geegaw.com

Attempting levity . . .

In the battle of hyenas vs. cheese-eating surrender monkeys, I'm tied with the garlic-eating French. Via Gram).

I can't keep up the jokes for long. Residents of Umm Qasr on the American invasion: "Now that they have started to remove [Saddam Hussein], they cannot stop. If they do, then we are all as good as dead. He still has informants in Umm Qasr and he knows who is against him and who isn't." (via Arab News, "Saudi Arabia's First English Daily.")

the battle against the First

Stayed at home today due to a weird flu-less flu. I'm achy but hyperactive; alternating chills and sweating, but my body temperature is a degree below normal; sore throat that comes and goes. It's gotta be stress due to everything that's going on right now (the war, the break-ins, fears that my parents (who still live in Asia) will catch SARS, the war, worried about several of my friends, a smidgen of potential job instability, Iraqi civilians and American soldiers needlessly dying, the war, etc.).

The 2004 election will be a turning point in world history. It is our chance to turn America around. The next 20 months will be an uphill struggle against the forces of money and greed, but I do believe we will win it if every concerned American could just do these three things:

• Read a foreign newspaper daily. I like The Guardian, of course.
• Disseminate the (underreported) truth. Use a blog, or else set up a mailing list of friends and relatives, to publicize what you've learned.
• Vote.

At Night

Deeply lost in the night. Just as one sometimes lowers one's head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night. All around people are asleep. It's just play acting, an innocent self-deception, that they sleep in houses, in safe beds, under a safe roof, stretched out or curled up on mattresses, in sheets, under blankets; in reality they have flocked together as they had once upon a time and again later in a deserted region, a camp in the open, a countless number of men, an army, a people, under a cold sky on cold earth, collapsed where once they had stood, forehead pressed on the arm, face to the ground, breathing quietly. And you are watching, are one of the watchmen, you find the next one by brandishing a burning stick from the brushwood pile beside you. Why are you watching? Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there.

-- Kafka

%%%

Bummed out. Car broken into (window smashed, nothing stolen). . . .

Update: Turns out they took some change from the change compartment. And A. cut his hand on some glass while cleaning it up -- GODDAMMIT! According to the State Farm rep we talked to, the whole city suffered a rash of car prowls this weekend. The Seattle PD cop who came to investigate was pretty understanding about it, mentioned that there had been a few breakins last night on the street a couple blocks down from here. He tactfully forebore from mentioning my anti-war button.

In our garage alone, this is the 4th robbery of 2003, and we live in a pretty good neighborhood.   A. and I have been hit twice (they took our bike the first time) so the thieves owe us like $500 plus pain and suffering damages for hurting A.'s hand. I'm trying to organize a tenants' meeting to deal with the situation.

Thanks to Anita for the window replacement service tip. It's been a rough couple of months for a lot of people I know. But being robbed is nothing compared to having a son in the Marines like one of my coworkers has. 8% of the American troops deployed in the Gulf are from around here. Oops, there goes the war gong again.

Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?

Two of the great links at Talking Points Memo:

1) Iraqi refugees are giving some of their food to hungry US Marines. I can't figure out whether this is touching or ironic.

2) Report: Rumseld Ignored Pentagon Advice on Iraq. Seymour Hersh hits another home run. Anyone have a copy of the actual New Yorker article that this was taken from?

Slowly, unwillingly, Miranda drew herself up inch by inch out of the pit of sleep, waited for the daze of life to begin again. A single word struck in her mind, a gong of warning, reminding her for the day long what she forgot happily in sleep, and only in sleep. The war, said the gong, and she shook her head.

