Borrowing Money

France is borrowing money to shore up its banks.
Italy too. England, the USA, and Germany also.
Iceland has gone under. Guess they didn't borrow soon enough.
Japan and South Korea are also borrowing money.

From whom are all these countries borrowing to stay afloat?

The Saudis? Russia? The Chinese? Kim Jong Il, illin' and chillin' like a villian above the DMZ?

Too little, Too late

Cheney experiences abnormal heart rhythm.

5 Surgeons

Five surgeons from big cities are discussing who makes the best
patients to operate on:

The first surgeon, from New York , says, 'I like to see Accountants on my operating table; because when you open them up, everything inside is numbered.'

The second surgeon, from Chicago, responds, 'Yeah, but you should try Electricians! Everything inside them is color coded.'

The third surgeon, from Dallas, says, 'No, I really think Librarians are the best. Everything inside them is in alphabetical order.'

The fourth surgeon, from Los Angeles, chimes in, 'You know, I like construction workers. Those guys always understand when you have a few parts left over.'

But the fifth surgeon, from Washington , DC , shut them all up when he observed,

'You're all wrong. Politicians are the easiest to operate on.
There's no guts, no heart, no balls, no brains, and no spine; plus the head and the butt are interchangeable.

Bush is at fault

I am tired of hearing how Bush is at fault for all of our country's problem.

"Bush's policies, Bush is stoopid, Bush this, Bush that." Blah blah blah.

Yes, I agree Bush has been a terrible president. Anyone with half a luke warm cerebellum knows that. But how did he get there? Is Bush at fault or are all the people who voted for him at fault?

We are letting all those people who put him in office, who gave him the power to do what he has done, letting them off too easy. What about all those people who voted against Kerry because he was a flip-flopper? What about all those people who were so gung-ho for Bush and his accomplished missions?

Those people are the real causes of this deficit, this war, this financial crisis due to deregulation. Those folks got him into office. By blaming all this on Bush, we let ourselves off the hook. It absolves us of the real guilt. We all are at fault for the situation we are in - half of us for voting for him and the other half for not raising enough Hell, for all the shit he has pulled.

p.s.

everything is a Rorschach test

Nicknames for McCain and Palin

How about McCan't and Failin'?

Guess it runs in the family

Neil Bush was the most widely targeted member of the Bush family by the press in the S&L scandal. Neil became director of Silverado Savings and Loan at the age of 30 in 1985. Three years later the institution was belly up at a cost of $1.6 billion to tax payers to bail out.

The basic actions of Neil Bush in the S&L scandal are as follows:

Neil received a $100,000 "loan" from Ken Good, of Good International, with no obligation to pay any of the money back.
Good was a large shareholder in JNB Explorations, Neil Bush's oil-exploration company.
Neil failed to disclose this conflict-of-interest when loans were given to Good from Silverado, because the money was to be used in joint venture with his own JNB. This was in essence giving himself a loan from Silverado through a third party.
Neil then helped Silverado S&L approve Good International for a $900,000 line of credit.
Good defaulted on a total $32 million in loans from Silverado.
During this time Neil Bush did not disclose that $3 million of the $32 million that Good was defaulting on was actually for investment in JNB, his own company.
Good subsequently raised Bush's JNB salary from $75,000 to $125,000 and granted him a $22,500 bonus.
Neil Bush maintained that he did not see how this constituted a conflict of interest.
Neil approved $106 million in Silverado loans to another JNB investor, Bill Walters.
Neil also never formally disclosed his relationship with Walters and Walters also defaulted on his loans, all $106 million of them.
Neil Bush was charged with criminal wrongdoing in the case and ended up paying $50,000 to settle out of court. The chief of Silverado S&L was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail for pleading guilty to $8.7 million in theft. (Keep in mind that you can get more jail time for holding up a gas station for $50.)
Today Neil Bush is working on closing a deal in Florida, where his brother Jeb is governor, to sell a software package to schools with his startup company Ignite.

Trifecta!

Walking from the U2 line to the U8 line in Alexanderplatz. Saw a blond in a Rage against the Machine t-shirt.

She had a tramp stamp, a coin slot and a muffin top.

the Trifecta!

Long live the Free Market ! (unless it hurts the wealthy)

Democrats maybe donkeys, but Republicans are dumbasses.

Free Market! Free Market! Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!Free Market! Free Market!

Oh shit!

Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money! Save us! Give us Money!

Live by the free market, die by the free market, no?

Isn't the bank bailout basically socialism?

Why doesn't the federal government bail me out when I make bad business decisions?

touch

interesting site about touch.

Liberal vs. Conservative

An interesting TED talk about Liberals and Conservatives.

