randomWalks

I would like to cement this to the front of our house. Do you think someone would call the cops or something?

Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be Pocketed by Grant Barrett is a fantastic read.

“Naropa University is pleased to announce the inauguration of a low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. The program reflects the standards and qualities of the residential Writing & Poetics programs offered at Naropa since 1974, when The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at the (then) embryonic Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.” Naropa: MFA Creative Writing Online.

I really would like to stop working forever--never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now--and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone -- maybe even a man -- and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

Ginsberg in the 50s

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility.  Businessmen are serious.  Movie
producers are serious.  Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

America, Allen Ginsberg. (Re: Allen Ginsberg on Time Magazine.)

Time magazine on Allen Ginsberg?

Meditation on the cover of Time magazine.

Before the work ethic was hijacked by the overwork ethic, there was a consensus in this country that work was a means, not an end, to more important goals. In 1910, President William Howard Taft proposed a two- to three-month vacation for American workers. In 1932, both the Democratic and Republican platforms called for shorter working hours, which averaged 49 a week in the 1920s. The Department of Labor issued a report in 1936 that found the lack of a national law on vacations shameful when 30 other nations had one, and recommended legislation. But it never happened. This was the fork in the road where the United States and Europe, which then had a similar amount of vacation time, parted ways.

Europe chose the route of legal, protected vacations, while we went the other -- no statutory protection and voluntary paid leave. Now we are the only industrialized nation with no minimum paid-leave law.

Matador is a Spanish-English machine translation system implemented following the Genereation-heavy Hybrid approach to Machine Translation (GHMT). What languages do you speak?

We started making a list of all we had to do to extricate ourselves: Sell our house. Sell our car. Find homes for Sarina's pet bird, rabbit and frogs. Pack up all of our furnishings and store them in a warehouse. Buy airline tickets. Cancel our Internet service, cell phone, DWP, gas, telephone, security, newspaper and other services. Find out about schools and pediatric medical care on Rarotonga.

Lorraine provides the latest update: “the place is coming slowly. we have to be out of the condo on the 31st, so we’ll be moving in then, finished or not. hopefully it will be mostly done. the painting is just about finished. and now the floors have to go in. but the bathroom has to be all put together, and that is going to take a while i think. oh well. ian loves the new house. and wants to go there everyday. he really wants to take a bath in the new bathtub we bought. and he can’t wait to bring all his toys over. mostly he just likes to be in the yard. he loves that. just being able to open the door and be outside in the sun and the grass. and there are always lots of sticks around. which is very important to him.”

“This spectacular ‘blue marble’ image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public.” EO News: NASA Olympics Blue Marble Release; February 6, 2002. I’m minorly obsessed with images of Earth. I guess it’s the notion that observing ourselves from without can provide some perspective on within. Should we talk about the weather?

On Fridays and weekends, he performs on his wheels of steel: two turntables, speakers and a fader/mixer, all powered with a portable battery. The 27-year-old turntablist earns his living scratching and mixing funky beats here on the boardwalk.

"I got some hip hop, old school, new school, some drum and bass, acid jazz, dirty disco, old school classics," Hymn says. "There are no rules. It's just getting creative and funky."

Here’s our floorplan, from the 1954 sales brochure.

What people have to rethink is the role of the bathroom, not as the space to spend the least amount of their everyday lives but as a place to retreat and foster their spirituality.

I think two or three of these chairs and a nice bench would look great around a dining room table.

I’ve put up a photo album demonstrating our refined sense of interior design. The best way to look through the pics is to start in the boy’s room and click ‘« Previous’ to walk through the house.

The abundantly elegant What Do I Know has very nearly convinced me of what kind of lawn mower to buy.

"All my friends say I ought to put up a fence and charge people $2 a head, but that's not my way," Balestra said. "I'm enjoying this. People lying down in my wheat field, and wrapping their heads in foil."

It’s an American Basswood, aka Linden tree. They make blinds out of these. I’ll tell you what else I learn.

There is paint on walls. Tomorrow, pictures.

Reuters reports that while Bush was speaking, the residents of the local island of Goree were involuntarily rounded up at 6AM and held at a local football field until after Bush had left, to prevent them from protesting or otherwise exercising, you know, American-style freedoms that are the opposite of slavery.

“The Don DeLillo Society will not do your work for you. We have work of our own to do.”

We're going to have a few things done before we move in. We're tearing out the 'dog' carpet and putting in wood floors, painting the interior, and renovating the (busted) bathroom. It feels a little strange to be spending so much money on top of the cost of the mortgage, but I'm looking at it as an exercise in the pure experience of expressing power and control through expenditures. Put another way, we may never have another opportunity like this. In fact, blowing all of our savings and inheritance on things like tumbled natural stone-like floor tiles pretty much guarantees it, but I know you're with me on this one: those are fucking phenomenal tiles.

The new MacBytes.com looks like nothing so much as our dear Fark – just an observation.

What it always feels like to me is that while I always know my ancestors were slaves at some time, the slave masters, the slavers, the captors, and everyone else involved were these mysterious white people that have no connection to white people today.

I’ve been using Jen’s “post this” Movable Type bookmarklet for Safari for a couple weeks now and it’s quite refreshing. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a working bookmarklet and getting it back reminds me just how quick and easy it makes things. I have a slight improvement to share – this version puts any text you have selected into the ‘Entry Body’ field of the pop up window. (Be sure to check out the link above for good instructions on customizing the code to suit your needs.)

[post this]

I remember a sociology professor who worked at my university for a time. As a woman of color, she confronted her predominantly white classes with the admonition that white people can't say they're not racist until they compete against a black person in the job market. I thought it was an odd statement. Now I understood what she meant.