Another quick Freaky Trigger recommendation for now

Namely Kat Stevens’ very enjoyable “Us Against The World: My Journey Into Mum-Pop,” which while UK-centric at points (not a bad thing at all, but some of the reference points may be unfamiliar as a result) is a solid take on an aspect of pop and consumption thereof that I’ve idly considered a bit over the years. Kat brings things into both sharper focus and on a more anecdotal level, referring to her own mum’s taste over the years, and the whole thing’s a treat. To quote a key part:

‘Mum-pop’ itself has connotations of unchallenging music with smooth, melodic vocals. There’s no need to impress your toddler with how cool your music taste is, so anything goes as long as it’s music that won’t offend or irritate (and that you can sing along to in the car). It’s good for dancing to at weddings but not too exhausting or repetitive. The songs are about love and loss, but not about sex or anger. This is music you’d let your kids listen to. One of the recently be-sprogged FT regulars confirmed this when I asked her opinion. “You want to protect them from bad influences! No child of mine is growing up listening to emo!”

Hey, I was raised on Sesame Street records and the like. For which I am always grateful.

As written by my sis in SF sidewalk cement

Now she’s immortalized myself, her boyfriend and friend Remy. FOREVER. Maybe.

A quick metal observation for a Sunday morning

So last night my sis, her boyfriend Tyler, their friend Dina and I all went out to Annie’s Social Club to see some bands; the irrepressible Chaki was there along with friends and bandmates of his so that made it even better.

Tyler had specifically wanted to see the band Indian, who ended up being first on the bill when a German band scheduled to open didn’t make it. And they were…good, a bit trancey without being drone (and I mean trance as in an actual trance rather than Paul Oakenfold). There was some puzzling over the drumming after it was over, with people split on its worth.

Then Middian came up (this is the original one from Oregon, I should note — more details here), who I know I’ve heard before, and who clearly have some sort of straight up hardcore-and-hooks background that they play around with in all the rampaging, so it was a nice contrast. Still, I have to say one thing — and this is just always going to be a case with any scene most of the time, I figure — the fact that Middian looked like Indian had gone offstage and shaved off their beards and removed their glasses and otherwise hadn’t changed at all was kinda funny. Even the drummer looked like the same guy (actually…was it? that would be extremely efficient touring if so).

Still, one stereotype overturned — my sis figured it would be mostly guys at the show, but modern metal is nothing if not more inclusive than you expect. So the fact that everyone seemed to be wearing a black hoodie is one thing but I’d place the gender balance at 75/25. Let there be rawk.

A good short evening out, been too long since I’d been to a show. A pity to miss Asunder but we were all getting tired, and I’m off home here in a couple of hours anyway, so talk to you all when I’m back in OC…

A report on the MEGABUS!

If you like. People have been asking me about this ever since I planned my SF trip around testing out this company, so I figured I would post a bit about it.

I first heard about Megabus some months back when I stumbled across this story at the LA Times talking about their service between LA and San Francisco for a low price. A very low price — $1. As the story mentions and the official site also indicates, this isn’t the price for every ticket, merely the initial starting ones, but overall the point is — we’re talking cheap.

In reading the story and noting the possibilities, I realized that I should give it a whirl one of these days, simply because I do love SF, and have someone to stay with thanks to my sis and her boyfriend and their place together is even more of a bonus. I’d initially thought over a late February trip but since late March provided a three day weekend and a chance to get away from OC for a bit in between academic quarters I sprung for a ticket in early February at $10, a mighty fine thing. I planned on only taking the trip up that way while flying back, since that way in case the whole thing turned out to be a washout that way I didn’t have to worry about problems on the return journey.

Having booked, I started talking to a lot of others about this all and needless to say there was a lot of interest. The advantage of Megabus’s service as described is not only a matter of price, but convenience and simplicity. Its two routes to SF involve only one brief rest stop around Coalinga, then otherwise you’re being put in at San Jose (which could be handy for anyone wanting to get to Santa Cruz from there, say), then Millbrae and finally SF’s main station at 4th Street, or the route I did, which went to Oakland and then the same SF station. The advantage of both routes, meanwhile, is that both Millbrae and West Oakland are major BART terminals, so if one wanted to switch from the bus to that, it’s even a handier situation than simply going into 4th Street.

