The new decade

doesn't start until the end of 2010.

C'mon, people...get it right.

Geothermal energy is a bad idea.

a really bad idea.

First let us start with the idea that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Geothermal, as I understand it, involves tapping into the molten core of the earth for energy. This can be done in several ways. Some methods are more passive - using a heat exchanger to heat water to heat house and water. One place I have experienced this is at the Breightonbush Hot Springs in Oregon. Their sauna is right over an open geothermal pool, capturing the heat and steam that would be lost into the atmosphere anyways. Another method, enhanced geothermal system, involved drilling into the earth ( i.e. !!!WARNING Not using naturally occurring sources of geothermal energy WARNING!!!) and injecting cold water into the "hot dry rock." The water then heats, expands and is converted into electricity using either a steam turbine or a binary power plant system. This method has lead to earthquakes. Granted they were only 2.9. But man made earthquakes are not a good thing.

But what worries me is not the possibility of man made earthquakes, but the assumption that geothermal energy is a sustainable source. Sustainable in comparison to coal - less CO2 emitted and maybe more sustainable than nuclear power plants - no radioactive waste to deal with. But the long term consequences are much more frightening. And our collective inability to see down this road is what is really frightening.

The earth's magnetic shield, the magnetosphere, "provides protection, without which life as we know it could not survive. Mars, with little or no magnetic field is thought to have lost much of its former oceans and atmosphere to space in part due to the direct impact of the solar wind. Venus with its thick atmosphere is thought to have lost most of its water to space in large part owing to solar wind ablation. " The shield, which protects all life on earth, is generated by the Earth's FLUID core spinning. See dynamo field.

For this to work, the core must be liquid. And if we suck more and more energy out of the core it will cool. This will lead to solidification. This will lead to death of the magnetosphere. And this will lead to the death of everything on the planet. Except for roaches and those bacteria that live down near the vents at the bottom of the ocean. Oh, but wait, Mars lost it's ocean due to solar winds. So I guess everything on earth will die.

But, wait, you say - The Earth's core is so huge and we could never extract that much energy. Humans can't have that much impact on our planet.

Overfishing anyone?
Deforestation?
Global warming?

When humans started using petrochemicals for fuel, did we even have a concept of running out of them or that we would affect the atmosphere? We, as a species, cannot look that far ahead.

You heard it here first - Geothermal energy is a BAD idea.

New Website

Coming soon!!

wasswasswass.com should be up some time next week.

andrewwass.com will still work and redirect you to wasswasswass.com

Public transportation in Upland

Walking from my mom's house to Hangar 18 climbing gym - 1 hour and 30 minutes

Taking the bus from my mom's house to Hangar 18 climbing gym - 2 hours 17 minutes

any questions?

Macluhan vs. Johnstone

Content lies in the structure (Keith Johnstone) = The medium is the message (Marshall Macluhan)

discuss

Missile Defense

“Scrapping the U.S. missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic does little more then empower Russia and Iran at the expense of our allies in Europe,” said Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, the House minority leader. “It shows a willful determination to continue ignoring the threat posed by some of the most dangerous regimes in the world, while taking one of the most important defenses against Iran off the table.” - from the NY Times September 17, 2009.


Distance from Tehran to Warsaw -1877 miles
Distance from Tehran to Jerusalem - 975 miles
Why don't we put the missile system in Israel? It's closer to Iran.

Fair Health Care

If the U.S government won't pay for its citizens healthcare, why should it pay for the healthcare of the politicians?

Blue Accords

Live from Berlin, it's Monday night. Though when you read this it won't be Monday night. Though chances are 1 in 7 that it will be a Monday, but not the same Monday night that I am writing this. I was lucky enough to see two shows in this year's Tanz im August festival. I say lucky, not in relation to what I saw, but that I was able to get tickets. Seems like dance performances sell out here in advance. The tickets I got were for the Thomas Hauert/Zoo performance of Accords at the Akademie der Kunste performance and for the Juan Dominguez performance of Blue at Hau 2. I had never heard of these companies before. Availability determined my fate.

To be flippantly glib or glibly flippant (can one be flippantly flip?), I would say that Zoo's performance of Accords was Flocking 201 mixed with simulstart and a peppering of bad contact and that Blue was bad acting with few props. Should I describe the performances in more detail? Should a Danish professor include the cartoons in her book about the cartoons and how they incited the Muslim world?

