massdestruction

aarpMAC

My Dad asked me to go with him to the Apple store today so I could help him buy a new iMac. When we went to the counter to pay there were three men over 60 buying new iMacs. Who'd have thought that was the demographic!?!

This is my Dad's first Mac. My brother hates Macs, he's now outnumbered.

I heard that

There seems to be a trend to the thinking lately of Republicans, Libertarians, Objectivist... and generally the mouthpieces for those right of center complain about liberals letting too much "feeling" enter into their politics. Take this note about the Ayn Rand Center as an outside example.

You know what, to feel is human... bitch.

The Tsunami

I am sure we all have similar feelings when we read things like "125,000 deaths and counting" and certainly the money I gave to the Red Cross seems less and less each time I read the news. I don't want to get too political about such a tragedy but I think this article in the Guardian about how the Western media focuses on the deaths of Westerners is interesting. I was thinking about this the other day when I read about some Italian soccer players having been on vacation in the area and how they are all safe and accounted for. It certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't care and worry about Westerners, but it is food for thought.

A Dream

Last night I had a dream. I'm sure I have a dream every night but I tend to be one of those people who simply doesn't recall most dreams. However, there is one image from last night's dream that keeps coming back to me this morning:

I was leaning over to pick up a nickel I had dropped on the floor. When I stood back up I realized that there was a woman behind me (I don't know who she was) staring at the plumber's cleavage that had shown during my action.

What does that mean?

NYT

I always feel a bit dorkish pointing out articles that are the lead articles on popular sites. I mean you are all smart enough to find and read them yourselves, right? So at the risk of being a dork... ok, at the risk of being more of a dork I will point out a Salon article.

Upon the build-up to the Iraq war I was reading voraciously. One person who caught my attention was Judith Miller in the New York Times. She really seemed to have the inside track on the WMD in Iraq. She was one of the main reasons I couldn't totally disagree with going in there - hell, she scared the shit out of me with those reports! So now that we all know the truth I find myself having trouble trusting anyone I read, including those whom I enjoy reading from reputible organizations. Today Andrew O'Hehir has a pretty good article in Salon about this and the Jayson Blair deal as portrayed in two new books. I'd like to agree with him about wondering why in the world Miller still has a job at the NYT - but I'd like to agree even more with this line from Seth Mnookin's new book "Hard News":

[The New York Times'] employees ... need to be willing to sublimate their own egos to serve a larger, quasi-public good.

Yep.

OK Xmas

I had an OK Christmas. Cate made a good holiday out of it just a few days of places being closed. She accomplished this first by just being Cate, and secondly by giving me a kick-ass end-table with a built-in radio that was made in 1946. The radio works fine but needs a little bit of restoration. What a kick-ass gift! It wasn't on any gift wish list which made it all the better really. If I had a list I'm sure it would have had something like an iPod mini for working out and playing around with but damn, a 1946 radio!

The downside was that Cate was on call for xmas so I went with her and hung out - its very boring in the town in which she works.

My parents ended up giving Cate 2 gifts and me nothing. Isn't that odd? I think they think the gifts are for both of us and all but these are gifts that are Cate's, no question. They love her lots.

Also during the holiday I got a letter from UNC telling me my registration was dropped. OK, so I decided to go back to school. I wanted to go to a couple of classes to see if I want to pursue it and, if so, to get back in the swing of things. The letter said I was dropped because I haven't registered for any classes. OK, if they would open the registration back up I would! The registration is on the web and I have never seen it open to accept new registrations. When I asked my advisor she simply said that I had to wait for it to open. Well, yeah! Now I have been dropped and I imagine its going to take all of the paperwork I did before to get back in... before classes start! This really blows as I have no work for January, and now no school. Merry Christmas from UNC Dave!

On top of all that, my dog is limping worse than a few days ago. He has to go to physical therapy in Raleigh soon.

I hope your holiday was better than mine. In other news, the more I read about it, the more I want to be [shout out to b] a Buddhist.

