On day two when I got reprimanded for saying “awesome” instead of “pawsome” and “very” instead of “beary” I knew I was in for a long summer.

The Worst Jobs I’ve Ever Had — The Bygone Bureau

“Sniff sniff,” she chirps in a singsong voice. “I made a stinky!” Baby Dolls Raise a Stink In More Ways Than One - washingtonpost.com

…That might be the atomized fate of the West in general: desperately seeking visions, alone in the wild, surrounded by portable gadgetry. BLDGBLOG: The Digital Replacement of the Natives

For the poor Christian Moslem Jewish saps duped by fundamentalist nihilism the Last Day is both horrorshow and Rapture, just as for secular Yuppies global warming is a symbol of terror and meaninglessness and simultaneously a rapturous vision of post-Catastrophe Hobbit-like local-sustainable solar-powered gemutlichkeit. Thus the technopathocracy comes equipped with its own built-in escape-valve fantasy: the Ragnarok of technology itself and the sudden catastrophic restoration of meaning. MAGPIE: ENDARKENMENT MANIFESTO by Peter Lamborn Wilson. (Gemütlichkeit?)

>OPEN CAN OF WORMS

Opened. Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org

His very name was a microcosm of the system he invented: the exotic “Gygax,” calling to mind the pantheon of Lovecraftian gods and remote regions of Hyborea; the mundane “Gary,” reminiscent of suburban kids all over the nation who were ignoring their algebra homework in favor of The Dungeon Master’s Guide. Deified and Demagogued by Matthew Baldwin - The Morning News

He’s wearing Gucci shoes and carrying The Wall Street Journal. She’s a looker. Neiman Marcus clothes. Vanity Fair under her arm. So I told them, ‘Tomorrow is Labor Day: the holiday to ‘honour the unions.’ The guy gives me the kind of look Noel Coward might have given a bug on his sleeve. ‘We despise unions.’ I fix him with my glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, and I ask, ‘How many hours do you work a day?’ He tells me eight. ‘How come you don’t work 18 hours a day, like your great-grandparents?’ He can’t answer that. ‘Because four men got hanged for you.’ I explain that I’m referring to the Haymarket Affair, the union dispute here in Chicago in May 1886. The bus is late. I have him pinned against the mailbox. Then I say, ‘How many days a week do you work?’ He says five."

Terkel laughs, and takes a sip of water. “I say: ‘Five €– oh, really? How come you don’t work six and a half?’ He isn’t sure. ‘Because of the Memorial Day Massacre. These battles were fought, all for you.’ I tell him about that massacre of workers, in Chicago, in 1937. He’s never heard of these things before. She drops her Vanity Fair. I pick it up, being gallant. I am giving it to them now: the past. Studs Terkel: The world’s greatest interviewer - Independent Online Edition > Profiles

I think it’s important, even now, to look at the ways African-American people tried to carve out a place for themselves in the Reconstruction period. It took an enormous amount of imagination and courage to do that, and it’s something people need to know and understand. The Kingdom of the Happy Land was a community founded by freed slaves in the western Carolinas mountains at the end of the Civil War. What remains is a small pile of stones, the remnants of a chimney.

NPR : Dean Reed: The Man Who Rocked the Iron Curtain — NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Reggie Nadelson, author of Dean Reed biography Comrade Rockstar.

To do what I’m called to do, I need to have a human body. I live in a body in order to bring man closer to God.

This is the first time I have been needed in 2,000 years. This is a critical point. Only when mankind becomes one family on Earth will the doors to the universe become open to them. Seventeen years ago, a young man in Siberia realized he was the second coming of Christ.

A Long Line for a Shorter Wait at the Supermarket - New York Times

“We have good clocks in our heads for roughly three minutes,” said Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell, a retail consulting firm.

“Once we get beyond that, time expands wildly,” he said. “If somebody is there for 4.5 minutes and you ask them how long they waited, they will say 15 minutes.” We do! Whether counting or not, most people are very good at estimating periods of 30 seconds and one minute. (I demonstrated this in 8th grade for the science fair.)

The long and winding ‘Road’

Here’s the published version: “My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.”

In the scroll, the section runs four times longer and wraps with: “If these men stop the machine and come home - and get on their knees - and ask for forgiveness - and the women bless them - peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse.”

“Holy moly, man,” said Canary. “That’s a whole different book.”