-- Katherine Anne Porter, from "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"

The conference call with Governor Dean at last night's house party was electric. The good news of the night: the campaign is only $83,000 away from hitting its fundraising goal by the March 31st FEC deadline. Donations still needed, of course. Plus they're opening up a campaign office in Seattle soon! Smart move: Washington is Dean country, and last night there were a dozen Dean house parties held statewide(!). Even better, I think the reactions I'm getting from people on the street seem to be shifting from "Who's Howard Dean?" to "Yep, Dean's our man."

your academie

saya tidak mengerti bahasa melayu. saya datang dari negara zero: now go away. (Sorry readers, I know you're as tired of reading past these tiresome missives to Señor Paz as I am of writing them. This is the last you'll hear on the subject.)

looking inwardly - looking outwardly

If I wait, I am a castle
Built with blocks of pain.

If I set out
A kayak stitched with pain

- Ted Hughes, from "Gaudete"

Crow crucified a frog under a microscope, he peered into the brain of a dogfish.
Where is the Black Beast?

Crow roasted the earth to a clinker, he charged into space--
Where is the Black Beast?

The silences of space decamped, space flitted in every direction--
Where is the Black Beast?

Crow flailed immensely through the vacuum, he screeched after the disappearing stars--
Where is it? Where is the Black Beast?

- Ted Hughes, from "The Black Beast," published in Crow

fire in the lake

Today, while my country condemned the US military action, I checked out a book from the library.

"It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

- Donald Rumsfeld, on Feb. 7th

Worked hard at work today, fixing bugs . . . forgot about current events for a little while, even dropped out of contact with the news sites for a few hours. Have been obsessed with minimizing deltas and total lines of code and occasionally restructuring things so as to minimize future deltas. Also I'm excited about the Howard Dean online merchandise store but I'd be more excited if I hadn't already ordered a half-dozen more expensive bootleg buttons. Dammit!

Make me the way I was before, so I can give the Slayer what she deserves

Confidential to Señor Paz (OH! Back from Brazil! I remember you!): Those anonymous arguments of yours make a lot more sense when you send them through the feedback form. I'm curious to know what further political actions you'd like me to take, as well as what you yourself have done (since your country is a member of the Coalition of the Willing, which mine is not).

Lately I'm getting it from both sides -- criticism about I'm not doing enough, cautions not to turn into one of those demonstrators who does too much -- well, all the attention is not unflattering, but it seems like there must be better things to do in our limited time.

Cafepress store I liked: Regime Change Begins at Home: VOTE. Profit margin allegedly donated to MoveOn.org.

And since Regime Change Begins at Home, Kos has a breakdown of the leading Democratic candidates and their positions on the war .

To: president@whitehouse.gov (President George W. Bush)
From: k@metameat.net (Paul Kerschen)
Subject: The cost of the Iraq war

Dear Mr. President:

I have made a charitable donation to the [Iraq Emergency Fund] in the amount of $199.62. As I am in the fifteen-percent tax bracket, this will reduce my federal tax liability for the next year by the precise amount which you have charged me for your war.

The math is bogus (we're going to have to pay for his war sooner or later, and the sooner we do it the cheaper it'll be) but the principle behind it is noble: How Much Are You Paying For This War?

And Juliet also had an intriguing entry about the effects of viewing graphic war footage:

"... it would be difficult to believe that the sight, day after day, of American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians dying in a way that seemed to make no progress could not have had some effect on the viewer. Yet a survey conducted for Newsweek in 1967 suggested a remarkably different conclusion: that televion had encourged a majority of viewers to support the war. [...] A prominent American psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, said, in the same year, that television had the effect of conditioning its audience to accept war, and a further Newseek enquiry, in 1972, suggested that the public was developing a tolerence of horror in the newscasts from Vietnam--'The only way we can possibly tolerate it is by turning off a part of ourselves instead of the television set.'"
-- The First Casualty, Philip Knightley, (411-412)

Now here's a really effective way to stop the war: post to the diablog!

Gee, don't you just love those web surfers who breeze in, skim two entries, post a bitchy anonymous comment and then leave, (hopefully) never to return. In response to the most recent diablogger ("geegaw regrets . . ."), who is a Bhikku reader from Spain:

(1) The very first line of text on this page is a quote opposing the war.

