randomWalks

The good folks at Eatonweb might want to tweak their portal a bit; it’s less than accurate to suggest that the Aryan Revolutionary Digest is a weblog similar to randomWalks.

Syracuse New Times: The Plunder Down Under.

Tall and narrow, usually built for one and typically made of wood, most had flat roofs. Some had angled roofs and classy models had gables. A half-moon was traditionally cut into the door so no one mistook it for the wood shed, chicken coop or pigsty. Odiferous, dark and drafty, outhouses didn’t make good reading rooms, especially in winter.

Unlike current toilets, yesterday’s commodes weren’t simply the final resting place of their owner’s intestinal products. They made convenient dumping grounds for small imperishables that couldn’t be burned; and even served as vaults for storing small valuables like cash and unmentionables: grandma’s whiskey, dad’s porno, the kid’s tobacco. Since it was considered unwise and in bad taste to discuss “potty deposits,” the owner was usually the only one who knew about the stuff and it was sometimes left in the hole when illness or senility claimed him, or if he had to get out of town in a hurry. Today, these spoils are like juicy wild fruit, available to everyone, just for the picking.

Standing alone against the elements isn’t easy and an abandoned thunder house – not exactly a farmer’s pride and joy – didn’t last long. In fact, about all that remains of the majority of these uniquely American temples to the human appetite is the wood cut to create the holes in the benches. Allowed to fall to the bottom of the pit, the “holes” were quickly buried, especially if the family was big. Some of the slabs have survived and when unearthed, are rare, prized trophies by diggers who varnish them, attach plaques bearing the date and time of the find, and hang them on their living-room walls.

Most students entering college this fall were born in 1984. The Beloit College “Mindset List” has fast become a benchmark forwarded by scattershot email from those for whom feeling old still has some novelty. It’s refreshing to see that I (b. 1975) have got something in common with these kids, though: (18.) They have no recollection of Connie Chung or Geraldo Rivera as serious journalists.

The extraordinary array of groups questioning the Bush administration's rationale for an invasion of Iraq includes longtime radical groups such as the Workers World Party, but also groups not known for taking stands against the government. There is a labor movement against war, led by organizers of the largest unions in the country; a religious movement against the war, which includes leaders of virtually every mainstream denomination; a veterans movement against the war, led by those who fought Iraq in the Persian Gulf a decade ago; business leaders against the war, led by corporate leaders; an antiwar movement led by relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; and immigrant groups against the war.

There are also black and Latino organizations, hundreds of campus antiwar groups and scores of groups of ordinary citizens meeting in community centers and church basements from Baltimore to Seattle.

The U.S. Central Intelligence agency reckons that in a mere seven years, by 2010, India will have the most HIV victims in the world -- somewhere between 20 and 25 million. China, it says, will have between 10 and 20 million.

The National AIDS Memorial Grove covers approximately 7.5 acres in the eastern end of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

originally posted by daiichi

bogus holidays make me tired, at blue period.

originally posted by daiichi

Supreme Court judges take issue with rhyming colleague.

originally posted by daiichi

On Sunday, hundreds of bloggers, diarists and other personal website publishers will link to resources about HIV and AIDS and reflect on how the disease has changed their lives as part of the Link and Think awareness campaign, an annual observance of World AIDS Day.

Suicide Girls isn't so much an offshoot of some kind of emo-porn phenomenon (as a past issue of Spin put it) but rather just a good example of the classic free-market tenet: Where there's a market, there's a way. After all, sex sells, even (especially?) if you bundle it with the DIY aesthetic, a connection to the punk and indie-rock community, and a liberal dash of personal weblogging.

originally posted by xowie

Giant guitar
of light-strummed
at dusk
it rests
by the intersection
Tuning not itself
like the organ keys
in a haunted house
but us
To make us see
we are the keys
and it the organist
invisible guitar player
of no spooky music.

originally posted by daiichi

A television commercial for a local Toughman contest came on. They were looking for tough men and women to fight three one-minute rounds in nearby Louisiana. "I'm drunk. Sitting around in a room full of guys, who are all tough anyway, because they're all prison guards and I'm the only girl in the group. You know, I've gotta be tough, too. So the commercial comes on, and I feel it's my need to assert my feminine side here, so I say, 'Y'all aren't tough.' I said, 'You want to know tough? Women. Menstrual cramps and childbirth. We're tough. You people aren't shit,'" Mahfood recalls. "They loaded my drunk ass up in the car. Carried me down there. I registered. I woke up the next morning and said, 'Oh, my God. What did I do?'"

originally posted by daiichi

Page Seventeen is huge.

originally posted by xowie

"He'll have jazz playing up his ass all day long! Man, he'll be sorry he met me, 'cause I don't let nobody run my life for me. I'm a man. Can't he see that? I'm a man. And I ain't doing nothing just 'cause some bus driver says so."

originally posted by xowie

What would you do on poetry’s behalf?

originally posted by xowie

Sweet potatoes aren't really yams; yams, which belong to the genus Dioscorea, are grown widely in Africa, where they originated, and elsewhere in the tropics but scarcely at all in the United States. What we are dealing with here is Ipomoea batatas, which is not only not a yam but not a true potato. Believed to be a native of Central America, it is closely related to the morning glory, with the same purplish, heart-shaped leaves. Sweet potatoes, which are less dense and starchy than yams, are rich in healthful beta carotene, an important source of vitamin A.

Lemon taught himself to read and write while incarcerated. Nine years ago, he watched poets performing at a community center. "I never knew they were poets," he says. "I thought they were rappers."

originally posted by xowie

"We do not think justice has been done," they said in a statement. "The dog is still free and is a danger to society. Our children were lucky that they avoided grievous injuries -- other children may not be so lucky."

originally posted by daiichi

Happy Birthday, IndyMedia.

originally posted by daiichi

Elvis Mitchell on Velocity, starring crufty pagan Fairuza Balk.

originally posted by daiichi

Perhaps scantily clad multimillionaire supermodels flaunting a socially constructed notion of idealized beauty for an hour isn't the gravest threat to women's rights and mental health since the invention of the tube top and/or "Baywatch." Possible?

originally posted by daiichi

"Tell me, is there any point?" she asked. "Here, I have to work and earn my living. Death will come in its own time, and when it takes me away, I will be happy that I have been released from this world and its suffering."

originally posted by daiichi

The Name on My Cross

April 23, 1990
Fort Benning, Georgia

Juan Ramon Moreno S.J.,
I carried your cross
in the circular procession today,
shaking my rattle.

I confess
I leaned on your cross a little
during the speeches,
rattling my applause.
Then looked over my shoulder.

The soldiers stood
in little motionless groups
as if posing for photographs with their
personnel carriers,
in battle camouflage and riot gear.
They watched.
I couldn’t tell if they listened.

I hoisted your cross
and turned your name around to face them.
Not to accuse anyone:
I wanted to feel the weight of the wood.
And I wanted them to notice
You had a name.
Not just another dark-skinned man on a cross.

- Stephen Wing

originally posted by xowie

"New Years Eve, nine years ago," recounts Moss. "We had a bunch of this Jager knockoff crap called Beck Torova that nobody would buy or drink for free, not even the bums. Well, one of the bums said 'I'm not drinking that ass juice' and that's how it started."

originally posted by xowie