When Champion approaches the first turn, he slows a bit. “Now see, here,” he says, reaching to the top of his head, where his youthful dark brown hair stands in haphazard disarray. “I’m starting to feel something.” Often when he walks a labyrinth he feels nothing special; the walk is just a tool for meditation. But sometimes the stroll brings Champion to the outer reaches of metaphysical rapture: He’ll be overwhelmed by the sensation of energy from the earth or local spirits, or he’ll have visions. “A labyrinth experience happens when you don’t expect it to,” Champion says. “Those are the nature of labyrinth experiences. Those are what people keep coming back to.” SF Weekly: A Winding Path.

People couldn’t believe it, man. They were ready to have us locked up and put on Thorazine. It just occurred to me to give up all the hassles – money, car insurance, bouncing checks, going to the bank, traffic tickets, late fees at the library. The Other American Dream - Washington Post Story on Twin Oaks Community

“Old people and children,” I point out, “get a free pass on fancy fonts.” “And family,” Amy says. “Right,” I say. Amy and I are on the same page here. My husband is staring at me. He disagrees? “Why do you use so many ellipses?” he asks, as if finally getting the nerve to confront me on this matter. I do? “Yeah, you’ll write to tell me about the kids having soccer practice, and then you’ll end with a whole bunch of periods.” Say It With Screamers!!!!! - washingtonpost.com

You try to be realistic, but they won’t let you. You can’t touch corporate America. LA Weekly - The Meat of the Matter

The famously rebellious Jimi Hendrix played a legendary, electric-guitar rendition of America’s national anthem at Woodstock in 1969. Was this feedback-heavy anthem a symbolic rejection of mainstream American culture, or a celebration of the country and its values? Hendrix’s use of this prominent American symbol forces us to question just how far the hippies went in rejecting the dominant culture. Indeed, countercultures and the American mainstream make strange, but frequent bedfellows. Witness the adoption of one-time countercultures by corporate America: Could early punk rockers have guessed that music by The Clash and Iggy Pop would one day sell luxury cars and vacation cruises? How did the hippies go from rebels against 1950s materialism to fashion trendsetters? And what transformed a small, underground music scene in the Pacific Northwest into the lucrative grunge and “alternative rock” juggernaut of the 1990s? Jamie Jesson is teaching RHE 309K - Youth Rebellion and the Rhetoric of American Identity at the University of Texas at Austin.

How I Blog (kottke.org)

When I’m deciding what links to post here, I’m essentially curating ideas, collecting them to “send” to you (and to myself, in a way). Jason hits the nail right on the head with this, echoing an early conception of weblog as modern wunderkammer, for which I regret I cannot find a source.

Anderson Cooper 360 Blog ‘Missing’ Marine from 9/11 comes forward

The new Oliver Stone movie, “World Trade Center,” tells the story of two Port Authority police officers – Sgt. John McLoughlin and Officer Will Jimeno – who were found by two former U.S. Marines working as volunteers. But the moviemakers only knew the whereabouts of one of the Marines; the other had seemingly vanished.

Because the moviemakers (and most everyone else) didn’t know much about the “missing” Marine, the actor playing him is a white man. In real life, Sgt. Thomas is African-American.

And on the street the Hummers roll, driven by small, blond college girls, as if America had invaded itself. The Phoenix: The New New Age: The movement pulls away from the mainstream and gets apocalyptic.

She’ll be strong in spring, Ms. Regan theorized, because she has a “wood nymph quality,” and added that her pink coloring made her great for merchandising around Valentine’s Day and Christmas, when she will pair well with red Elmo. Then of course there’s the fall back-to-school theme of a new girl getting to know her classmates. A Girly-Girl Joins the ‘Sesame’ Boys - New York Times

et cetera on Vimeo

Transgressive; sublime. (NSFW)

Six minute audio collage on dumpster diving & scrounging.

After a few rotations, you end up with a lump that resembles a red blood cell

We're frequent burrito rollers in our house. I'm going to make my own tortillas! Flour tortillas from scratch, redux.

It is suggested in the Gospel, in no uncertain terms, that Judas is the only one of the disciples who truly understands Jesus. The heart of the Gospel of Judas communicates a revelation or a teaching that Jesus offered to Judas about the nature of the world and the nature of God in the world. It is this teaching about cosmology that is the content of the knowledge that Judas must understand in order to become enlightened. He does understand it; He becomes transfigured or enlightened and he does exactly what Jesus asks him to do. He turns him into the authorities.

