randomWalks

Links to free culture (Marcel Mauss, the Free Store, the Situationists, the Internet gift economy, GNU, net.art, mail art, free music, free publishing, etc.) courtesy the Free Words project, via jessamyn.

The Utterly Surreal Test - Result

I am a Collection of Elvis Impersonators. I refine elastic nightmares with habitable abstract umbrellas. My perspective oranges enter forgotten densities of responsible soap. Evil lids of atomic paper eat my incomplete golf balls. Who spices folded robots? The Utterly Surreal Test

Although the world’s best Chinese food is served in Monterey Park, I am not brave enough to eat here. (Vegans read at own risk.)

originally posted by xowie

The most unusual (and visible) aspect of betel chewing is its effect on the salivary glands. You don't just salivate, you pour; and the saliva emerges from your mouth tinted a deep brick red. (...)

Perverse as it may sound, betel-drooling is quite pleasurable indeed. There is an almost orgasmic satisfaction to be found in the experience of saliva-ducts open to full throttle. Delicious above all is the aftermath: when the chew is finished, your mouth is left astonishingly fresh and sweet. You feel uniquely cleansed, drained, and purified.

On the one hand, I would have liked to have gone to DC’s “2nd annual” Zine Fair,“a celebration of diy publishing and radical thought” – which sounds a lot like the old indy rock yard sale, this time with an anarchist bent. I suppose it was a nice way for the city to celebrate my son’s first birthday, in any case.

In this fight for our cherished freedoms, those cherished freedoms should definitely be the first thing to go. Sieg heil, y'all.

Don't count me among those who quake that Mr. Ashcroft is shredding the Constitution. He does respect some rights, after all, like that of illegal immigrants and terrorists to buy guns in the U.S. without fear of government intrusion. And he just doesn't seem clever enough to undo the Bill of Rights, even with the president's backing. You have to have more command of the law than he does to subvert it.

originally posted by xowie

When they moved from a 65% cool computer ad format to an 89% luxury crap ad format, I let my subscription lapse. This means I have to wait a few extra weeks to read things like Wired’s October The Fellowship of the Ring cover story online.

Huge bonuses were paid to Enron insiders two days before the bankruptcy filing. Also, a great response to Bill Lockyer’s tasteless comment about Ken Lay.

originally posted by xowie

IHT.com: Villagers Dying Under U.S. Bombs, Anti-Taliban Forces Say

From Ethel:
What really caused the prisoners to revolt, and what really killed them? Also: It takes money, unimaginable power, and greed unchecked by moral or ethical considerations to make money, as the saying goes. (Featuring your favorite group and mine, the Carlyle Group.)

Font of the Week? Font of a lifetime! Learn about Albertus, create your own sample, and download a truetype version for Windows.

Sen. Thurmond Celebrates 99th Birthday (yahoo/news) looking healthier than ever!

Q: Given the trend just after the attacks to revise popular culture and pull images of the World Trade Center or terrorism out of any entertainment, were you concerned about the content?

FM: [Laughs.] Well, it's on the press.

originally posted by xowie

“A joint initiative of six organizations with exceptional expertise in computer and Internet training in the [global] South,” itrain online is a multi-lingual directory of training materials and tutorials on all aspects of computer, network, and internet technologies.

Danza (jish, boingboing, 0sil8) hasn’t hit Daypop yet. This ought to be interesting.

From Follow Me Here:

From this weblog community vantage point, the outrage about the Dictatorship’s mad, ongoing powergrab under Ashcroft’s influence seems so palpable, but where’s the organized opposition behind the spleen? It may turn out to be one of the greatest, most enduring humiliations in American history – certainly on a par with McCarthyism, if that phrase still makes anyone blush – that reasonable Americans are allowing this to happen with no more than ineffectual spluttering like this. Is it time to write your Congressional representatives? Ha! Time to march on Washington? blockade the Justice Dept? Do the words mass protest, or nonviolent civil disobedience, resonate with anyone anymore?

The Weblog Review has given us a once-over and compared us favorably to MetaFilter, which is pretty cool, though not as cool as it would have been back when… Nevermind. I’m a little surprised that a weblogger reviewing weblogs isn’t familiar with the convention of hooking a perma-link to each post’s date/time info, but I have chosen to suppress the link color and hide the underline, so the point is taken that I will miss out on some direct links as a result. I suppose I could also put a link to the archives higher up, with those nav links at the top of the sidebar. In any case our official rating is a 4 and our reader rating is a 2.75, so you know what to do (scratch your butt, close this window, and go get something to eat)!

Monkeyfist.com unveils a new look (I was going to make some joke involving gloves but what’s the use) which does a great job showcasing some of the very best original content on the Web. My favorite recent piece goes a little like this:

I am homophobic.

I am homophobic (literally, “afraid of non-heterosexuals”) to the extent that I accept the exclusive validity of “traditional” notions of gender, of masculinity or femininity. I assume, as most people do, that everyone around me is heterosexual, unless they make it clear that they aren’t. By making this assumption, I expect a uniform range of behaviors from everyone I encounter. This expectation has everything to do with why life is extremely difficult for those who are homosexual and for those who’s sexual identity lies somewhere in between. Because it takes a considerable amount of work to break out of these expectations, only a very small number of people who feel overwhelmingly that they are homosexual, and simply cannot live normally otherwise, actually “come out of the closet.” The same closet that’s built and maintained by me and by everyone else who assumes and expects heterosexuality of everyone.

Most people of color (and therefore most of the world) are lactose intolerant. White poison from Colorlines and The Food Pyramid Scheme are two interesting articles about racism and the dairy industry. Additionally, NoMilk and NotMilk are informative sites about the untold horrors of milk consumption. It’s time to go vegan again!

originally posted by beXn

“How Gyroscopes Work” from Howstuffworks.com, courtesy The Segway Blog (see flux).

Diary of the first Segway owner. (c/o boing boing)

originally posted by xowie

Darrell, O.J. - let’s roll!

originally posted by xowie

Know your rights. (via Emil Guillermo.)

originally posted by xowie

Yahoo! News Full Coverage-Literary News

Q: I feel an overwhelming need to kill this man in the cave, but the location of the cave is unknown to me, and so it's impossible to find him. He's been allowed to stay in the cave, however, by the fanatical rulers of the country where the cave is, Afghanistan, so I feel an overwhelming need to kill those rulers. As they've moved from place to place, though, I haven't found them, but I've succeeded in finding and killing many young soldiers who guarded them and shepherds who lived near them. Nonetheless, I do not feel any of the expected "closure," and in fact I'm becoming increasingly depressed and am obsessed with nameless fears. Can you help me?

A: Your real problem is simply the way that millions and millions of people around the world feel about you. Who are these people? They share the world with you -- one single world, which works as a unified mechanism. These people are the ones for whom the mechanism's current way of working -- call it the status quo -- offers a life of anguish and servitude. They're well aware that this status quo, which for them is a prison, is for you (or for the privileged among you), on the contrary, so close to a paradise that you will never allow their life to change. These millions of people are in many cases uneducated--to you they seem unsophisticated--and yet they still somehow know that you have played an enormous role in keeping this status quo in place.

Times Cries Eke! Buries Al Gore by Gore Vidal.

originally posted by xowie