Race and Our Place in It

Is it an any wonder the USA has so many racial issues? We can't even get the terms to identify each other right.

There are black people and white people. A color scheme, yes?

Okay, fine, but then to call an Asian person yellow is derogatory and to call a Native American person red is also offensive. But to describe someone as having olive colored skin is okay. Which kind of olive anyways - Kalamata or Graber's? Nabali or Manzanillo? Mission or Pecholine?

Oriental is out and Occidental (its correspondent term) was never in.

To call a person a European is fine, but to call someone Oriental is frowned up. European cars and Oriental rugs, just fine. Granted no one under 75 calls Asia the Orient, but still...
And European styling? What the @#$@! is that? Italy and Sweden...same style?

Caucasian, or European. Are we using continents or mountain ranges to define ourselves? Hitler tried Aryan, but he probably would have put the real Aryans in his camps.

Are we using colors or names of countries, continents or geographical features? How about all of the above?

And then there's hyphenating. Do we do it from the part of the world our ancestors came from? or just the country? Am I a European-American? Or a Northern-European American? Or an American of European descent? Or to be people first, a person living in American of European descent.

I think this inability for us to pick one spectrum of label ourselves is related to the affirmative action debate, also to the individual vs. group debate. What scale do we use to evaluate applicants for schools, jobs, contracts? When do we say that everyone is finally on the same playing field?

Who knows?
I certainly don't.
I just know that I am a white Caucasian Occidental Polish-Czech-German-Irish-English-Scotch American.

Carbon Footprint of music

As I write this post, I am listening to the melodius musical styling of Miles Davis et al. on Pandora.com. If you don't know Pandora, get to know her!! Type in a musicians name, or a band or a song and the algorithm or small elves or whatever picks other songs to play based upon your voting yeah or nay on other songs.

But I digress...

As I sit here and listen to this music, I wonder about the environmental impact of listening to music on the internet. Does it take more juice than listening to a cd of the same music? How does that compare to a turntable? If all music in the future is only digital and no physical LPs or CDs are made, would that offset all the energy needed to run my computer, wireless router, DSL system and computers at Pandora's end? No need to drive to a store to buy a plastic disc to then drive back home and stick into my computer to then rip and store on a harddrive that has to be on and using juice if I want to listen to the music.

Maybe the best way, least impactful method of listening to music would be just to make my own music on non electrified equipment...

the true history [is] lost

From "John Adams" the HBO miniseries

"It is very bad history"

"Do not let our posterity be deluded with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical license."

"I consider the true history of the American Revolution as lost."

Was Tom Hooper, the director of this series, also talking about his own work, this miniseries on John Adams. A visual experience based upon a written experience, the book John Adams by David McCullough. How much has this series deluded our posterity with fictions? How much of what we witnessed in the series actually happened?

What scares me is that in a few years, and maybe this is already happening, films & movies such as these will be shown in classrooms as fact. Easier to watch a movie than to read a book.

The second quote above also relates to art making. I would postulate that art, especially dance is deluded with too many fictions under the guise of poetical license. Too often choreographers are vague about what the point of their work is. Hiding under the guise of poetical license is one thing that brings dance down in terms of being taken seriously, removing it out of the entertainment world.

Too often dance makers bow too quickly to their own aesthetic to make something that is palatable to the audience, rather than following their curiosity to its end - wanting more to please than to challenge. Dance is still stuck in the world of dancing for the court, trying to please the king. Instead of now it is the audience and the grant panels. What logics are hip now? What tools are hip now? What aesthetics are hip now? The true idea of the choreographer gets lost. The work gets lost in poetical and graphical license.

Not many choreographers are accused of being great intellects. Playwrights, composers, yes. But not choreographers.

Why is that?

( I think it has something to with that horrible quote which has been destroying dance ever since whoever said it - "Dance expresses what words cannot" or some such nonsense like that)

Quote of the day

"Sounds like running down a mountain in the rain towards a deer just killed by an arrow."


from Pandora about a song by the Precious Fathers

You know it's good sex when...

your abs get sore.

Irony

In the post modern world there is no irony.

Well?

Swimming vs. running

Swimming has many different races - different in length and in styles of swimming. Where these styles of swimming come from, who knows? Well, Wikipedia does - The four competitive strokes are the butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. Running races are of different length, but not necessarily in style, though the way of running changes depending upon the distance run. The differences in ways of running are not as different as the differences in the ways of swimming.

This leads me to wonder why there are not running races of people running backwards. "That would be silly" you say. Well, what is the backstroke? Swimming backwards, looking where you have been not where you are going.

