randomWalks

Go read the new Lynda Barry cartoon at Salon, you turtle-headed sucker-leg.

For each of the past two winters it has snowed at least 36 feet. Feet, not inches. The building is called Begich Towers, a 14-story monolith and a model of drab Army efficiency, rising like an urban transplant amid the town's rail-yard waterfront. City Hall, the Country Store, the U.S. Post Office and Cabin Fever Cures, a combination video store and tanning salon, all sit on the first floor. The tunnel has long been Whittier's lifeline to the rest of the world. In winter, when the ferry service isn't running, a train ride through the two-mile tunnel under a mountain is the sole avenue of access. It runs four days a week, with a single passenger car and a series of flat cars; folks sit in their cars and trucks for the slow ride through the tunnel, then about 10 more slow miles out to the Seward Highway.Foul weather, a fortress of a building and a tunnel. That's this town.

I’ve jazzed up the ‘links open windows’ tool a bit: see the linked text next to the checkbox? This is now a bookmarklet, a tool that can live in your toolbar or favorites list for you to use wherever you like. Just drag the link up to your toolbar (a la deepleap) and click it whenever you want links to open windows – on any Web page, not just randomWalks. Enjoy! (Note: these are not the improvements I mentioned earlier. This bookmarkletization I did myself.)

I think I’d rather read a hiking site for amnesia victims than this old blog any day. No, not that one, this one.

Believe it or not, I did come up with that ‘links open windows’ toggle all by myself. Once again, feel free to use it for your own purposes. Someone emailed me recently about some improvements they made to the code, which I’ll share (or at least link to) soon.

Some roots and seeds that were churned up in the landslides came to rest near the surface and soon sprouted. Insects buzzed in, and pollen rode the mountain winds. Tiny pocket gophers, whose burrows had served as bomb shelters, emerged to dig new holes, churn up fresh soil. One forested valley that was transformed into a flat expanse of rubble is today a patchwork of wetlands and plains, home to bright green Pacific chorus frogs, red-winged blackbirds, elk and coyotes. The air is heavy with alder pollen, and noble firs and Douglas firs sprout everywhere. As more plants like the purple lupine flower or the orange fireweed sprout, rebirth gathers momentum. The area should be fully renewed within 100 years, an eyeblink in geological time.

Stealing artists' music without paying for it fairly is absolutely piracy, and I'm talking about major-label recording contracts, not Napster. If these major labels aren't going to do for me what I can do for myself with my nineteen-year-old Web mistress Brooke [Barnett], which is drive millions and millions of people in less than a month by just doing that Web site, and providing real content for that Web site, than they can go to hell.

How good was that Simpsons last night, and how bad was that X-Files? I’m so sure Scully is excited about her pregnancy.

DivX (not the DOA Circuit City DVD scheme) is a new codec which just might do for video what mp3 has done for audio. Check out MacDivX for more info.

American Pictures is a narrated slideshow documenting “a Danish vagabond’s personal journey through the American underclass.” Jacob Holdt tours the US in the spring and fall bringing the “mind-shattering experience” to standing room crowds at colleges and universities. I can’t wait to see it.

Sidewalks aren’t natural things. Paving over nature with concrete is the real graffiti. And since when does painting on a sidewalk ‘damage’ the sidewalk? It rubs off after a few months without a trace. Where’s the damage? City workers spray paint all over the streets and sidewalks with flourescent colors because there is a compelling reason for this. They are saying: Do Not Drill Here. There is a Gas line or a water line and if you drill here, there is a clear and present danger. That’s exactly what I’m saying. ‘If you keep building prisons and taking away money from schools and social programs, there is a clear and present danger.’

Sparky the penguin announced his candidacy for president on Monday, “because you could do a lot worse this year”.

“Sewage line feeds into Louisiana water line for 3 months”? Oh no, no no no no.

What some call cube art, I call a monumental waste of time – I feel it’s more descriptive. thanks, larkfarm.

Bjork is not an actor, which was a surprise for me because she seems so professional and really she is not. She is not acting anything in this film, she is feeling everything, which is very hard on her and very hard on everyone. It's like being with a dying person.

Baghdad is an urban version of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The birds have gone as avenues of palms have died, and this was the land of dates. The splashes of colour, on fruit stalls, are surreal. A bunch of Dole bananas and a bag of apples from Beirut cost a teacher's salary for a month; only foreigners and the rich eat fruit. A currency that once was worth two dollars to the dinar is now worthless. The rich, the black marketeers, the regime's cronies and favourites, are not visible, except for an occasional tinted-glass late-model Mercedes navigating its way through the rustbuckets. Having been ordered to keep their heads down, they keep to their network of clubs and restaurants and well-stocked clinics, which make nonsense of the propaganda that the sanctions are hurting them, not ordinary Iraqis.

TAFKAPinkaPa.

“Breaking the Bank”, a video documentary of the a16 DC events, is now available on videotape and online.

Promising new (to me) blog: bjord.org, “which is officially known as the HQ for underground anarchist web developers building ecommerce backdoors for the revolution, running homebrew log software.”

Jason O’Grady of the PowerPage is providing live coverage of Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote.

Several years ago I was trying to educate myself about the Black Panther Party when I came across this so-called “Coloring Book” presented online as an authentic Party creation. It shocked me into thinking that the Black Panthers were too violently prejudiced to be worth my further investigation. Only today did I learn (thanks, monkeyfist) that the coloring book was a product of the FBI’s COINTELPRO – a project the US government undertook almost forty years ago is still undermining dissenting discourse and progressive political thought and action today.

Over the weekend, the Guardian Unlimited reported the almost-unbelievable story that “the US Air Force developed a top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon as a display of military might at the height of the Cold War.”

Anyone who thinks Apple's revival is all about colors, curves and cutesy ads should take note -- this is real innovation. Apple didn't invent the technology -- it gets its AirPort cards straight from Lucent. But Steve Jobs et al deserve a lot of credit for seeing the potential in the technology, integrating it into their hardware and software, and bringing it to market at prices that have competitors gasping.

Check out this incredible satellite image of the smoke plume from the Los Alamos fire drifting across several states.

Ingolf is a young man with a bathroom obsession. His entire 65-square-metre apartment has been converted into a washroom. And he lives in it, dreaming of his girlfriend Eva, who is as beautiful as the shower attachment, and feels "My bathroom and I are one". He listens to Beach Boys' hits and Handel's Water Music, loves and sleeps in the bathtub. And when he dies, he wants a bathroom sink with pedestal and crossbar taps on his grave in place of a gravestone. Ingolf is the hero of our modern fairytale.