emotion, Human

I spat this out in a rush of words tonight at someone who wasn't interested: About a week ago, I looked out my window - just off to my right, peripherally within view even now - and formed the only recent memory I have of feeling startled, shocked, afraid. There was, at altogether too low an altitude, a zeppelin. It appeared at approximately news helicopter height or lower, bearing straight toward (and ultimately over and beyond,) my apartment, and my window. Not the sort of thing that -ought- to be scary, but there you go.

This irrational fear is exciting and remarkable to me because of what a rare thing it is to feel something so vividly. The default position for someone about where I happen to be is, I think, 'couched in irony,' and it's a pretty thick layer. The only time I can remember being red-in-the-face embarrassed (my favorite request to make of professional actors) was in a Borders bookstore - the kind in Ohio in which a fellow can spend a day reading things, like a library, but not like a crowded and tiny LA bookstore or LA library, whose chief function is in the field of hobo naps. I saw a familiar clerk with an armful of periodicals collected from the various comfy chairs in the store, as he went about sighing and restocking the magazine shelves....just as I was about to make my way to the comfy chair section with a fresh armload of magazines I intended to read for free.

I tried to take still photos at dusk, and as you can see, they mainly fail at suggesting the size, speed, and proximity of the airship. As the thing flew directly overhead, I realized what I needed instead was video.

zeppliphoto

Good honest politics.

 

This isn't a post about Prop 8, this is a post about this banner ad.  I'd say it's about as useful and informative as any political ad I've ever seen.  It belongs right in between those ads that say "firefighters want you to support initiative 17A this Novermber" without ever mentioning what the hell initiative 17A is, and an ad that says "Vote no on initiative 17A this November, because we want you to so much that we bought an advertisement."

EDIT: Apparently, more people are up in arms about their google ads running that Prop 8 thing (legislative branch action to ban same sex marriages after the judicial branch found them acceptable) regardless of relevance or adsense filters that may have been in place.  Kind of like the Emergency Broadcast System, but with more hate than usual. And here I've gone and put it up on my own ad-free site anyway, just for being goofy-lookin'.

A little casual racism...

I recently discovered a delightful OSX application called Monolingual. It's designed to remove unused alternate language packs from your mac.  As you can imagine, I was relieved not only to regain nearly a gigabyte of hard disk space, but to rid my machine of all that horrible Portuguese!

It's times like these one can really make the most of an arbitrary, baseless prejudice.  Take that, Portugal!

Is that really something?

Are there actually people who believe that [terrorist organization] could sneak a politician into the system with the end goal of making him president, at which point he'll pull off a rubber mask and yell 'gotcha!' and now [terror] will own the United States?   And if so, shouldn't that be more or less allowed anyway?  Isn't that sort of thing the point of the idealized description of our form of government?

Or do they think it'll all be done hush-hush, like they get their guy in, and he makes sure that everything's cool when they try to attack us, and they have him arrange to do things to bring down the country from within, by misdirecting the public focus, damaging and dismantling 'public good' programs, tanking the economy, lowering our allies' esteem of us, peeling back civil rights...wait a minute....hm.

Bus stop, bus goes...

I always thought it was about "Bus stop Wendy." It's still a beautiful song, as far as songs go. (Since, of course, all songs are sad.)