suspicious activity

i think everyone is conspiring against me. invisible enemies are all around me.

The Big Lebowski + the big screen

I'm going to watch The Big Lebowski at the Darkside Cinema tonight.

Yay! I need something fun after having my life sucked up and absorbed by new people and having the old friends (you guys, since no one else reads this) not even really like me anymore. Oh yeah and I got evicted!
HAHA
Roberto Benigni was right; Life is Beautiful!

terminally tired

terminally fired and permanently tired.

goddammit, it's like i'm tired all the time.

as far as the current hot button issue, i have nothing to say, except that if i suspect you're not telling me something, then i'm forced to try to read into what you do say and jump to conclusions.

look forward to me being suspicious, secretly overanalytical, and jumping to lots of incorrect conclusions from now on.

Tee Hee

Chuck got a handjob.

guitars...geeks...i like it

i think i've heard of this site, guitargeek.com before, but it's freaking awesome. they have diagrams of people's guitar rig layouts. no brian gibson though :(

here's agata of melt-banana's setup:


although, according to wikipedia, that setup has changed since that interview, but whatever.
if i ever come into some money, i'm gonna get some pedals and be cool.

in other news, i'm getting better at making noise rock in fruityloops. it makes it easy to write songs, then maybe lucas and i can play live over the drumtrack.

Nineteen Ninety Nerds might just get somewhere. if only we didn't have work getting in the damn way. i thought it would be easier to schedule practices with just two people. maybe we'll just have to start sending shit back and forth over the internet. even though we live in the same town, it's hard for us to live in the same time.

the language politics of 'geek'

the word "geek" is appearing a lot in the news. they've even noticed it over at slashdot. i noticed it too, like when the news story i was watching said "blog geeks," and then on that show Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria, he said something about geeks.

None of this stuff was particularly mean spirited.

I just feel like, "hey, don't call us that. That's our word."

does that mean the word "geek" needs to mutate?

any suggestions? "gik" ? "geeka"? "gee"? "gook"? whoa now. that bit of ironic racism is already taken i think. so....i give up.

killoggs?

i just found this site called killoggs.com, and it has some pretty interesting random shit, like a link to art by Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt.

i found the site by searching for "ironic racism" in google, but i never found the reference to it.

weird notebook

i found this weird notebook in my apartment. it's small and has those cool elastic straps that keep it closed. anyway, never seen it before. it's got some girls' handwriting in it, on what seems like a totally random page. it looks like it was passed back and forth in class...some discussion about who (out of a list of four suspects, listed on another random page) stole something out of one of the girl's bathrooms.

wtf?

lucas is the most synchronous motherfucker i know

1) he tells someone "snape kills dumbledore," to which they reply "noooo! you bitch!" having never see the ytmnd referencing that.

2) he says "i wish i could put this dollar in the t.v. and get bacon," then, the next commercial starts off with a close-up shot of a dollar being put into a vending machine.

ok...so, you're thinking, yeah, so what? it wouldn't really be impressive if this shit didn't happen all the time with this guy.

the best one, i think, is the melba toast incident. back in college, we went to the cafeteria. lucas looks at the salad bar, sees melba toast, and tries it.

lucas: wow...this is really good.
me: yeah, it's melba toast
lucas: i'm gonna put this is my pockets for later

(ok, that's not the exact dialogue, but you get it)

later that night, we're watching the movie Apt Pupil which isn't all that notable, except that for no fucking reason at all, there's a scene where Ian McKellen looks into the camera and says, "let's have some melba toast."

WTF?

i'm sure he can relate more of these synchronous incidents.

william s. burroughs haiku

william s. burroughs
has tea with dr. benway
a shot is fired.

A Man Can Dream

on my way home from work

i was cold and by the library, so i went in and decided to use my expensive privilege of checking out books. these two relatively new books are really cool so far. if you know me, you probably know that i'm a big fan of deleuze. i recommend these books to anyone interested in complexity theory

...especially deleuze and geophilosophy. it really helps put science in an upfront conversation with philosophy. it also connects signs with materialism (memetics?). and, it deals with questions of structure, agency, and determinism.

Deleuze and Geophilosophy : A Guide and Glossary by Mark Bonta, John Protevi

this book by poststructuralist anarchist theorist Todd May deals with the question "how might one live?" so far, it's just a really good take on what philosophy has had to offer on similar issues like breaking down our preconceived notions and realizing that our subjectivities are products of historical processes (also compatible with memetics).

Gilles Deleuze : An Introduction by Todd May

in other news, i wound up on the cutting room floor for a story on blogs that i was interviewed for by KVAL in eugene, OR. i guess i'm just too weird (looking and thinking), even for eugene.

looking for a safe stance on abortion?

me neither.

Douchebag Tony Blankley just said, on The McLaughlin Group (for no apparent contextual reason) that the only people who should have an opinion on abortion are fetuses. I agree.

Hey fetuses...mind if we abort you? What's that? Speak up. I can't hear you.

I guess they don't mind.

i realize you might be saying "hey, if you apply that logic to people who can't communicate, then it would be okay to kill them."

you might be a humorless douchebag.

i'm still pro-abortion. not every piece of genetic material has a "right" to live. that's absurd. a zygote is a single celled organism, which is just as human as any other single celled organism. whether or not the DNA is human or spider is irrelevant, because it's still one cell. so...when's the next possible definitive point we can define humanity? birth. enough said.

forty years later

November 18, 2005:

In Paris, which has an estimated 200,000 homeless, a series of fires in sub-standard buildings killed 48 immigrants earlier this year. “Actions like these are the only way we can be heard,” said a young woman from the poor suburbs on TV.

For many in the middle class these events mark their first awareness of the degree of poverty in their country. Another teen said, “This is a new 1968, not in the universities, but in the projects.” And another: “We want jobs and we want respect.”

Instead, the government has resorted to a heavy hand. It imposed “fast-track trials,” sentencing in a few days almost 150 youth and adults to detention facilities in trials that lasted minutes.

And on Nov. 8 it invoked a 1955 law used during the Algerian War to put in place a 12-day state of emergency. Le Monde blasted the move as “[sending] to the youth of the suburbs a message of astonishing brutality: that after 50 years France intends to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents.”

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2005/11/60130.html

December 1965:

Generalized self-management, "extended to all production and all aspects of social life," would mean the end of the unemployment that affects two million Algerians, but it would also mean the end of the old society in all its aspects, the abolition of all its spiritual and material enslavements and the abolition of its masters. The present fledgling effort toward self-management can be controlled from above only because it consents to exclude below it that majority of the workers who don't participate in it or who are unemployed; and because even within its own enterprises it tolerates the formation of dominating strata of "directors" or management professionals who have worked their way up from the base or been appointed by the state. These managers are the state virus within that which tends to negate the state; they are a compromise. But the time for compromise is past, both for the state power and for the real power of the Algerian workers.

from: "Class Struggles in Algeria" by Mustapha Khayati

Published clandestinely in Algeria as a pamphlet, December 1965; trans. by Ken Knabb

athens

A police cordon separates demonstrators from the Embassy of the United States in central Athens Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005. Protesters gathered in central Athens Thursday to commemorate a 1973 pro-democracy uprising, as 7,000 police braced for possible violence inspired by nightly riots in France. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)