airport slipped some plastic explosives into a random passenger’s bag as part of an exercise for sniffer dogs, it is still missing — and authorities are stumped and embarrassed.

You can read the rest of the story here.
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It's really sad when the best thing that you can come up with about the weather is that "tomorrow it's supposed to warm up enough to snow".

*fwetch*
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Closing thought for today:
"How can you be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six kinds of cheese?” -- Charles DeGaulle

Okay, is it just me...?

Music-related annoyances...

First off -- Is anyone else annoyed by all of the yellow ribbon paraphernalia that is appearing out there?

Don't get me wrong; while I don't agree with just about ANYTHING that the Sock-Puppet-in-Chief has done, I believe that as long as American troops are fighting overseas, they deserve the best that we can give them. Period.

But, Number 1 - I haven't seen anything that makes me think that the makers of the magnetic-stick-on fake yellow ribbons are donating their proceeds to, say, the USO, the Red Cross, or aid for the GI's families back home, so THEY'RE not really supporting anyone but themselves...

And, Number 2 -- Has anyone who is plastering those fake yellow ribbons around EVER ACTUALLY LISTENED TO THE #^%^&#$&* SONG!??!

The guy on the bus was IN PRISON. He wrote his sweetie a letter that said "I screwed up, big-time. If you're willing to put up with a f*ck-wit like me, tie a yellow, etc.." So the yellow ribbon, here, symbolizes "Yeah, you're a f*ck-wit; but you're MY f*ck-wit!"

So isn't the whole yellow ribbon thing telling the returning troops "Welcome home, moron"?

A suggestion: ditch the yellow ribbons - Red, white, and blue would work just fine and won't send any mixed messages!

Just a thought...
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I Write The Songs

Written by: Bruce Johnston

I've been alive forever, and I wrote the very first song
I put the words and the melodies together
I am music and I write the songs...


So let me get this straight. Barry Manilow didn't write the song, "I Write the Songs"...

That's just SO wrong...
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And that Billy Joel song "Piano Man" has been bothering me for, what, 20 years, now...?

(On the other hand, at least Billy Joel, apparently, ACTUALLY wrote the thing, which puts him one up on Barry Manilow...)

But, again; everytime that I go past a hotel piano bar and hear the thing, I want to go in and slap the listeners upside their collective heads.

Again -- LISTEN TO THE %^$%*()( LYRICS, PEOPLE!!! The singer is going on and on and on about how everyone in the place is a LOSER, EXCEPT HIM! ... And JUST LIKE the rest of them, HE DOESN'T REALIZE THAT HE'S A LOSER, TOO!!!

The whole thing is a paean to drunken oblivion!!!!

Closing thought for today:
"In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man will be hunted down by an angry mob and burned as a heretic." -- Me

Sweet Cheezis...! Just when I was starting to think that things couldn't POSSIBLY get any worse...!

NEWT GINGRICH OPEN TO PRESIDENTIAL RUN
WASHINGTON (AP) — Newt Gingrich is taking steps toward a potential presidential bid in 2008 with a book criticizing President Bush's policies on Iraq and a tour of early campaign states...

-----
You can read the rest of this horrifying article here.

(Do yourself a favor: Cover your keyboard with something impermeable before clicking the link.)

As if it isn't bad enough that the Sock Puppet wants to drive the U.S. into a brick wall at 90 miles per hour... Now Mr. Newt "Contract On..." -- excuse me -- "Contract With America" Gingrich is considering the possibilities of kicking it up a notch!!!

Apparently a nation where the top 1% of the population controls 38% of the wealth isn't divided enough. One where the top .01% -- 13,000 families -- have more income than the poorest 20,000,000 families isn't inequitable enough. One where we are actively considering encouraging people to replace part of their Social Security insurance with exactly the sort of stock market speculation that Social Security was designed to avoid isn't insane enough! One where we have taken the wave of world-wide goodwill towards us after the September 11th attacks and squandered it in the three years since -- culminating in our (mis)Administration's ill-advised adventurism in Iraq -- just so that the Sock Puppet could prove that his plums are bigger than his father's -- wasn't disastrous enough!!


NOO-o-o-o-o...

NOW we have to worry about what .THIS... this...

*
*
*

-- click --

*

-- reboot --

****

... I'm sorry... I'm blanking, here...I can't THINK of a word that's low enough to describe how I feel about Gingrich...

The mere act of calling this bottom-feeder a BOTTOM-FEEDER is an insult to every hard-working catfish in the continental United States!!!

I'm actually starting to think that maybe passing that "Let Arnold Run" constitutional amendment wouldn't be a totally moronic idea...!

(At least HE'D have Maria to slap him upside the head every so often!)

Hmmmmm... Maybe that's the Republicans' plan... Float the idea that they're even considering *THINKING ABOUT* letting this loathsome man run for President, and wait for the backlash that will turn Gov. Schwarzenegger (And how many times can I type that before my fingers choose to drop off of my hands under their own volition...?) into the warm and fuzzy alternative...!

... I'm sorry... I've got to quit before that vein throbbing in my forehead explodes...

Closing thought for today:
"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. "-- Robert A. Heinlein

Just For Grins...

I'm not sure why, but I've decided to tak' the King's shillin'.

Or at least Google's.

At some point advertisements (allegedly based on the content of my ramblings) wil start appearing on this page, with some minuscule payment coming to me for every clickthrough. I'm, frankly, more interested to see what Google thinks I'm writing about than I am in any measely amount of cash that I might get from this.

