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Kind of lame month for new music. Worried life stress might be making me less attentive or something...

I like the midtempo melancholy of "Out of my Head" and I'm happy with how my arrangement of "Misirlou" for JP Honk came together...

4 star:
Out of My Head (Fastball)
Misirlou (Dick Dale & His Del-Tones)
3 star:
I'm All Right (Madeleine Peyroux) Nemesis (RYLLZ)
Story of Bo Diddley (The Animals)
Ms. Jackson (Outkast)
Que Si Que No (Funiculi Funicula) (Gipsy Kings)
Sledgehammer (Peter Gabriel)
Mm Mm Good (Big Freedia)
Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
Tessie (Radio Version) (Dropkick Murphys)

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I somehow feel like I'm more of a real Boston-er when I feel a twinge of guilt for getting Manhattan Clam Chowder.

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On my devblog, thoughts on the future of programming in an AI-heavy world

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more tumblr thoughts on how society woke up about not coercing left handed people to be different than who they are, and, to say the quiet part outloud, with hopes they'll figure it out for trans folk as well. I don't post these often but, heh:

Wordle 317 2/6

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🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

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Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.

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The opinion to kill Roe v Wade has been drafted and leaked.

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Two weekend thoughts: It took me a weirdly long time to notice that the closest Dunkin' Donuts is one that I used to go to when I lived in Arlington before, and is actually at the end of my street...
Also, assembling IKEA furniture... I would really love to see an F1 tire changing team type group put together one of these things

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Some astounding PETSCII art by christwoballs...

Strong Jim Woodring energyKind of a slow month, not surprisingly. My friend Arun gave me a birthday gift of a lot of music, and while I'm super selective about what I add into my collection, it's been nice skimming through and finding some real gems.

Super goofy but fun 5 star song!

★ ★ ★ ★	Watch the World Ben Cocks	Kind of sweet indie song. From a "Farming Simulator" trailer video.
★ ★ ★ ★	Ieva's Polka, Ievan Polkka Loituma	Such charming and unintelligible (to me) a cappella! from Arun's collection.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★	The Squat Song SQUAT TEAM	Super goofy song promoting squatting... but so funky! Albeit in a very polished way. Been on my "find an mp3 list" for a long while.
★ ★ ★ ★	Mississippi Goddam (Live at Carnegie Hall, New York, 1964) Nina Simone	Racism protest song. Not that there's any reason for Boston to feel smug. Beyonce's Homecoming video introduced me to Simone in general.
★ ★ ★ ★	Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime Beck	Really melancholy song, especially in the context of the movie. Recently saw a film series version of my favorite movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"
	Paradise John Prine	Folksy. Prine wasn't much on my radar before his death, heard this was a campfire song in some parts.
★ ★ ★ ★	Chameleon Rebirth Jazz Band	Interesting that this one doesn't have the classic bassline. Also, not the version I'm listening to, but this longer version adds the lyric "Oh Lord Oh Lord, Tell Me What Did I Do Now" which is less square than "Herbie Hancock Curiosity is Good" I came up with to try and keep my band in time. from The Street Brass Podcast
★ ★ ★ ★	Bad Education Tilly And The Wall	I love shouty women singing. from Arun's collection.
	James Bond Theme (Moby's Re-version) Moby	Nice James Bond theme cover, always love songs that play w/ the big brass. from Arun's collection.
★ ★ ★ ★	Let's Get Lost Cyrille Aimée	Sweet French and Bouncy from Arun's collection.
	Rich Girl (Remastered) Daryl Hall & John Oates	Hall + Oates were kind of under my radar. Man, I wish I had some old man's money like that. My friend Sophie posted the Hall and Oates Emergency Hotline: 719-26-OATES
	Boyz-N-The-Hood Eazy-E	Nice old schol hiphop. Melissa pulled up a classic hiphop Spotify playlist.
	Distant Pyramids Sight of Wonders	Kinda cornily "middle eastern" from this infographic animation on oil production
	For Her Fiona Apple	Oof. I wanted to skim through the knew Fiona Apple album, I picked this one for the percussion, but man are the lyrics tough. Just making the rounds as a bit of Quarantine time art.