The set for Accords was an empty stage with black panels hung in the back. Each the height of the stage and about 3 feet wide, they were spaced widely enough apart for dancers to slide on/off stage between them. The lighting varied from general washes to sharp diagonal bands to lighting behind the backstage panels (one of my favorite parts) to murky gobos. The costumes were tight primary color pants and shirts covered in black mesh body suits. Sound was a smorgasborg. Wish I hadn't recycled the program so I could tell you what the exactly range was. I remember classical music and the chirping of birds. Oh and Eric Satie. Thank gawd for Eric, because I was able to tell how far along we were in the performance. That is the only good thing about using a bunch of songs in performance, letting the audience figure out how much longer they have left, well that and to tell the audience how cool your iPod play list is.

The performance consisted of sections delineated by performers entering or exiting the stage through the spaces between the curtain. The sections were either simulstart/stop, flocking, or awkward partnering. Simulstart or simultaneous start is when the performers try to move at the same time. When engaged in this score, dancers tend to clump near each other and did Hauert and his dancers. Flocking is when people move in a clump changing spacing/facing with no discernible leader. Awkward partnering is skilled bodies coming in contact in an improvised manner consciously eschewing the CI movement paradigm. The tension in the hands and reluctance to full engage the hands on the bodies of other dancers lead me to believe that the dancers did not have much CI training. But I cannot be sure as the program did not have any information on the dancers themselves.

Three memorable sections:
1. The panels were lit from behind and the dancers ran them cross stage. It was like watching stills from a movie(French guy?Lumiere?), runners caught mid-stride.
2. Two dancers lying on the ground down stage left, light from above. Simple movements of limbs extending across and above each other.
3. All 7 dancers onstage dimly lit with a marsh(?) soundscape. Dancers would move with similar timing and flavor to the bird calls in the soundscape.

Why were these more memorable sections? I'd say the first one was the change of relationship to the set and the visual pop dancers appearing in bright light. The second because it was something besides simulstart/stop, flocking, or awkward partnering. And the movement wasn't as frantic allowing some respite from locorhea (movement diarhhea?) as can happen in improvisation and well choreography too for that matter. The third, though it was kinda cheesy and strawberry ice cream, 5, 5, 5, 5, I get it 5, but it was nice to see a more direct relationship between the movements and sounds. "The bird is chirping and I am dancing in the same rhythm, whee!!"

What was Hauert trying to reveal to the audience? Listening skills? The performers had rehearsed a lot and it was enjoyable to watch the skilled bodies move simultaneously. But their energy was too inward, too much into the group. Can a group be tuned and aware with out everyone having to look into the center? One woman who came out and did a solo (that was too short) was lithe and rubber limbed and able to go in an direction with ease, drawing support from all facets of her body. Too short in that she was joined by another dancer for a close range let's look at each other and smile simulstart duet, "show the audience what you are feeling, that you are having a good time" It was also enjoyable to see the melding of flocking and simulstart, different dancers taking the initiative to change to facing or the vocabulary. And as nice as it is to see an improvisation stay within a world or a frame, I felt that this one went on too long. But maybe Hauert was using the boredom created to make those three sections pop. I think a little less boredom would have made them pop just fine.

Blue by Juan Dominguez as I stated before was bad acting with a few props. Or maybe it was avant garde dancing with a few props, or maybe it was advanced guard singing with a few props, or maybe it was fortgeschrittene Wache welding with a few props. In these post-disciplinary days (a term I learned about recently from a friend who learned about it from the Art Institute of Chicago), I can't say for sure what it was - dance, singing or welding. But as Blue was part of Tanz im August, Blue with be viewed as dance for the purposes of this diatribe...I mean review.