However, the proof had to be in the pudding. Greyhound, the major US bus service, is somewhat notorious for its downmarket image on a variety of fronts, while friends of mine who have used it in the past always talked about problems with the drivers, creepy passengers and a generally bleh feeling. Clearly the folks behind Megabus know that and aren’t interested in gaining something similar — the company is an outgrowth of the original one in Europe, though, and there bus and coach services are a little more entrenched and of a higher reputation, at least in comparative terms. Meanwhile, the pricing reminded me of many European airlines that provide cheap flights like Ryanair and EasyJet, so I wasn’t surprised by the low cost.

In any event, I was booked for the trip and on Thursday night found myself waiting with fellow passengers for the late night trip. It should be said that Megabus runs three trips per day between LA and SF (and the same number back), so it’s not like one has to try a night trip or else. However, there’s an advantage in that if you can get some sleep on the way via the late night trip, then you can have the day to yourself once you’re in, and it just turned out to be more convenient for me that way anyway. As the service is all done online there’s no extra assistants or anyone waiting for you at the top — we all formed a general line, the bus pulled up and the driver, a garrulous but friendly fellow named Chada who is the same driver profiled in the Times piece, got everyone shipshape and loaded in as quickly as possible.

The bus itself was clearly still quite new — looked sleek both outside and in, and there’s plenty of space for both hand luggage inside and regular luggage down in storage bays below the seats. The seating was slightly cramped for someone of my height but not impossible; as I was fortunate enough to get two seats to myself (it’s first come first serve but nobody took the seat next to mine, so hey), this wasn’t so bad at all. A toilet in the back of the bus was there for anyone who needed it but I ended up not having to so nothing to report there.

Now I wish I could say that the trip from there was a dream — but there were a couple of initial problems that I have to report (and I’ll be sending a note to the company about this blog entry for their reference). First, shortly after we pulled out to head north, Chada noticed that the coolant had almost totally leaked out, which he found very surprising since the engineer had signed off on it before taking the bus out. Therefore, he pulled the bus off on Lankershim in the Valley after calling it in, as they’d have to send out a new bus as well as an engineer from their Long Beach depot. The engineer arrived in good time and started to work on it, but the replacement bus was delayed because the fellow driving it up for whatever reason didn’t know how to get to where the broken bus was at — completely on the wrong side of Dodger Stadium for a start. Chada noted a touch tartly on his call back to the depot that the GPS indicator should have been clear in terms of where they were at, so who knows? After some delay, the new bus arrived, everyone transferred over and we were on the road again after a delay of two hours.

What to take from all this as a traveller? Well, I’d definitely have to say that Chada did the right steps from what I could tell at each stage — safety was the prime consideration, and had the bus shut down in the middle of nowhere or on the Grapevine or the like, who knows where things could have gone? So while he was obviously a bit frustrated with the delays — he clearly prides himself on running a punctual service and made mention about how he always aims to be in SF before the morning rush hour ties up traffic on the bridges — he was following correct procedure, and I certainly thank him for that as well as his can-do attitude and professional attitude for the whole trip. But the combination of learning that a mechanic had apparently made a mistake of some sort in checking on the bus equipment (apparently this same bus had had an initial problem on a Vegas run just previous to this one — and without sounding flippant, I did have to wonder what the equivalent for a plane’s engineer making this mistake would be; at least all we had to do was pull off on a highway exit) and the error on the part of the driver bringing up the replacement bus made me think that Megabus might want to strongly consider reviewing these areas for the future. These may well have been both isolated situations; nonetheless they’re the ones I experienced, so there you go.

That said, and now dealing with the fact that we were quite behind, we hit the road and from there, everything went pretty much like I’d expected and hoped it would. I was near the front of the bus, and besides getting a nice clear view of the road ahead I also got to hear the conversations between Chada and a couple of passengers who clearly used this service a lot; turns out that at least one and maybe both used it not so much for pleasure but for jobs, a good cheap way to get between home and work, if an exhausting one still. As it was a night run, though, most of the conversation died down after a bit as we quietly chugged along the familiar reach of the Grapevine and then the flatness of the Central Valley, lights far off in the distance indicating other roads, towns, farms. As is often the case with night travel like this, I wasn’t able to fully nod off to sleep, but I catnapped well enough.