New to me music I added last month. Decent month but only 14. In roughly descending order of coolness, 4 or 5 stars in red...

One five star:

• Curse of the I-5 Corridor (Neko Case) 1 minute cartoonishly NSFW-ish short

Melissa and I saw this in concert. It's a beautiful and melancholy song. Melissa finds the line "So I left home and faked my ID / I f***ed every man that I wanted to be" especially poignant, and there's also that "Baby, I'm afraid But it's not your fault"

Arun hosted a house concert, Caroline Cotter... an amazingly cool thing to do. I got these 3 songs:

• Home on the River - probably my favorite
• I Am Satisfied (Caroline Cotter) - this was her closer, and a sing-a-long for the audience.
• Pollyanna (Caroline Cotter) And I always like songs that engage... well, if not mythological figures, cultural ones.

Two NOLA-style songs:

• Why Your Feet Hurt (Rebirth Brass Band) JP Honks youngest player thinks we should arrange and play this... he's not wrong...
• Sousamaphone! (Riot Jazz Brass Band) "I got a sousamaphone, sousamaphone... that's why the girls won't leave me alone..."

Other songs:

• Pretty Ugly (Tierra Whack) man, why is this only a minute?
• Juice (Lizzo) So much sass and energy.
• Wolf Totem (The Hu) Heavy metal throat singing.
• Touch a New Day (Lena) I dunno how many USA folk know her from her Eurovision triumph Satellite but she's kinda great.
• The World We Made (Ruelle) I think an HBO trailer had this as background music, and damned if it doesn't sound just like How To Make A Blockbuster Movie Trailer's cover of "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)"
• Be OK (TIAAN) Gentle healing song
• I'll Listen (Radio Edit) [feat. Ana Criado] (Armin van Buuren) Another song with a theraputic vibe, Gowen mentioned, about how to be a good listener.
• Kinko the Clown (Ogden Edsl) Ooh boy. This is definitely on the bubble of being removed - it's a novelty song about a "kid loving clown". Oh, the 80s. I only new it because someone wrote the first few lines on a chalkboard at school. For some reason I thought a better lines 3 and 4 would be "Kinko is as Kinko Does, None to Rearrange".

The Sam Harris' Waking Up Podcast Live I went to in January was posted the other week, his guests were Rebecca Goldstein and Max Tegmark.

Two quotes I wrote down then:

I'd rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question.

and

Universal consent is not what makes for moral truth.

(Another idea I got from listening to it again is Goldstein's concept of "mattering", how important it is to us and our philosophies. And how religion can be like "mattering cheesecake" - full of the rich fatty deliciousness that are evolutionary line was so craving, but now kind of a bit too much... )

I got to thinking about this one problem I've heard Sam Harris describe, where our sympathy / compassion is a bit broken, that we are demonstrably more likely to respond a picture of a single suffering child then a picture of her and her brother, and even less to, say, their whole class of suffering kids. It's a bit of compassion fatigue, but I think it's more that we are more stirred to action to correct an outlier of injustice than take up arms against the way the world is. I think in some outlooks that stress Moderation as a virtue, and how things find their own path, this seeming contradiction is less paradoxical than it first seems.

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astronaut.io explore the lonely internet, an endless slideshow of videos (ones up loaded with generic auto-generated number names) that maybe you'll be the only person looking at, ever.

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Tattoos and babies aren't permanent like people say, both can be destroyed with lasers

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Almost 90 today? Yeesh. Earliest Bowser and Donkey Kong arcade drawings



via SupperMarioBroth

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It turns out the knack for selling 'luxury' to people with no concept of value is the same as the one for selling 'liberty' to people with no instinct for democracy.