(2) The photo of the wounded girl is linked to from at least two of the (US- maintained) websites cited on this page.

(3) I don't own a Lomo.

And, you know what, it may surprise people to learn that America's so-called volunteer army isn't entirely made up of bloodthirsty birds of prey. It includes the children of my parents' friends who couldn't afford to go to medical school without a military scholarship or who had to work their way through college: young men and women who grew up all over the world like I did, came back to their homeland to participate in one of the best educational systems in the world, and found themselves contractually bound to serve in a disgusting war. No one deserves to die, neither Iraqi children nor American soldiers, and I reserve the right to grieve for all deaths.

Just because I am not an American doesn't make me obligated to despise America and all its people. And it is possible to advocate peace by hoping for a minimum of casualties on all sides.

(No news on the war, because I assume you're compulsively reloading agonist.imaginot.com or warblogs.cc or whatever your news site of choice happens to be.)

Why buy a Lomo when you can fake it in Photoshop?

Thank you for your comments on the photos. Obviously I have a lot to learn before I can get to the skill of these nature shots. But it's about time I got off my butt and started trying to teach myself photography. I have been jealous of Manuel's gallery for a long time.

Support our troops, bring them home

. . . but in all the hubbub about stopping the war, let's not forget to support the filibuster of the Miguel Estrada nomination, I don't want some right-wing wacko tipping the balance on the DC Federal Court of Appeals. . . .

Police brutality - senior citizen. Eyewitnesses say the photo was taken right before the Seattle PD started beating the elderly peace protestor. (NOTE: it's an Indymedia link, but I do not condone Indymedia's anti-Semitic views the anti-Semitic views of certain people who post articles to Indymedia.)

American forces have not been faring as well as I had hoped.

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming, so deep there had been nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

- James Tate

pfuck the euphrates

Ugh, came down with food poisoning last night/this AM. feel just terrible. Never again do i eat oysters since even the cooked kind are obviously TROUBLE. Time for some laffs:

What the bejeezus?

My brother tells me the news in Boston is that NBC sent a camera crew to Harvard to film a peace rally, except the crew came an hour early and filmed some housing lottery shenanigans instead: upperclassmen congratulating freshmen on their new dorm assignments, with signs like "Quincy House Rules," or "Pfuck the River". Thus we have it that a college kid in a giant bunny suit waving a Leverett flag is construed as being against the war. Hell, at least they're finally trying to give the peace protests some coverage. This kid has a link to the mistaken newscast.

an', by the way an' an' I confess I stole this green

you get in a sulk

I took this photo a few months ago, back when it was sunny.

L. reminds me that it's the vernal equinox.
And green remains my favorite color.
Today's rain is too copious and too cold to be the tears of any deity.
My personality is gotten all spiky lately.
I do not think I shall be leafletting tomorrow.

There was a little honey bee,
a record star he thought he'd be.
But we need honey for biscuits, and
honey for toast and for tea--
He was a foolish honey bee.

he waits for the blessèd break

"Shock and Awe" has begun. Trying to cling to hope. Have to keep up my energy so I can get out there and protest tomorrow and, if I can work up the guts, hand out some Dean For America leaflets while I'm at it.

Toadex sends a reassuring WHO factsheet on depleted uranium.

hoping for an early end

As I write this, none of the "shock and awe" bullshit seems to have happened yet . . . just hoping and hoping. . . .

American weapon of the day: Depleted uranium munitions: According to Doug Rokke, the scientist who developed them, these heat-resistant darts made from nuclear waste also emit radioactive oxidized particles too tiny for Army-issue masks to filter out.

In the past decade, Rokke said 30 men out of 100 who were closely involved in these [DU cleanup] operations dropped dead.