The recap - 4 people standing on stage, 2 women hugging center stage, a man stage right near 2 cases of water bottles, another woman stage left. A black curtain arcing from upstage right to center stage. Full white lighting exposing the walls, pipes etc. And they kept standing, and standing. Yep, I must be in Europe, the piece is starting with standing. Add in self conscious smiling. Another man enters. The five dancers (welders? weavers? clowns?) clump together, hold hands occasionally kiss each other on the check, shift position. A piece of cheesecake enter the scene and two women eat it with exaggerated enjoyment. "Show the audience what you are feeling and tasting" I imagined the choreographer (director? conductor? therapist?) saying. Pants are removed, shirts exchanged, a wig appears on the bald guy. Someone leaves stage, the performers start laughing uproariously as one of them enters with a piece of black cloth. Fingers become horns and a bull fight ensues. An iron board, a TV and a large piece of iron that is used as a couterbalance enter the stage. More laughter. Someone pulls up the white marley and crawls under pretending to go to sleep. More laughter. Sexual innuendos appear - A man sucking a plastic bag, rubbing his ass crack on the corner of the wall, a woman rubbing her nipples on a rope. Another woman humping the crack between two marley sheets. "We're doing the sex thing. Wink Wink." A woman thrusts her left breast repeatedly into a boot. Rubbing each others noses, a duet goes between recognizable and silly sexual acts. The five dancers clump together each touching or groping at least 1 other person. As soon as the nudity appeared about 15 people started to leave. Not sure if it was because of the nudity or that they finally had had enough. Enough of what exactly? Watching five people "experience" things in an exaggerated manner? After the mock orgy, a ping pong ball appeared and the dancers(?) formed a circle. Throwing the ball back and forth the performers screamed. One by one they left the stage. Oh, I think I forgot to mention the part when the water bottles were rolled across stage. This, too, was seen as hilarious.

The audience half heartedly clapped. I booed. The performers did not reappear. The audience clapped louder trying to get the welders(?) back on stage. They did not appear.

My main objection to this piece was that there were no boundaries. Anything could have happened and it would have fit in the piece. Maybe that was Dominguez's point. Anything goes. In the program he wrote - Reversing the temporality of events, putting them out of context...- Yep, I guess that is what I mean by boundaries, the events had no context. He also wrote - ...prolonging the pleasure...exaggerated manner...- Was that the faux sex and exaggerated enjoyment of the cheesecake? -...tracing the amorphous... - sounds impossible - ...imagining reality... - why bother? it's already here- - ...transforming curiousity...astonishing more -

AHHH, THIS REVIEW IS GETTING TO BE WAY TOO LONG AND LOSING FOCUS...

(hmm...sounds like the last piece)

Beauty Contests

In the 1930s, financial markets, for obvious reasons, didn’t get much respect. Keynes compared them to “those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors.” - from the NY Times.

sounds like an apt description to me

Past affecting Future

From the NY Times 2009/07/15

"Repeatedly, Judge Sotomayor sought to persuade the panel that her past, rather than determining how she rules on cases, makes her more perceptive in sorting out the issues."

But if her past is making her more perceptive about the issues, then won't it affect how she rules?

"No, the judge said. She pledged that “at no point nor time” would she let her background affect how she rules."

But then doesn't this mean that she cannot let her past make her more perceptive in sorting out the issues?

' “I think the system is strengthened when judges don’t assume they’re impartial,” she said." '

"This statement seems to contradict that she will "at no point nor time" affect how she rules. Why can't we all admit that everyone is biased? Some are more biased more than others but that is only when their bias does not jive with your bias.

I say let her on the Court. She has enough experience. And there are enough old white male biases on the court. Time for another bias.

Don't Put Bernie in Jail

I think it is a terrible idea to put Bernie Madoff in jail. I am not saying that I think he is innocent and I am not saying that I think he should not be punished. I think he should be punished and severely.

But if he is put in jail, he will once again be living off other people. He will continue his parasitic lifestyle. He will be sucking his livelihood from the taxpayer. We will be paying for his food and shelter and his health insurance.

Instead of putting him in jail we should make him live in a suburb of Pheonix or Cleveland or Fresno. Make him live in a nondescript badly struccoed apartment complex with meth addicts and hookers. In a small one bedroom with broken air-conditioning and dark wood paneling. With the only view being the back of an equalling depressing building and the dumpsters between them.

Make Madoff work at a minimum wage job that does not provide health insurance. Make it so that he can never be promoted and always has to clean the bathrooms. Make him stay there till he croaks with no retirement and terrible health insurance.

Yes, this might fall under "cruel and unusual", but shouldn't the punishment fit the crime?

Food

From an article in the NY Times -

Chili’s cook up “hyper-palatable food that requires little chewing and goes down easily"

hmm...doesn't sound hyper-palatable when it's put that way

and

the Snickers bar, for instance, is “extraordinarily well engineered.”

Now I know why I love Snickers...good engineering!