Daring

Not-so-Evil Knievel

Minister of fraud

Hey, lets all take the Moral Highground!. That story has the added bonus of being in my super-lame hometown of Wilson, N.C., the home of conservative values, and me.

Lambert, LA Times, and a Mercury Montego

I've not posted as much lately as I have been trying to ween off the Internet teet a little bit lately. Reading books seems better than webpages. This evening though, I was catching up on some blogs I read and noted Tim Lambert's post about the LA Times sucking. While I don't read enough of the LA Times to comment one way or another, I will point Tim to this hilarious car review published in the LA Times recently. OK, its not news... in fact it really has no redeeming qualities at all beyond entertainment... but damn it made me laugh!

Freakin' Cold

Its cold. Freakin' cold. I got up to pee last night around 4am and my cool little digital thermometer showed 11°F. Our "high" today was 22°F and currently its 20°F. Cold. I kind of like it though I am glad we don't have months and months of it.

Bakelite

Cate and I are now Vonage customers. It will take a few days before our number is transferred over so until then I simply plugged an old phone into the vonage hub to see if it was working. The only extra phone I had is a 1940s bakelite phone our friend Kio gave to us a long time ago (carefully rewired with a new RJ-11 plug using only the finest electrician's tape).

There is something very satisfying hearing a dial-tone on a 1940s phone via VoIP. Unfortunately the rotary dial action doesn't work. Maybe Vonage has someone named Sarah who can place the calls for me.

Fair well BellSouth and Sprint, we have instantly halved our phone bill.

The Good Rev. Hintz

This is such perfect timing... not for the kid of course, but still. I love it when "values" screamers land on the wrong side of the culture war.

iCozy

A few weeks ago there was an announcement about a new craze which I read on Gizmodo - the iPod sock. When I saw it I immediately thought that it was super lame and that my lovely, and multi-talented wife would be able to do 100 times better than that with her amazing knitting skills.

While our friend Jon was over this evening for some dinner and Spanish soccer Cate made him the iCozy - a sweater for his iPod. I would have to say that it is way better than the iPod sock. And in keeping with the trend started by the iPod sock... $100 each if you want one.

My face hurts from shrinking

So last night was King's Great Cover Up. My friends John, Joe, Mike and I covered the Small Faces. For those who may not know their music, they are one of my all time favs. They were hugely influential and extremely popular in Britain but never really hit it here. I was a bit worried about us covering a not-as-well-known band but we got lots of comments about playing people's favorite songs.

It seemed to have gone well despite Kings having the worst sound I have ever had to play with. My guitar-rig had some problems which really threw me off for the whole show but no one seemed to notice (or if they did they were polite enough not to say).

In all, a damn fun evening and an honor to play with some extremely talented folks.

On writing

Recently, I have made a serious effort to get back into writing. In college I would write lyrics, poetry, stories, and the regularly scheduled essay for class. When I moved into the 'real world' most of my work revolved around writing. Unfortunately the writing I did/do was/is so mind-numbingly boring that it killed that thing inside that made me *want* to write.

With my current schedule I have jumped back into writing. I really have no particular projects in mind but I am making sure to write at least 1000 words every weekday. So far, so good.

One of my main inspirations for writing is Sam Shepard's Motel Chronicles. If you've read this blog for any amount of time you will probably know that it is far and away the best piece of creative writing I know of. Anytime I travel I wish I had it with me if I have left it behind. If I bring it I read it all the way through, perhaps twice. I simply find it best for travelling.

Luckily Shepard's book inspires short writings that can be almost poetry in their simplicity.

Recently, however, I started reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. This is the first huge book in a ~2700 page trilogy. This work does not inspire my writing as of yet. First, tts not the type of thing I would want to do. Second, I simply don't understand how one writes such an enormous work. I would never be able to keep it organized. Its one thing to organize something like a history where there are thousands of references that help organize. It is something else to organize one's own creative story that stretches out as much as this one does. I just don't know.