randomWalks

VixenLove’s logs by score. via Blort.

originally posted by xowie

Nice guide to polyamory, not that I would know.

originally posted by daiichi

If you have any appreciation of the psychedelic G-Force software — also known as the iTunes Visualizer — check out G-Force Gold Upgrade. I post this as an excuse to reinforce my meme-child: Andy O’Meara has more than earned a MacArthur (“genius”) Fellowship. Make his Christmas merry with a purchase, if the spirit moves you.

seven o'clock, roof
eleven o'clock, back yard
three o'clock, pine tree

From '3 Haikus About Squirrels' by Bill Smith in LA Weekly: Supplement: The List 2003: More Lists

Dennis Kucinich: the Kuro5hin interview.

originally posted by xowie

This writing gig, this is my Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where it is easy to be bold and honest and confrontational. But in my real life, I have always been shy and wussy, and Mr. Rogers' gentle-Americana Buddhism made me feel as if that was good. He knew that the only reassurance in the face of the Sendakian horrors of childhood—the uncertainty, the lack of control—is acceptance. His neighborhood wasn't a utopia—he lived alone in a small apartment with a fish tank—but a community where every type of person was nice to him because he accepted them. I'd assuage my loneliness by jamming to my Mr. Rogers album all the time, but it wasn't until high school that I learned how politically radical Fred Rogers was. One of the toughest kids in the school, drunk, his gold chain hanging halfway down his already hairy chest, told me his dad would lock him and his brother in the closet every time he caught them watching Mr. Rogers, fearful the show would turn them into homosexuals. But even years later, at 18 years old and miles from a sweater vest, this kid still loved Mr. Rogers. And I realized how much worse my high school, and my world, would have been without him.

originally posted by xowie

Terror Alert Level

For Biracial Children, a Look at Attitudes (washingtonpost.com)

"You have to be very careful to explain this on a level that they understand," said Francis Wardle, director of the Center for the Study of Biracial Children in Denver. "Kids don't understand race. They don't understand who is codified by race, and how it differs from country to country."

Wardle said Williams's decision to proclaim her heritage "is a wonderful opportunity to look at the history of race in this country."

He said he does not see that happening yet, because news coverage has focused solely on Williams, rather than on the vast population of other mixed-race Americans from her era who were abandoned by white parents.

MP3 recordings of Daniel Pinchbeck at Palenque Norte 2003, a Burning Man theme camp. Author of Breaking Open the Head: a psychedelic journey into the heart of contemporary shamanism, Pinchbeck said of this talk, “I was very proud of this event … in a quite intense headspace at the time… think I put a lot of information together, and presented the core of what I am hoping to do in the next book.”

Clark's net worth (between $3 million and $3.5 million, according to his campaign spokesman) is far less than the assets of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who, with his wife, is worth an estimated $500 million. According to news accounts, the net worth of other Democratic candidates ranges from $13 million to $60 million for Sen. John Edwards (N.C.); $2.2 million to $5 million for former Vermont governor Howard Dean; and $2,000 to $32,000 for Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio).

Clark's Earnings Are Way Up (washingtonpost.com). (Thanks, linus.)

By the second bottle of wine, Kesey said, "America is hard on writers. I call it the Hemingway complex. Who I am, my persona, stands behind my characters. It's as though I'm holding a mask out in front of me and writing through the mask. Who you get is me behind the mask. You don't get that from Shakespeare, or Mark Twain. I have no idea who Melville was, but Ahab will stalk around in my attic for the rest of my life, and that's how it ought to be." Kesey the messenger had become the message. When Hemingway the hunter became Hemingway the hunted, he slipped a shotgun into his mouth and tripped the trigger with his toe. Kerouac's "Road" ended in his mother's Florida ranch house, Kerouac's magnificent youth bloated, unshaven, angry and sodden.