Redundancy

A PIN number is what people use at an ATM machine.

Re: G.U.T

G.U.T is this.

An aesthetic has no inherent tool or logic.
A tool has no inherent logic or aesthetic.
A logic has no inherent aesthetic or tool.

Violence begets Violence

What would have been the worst thing to happen if police and the Basijis hadn't shown up?
Sounds like the bad stuff started when "police and militia forces used guns, truncheons, tear gas and water cannons to beat back thousands of demonstrators" Where did they need to be back from? Did the demonstrators have pitchforks and torches? Were they threatening anyone?

Trying to use the fear of pain is obviously not working, so why does the government insist on escalating it? It is just making the current Iranian government look bad.

The situation would have blown over much faster if the protesters had been allowed to march peacefully. Let them get their yayas out and then eventually they'd go home.

Moderate Drinkers

"Moderate drinkers are healthier, wealthier and more educated, and they get better health care, even though they are more likely to smoke. They are even more likely to have all of their teeth, a marker of well-being."

Maybe also better looking and loads more charm...

What the Fuck? File # 17-L

A 14-year old German boy was hit in the hand by a pea-sized meteorite that scared the bejeezus out of him and left a scar.

"When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road," Gerrit Blank said in a newspaper account. Astronomers have analyzed the object and conclude it was indeed a natural object from space, The Telegraph reports.

Most meteors vaporize in the atmosphere, creating "shooting stars," and never reach the ground. The few that do are typically made mostly of metals. Stony space rocks, even if they are big as a car, will usually break apart or explode as they crash through the atmosphere.

There are a handful of reports of homes and cars being struck by meteorites, and many cases of space rocks streaking to the surface and being found later.

But human strikes are rare. There are no known instances of humans being killed by space rocks.

According to a SPACE.com article on the topic a few years, back:

• On November 30, 1954, Alabama housewife Ann Hodges was taking a nap on her couch when she was awakened by a 3-pound (1.4-kilogram) meteor that crashed through the roof of her house, bounced off a piece of furniture and struck her in the hip, causing a large bruise.
• On October 9, 1992, a large fireball was seen streaking over the eastern United States, finally exploding into many pieces. In Peekskill, New York, one of the pieces struck a Chevrolet automobile owned by Michelle Knapp. Knapp was not in the car at the time.
• On June 21, 1994, Jose Martin of Spain was driving with his wife near Madrid when a 3-pound (1.4-kilogram) meteor crashed through his windshield, bent the steering wheel and ended up in the back seat.

In 2004, a 2,000-pound space rock bigger than a refrigerator exploded in the late-night sky over Chicago, producing a large flash and a sound resembling a detonation that woke people up. Fragments rained down on that wild Chicago night, and many were collected by residents in a northern suburb.

Titles

Title = intention or context


Yes?

No?

Processed Foods

I know processed foods are unhealthy but this really was a shocker...

"Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients." (From the NY Times)

CI

Contact Improvisation:

2 or more dancers sharing weight experiencing gravity.

Abstract Narrative

Is "abstract narrative" code for "I am not sure what I am doing"?

Laughter

If sit-coms have laugh tracks, why do dramas not have crying or screaming tracks?

Choreo vs. Impro

The glass is either half full or half empty.

Wrong. It's both. Those two states are not mutually exclusive.

Been thinking about choreography, improvisation, definitions a lot since M2M '09. Had an "aha" moment the other day driving home. No piece is either choreographed or improvised. All pieces are both. Even the most rigorously choreographed piece has a vast number of variations each time it is performed. And each improvisation has a lot of choreography i.e. habit, physical limitations etc.

Also the question of which elements are improvised and which are choreographed arises. For several years, Lower Left has been choreographing pieces using the lights. We predetermine(choreograph) what the lights will be and how long each will be on and what the transitions will be. What our bodies do within those lights is improvised. But then there is the question of habits and current injuries and what other information we have been taking in recently. All those elements can limit or choreograph us.