The stopover in Coalinga was brief but welcome, a chance to stretch legs and munch on a snack (I’d made sure to bring a little something with me — some water, an almond mix, an apple) before heading out again. Chada was able to make up some of the time; however, as we turned off from the 5 to head towards the Bay Area, traffic was already starting to pick up noticeably as the morning rush hour began to kick into gear. By the time we were over in Oakland itself I realized that rather than going all the way to 4th Street Station it would be handier for me to get off at the Oakland stop and take BART into the Embarcadero, where I could switch to the N-Judah MUNI line, which is all needed in order to get within a couple of blocks of my sis’s place. This line also runs from 4th Street Station, so by doing this — and since the Oakland stop is the West Oakland station, which is just opposite the Embarcadero station on the other side of the Bay, in essence — I ended up being able to get exactly to where I needed to go via a quick BART switch as opposed to waiting for the bus to try and force its way across the Bay Bridge in the rush hour crunch. It meant spending a couple of extra bucks for the BART trip, of course, but that’s nothing!

And so I got into the City, stopped off briefly at Arizmendi Bakery for some necessary refreshments (and hurrah for it being on a street the N-Judah line runs on) and from there have had a great ol’ time; as mentioned in the previous post yesterday was a lot of good fun out eating and drinking with folks (my friend Remy’s just finishing up a monthlong visit in town and so I got to introduce him to my sister and her crew; everyone got along great!), today’s been some relaxing and a bit of shopping indulgence (thanks to a birthday gift certificate from my sis and some store credit I had a hell of a blast today at Amoeba) and tonight will be more chat and a show (specifically the one listed here) and I fly back tomorrow — and I admit I will enjoy the quickness of that! (I’m going to be testing out the LAX Flyaway service upon arrival, since that provides a quick turn around between the airport and Union Station.)

So that all said, but final thoughts on Megabus? Well pretty much you’ve seen my take — yes, I would recommend it, but with caveats. Keep in mind that I wasn’t really following a set schedule, was only traveling with myself, was able to make a last minute change of plan on a dime — flexibility was key. If I had been with folks, if things were more incumbent on being in the city at a specific time, then maybe the inconvenience of the delays could have been worse. Meantime, I can’t say that I would totally be trusting in a bus now until we’re well on the road, and even then I’d have to wonder if another mechanic maybe made another mistake that isn’t immediately apparent. It’s unfortunate to have to say it but I can’t NOT say it! If the company is worth its salt, it’s already investigated this situation to try and figure out what’s wrong; if it hasn’t, hopefully my take on it (and possibly that of others on the trip) will help.

But yeah, I think I will do it again sometime. I think though my biggest change will be to make it a day or evening trip rather than a night one — not positive in the end, really, because eating up the time during the late night is handy, and it just took a little nap in the morning for me to get myself back in shape, whereas eating up the time during the day can feel a bit wasteful. I might do more combined trips, where I go up via the bus and fly down in return. But all in all, it was a good experience, I am glad I did it, and I think for a lot of folks who, like me, want to make the trip but don’t always have the easy funds to do so will jump at the chance to give it a whirl.

So in all, good on Megabus — but yeah, double check those coolant systems, would you?

Some quick SF thoughts

Since yes I’m up here again visiting family:

* Pauline’s Pizza in the Mission is well worth it.

* The Liberties bar in the Mission is equally well worth it.

* Zeitgeist is as great as ever.

Etc. etc. Meantime, I’ll have a separate post later today about Megabus, which is how I got up here for cheap. In brief: worth it, with a slight caveat.

Meanwhile over in the UK — “A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou”

I’ve mentioned my love and admiration for the fine crew at Freaky Trigger for a while now, and Mark Sinker of that parish referred me to their newest radio project on Resonance FM, “A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou”:

A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou will delve deep into the science fiction short stories of SF’s Golden and Silver Ages. The pulp and avant-garde writing of c.1935-65 has fallen out of public memory; hosts ELISHA SESSIONS and MARK SINKER and their astounding guests* will return to this forgotten motherlode, once bedrock of the entire field. Eli will read evocative extracts, then quiz Mark and guest on authors, styles, subtexts sexual and political, technique, value, impact and legacy, plus changing fashions and meanings in backdrop, tech and alien allure — and anything else that pops into their pulsating crystalline brain-lobes.

As you can guess, this is perfect grist for the mill for at least one of my regular readers (hi dere QuartzCity!) and doubtless many others as well. Elisha and Mark are a great team and great folks, and this will likely be the most entertainingly informed coverage on this subject for a long time to come. Check it out!

[UPDATE — mostly unrelated but this enjoyable interview today with John Darnielle via io9 touches on sf and other genres as it relates to his work, both musically and in his writing]

A question for uncritical war supporters

Just, in general. Merely a quick observation.

Now, let’s say, oh, I don’t know, that as part of supplying arms to folks theoretically aligned with us over in Afghanistan we let this sort of thing happen:

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.