Washington Post: Ancient 'Gospel of Judas' Translation Sheds New Light on Disciple

A Short History of America in twelve panels by R. Crumb.

What do you do if God is too fat?

We used to be a family. Now we are four women carrying heavy grocery bags past an unshaven man in an armchair who is staring intently at his thumbs.

The New York Times: Board Games to Put Families Back in Play

NPR : 'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey

He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says 'I don't know.' He turns the room's lights on when there is broad sunlight outside.

1955—1965 by The Village Voice

Burritoeater: “Is it as fun as skimming rocks on a frozen lake? If you imagine that the rocks are burritos and the lake is our systematic, fully thawed engine of analysis, then yes, it is.”

"My audience has gone from being over 95 percent Black 10 years ago to over 95 percent white today," laments Boots Riley of the Coup. "We jokingly refer to our tour as the Cotton Club," he says — a reference to the 1920s and '30s Harlem jazz spot where Black musicians played to whites-only audiences.

...

"I love Boots Riley's music, but in general people in the 'hood are not checking for the Coup," says Brother Ali, part owner of the Minneapolis-based hip-hop collective Rhymesayers Entertainment. "It's hard enough to get some of our people to go to a Kweli show. It has a lot to do with the fact that the emphasis on the culture has been taken away. It's just the industry now and it's sold back to us — it's not ours anymore. It used to be anti-establishment, off the radar, counterculture. People in the streets are now being told what hip-hop is and what it looks like by TV."

Village Voice: The Cotton Club by Bakari Kitwana .

I struggled to imagine the emotional currents that had carried people here to this bus, so far from their homes, to honor his memory. Later, a friend who had been born in Alaska and exiled to Maryland for five years tried to explain the overwhelming smallness and sameness of life on the suburban East Coast, where lawn care excites great interest; no wonder someone like Christopher McCandless seems adventurous and spiritual and inspiring, despite being dead.

...

For many Alaskans, the problem is not necessarily that Christopher McCandless attempted what he did — most of us came here in search of something, didn’t we? Haven’t we made our own embarrassing mistakes? But we can’t afford to take his story seriously because it doesn’t say much a careful person doesn’t already know about desire and survival. The lessons are so obvious as to be laughable: Look at a map. Take some food. Know where you are. Listen to people who are smarter than you. Be humble. Go on out there — but it won’t mean much unless you come back.

The Anchorage Press: : I Want To Ride In The Bus Chris Died In.

This thing called psychiatry -- it is a European-American invention, and it largely has no respect for nonwhite philosophies of mental health and how people function.

Washington Post: Patients' Diversity Is Often Discounted.

The time feels right to me. My spirit’s ready for it.

Bodo's Bagels is open on the Corner after many lifetimes of anticipation.

Ladies and gentlemen, do not be alarmed. That is my dog, Spot. He is the bus dog. We go back a long way. Spot keeps me sane. When I am sad and lonely, he talks to me, telepathically. We are one. Thank you.

N.Y. to D.C. On the Quirky Express is Marc Fisher's account of riding the Chinatown bus.

A digital puff of marijuana, for example, temporarily slows the action of the game like a sports replay. Taking an Ecstasy tablet creates a mellow atmosphere that can pacify aggressive foes. The use of crack momentarily makes the player a marksman: a "crack" shot.

But using each drug also leads to addiction, which can lead to blackouts that cost the player inventory and to demotions or even expulsion from the police force, which halts progress in the game. In measured doses, the substances can make a tough challenge easier, but the makers of the game say it is possible to play without using the drugs at all.

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Where a Puff of Marijuana Is the Ultimate Power-Up

Speaking of Faith | Brother Thây: A Radio Pilgrimage with Thich Nhat Hanh

Forcibly exiled from his native country, Thich Nhat Hanh is currently visiting Vietnam for the first time in nearly forty years. In 2003, Speaking of Faith took a radio pilgrimage with Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh at a Christian conference center in a lakeside setting of rural Wisconsin. Here, Nhat Hanh discusses the concepts of "engaged Buddhism," "being peace," and "mindfulness" with host Krista Tippett.

"He'd done his work," Winkel Thompson said, adding, in Hunter Thompson's own words, "He was a road man for the lords of karma."