In fact with each improvisation each piece that people claim is "open" has a huge amount of predetermined factors:
-Gravity
It will still be same throughout the piece. There might be some fluctuation due to the moon and the earth's spinning core or other factors. But essentially the same.
-The Theater
Not many pieces change venues partway through. How many improvisations have decided to leave the building completely? (How about choreographing a piece but improvising the theater/location?)
-Performers
yes, people do enter and exit the performance space, but they are still the performers. How do we improvise the performers. Beside the names in a hat thing, because that is from a predetermined set of performers.
-Costumes
The pieces I have been in that had costume changes were choreographed as were the costume changes. I haven't been in a single improvisation in which I had the opportunity to improvise my costume. I have disrobed, maybe that counts. But never had an improvisation with costume as an equal improvisational element. Must look into this.
-Bodies
I always (for the most part) have the same body. I have never been able to grow extra legs on stage. Never have I seen anyone improvise on stage how many limbs s/he had.

Every piece is choreographed and every piece is improvised. The question is what elements are the choreographed ones and which ones are the improvised ones. And the next question is how tightly each one is improvised and choreographed.

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Darwin Thwarted Again

BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- A polar bear attacked a woman at Berlin Zoo Friday afternoon after she climbed a fence and jumped into its habitat during feeding time, police said Saturday. One adult polar bit her several times after she plunged into the moat, police said.Zoo workers tossed rescue rings toward the woman to hoist her out and distract polar bears swimming nearby, said Goerg Gebhard, a Berlin police officer. At one point the woman fell back into the water and was grabbed by a bear before she was eventually hoisted to safety. "They saved her life," Gebhard told CNN. The woman was severely injured and was being treated at a hospital, police said. It's unclear why the woman entered the bear habitat, but police issued her a citation for trespassing. Berlin Zoo is home to Knut, the first polar bear to be born there in over 30 years. The bear became a huge talking point in Germany when his mother gave birth to him in December 2006.



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New Method of Terrorist Attack?

A man stole a plane from a Canadian flight school and flew into the United States.

Will this be the new paradigm of attack? 9/11 caused the first shift. And then the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid caused another shift. Thanks to him we have to take our shoes off now when going through security. Found out after looking at Wikipedia that I am 6 days older than the Shoe Bomber.
from Wikipedia - "He was sentenced by Judge Young to life imprisonment on each of the three charges, 20 years imprisonment on four other charges, and 30 years on four other counts, to be served consecutively, followed by five years of supervised release."

So after the Shoe Bomber serves his life imprisonment term he will have 5 years of supervised release. Who is going to supervise that? And then once the supervision is done, will he be able to freely roam the after-life?

But back to the topic at hand - Are Cessnas from Canada the new dirty bomb? What about Mexico? Well, those from Mexico are probably too full of cocaine or weed to put any bombs in them. But then again, I heard that Canada grows some fine buds also...

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Aging

The older you get, the more slowly you age.

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The Positions of the Human Form

360(shoulder) x 360 (shoulder) x 135(elbow) x 135(elbow) x 360 (wrist) x 360 (wrist) x 360 (spine) x 360 (hip) x 360 (hip) x 135(knee) x 135(knee) x 360 (ankle) x 360 (ankle) x 360 (head) =

12,143,953,109,659,430,000,000,000,000,000,000 body positions

Between 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 estimated number of stars in the universe.

Assuming 1 postion/sec (31,449,600 seconds in a year)

386,140,145,173,847,400,000,000,000 years for 1 person to do all positions.


These are rough calculations that do not take into account several factors. The fingers, the face, the wide range of mobility of the spine, the various sizes of circles that each rotation joint can do.

If you wanted to see how many possible positions there are in a duet, square the large number at the top. A trio - that number to the third power... a quartet that number to the fourth power etc.

Adding in costumes, lighting, repetition of movement, sound...there are an infinite number of dances possible.

Which leads me to a question of value. If so many dances are possible, how do we determine the good ones? Value and quantity usually have an inverse relationship - the greater the number of something, the less that something is valued. Take grains of sand and diamonds.

Are all of the dances that have been created of equal value because there are vastly fewer dances that have been created in comparison to dances that have not been created? Is every dance you will see in your lifetime of equal value?

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Tax Cuts vs. Food Stamps

From Harper's Index:

Estimated amount by which the U.S. GDP increases for each additional dollar of tax cuts:
$1.03
Amount for each additional dollar of infrastructure spending and food stamps, respectively:
$1.59, $1.73

Are Republicans, supposedly the business minded and business friendly party, unaware of this fact? Maybe I don't have such a great business acumen but I have always thought a 73% or even a meagrer 59% return on investment is much better than a 3% return. But then again, the Republicans were at the helm when the economy went into the toilet, so what do they know.