Rokke's lungs and kidneys are damaged. He believes that uranium oxide dust is permanently trapped inside his lungs. He has lesions on his brain, pustules on his skin. He suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome. He has reactive airway disease, which means he can't stop wheezing and coughing, and experiences a loss of breath when he exercises. He also has fibromyalgia, a condition that causes chronic pain in his muscles, ligaments and tendons.

About one quarter of the 700,000 troops sent to the Persian Gulf War have reported some sort of Gulf War-related illness, and Rokke is convinced that DU has something to do with it, along with the host of other chemicals to which troops were exposed, including low levels of sarin gas, smoke from oil fires, countless pesticides as well as anti-nerve gas tablets which troops were required to ingest.

the frail, illegal fire balloons appear

The first explosions in Baghdad were heard with the sun just rising, two hours ago. An hour ago Bush made a speech about it.

I guess everyone's been linking to dear_raed.blogspot.com: he blogs from Iraq. And I hope the end of the war finds him in tip-top blogging condition.

Did you know, I know exactly two phrases in Dutch: "Geen bloed voor olie" and "Niet in onze naam."

Dear diablogger, thanks for the Howard Dean links (Wall Street Journal profile). Yes, note that he is really quite a moderate. To me he stands for reason, and hope. I'm not falling into that Nader trap twice.

And yes, the mighty blog Eclogues is back, under the moniker SargassoSea.net

fighting for the right to fight the right fight for the left

If you're at all uneasy or depressed about the current government, you must, must, must watch the amazing video of Howard Dean's speech to the California Democratic Party State Convention. (It's CSPAN: the first "Road to the White House" link, then scroll to 24:45 and crank the volume on high. 18 minutes long. Here's the direct link to the RealAudio stream.)

I feel galvanized after watching Dean's speech. I actually feel hopeful about America for the first time in years. I'm going to do whatever I can to get this guy into office.

MyDD quotes Lee Fink:

Dean had the place sold. . . . it was absolutely unprecedented.

Carl with a K writes:

On the convention floor, the air was electric. Delegates were amazed and in awe . . . some in tears. Even my eyes were a bit moist.

Daily Kos writes:

But the most amazing part was the finale, with a fiery Dean pounding the podium:

I want my country back!

I don't want to listen to fundamentalist preachers anymore!

When Dean uttered this last line, the whole place went nuts. Utter pandemonium.

Believe me, if anyone has the spark to galvanize apathetic folks like me, it's Howard Dean. In fact, believe it or not, I just mailed off a hunk o'cash to the Howard Dean campaign (paper mail, since the online form uses the evil Verisign).

"But Ms. Gaw," you retort, "where does Howard Dean stand on the issues?" Most (in)famous for signing the Vermont Civil Unions legislation, he's running on a platform of fiscal responsibility, equal rights for all, and universal health care (don't laugh, his plan is actually realistic and he implemented it successfully in Vermont). Here's some links:

• Howard Dean interview in the Nation
• Analysis of Howard Dean's position by the New Republic

Howard Dean has the least money of any of the major Democratic candidates, so some of his New York supporters have started this "Million Dollar Meetup" challenge to raise a million bucks for him by the March 31st FEC deadline. If you decide to send in, please make the amount end in .01 so he knows it's from his Internet fans! And, heh, thank you for reading to the end of this uncharacteristically long post.

cautious relaxation

The Straits Times reports that two of the three Singaporean women who caught SARS in Hong Kong have recovered and been discharged from hospital.

ABC News reports that the infectious agent doesn't seem to be airborne; "the spread is not as aggressive as most forms of influenza."

WHO officials also said that for the first time, China was allowing teams of experts into the country to take a closer look at its own earlier outbreak, which killed five people before it was brought under control.

The Chinese said 7 percent of patients there required breathing tubes, but most eventually got better, especially if they were not also stricken with a bacterial infection. In addition, the disease seemed to weaken as it passed from person to person.

the costs of war

In case you haven't been following current events, there's three things I really want you to know about the upcoming unilateral war on Iraq.