Rocky Mountain News: Family says writer didn't kill himself out of desperation

All Hail The Death Of Radio / Clear Channel suffers and rock radio is gasping its last and, more importantly, does anyone care?

Only a handful of major-station radio gems remain on the dial anywhere in the country, stations that still fly their flags of ragged independence like beacons in a wasteland of sameness and blandness and endless replays of Beyoncé and Eric Clapton and Sting, while the FCC stands behind them all like a psychotic nun with a giant ruler and a deep scowl and callused nipples.

Mark Morford is big on podcasting, too.

Why did the Greenland Norse prefer to starve rather than copy the ways of the Inuit? How did the Anasazi fail to notice that by squandering their piñon on structures, they were eliminating a precious food source? And how do we, in this 21st-century global village, continue to live in denial about impending climate change, something every credible climatologist has confirmed?

Judith Lewis: What Did the Last Easter Islander Say as He Chopped Down the Last Tree? "Jared Diamond, The best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, asks whimsical questions with grave answers. In his latest book, he turns his attention to the collapse of civilization."

Reason: Gabbo Gets Laid. 2004: The Year of Puppet Sex (Thanks, Thatcher!)

For me, the defining moment of the year came when the Motion Picture Association of America required Trey Parker and Matt Stone to trim a few seconds from a sex scene in their marionette movie Team America: World Police. Even in its reduced state, the sequence probably set a record for explicit puppet-on-puppet sex.

CNN.com - Court allows church to use hallucinogenic tea - Dec 10, 2004

The U.S. Supreme Court sided Friday with a New Mexico church that wants to use hallucinogenic tea as part of its Christmas services, despite government objections that the tea is illegal and potentially dangerous.

I love the fact that all the students took off their shoes before climbing on it, says UC Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who, as a young faculty member, joined the movement 40 years ago. That's so American. Americans respect cars. They don't respect the police, but they do respect cars. I like that.

...

The notion that the Free Speech Movement was a victory of the left is a time-honored misconception. At the beginning of the school year in 1964 when, at the height of the civil rights era, the university banned political advocacy of off-campus social issues on school property, both liberal and conservative student groups joined forces, calling themselves the United Front.

After the Revolution, The Commemoration (washingtonpost.com)

The dean refused to see the other students, who, in turn, refused to budge from the building. The standoff continued into the next morning. A police officer arrested a mathematics grad student named Jack Weinberg for not identifying himself. But before the police car could take him away, students and their supporters surrounded the car, the roof and hood of which became the impromptu podium, sans shoes, for the day's rally of nearly 5,000 people.

...

I'll tell you a secret about democratic societies, Searle concludes. If a movement is successful, it has to be symbolically absorbed into the mainstream. I think that's what happened to the FSM. The FSM is not a threat to anyone if it's a coffee shop -- a cafe, for God's sake. If a police car can be something that former presidential candidates can climb on, it's no longer a revolutionary act. And I think that's terrific. It's a sign of a healthy democracy.

Healthy or ill as democracy may be, there is at least one lesson unlearned from this movement. Nevada rancher Larry D. Hiibel was arrested in May of 2000, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, only because he thought his name was none of the [arresting] officer's business.

George Takei spent four years of his childhood in internment camps.

Tribute was paid to those who passed in all 10 internment camps with candles lit by representatives from each of the camps. I was honored to represent Camp Rohwer in Arkansas, where my family and I were held before being brought to Camp Tule Lake. As we paid our respects to those who passed in these camps during World War II, my thoughts were also with those Arab Americans today who are being detained without the due process to which we are all entitled.

NPR : Dungeons and Dragons Turns 30

Anyone who thinks that Dungeons and Dragons has been consigned to the scrapheap of 1980s relics, right next to Pac-Man and leg warmers, would be surprised by what happens every Thursday night in Peter Girvan's apartment in the Bronx.

For the past two years, Girvan and four friends--all professionals in their 30s--have been getting together every Thursday to play D and D--sitting around a table with inch-high plastic figures, rolling odd dice and saying things in the odd, imagined voices of their characters.

BoingBoing: Bruce Sterling SIGGRAPH 2004 speech "When Blobjects Rule the Earth"

Our material culture is not sustainable. Its resources are not renewable. We cannot turn our entire planet's crust into obsolete objects. We need to locate valuable objects that are dead, and fold them back into the product stream. In order to do this, we need to know where they are, and what happened to them. We need to document the life cycles of objects. We need to know where to take them when they are defunct.