What are we waiting for, Obama? Let's start feeding people and building bridges!!!

Don't candles also make greenhouses gases?

From an Antarctic research base to the Great Pyramids of Egypt and beyond, the world switched off the lights on Saturday for Earth Hour, dimming skyscrapers, city streets and some of the world's most recognizable monuments for 60 minutes to highlight the threat of climate change.

Sounds like a good idea. But I am not sure if everyone got the idea completely.

"In Australia, people attended candlelit speed-dating events..."

Candles burn oxygen creating carbon dioxide, a green house gas. Therefore they were still adding to the problem.

"A key 2010 football World Cup qualifier against Serbia posed a dilemma for Romanians. "Shall we watch the match or turn off the lights?," the 7plus daily asked in its main front-page headline."

Couldn't they just play the game during the day time when there is carbon free light?

"McDonald's Corp. planned to dim its arches at 500 locations around the U.S. Midwest"

Why not stop selling burgers for an hour? The consumption of meat adds more to global warming than transportation.

Irish Police

Sounds like the police in Ireland could use the Rosetta Stone.

from the BBC -

"Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up with the country's most reckless driver have emerged.

He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.

However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.

Poles are Ireland's largest immigrant population

But then his cover was blown.

It was discovered that the man every member of the Irish police's rank and file had been looking for - a Mr Prawo Jazdy - wasn't exactly the sort of prized villain whose apprehension leads to an officer winning an award.

In fact he wasn't even human.

"Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence," read a letter from June 2007 from an officer working within the Garda's traffic division.

"Having noticed this, I decided to check and see how many times officers have made this mistake.

"It is quite embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities."

The officer added that the "mistake" needed to be rectified immediately and asked that a memo be circulated throughout the force.

In a bid to avoid similar mistakes being made in future relevant guidelines were also amended.

And if nothing else is learnt from this driving-related debacle, Irish police officers should now know at least two words of Polish.

As for the seemingly elusive Mr Prawo Jazdy, he has presumably become a cult hero among Ireland's largest immigrant population"

Solar Panels over Parking Lots

After seeing this on the news yesterday, I had one of those moments of - Duh, why didn't I think of that? (a feeling that also happens when viewing contemporary art) In Sunnyvale, Ca, the parking lot of Applied Materials is covered in solar panels. Electric vehicles can charge up in that lot.

Why are we not covering every single parking lot south of San Francisco with such structures? I remember listening to a Science Friday on NPR that talked about solar panels and part of the problem is that there isn't enough room for solar farms near where the power is needed, i.e. urban areas.

Well, doesn't this just solve that problem? How many parking lots, huge parking lots, are there in L.A., in Pheonix, in Houston, that are just baking in the sun 300+ days of the year? Why are we not demanding these solar farms be built? They could be a revenue source by charging people to recharge their cars while they are at the mall or the movies or at Disneyland or the golf courses outside Palm Springs.

Why are we not doing this? Are projects like this in the Stimulus Package?



p.s. why are there golf courses in the desert?

A piece of the Pi

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Art = Science

"[Art] is what it is simply because it can break down fetishes and superstitions and is bold in explorations and because it opposes following the beaten path and dares to destroy outmoded conventions and bad customs."

- Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

The first word in his quote is "science", but art works just as well, if not better. In many repressive regimes throughout history, art is suppressed. As is science.

Galileo, Degenerate Art, Evolution...just to name a few.

Love Hurts With Frequency

Love hurts with frequency.

Drinking a lot of beer is what ails me.

The young lad wept loudly because he didn't catch the ball.

Johnnie Carson was as good as a host as Jack Paar.

Hank always wore nylons when he went stalking

The geologist thought the coarsely foliated and crystallized rock was nice.

After a vigorous food fight, the Maitré d was gored by the spaghetti squash.

Hank spends much of his time looking at a book about reeds and other marsh flora.

He chewed in rhythm while eating a beet salad with a nice balsamic vinaigrette dressing.

Insanity

"Hamas had it coming" read a sign I saw at a protest near the Oakland Farmer's Market last Saturday. Did these children in Palestine have it coming?

Did Hamas think Israel would respond in any other way?

How can Israel not think that killing more wives, husbands, daughters and sons will make even more "terrorists"?

How can Hamas not think that Israel is going to pound the #^@% out of Gaza once they start firing rockets?



Insanity - doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.