Comparing the World Records in the 4 styles in the 50 m race, we see that the 50 m freestyle is the fastest.
50 m freestyle 21.28
50 m backstroke 24.47 *
50 m breaststroke 27.18
50 m butterfly 22.96

So why do the other styles of swimming exist? Why are there not styles of running? How quickly could Usain Bolt run the 100 m backwards? Or sideways? Or one one leg? Or while turning in circles? I think the different styles of swimming should be abandoned and people swim however they want to as long as they stay in their lanes. Having different styles of stroke is silly. It should just be getting from A to B as quickly as possible (or A to B to A to B etc. if doing multiple laps) however possible without interfering with other swimmers.

This then leads me to the hurdles. What would the swimming equivalent be? Hoops underwater for the swimmers to go through?

Raccoons in SF

Sunday night, K and I were driving home after participating in a fund raiser for a show of some friends. I was the MC, meaning I drank a lot and tried to get people to laugh. Well also introduced the acts and K and I did some recreations of Allan Kaprow's work.

Anyways, we were on Folsom and 6th or there abouts at the light in the right lane. 11 p.m. @ night A racoon sprints across the intersection. Shock, surprise...a taxi comes up the street and generously rounds the corner hitting the racoon with both right side tires. Somehow the racoon survived. Waddled, scrambled of the street to hide underneath a parked car.

What are you supposed to do in that situation? Is there someone to call to help the damaged animal? Animal control? Human Society?

Made me think of the frozen burgers in our 'fridge? Made me think of the time my dog Blackie was run over and died. Made me hate cities and cars. Why are national parks enclosed and roped off? It should be the other way around. Cities, places of human habitat should be sequestered and scrunched together in "national parks" As the human population becomes more urban hopefully that will happen. Restricted zones where we can build, kinda like Portland.

I wonder how long the raccoon lived.

Sport vs. Art

This is a list of all the Summer Olympic Sports

Archery, Athletics(or track and field), Badminton, Baseball, Basketball, Beach Volleyball, Boxing, Canoe/Kayak Flatwater,Canoe/Kayak Slalom, Cycling BMX, Cycling Mountain Bike, Cycling Road, Cycling Track, Diving, Equestrian, Fencing, Football, Gymnastics Artistic, Gymnastics Rhythmic, Trampoline, Handball, Hockey, Judo, Modern Pentathlon, Rowing, Sailing, Shooting, Softball, Swimming, Synchronized Swimming, Table, Tennis, Taekwondo, Tennis, Triathlon, Volleyball, Water Polo, Weightlifting, Wrestling

Some of these sports have judges, determining which participant did the event better, a subjective event one could say. Sports in my mind are not subjective. Well, they are subjective in that some people enjoy some sports and not other. Some people enjoy them not at all and are rather proud of that fact (like that mother on Mommy Swap or whatever it's called. Man, was she a nut case.)

Sports are objective - who crosses the line first, who gets the ball from A to B more times, how much did this person lift. It's not about how, but about what. I would remove - Synchronized Swimming, diving and all forms of gymnastics. This not to say that those events are not hard. They are quite hard. What those gymnasts can do is #$#@! amazing. But just because it is physical and hard does not make it a sport. I would say gymnastics and synchronized swimming are really physically challenging art forms.

Giving birth is really hard to do, why not make that a sport? Making a nice soufflé is really hard also. Why not have cooking in the Olympics? There could be a panel of judges who then taste the soufflé and give the cook points for style, presentation and taste. They could even have cook offs with special ingredients. Oh wait, that sounds like Iron Chef.

How about writing, poetry or otherwise in the Olympics?

People get 15 minutes to write something. Give them a topic and off they go. At the end, judges read it and give a grade, I mean a score. Points for difficulty of topic and points for execution.

Ridiculous, if you ask me if cooking or writing made it into the Olympics. Those are clearly not sports. But still hard to do. So is it amount of calories burned that are a requirement for an event to be considered a sport? I'm sure that training for diving takes a lot of calories, but each dive itself can't burn many calories to do. So if it is caloric output, I vote for sumo squats.

So is it physical difficulty that makes an event a sport? Caloric output? What?

It's been a while

Back home for a spell.

Getting back into the rhythm of home (married!) life. So far not so different. Except for the ring finger on my left hand is a little heavier. But it doesn't really fit. When the ring was purchased it fit fine. My ring finger was still slightly swollen due to a torn ligament or tendon. It had been that way for a long time so I thought it was thicker permanently. Now that I have been eating Aleve like it's candy due to my knee, my finger is back to normal. Go figure.

Anyways, go see the film Tell No One. Good stuff.