This week, after repeated inquiries about AEY’s performance by The Times, the Army suspended the company from any future federal contracting, citing shipments of Chinese ammunition and claiming that Mr. Diveroli misled the Army by saying the munitions were Hungarian.

And you can read all sorts of details from there.

Now, there’s plenty to be said about how perfection is impossible and all that. That something as involved and as large as the military might involve waste and corruption is not exactly a new scenario. So it’s not a question of this having occurred, that’s no surprise.

However, this was reported via an outlet of that dreaded mass media, the one that a lot of people have taken more than a few pot shots at over the moons, and sometimes quite justifiably — thus my link in the previous post to this one to the tale of a guy who, rather like our non-hero in this piece, came from Florida, dreamed big and apparently thought the law was for others. In James Sabiatino’s case, a lot of hip-hop names were pissed off and the LA Times look like goofs.

In this case, though, the goofs appear to be the Army and the government and…are people dead because of this? Is trust now eroded? A hoped for mission not coming off quite as planned? (Of course, I could apply that to the last couple of days in Iraq too, but that’s for another time.)

Ask yourself a bit — isn’t this a matter of national security and international peace, as the current administration has so often claimed? Therefore, theoretically, this kind of stuff should be looked into with an eagle eye at all times — it couldn’t take the prompting of the outside press to expose an error, or even a potential disaster, like this, could it?

No?

To those who seem to think that the NY Times, or any other mass media outlet, consists solely of supposed traitors rather than, say, humans, flawed like the rest of us, who sometimes make mistakes and other time hit bullseyes: Going to blame the messenger again this time? Going to ask yourself what else is being missed? Going to ask for some actual accountability down the line on this and other matters no matter who is in the White House or who oversees the military, in the executive branch, in the legislative?

Or would it always be the case that because the ‘right’ people are in charge, everything’s being handled just fine, while the ‘wrong’ people would clearly let everything go to hell?

Just curious. Thinking out loud. A minor point, an obvious point, but one to note.

Meantime, you can always check out this dude’s Myspace page, for now at least:

MY FAVORITE MOVIES ARE: HEAT,,BLOW,SCARFACE, FACE OFF, THE ROCK,GOFATHER, SCHINDLERS LIST,AMERICAN BEUTY ETC…..

Indeed. The world ain’t yours, pal.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

A quick thought today on science — specifically solar power

First, check out this story in the LA Times today, which I think we can trust because it doesn’t have anything to do with obsessive fanboys in jail:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Southern California Edison plan to announce today the country’s largest rooftop solar installation project ever proposed by a utility company. And on Wednesday, FPL Energy, the largest operator of solar power in the U.S., said it planned to build and operate a 250-megawatt solar plant in the Mojave Desert.

The projects would help California meet its goal of obtaining 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. In 2006, about 13% of the retail electricity delivered by Edison and the state’s other two big investor-owned utilities came from renewable sources such as sun and wind, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.

Energy experts were struck by the size of the two projects, which would bolster the state’s current total of about 965 megawatts of solar power flowing to the electricity grid.

“Five hundred megawatts — that’s substantial,” said spokesman George Douglas of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Projects of that size begin to show that solar energy can produce electricity on a utility scale, on the kind of scale that we’re going to need.”

The Edison rooftop project will place photovoltaic cells on 65 million square feet of commercial building roofs in Southern California. The cells will generate as much as 250 megawatts of electricity — enough to power about 162,500 average homes, based on the utility’s estimate that one megawatt would serve about 650 average homes.

This excites me for a lot of reasons, so to backtrack a bit — in the late seventies, perhaps the last (and only?) time there was a sense of general societal alignment all around on the matter of energy efficiency and renewable resources, solar power was present but for a lot of reasons didn’t get the traction it should have done. Saying Reagan’s administration killed off a lot of the enthusiasm overstates but not by much — in contrast, I remember writing for and getting a kid-friendly ‘Welcome to the White House’ brochure in 1979 or so, which contained a photo of Carter showing off a solar panel that had apparently been installed in one area of the building itself.

Meantime, there were a few Disney tie-in comics around the time — the kind of gently cheap and cheery things that the company did pre-Eisner — where Mickey and Goofy encountered Enny, a sunlike creature whose name was short for ‘energy,’ of course, and he taught them about doing things like not washing one sock at a time. (Goofy was apparently prone to doing just that, the poor sap.) Then there was Sunshine Porcupine and…well, I could go on.