1. Bush Sr. delivered a speech last week warning his son against unilateral action.

2. The strategy of the Pentagon's current war plan is called Shock and Awe: firing more missiles in a few hours than were fired during the entirety of the first Gulf War, which one of the plan's authors describes as a "simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima." One Pentagon official is quoted as saying "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad." - and that includes all civilian facilities: houses, schools, hospitals. . . . And note that Iraq's population is mostly children.

3. Since US and Britain alone will bear the expense of the coming Gulf War (unlike the last one, which was heavily subsidized by our allies), though no one's really sure how much of a burden this war will be on the staggering US economy, a rundown of all the analyses shows that everyone agrees it's going to cost a heck of a lot. (The $200 billion estimate seems the most well-researched one, to me.) And the Bush Jr. administration has been extremely cagey about war costs, having omitted them from their 2004 budget.

I loved everything I saw

While reading up on the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, I was intrigued to find that some authorities attempted to blame the epidemic on terrorism:

Lt. Col. Philip Doane, head of the Health and Sanitation Section of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, speaking in Washington, D.C., fuels the rumor and speculation by blaming the Germans for the deadly influenza that was striking Americans. Said Doane: "It would be quite easy for one of these German agents to turn loose Spanish influenza germs in a theater or some other place where large numbers of persons are assembled. The Germans have started epidemics in Europe, and there is no reason why they should be particularly gentle with America."

Also, if you were curious why everyone calls Saddam Hussein "Saddam," apparently it's because his full name is actually "Saddam Hussein al-Majd al-Tikriti." Here's a better, but more complex explanation.

amour et interim

How I've been: weepy (The Hours), frightened (SARS), and inspired and galvanized (Howard Dean's speech to the California Democratic Convention). How I haven't been: literary!

More soon, though, possibly. . . .

starve so dreamlessly

Which Humor Troubles the Disposition of YOUR Body?

Now that online quizzes are more tepid than they are cool, I've finally jumped on the bandwagon and created one of my own. It's more Google-researched than it is researched . . . so, there you have it.

exhumption

I liked this note from Daily Kos:

Guinea announced that it would abstain (or at least hinted strongly), while Chile vociferously denied rumors it would back the US. So I guess we'll have "freedom pigs" and "freedom verde", huh?

But "hater taters" taste great compared to the news that some Congressman wants to exhume veterans buried in France. Fuckinell.

a joking matter

UPDATE: A reader seeks the name of the diablogger who wrote "A mob, a bomb, a nation . . ." for use as a citation in a poetry class. Would the anonymous poet in our midst be willing to own up? (Turns out it's our ingenious friend Dorky once again. Hurrah!)

. . .

I found monkeytime.org on a Google search for liberty steak (which is what they renamed hamburger to, during WWI), and was gladdened to find a lovely long entry on the varieties of hysterical wartime experience. Amidst stories of lynchings of German-Americans, the article Mr. Monkey cites had some intriguing bits:

Restaurants served "liberty steak" in place of hamburgers and "liberty cabbage" for sauerkraut. In Massachusetts, a physician even renamed German measles "liberty measles."

Attacks on German music included the banning of Beethoven in Pittsburgh and the arrest of Dr. Karl Muck, the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, on charges that he was a threat to the safety of the country. The same motive lay behind the removal or vandalism of statues of poets Johann Goethe and Friedrich Schiller and other German cultural giants. German-language classes were dropped from school curricula and German textbooks banned...streets, parks, schools, and even towns were re-christened: Germantown, Nebraska, for example became Garland and Berlin, Iowa, was renamed Lincoln.

I'm only writing this because I'm appalled that certain reasonable-seeming people I know have begun to hate the French. Appalled and nervous. The French are our allies!

utter, His father, one word

Busy -- been working on lots of other shit, symbolic, nonverbal, tough: though I like the time I spend with computers, and I spend much more time with them than with people. It keeps the mind off.