It may, in fact, end up with my commenting here on the results as I see them, or as one of you out there passes them on to me, in which case the recursive effect of ads relating to the previously posted ads starting to pop up might, at the very least, prove amusing.

Just to get the ad-wave started, I'm going to mention a currently available book and see how long it takes for a related ad to come back to me.

My daughter (Guin; age 23) and I go to stupid comic book movies together. Last year one of the must-sees was the amazingly-well-done Hellboy. One of her gifts to me this Christmas was the book about the movie Hellboy: The Art of the Movie". Which is one of the best "art of the movie" books that I've seen.

One of the images in it (and at some point I'll get around to hooking up my scanner and include the page in question) is of the cover of a "iHellboy" comic book that appeared briefly in one scene of the movie. Now this was not Hellboy creator Mike Mignola's REAL book, mind you. Rather it was a great pastiche of the 1960s Marvel Comics type, with art in the style of the great Jack Kirby, and the requisite Comics Code Authority stamp in the upper right corner, showing that it had been cleared by the comics industry's self-censorship organization (and I'll probably write a rant on Dr. frederick Wertham, the Code Authority, and censorship in general at some point). The cover was truly a perfect example of the style that it was imitating. There was only one thing wrong with it, which didn't register until I saw it in the book.

The Code was so restrictive that any book with the word "Hell" in the title would NEVER have gotten approved.

... A tiny thing, I know; but of such minutiae are geeky fan-boy compulsions made!

(And, supposedly, shooting on Hellboy II starts this month -- Wheeee I can't wait!!)

Closing thought for today:
"Of all the strange 'crimes' that human beings have legislated out of nothing, 'blasphemy' is the most amazing - with 'obscenity' and 'indecent exposure' fighting it out for second and third place." -- Robert A. Heinlein

An Ode on New England Winter

(To the tune of "Oh! What a Beautiful Morning!")

There's a bright, icy glaze on the sidewalk!
There's a bright, icy glaze on the sidewalk!
And the cars whip on past
With a cold, slushy blast
And I slipped in a puddle and fell on my ass!

Chorus:
Oh! What a mis'rable morning!
Oh! What a mis'rable day!
I've got a mis'rable feeling
Nothin' is going my wa-a-a-a-ay!
Oh! What a mis'rable day!!!!!

A passing; a beginning...

I was saddened to see in the news that Will Eisner had died on Monday.

For those unfamiliar with him, Eisner was one of the earliest, and longest-lasting, masters in the art of "Sequential Art" (a term he coined), or the art of the comic book. From the late 1930s until his death, Eisner created superheroes, inspired and mentored other cartoonists, produced instructional materials for the government and industry, and with the publication of A Contract With God (a semi-autobiographical story of tenement life in the depression), created arguably the first graphic novel (another term of his conage).

He is perhaps best known for The Spirit, the adventures (and occasional misadventures) of a two-fisted good-hearted crime fighter in a blue suit, fedora domino mask and gloves. In many ways the Spirit was the role that James Garner would later make his own. The series ran in the 1940s and '50s as a comic book supplement that appeared in many Sunday newspapers. Eisner once defined his target audience for the series as "a 55-year-old who had his wallet stolen on the subway. You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid."



For more on the life of this amazing man, see this article.


At the other end of the emotional scale, I was pleased to find that a book that I first read when it came out six years ago holds up to re-reading.

INVISIBLE WORLD
by Stuart Cohen.
New York : Regan Books, 1998.
ISBN: 0060392274



Andrew Mann is awakened one night by a phone call, telling him that Clayton Smith, his childhood best friend, the friend that had drifted away years before to become a jet-setter and an artist, has committed suicide in Hong Kong.

The next day, while working in the office of his father's Chicago plumbing company, he receives a package from his dead friend with a large sum of money, airline tickets to get to his funeral, and a cryptic note that says, "I've always been your wild card; play me".

Leaving his staid, Midwestern rut, Andy flies to Hong Kong and finds that Clayton has left him a legacy, involving a map - supposedly the brocade map that the Great Khan sent west as a gift for the Pope in the 1400's. But other people want that map, for reasons of their own.

Following his friend's last request, Andy enters a journey of discovery and learns about art, elegance, gangsters, smugglers, his friend and himself, following clues left by Clayton that lead him to Beijing, Inner Mongolia, and beyond into an Invisible World of the spirit.

To most people, I suspect, the world of textile collectors in which Andy finds himself - where centuries-old pieces of fabric are smuggled and sold for fabulous sums - would be as foreign as Inner Mongolia; I know they were to me. But Cohen clearly is of the cult who adores cloth, and he makes the reader truly feel the excitement of the quest. He makes the colllectors as real as he makes Hong Kong and Mongolia. This is Cohen's first book, and an intimidating start; it will be interesting to see whether he can do it again. In any case, I'm going to have to see if he's written anything else.

Closing thought for today:
"In reflecting on our problems, we should include ourselves." -- Shunryu Suzuki

...And So, It Begins.

Who reads this stuff?

Who WRITES this stuff?

You're about to find out the latter, at least. Perhaps someday I'll find out the former.

This will be a semi-irregular ramble through the worlds of politics, art, books, media, reality, thought, and any number of things that might try masquerading as one of the above. Imagine a round-table discussion between Albert Einstein, Sunryu Suzuki, Harry Truman, John of Patmos, Charles Whitman, and Carrot Top, moderated by Rod Serling. Lord knows where it's going to go, but we'll keep going until we all get bored of it.

Next: The Real Stuff Begins