For me, this is all part and parcel of the general sense of dreamy sf/utopian wonder that to me was just part of how people thought at the time, at least from my eight year old or so perspective. I mean, who wouldn’t want O’Neill-style space stations and mass drivers on the moon? With time I can look back both with fondness on it all and how my thoughts (and the many dreams put forward) were only so much conditional evanescence, as much driven by the impulse of getting out of dreary reality into a future that was still heavily Star Trek-centric in the mass mind as it was based in serious considerations.

However, sometimes that intertwining is necessary — I’ve been reading an excellent book, After Sputnik, which is the tie-in volume to a Smithsonian exhibit covering fifty years of the space race since the launch of said satellite, and a bit of trivia was discovering that the original serious rocket pioneer, Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, credited his initial explorations into such matters due to a mass media smash hit of its day, Jules Verne‘s From the Earth to the Moon. The question of art inspiring science inspiring art etc. is its own one but it was intriguing to realize how the cycle had been in placed from the start — as was noted with Arthur C. Clarke’s recent passing, he credited the pulp fiction of his own era for driving his own impulses forward, and similar stories can be told on a variety of fronts.

Solar power is by default a much more grounded affair — gathering the energy from the sun we orbit around and converting it into use here — but like many things sf dream has become simple and basic reality (as I think I remember reading in a piece some years back, we are all nerds now — my getting the iPhone was just me waiting for the best level of nerdery to come along, really), and seeing that this project is about to launch makes me pretty thrilled. It’s not a magic bullet, but it is a concentrated step forward that we’ll see repeated more and more — one of my friends was seriously considering a solar panel installation at his house a few weeks back, and there’ll be other stories to come.

And right now it’s a beautiful day out. Perfectly appropriate timing!

Lee Abrams is a curious person

I take no credit at all for finding out about this in a timely fashion — if anything the meme’s a couple of weeks old now — but now that I have learned, I must share. Here’s the deal.

Lee Abrams is…a character. I don’t mean this in an entirely positive sense, shall we say. I’d been vaguely aware of the name due to his role at XM for many years but I learned earlier tonight that more than any other person he basically transmogrified rock radio as an admittedly imperfect ideal (freeform, deep album cuts, not much in the way of genre definitions) to the kind of tightly formatted and deadening sludge that basically made a lot of my generation hate anything tagged with the term ‘classic rock’ (well, hate is a strong word — but basically, a lingering distrust of a deadened and dull mindset endlessly repeated). Dave Marsh had some things to say about him back in 1980, and whatever the many differences Marsh and I have in musical taste, he sure seems spot on here.

So anyway, he’s been recruited by the Chicago-based Tribune Company, one of the bigger media conglomerates out there (newspapers, TV stations, etc.), as part of the eternal effort to turn sagging fortunes around — ain’t that the way. Well and good, I suppose. However, the initial humor had to come from the fact that he was named their ‘chief innovation officer’ — one of those phrases where you know that the equivalent of ‘minister without portfolio’ was thought about first. Definitely read that press release, it’s classic boilerplate — ‘remarkable opportunity for Tribune,’ ‘pump new life into our content,’ etc. Switch around some names and specifics and this has been released by everybody over the years about every new high level recruit, so no matter.

But then Abrams sent around his note of introduction to everyone, describing himself as the ‘innovation chief.’

If you can make it through a read of all that without breaking down in hopeless laughter even once, I salute you — you’re either more cynical than I’ll ever be or you have remarkable self control. If you’ll allow me to quote one part in particular:

Average sucks. Best to be brilliantly good, or SO bad, it’s engaging. It’s
that evil zone of average that American Media is stuck in. WE MUST not accept average. Fight it! It’s gotten to be accepted that average is fine. No it’s not…it sucks!

Theater of the Mind. We have to play there. We gotta deliver the magic that gets in people’s heads. As a kid I’d have dreams about comic characters that I’d read in the Tribune. We need to have such an impact on the imagination that people dream about us. Sounds spacy and obscure? It is.

This was the point where I thought to myself, “You know, Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock mode would be perfect at reading these lines.”

I try to make allowances for folks as I can — I don’t always succeed, I should add. But in this case, what’s to allow? In reading through it all — besides the fact that it’s painfully long and half consists of quotes in an endless cascade — I feel a combination of goony-eyed sugar rush, endless hot air, buzzwords grabbed from thin air and slapped around where needed and the kind of buddy-buddy chatting that my friend Dan B. parodied years upon years back when he would widen his eyes and say, with the fakest smile ever, “Hey! *claps hands together* Did you catch my MEMO?”

