randomWalks

We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites. That is all there is to it.
   -- Joseph Campbell

Justin Quinnell’s bath, as seen by his tongue? Justin held a film canister in his mouth to achieve this perspective. My new digital camera should arrive any day now, but in the meantime I’m developing a fascination with pinhole cameras. I’ll probably make my first one out of an oatmeal box. Some people get into the technical aspects of pinhole photography, (you can be extremely precise if you wish) but I’m drawn to it for the opposite reason – without a viewfinder, a precision lens, and a computer controlled shutter, you can’t possibly know quite what will develop. I’m also a sucker for anything with such a wonderful history.

Dr. Dre has followed through with his threat to sue Napster. He issued a statement yesterday in which he stated 'I don't like people stealing my music'. I guess it wasn't 'stealing' when Dre made all those mixtapes that used be sold at the LA swap meets back in the early days of his career. I have a couple of those tapes and I don't think Dre got any of the music cleared, nor do I think he sent any of the artists royalty checks for beats used on those tapes.

-- Davey D takes Dr. Dre to task in the latest edition of his FNV Newsletter.

"I learned about black consciousness from Tyson," Gore said. Tyson got him to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. Gore said he remembered "loooonnng conversations at night in the bunk beds, top to bottom and back again" about the books, and how and why blacks perceived the world differently from whites. "You know, the way concepts of value and worth and beauty and normality are all defined in a majority culture in ways that can be hurtful . . . It was really quite an education."

This frightens me.

Three things I want to find in the Northern Virginia area: vegetarian restaurants, farmer’s markets, and food co-ops.

I know I won’t find vegetarian Chinese food as good as Hunan Delight in Brooklyn or Vegetarian House of Dim Sum in Manhattan’s Chinatown, but I’m going to keep my eye on the vegetarian resources listed at dcpages.com, and maybe one day make it out to Rockville MD to try Yuan Fu. The Vegetarian Society of DC also keeps a list of area restaurants and groceries.

Since we won’t be able to get great produce by just walking down the street, we’re going to have to figure out the farmer’s market scene.

We never joined the Park Slope Food Coop, probably because they didn’t let non-members shop and membership required a $100 deposit. A membership certainly would have been worth the money, but it never seemed to be the right time. Natural food stores are few and far between, but there’s Straight from the Crate in Alexandria, and The Uncommon Market, a cooperative in Arlington. Kendall at monkeyfist has a good explanation of why I want to avoid shopping at Fresh Fields as much as possible.

We’ll also need a source for fresh bulk spices, and ingredients for Indian, Japanese, and Chinese dishes that we make. This Washingtonian Restaurants and Dining section actually has a good deal of info about shopping for groceries. According to this Washingtonian article on ‘ethnic’ markets, there’s a great Indian spice store in Arlington. So I guess we’ll be alright.

After 35 years, the fabled movie cut from hours and hours of film and audio tape recorded on the Merry Pranksters' bus is being released on video in 10 or so episodes. I found out this morning and ordered a copy of the first episode right away. I’ve been wanting to see this ever since I read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the $29 tape includes footage of Neal Cassady’s famous rants – the same Neal Cassady who became Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road – which makes it priceless, if you ask me.

All of our stuff is packed in candy boxes we found on the street on recycling night – Bubblicious, Twizzler, Kablooie Blast, Lemonheads, Gummy Wormz in Candy Dirt, Ludens Cherry Lozenges, Swedish Fish. Sometimes I think I’d rather open a box and find the candy than a bunch of cords and markers and papers and floppies.

Sometimes (like just now) drinking beer gives me the hiccups. That’s weird, but not as weird as my wife, who gets hiccups whenever she eats boiled eggs or french fries. I’ve always found the ‘cures’ (holding your breath, breathing into a paper bag, drinking from the far side of a glass) to be unreliable, but it took google about 3 seconds to find me a cure that worked.

The Onion has a couple more Easter card designs on their site, and isee isay is celebrating this Easter with an investigation into the true nature of peeps, those bright yellow sugar-coated marshmallow ducks which inspire either candylust or revulsion (occasionally both) in everyone I know.

It's like suddenly learning how to program in C++, only you have to eat the guy from tech support to see the benefits.

Smash! in DC, some record store in Portland OR, and See Hear in NY are some places I’ve found copies of Cometbus, my favorite zine. Read Punk Rock Love and see why.

“According to Steven Hager, editor of High Times, the [tradition] began in the California city of San Rafael in the early 1970s, when a small group of high school students called the Waldos began gathering every day at 4:20 p.m. to toke up at the foot of a statue of Louis Pasteur.” Apparently lots of people got high yesterday.

Everybody was linking to the Constructor recently, but it didn’t hold my interest. I just found Gravilux, and I’ll probably be playing with it all day.

Harrowing account of attack on Black Zimbabweans, vis-à-vis robotwisdom.

Apparently angling for a picture in the dictionary under ‘myopia’, the Librarian of Congress declared last week that the Library of Congress will not digitize its collection. I guess he misplaced his copy of the mission statement or something.

The appeal of laissez-faire capitalism, as it spread around the world until it vanquished even the Soviets, was simple: You need neither a change in structures nor a change in human nature. Instead, the bad side of human nature -- the greed, competitiveness, and materialism -- could be counted on to magically produce enough wealth that many people could actually enjoy the easy life that the utopians and commissars could only promise. That is the revolutionary idea of our time, and it has cast into a sepia shadow both Gandhi and Lenin. We distrust moralizing as thoroughly as we distrust government; in a cynical age, our ultimate trust is in the notion that trust is unnecessary, that we should each simply advance our own cause.

Here’s a page of Godel, Escher, Bach resources. One day I’m going to read this incredible book all the way through. Who? Godel, Escher, Bach. Why? Take a peek at what’s inside.

The best pictures yet of Area 51 were recently released. No one can get through to the official site, of course, not even Mulder and Scully.

Bryan Boyer’s Hidden Information Spaces is required reading for Web designers. thanks, invisiblog.

xblog reminded me that Scott McCloud’s new book Reinventing Comics (a follow up to Understanding Comics) is due out soon. I’m going to keep an eye on xblog’s archive of comics links.

William A. Dickey renamed the peak, the tallest point in North America, Mt. McKinley in 1896. Why he got to name it is hard to fathom. Dickey had come to Alaska spurred by discoveries of gold in Cook Inlet. With three companions he made it to Talkeetna and saw Denali, "the great one" in the language of the nearby Tanaina Indians. According to C. H. Merriam, testifying before the U.S. Geographical Board in 1917, "The right of the discoverer to name geographical features has never been questioned," but Dickey was no discoverer. Native people had discovered the mountain thousands of years earlier. Even if only white people "discover," Russians saw it in the 1770s or 1780s and named it Bulshaia Gora, "big mountain." Even if only English-speaking white people "discover," George Vancouver saw Denali in 1794. Dickey was not even the first white American to see it; other Americans had preceded him by a quarter century.

indymedia: live coverage of imf & world bank protests

studio X live audio coverage of a16
mobilization radio
a16 official site
monkeyfist a16 coverage
yahoo IMF news photo search
washingtonpost.com special report
c-span streaming video of rally & march
kidspost: the protests explained - “Do the two sides agree on anything? They agree there are more than a billion people on Earth who barely have enough money to survive."
wp cameraworks top story
infoshop news (scroll down)
znet a16 coverage & analysis
a-infos news

Some really good Boondocks strips recently:

March 1
March 12
March 18
March 21
Feb 17

Gotta remember Teaser anticorporate media and resources.