Along Leninova, soot pines and state trucks,

a world emptying of human belief.

Since the war, they begin, or after the invasion:
a little stiff bread to soak up the blood
(meat and boiled potatoes),
a small silence for each of them,
salt in the palm,
a cold stone of bitterness.

"It is playing chess with us."

-- Carolyn Forche, from "The Notebook of Uprising"

Gained 2 pounds, I think maybe not an entirely bad thing. T minus 6 days, the dark cloud looming. Not the only dust on the horizon.

hazard a guess

A relaxing weekend during which I went almost two days without doing email or answering my cell phone. It was great. I may make this a policy.

The Metameat Poetry Grinder rocks very hard -- it's like Paul's own poetry anthology, turned into flashcards so we all can learn the poems inside out. If he could make a version for PalmOS, that might be the killer app for me. (I was thinking of getting a Treo but I can't help but feel it would degrade my quality of life even further.)

Slate has a modafinil diary feature -- that's the anti-sleep drug used to treat narcolepsy -- the author sounds kind of like me on red bull (which can really help me code, but I can't drink it more than twice a week without starting to feel seriously queasy). There was an amazing drink in Canada, Smart (fx), felt peppy all day and slept great that night, but the next day I felt dehydrated. Efficiency has its price! Better to remain a layabout, I think.

A certain sense of discipline

Let Them Hate As Long As They Fear. I read this article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times but the impact didn't sink in until it was paraphrased for me today -- well, I've been very tired.

Here's the skinny: the President of the country in which I live just threatened that, if Mexico didn't vote for a U.S. resolution, THERE WOULD BE AN INCREASE IN ANTI-MEXICAN SENTIMENT IN THE U.S.

What the FUCK kind of racist Trent Lott type BULLSHIT is happening here? America was 12.5% Hispanic in 2000 and the percentage has only grown since then. Why isn't this headline blaring from every newspaper?

Anyway, from Krugman's article:

Last week The Economist quoted an American diplomat who warned that if Mexico didn't vote for a U.S. resolution it could "stir up feelings" against Mexicans in the United States. He compared the situation to that of Japanese-Americans who were interned after 1941, and wondered whether Mexico "wants to stir the fires of jingoism during a war."

Incredible stuff, but easy to dismiss as long as the diplomat was unidentified. Then came President Bush's Monday interview with Copley News Service. He alluded to the possibility of reprisals if Mexico didn't vote America's way, saying, "I don't expect there to be significant retribution from the government" -- emphasizing the word "government." He then went on to suggest that there might, however, be a reaction from other quarters, citing "an interesting phenomena taking place here in America about the French . . . a backlash against the French, not stirred up by anybody except the people."

And Mr. Bush then said that if Mexico or other countries oppose the United States, "there will be a certain sense of discipline."

These remarks went virtually unreported by the ever-protective U.S. media, but they created a political firestorm in Mexico. The White House has been frantically backpedaling, claiming that when Mr. Bush talked of "discipline" he wasn't making a threat. But in the context of the rest of the interview, it's clear that he was.

P.S. Thanks for the screwball recs. We have in fact watched His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, and The Third Man, and though they were all fine films, none of them made me laugh as hard (esp. the third one) -- I guess we may lack some elusive screwball appreciation gene. The Man Who Came to Dinner sounds great; I wonder if it was the inspiration for that Family Guy episode, Death is a Bitch? Also, things have been hectic, I don't think I've written anyone email since Thursday. I apologize for the delay.

strange behemoth

A. and I caught the first showing of Ezra's one-man play, Cars, Driving, People, on Thursday -- it was a witty assemblage of found text and characters from interviews, with an unusually high ratio of content per minute. If you have a twenty minutes this Sunday I'd highly recommend heading down to ACT to check it out. Your ticket will let you see all the other acts that day, as well.