In practice, this is going to mean tagging and historicizing everything. Once we tag many things, we will find that there is no good place to stop tagging.

In the future, an object's life begins on a graphics screen. It is born digital. Its design specs accompany it throughout its life. It is inseparable from that original digital blueprint, which rules the material world. This object is going to tell you -- if you ask -- everything that an expert would tell you about it. Because it WANTS you to become an expert.

Part of why we're doing this is to reclaim public space and give people a way to use the nighttime that's not mediated by commerce. In our town, the parks close at sundown, you have to buy something at coffee shops. We wanted to give people a way to interact with each other outdoors without having to spend any money."

The New York Times: Now Playing, a Digital Brigadoon.

NPR's ombudsman says that this Morning Edition piece on hip-hop producer Timbaland was "tough to take, especially that early in the morning," and proceeds to grapple with the issue of NPR's failure to attract a diverse audience — without once mentioning race.

Venus Transit: Cycles of the Heart

We are about to experience the first Venus Passage in this millenium. The Venus Passage presently upon us comes in a pair, with each transit in the pair spaced eight years apart. There will be one transit on June 8, 2004 and one on June 6, 2012.

This article explores the eight-year pentagonal cycle of Venus; how the retrogrades of Venus are created; the 243-year Venus Passage cycle; why the transits in this cycle come in pairs for a while and why they then become singular; the drift of this cycle through the zodiak; the star alignments of the 2004/2012 transits in the sidereal zodiak; the psychophysiology (mental-emotional-physical facets) of Venus in our lives; and the astrophysical resonances of Venus in light (color), sound, and brain wave frequencies.

In September, Pantheon Books will publish Art Spiegelman's comic strip musings on 9/11 and its aftermath, In the Shadow of No Towers. Thank you, Bookslut!

Vanguard of Brood X Marks Its Spot: All Over (washingtonpost.com)

In isolated pockets across the Washington area, periodical cicadas have begun to emerge in heavy numbers, the silent beginning of an infestation of black-bodied, red-eyed insects that is going to get a lot more intense and a lot more noisy before it ends next month.

It's happening. I'd seen about 8 holes before this weekend, but now they're obvious. You glance downward, holes. Moving cinderblocks for the compost pile, I uncovered one guy who had tunneled all the way up, only to hit the block and say, "shit" while another tougher nymph had tunneled up and was now traveling horizontally, but was in the throes when I lifted the block.

Metafilter remembers 1987 better than I do. I'm starting to remember how loud it was, though. The buzz is holy.

I used to fill buckets with the exoskeletons too, Witty. I'd go out in my backyard and there'd be a hundred of them clinging to the wooden fence. I'd look down the cracks in their backs through their "eyes".

My sister and a friend of hers used to go downtown with a handful of them and hang them on people's backs as they walked behind them.

If you're a little high and you just want to look at pretty pictures, you can get fixated on the centerfold and you take out a magnifying glass and look at all those snowy flakes -- that's the resin, that's what gets you stoned. People like to look at that.

High Times At 30, Getting Its Head Together (washingtonpost.com).

MAPS A/V archive: Ecstasy Rising

Peter Jennings Reporting: 'Ecstasy Rising' takes viewers through the seminal events in this story and introduces all the major players -- from Alexander Shulgin, the famous chemist who was the first person to report the effects of Ecstasy, to Michael Clegg, the Dallas businessman who gave Ecstasy its name and turned it into a recreational drug, to the drug enforcement officer who led the fight to make Ecstasy illegal, to the DJ who brought Rave to America.

Download time varies according to the speed of your internet connection.

I just think it transcends what you normally get to do on TV. It's funny, sad, heartbreaking … I love the heartbreaking stuff, which is another reason we probably got canceled.

Interview with creator Paul Feig (but not writer/producer Judd Apatow) on the occasion of the release of the Freaks and Geeks DVD set.

The Fog of War is currently playing at AMC Courthouse; AMC Hoffman Center; Bethesda Row Cinema; Visions Bar Noir.

As far as I'm concerned, music is not a commodity. It's something that people have earned by being human. They have a right to hear it, and a right to share it, as they always have in churches and parties. That's how music happens.