Sparks fly upwards: Remembering Ken Kesey

creak, creak, we’re down south: The Metaphysics of Humor

Bags and Boards Variety comics weblog

Full-Circle 360° at once panoramic camera lens w/‘aha!’ diagram

The poet rode waves that peaked on accusation and explanation:

you weren't there when whips cracked the backs
I was there I didn't see you

The crowd was shouting back to Roger as he voiced its feeling, gave air to black peoples' grievance at the commercial success of white bands imitating black bands. "The Music Man" continued. Locating himself as the heir to a culture formed from the experiences of Afrikans in enslavement. Black music is his birthright and we white people who play this music and sell it out by selling it off in watered down forms were being called to task. He said that he was there on the slave ships, that he had sung the songs of slaves, that he was those people and they were him, in him now, calling his poem, inflecting his voice with its Trinian accent, fuelling that fire that gave birth to his passion. The last verse fell off of a crescendo and he slowed down easing us to the close:

i am the music man/ i am the music man/i am the music man
and you're a t'ief.

He left the stage to acclaim from his peers. The MC came on and all he said was "Yo Red," which was my poetry call sign. Speaking to me in poetry. The whole poem was addressed to white people working with black forms. People like me. In fact, the poem was addressed directly to me. I stood there dealing with my feelings of disorientation. I was being called out, again. Twice in one night. Something was happening. Something I couldn't deny. A challenge to what I was doing surrounding myself with the signs of black cultural forms.

Photographs, it has often been said, both objectify and subjectify what they depict. They atomize time, disconnecting past from present. A picture may tell a thousand words, but words have ultimate power over photographs because each photograph is just a fragment: it needs words to assign it a context, and this context may change along with the message of the image.

originally posted by xowie

Baltimore City Paper: Funny Paper, November 24-30, 2003

The cavemen have a strange and halting conversation about how thankful they are for freedom of speech. The last B.C. was this clunky was on Nov. 10, when Johnny Hart ran a gag about a crescent-moon-adorned outhouse that some observers took to be a veiled slur against Islam. At the time, Funny Paper wasn't sure if Hart was guilty or not, but the very awkwardness of the strip made us suspicious. Plus it wasn't funny. Not that that proves anything about B.C. But we're going to have to add this Thanksgiving strip to the court file. If Hart wasn't insulting Islam, why's he taking the First Amendment now? His defense two weeks ago was that he hadn't said anything offensive in the strip. Now he appears to be saying that he had the right to say what he didn't say. Which is it, Johnny? Victim or martyr?

It is not about getting back in touch with my masculine side. It is not about getting in touch with my feminine side or my social side or my college side or my macho grunting drunken hangover side. I am not in a frat. It's about, very simply, the human side.

originally posted by xowie

How the White House Fooled NPR by NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin.

They had four different varieties. I asked them what the mildest one was and they recommended the Mexicans. Within 15 minutes I started to get this warm, tingly feeling. Within half an hour the market had become this vibrant and colourful place.

The Guardian: High times in magic mushroom business - and it's perfectly legal. Mycology in the U.K.

Please watch the Where’d The Cheese Go fan video.

Am I Infected? A Complete Guide to Testing for HIV.

originally posted by xowie

New York Times: Frank Rich: America Tunes In for the Money Shot

People are turned on by the Jackson story because it's about sex, specifically pedophilia, at a time when the sexual fetishization of children is not limited to whatever may or may not have happened at Mr. Jackson's ranch. If a mass audience can fixate on whether or not Britney Spears, a singer first marketed as a devoutly Baptist schoolgirl, has lost her virginity, it is no wonder that the Jackson sideshow would move to the center ring and become a main event.

So if anything of value is to come from this circus, let's drop the pretense that it is about something as lofty as the American system of justice or even the lure of fame. The public, while purporting to be outraged by the crime of child abuse, is hypocritically slobbering over every last speculative pornographic detail used to fill in the supposed contours of that abuse; cable news ratings immediately shot up by double digits. And those who are now taking to the public stage to intone gravely about pedophilia in the Jackson show are often trading in titillation themselves; you haven't lived until you've heard Larry King bandy about the word "penetration."

Grooming an ELF: How Tre Arrow turned Jake Sherman into an “eco-terrorist” by Carlton Smith.

originally posted by xowie