"I think it better that in times like these / A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth / We have no gift to set a statesman right." Strange story about how Yeats excluded Wilfred Owen, Sigfried Sassoon, and all the other war poets from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse on the grounds that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies."

I am thrilled to announce that Rosebaby's put together the Cardinal Fish Cafepress Store.

And (note to self) a coworker recomends Games Mother Never Taught You. Hrm.

Radiolaria et al.

If you didn't already catch this on NQPAOFU last week or Bhikku a couple days ago, here's an absolutely do not miss, breathtaking and awe-inspiring set of biological engravings by some guy named Ernst Haeckel. . . .

You're the match of Jericho that will burn this whole madhouse down

We've been watching a lot of screwball comedies lately at Chez Gaw. My favorites so far:
1. 20th Century
2. My Man Godfrey
3. The Thin Man (I guess it's not a screwball comedy, but it has William Powell . . .)
4. Palm Beach Story
5. Nothing Sacred
6. Holiday
7. Sullivan's Travels
8. Philadelphia Story
9. It Happened One Night
10. The Awful Truth and The Lady Eve (tie)

Any recommendations?

On the bright side

The diabloggers are going nuts! Thank you, diabloggers!

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems

They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"

- James Tate

What the hell kind of bullshit is this?

I just got this piece of very credible-looking mail from "info@paypal.com". When I did a View Source, I could see that the form actually sends this data to http://cgi.wsh.ru/cgi-bin/formmail.pl and not PayPal.com. But I was actually taken in for a few seconds (before I scrolled down to see the form). If I had enough time and anger I would write a script that randomly sends them garbage info and flood the ****ers out.

Your PayPal account is Limited.

PayPal is currently performing regular maintenance of our security measures. Your account has been randomly selected for this maintenance, and placed on Limited Access status. Protecting the security of your PayPal account is our primary concern, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

To restore your account to its regular status, you must confirm your email address by logging in to your PayPal account using the form below:

interim

I just finished the new William Gibson book (verdict: eh). Anyone want to borrow it? Let me know.

Gone!

So it looks like Tensegrity reader Ned Batcheler took the whole "colors from hex words" idea and went nuts with a Python script that combs a words file looking for all words that can be expressed in hex+l337. His list of 805 words includes 0ddba11, 5ca1ab1e, and (blanch) defec8.

grainie grave-robber

Here's Pastemob on the new Cat Power album:

Her writing's more song-like now, in exactly the way that the audience gave her a pass for not doing before because everyone knows that when the spirits visit you (as they supposedly did during the making of Moon Pix, or SOMETHING like that) they never stress the importance of catchier choruses.

I don't like the song-like song structures -- I preferred the rambling caterwauls. I've had the album for a month now and it sounded nice at first, but it's already played out. My favorite song is the closing "Evolution," a duet with Eddie Vedder of all people. It makes me wonder if I misjudged him.

bad c0de

Neonepiphany briefly contemplates a site design based on HTML colors made up of hexadecimal words only: in this case, #3dbeef. Ha, it's the kind of thing the Oulipo might do.

Think of the #effec7 on the blogverse, if this literary exercise were to catch on. It'd #deface any blog that adopted it, and any paler text would be #faded into the lurid backgrounds. Just imagine -- an entire #decade of HTML's history given #a b0057 by this new and unpleasant wave of innovation #5eeded by neonepiphany.com!

(At this point the God of Excessive Contrivance #fo1ded his #beaded napkin (embroidered with #a def7 "E"), and #dabbed at the corners of his mouth, having consumed an entire plate of #coo1ed, #bad cod and then triumphantly #bedded more HTML groupies (of both genders) than he'd ever care to see again. He thought, "If I #fobbed them all off on the next #def fad, I could get back into the #5add1e and go riding with my #fab dad, the God of the #Dead Ad.)