So, this being the modern world, the memo got around and got out to everyone, thus my link above (and the ones to follow). Unsurprisingly, Gawker was all over it in their usual fashion, and that would have been the tip of the iceberg. Getting word of this and other reactions, Mr. Abrams apparently felt he needed to clear things up a bit.

Well, the reaction to my introduction letter was interesting. Ranging from “Appalling” to ‘exciting’ to …’huh’? That’s understandable. Without diving in, talking and exchanging, it all probably seems pretty obscure…but it’s really all about one thing: Opportunity.

Of course, the letter ended up on the Internet, feeding wild misinterpretations.

Of course. We, the collective people of the world, apologize for misinterpreting lines like “Web as an Information Disneyland” as anything but a mindless bunch of drivel.

Elsewhere in this second memo, this gem:

Then there’s certainly some “What does this guy know about our business”?! Well, I’m IN your business now. You should have heard the record industry laughing at the idea of some computer guy trying his hand in music. While the Apple guys may have had one of the most important ideas of the century, the point is that they had out of the circle thinking driving it. I don’t fault the record industry guys, it’s just that they were SO busy running their business that they initially missed the iPod. Maybe I can help one of us have an iPod idea or three.

At least he said ‘maybe’ rather than ‘definitely.’ Truth in advertising, at least — if generously stretched.

Well, feeling his oats, yesterday Abrams sent out his third e-mail to all and sundry — and I’ve no doubt at this point all Tribune employees on the receiving end of these were looking forward to these mails with a kind of mixture of catharsis and frivolity. This time around, it was time to talk think pieces:

I start April 1st but I’ve been pretty engaged from afar. Thought I’d share some observations on TV, web and print. Small stuff, “think pieces” more than anything…not end alls, but when we re-think and maximize hundreds of little pieces within the framework of bigger pieces and it could be part of the blueprint for something very powerful:

–NERVE TOUCHING. This is where you get people to stand up on their
chair because you touch a nerve. One underused way is simply to play to passions. For example:

CATHOLICS

(As it was, he goes on to explain what he means in more detail — not very well — but I am convinced that had he ended there, then scribbled out a resignation notice on a wad of toilet paper and lobbed it into the Tribune office building, he would go down as one of the truly great art terrorists of our time. Alas for what might have been.)

All of this prompted me to see if, like yours truly, he had a Wikipedia page. He does — and if there’s ever any doubt that Wikipedia pages can be prone to bias, that doubt should be put to bed by this, because if this isn’t some cut and paste job from a PR release about himself — and doubtless written BY himself — I’d be rather surprised.

Where this goes, who knows. But let it continue. Because more batshit insanity is just what the world needs right now…right?

Mid-week meanderings and mumblings

As it were. As mentioned, this is a bit of a big work crunch time for me so my usual disquisitions are going to be at a premium for a bit (however, stay tuned for the end of the week, in that I’ll be doing some further experimenting with the blog on a couple of fronts). So for the moment, here’s some quick things noticed here and there:

• This story about a library employee in the Central Valley is a striking one, and now that I’m more aware of the case I’ll be following it as I can. More than anything else, I hope it illustrates to folks who might think of librarians and library assistants as simply people who get the books and tell people to shush — or whatever other stereotype you might care to put into play — as people who, on all levels in a library system, can deal with vexing questions that relate to both many levels of the law as well as social standards.
• The grinding out of the 2008 Democratic primaries, while expected at this point, is starting to become something worthy of one of my favorite phrases, ‘savage torpor.’ There’s a combination of ennui and passion at play which in combination with the calendar has produced a feeling of suspended animation on the one hand and a near-reflexive lashing out on the other. Most of the commentary out there reflects this, to one extent or another — and quite understandably, really. As ever, I am keeping my eye on other factors — and the big Iraq news of the day is disheartening all around — and hunkering down a bit as we wait.
• It’s been a very good year for music so far — lots of excellent albums out — but nothing as yet is a core album/performer/song of the year for me. One quarter of the way down and more to go, of course, but I’m not surprised that the full process of hearing record after record without time or inclination to regularly return to something has reached this state for me. Mine is a very specific context, though — active listener who does a lot of freelance writing and all — so I’m not pretending that this signals something beyond my own ears and thoughts. It’s still an intriguing if not surprising development, though, and I’m not surprised that my concomitant interest in a variety of other things has increased alongside this change.
• It’s spring and it’s beautiful outside. And sometimes that’s more than enough!

More soon!