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Heh, Liz Ryan who throws together a marching group for Boston Pride asked me to record a little bassline I made up last year, to supplement the cadence the percussionists were doing.

It's meant to be easy on my jaw, 'cause it's kind of a long parade!

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I just now noticed Iron Man and some of the better folks from Game of Thrones share the name "Stark".

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From "The Book of Honk", the School of Honk bass section:
Arlington St Church

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Annie: So, what got you into photography?
Sam #2: Oh, I wouldn't call it photography.
Annie: What would you call it?
Sam #2: I love taking pictures, I guess.
Annie: Okay. Well, why do you take pictures?
Sam #2: Umm.. I don't know. When I see something I like looking at, I get to keeping looking at it.

Nicest spin about photography I've seen in a while. Few in number, not bad in quality, last month's songs. Arranged in descending order of "I really think you should check this out"

• Lo Lo Lo Lo Lohan (Zach Anner & The Gregory Brothers) I find this song funny and inspiring, and it reminds me to be grateful for a well-functioning physical body.
• The Star-Spangled Banner (Minor Key) (Chase Holfelder) The minor key transformation blows me away.
• Throw It Down (Dominique Young Unique) The finest twerksh thing I've seen this month.
• Lorde 2Pac Beck Mashup (Pomplamoose) Really good cover/mashup.
• Beat It (Demo Version) (Michael Jackson) Unfortunately, these seems to be removed from a lot of video sites, but it's worth listening to at least once.
• Cool Jerk (The Capitols) Rollickin'
• Free Fallin' (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers) One of those songs I kind of forgot about, but like. Especially good since I am going to do that whole zero-g thing.
• A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got) (Fergie, Q-Tip & GoonRock) One of those Great Gatsby remake style blends.
• Party Up (Up in Here) (DMX) Admittedly it's the Llama Video ("why vine exists") that reminded me of this song.
• Wobble (It) [Street] (Freak Nasty) I just realized this is NOT the song in this hilarious deadpan video...

Just finished week 4 of C25K, which puts me at halfway through. Noticed my arches are tender during the day, but I wonder if that has more to due with some fisherman sandals I've been wearing now that the weather has shifted.

I guess my speed isn't great, but I jog when they say jog and walk when they say walk and keep up with that, so that's something.

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My April, One Second a Day... a lot of Emma, was never sure when it was going to be her last shot...

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back online after a year without the internet So, not a clear win for "cut out the Internet", but still some lessons to be had. I wonder how I could get a better balance...
This is the view from the top step of my workplace, 501 Boylston. (Usually there aren't headless people walking around though.)

I put it together with a great free iPhone app from Microsoft... photosynth. It's a bit like some other panoramic apps I've shown here but it makes these interactive pieces that angle and stitch the separate views in real time, so you don't get the fish-eye effect of just mapping the whole thing onto a flat surface.

The other interesting thing about the app is how it's in Microsoft's "authentically digital" Metro style, as seen on the new Windows Phones - it gets rid of the chrome, random shading and softening and 3Ding that most software has these days. I think I digit it but I'm not sure.

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Perfect might be the enemy of good, but good enough is the enemy of brilliant.

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Speaking of things that are gross, why do cats who always pee and poop in their litter box feel like they can just barf anywhere they want?

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8 years to the day when Bush put on that costume and falsely declared "Mission: Accomplished."

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Well-timed: 65th anniversary of Hitler's Death announcement, 8th anniversary of "Mission Accomplished", and interrupted Trump's Apprentice.

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That said, I'm in the anti-gloating side. Hopefully this further disrupts Al-Qaeda, but still, dancing on his grave is not helpful.

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the secret life of libraries - nice piece on the institution.

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Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben. [What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you]

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I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.

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Man walks into a bar and says to the bartender, "Gimme a drink." Bartender says, "Why should I? You're so drunk your breath gives me a nosebleed."

So yesterday Amber, Kjersten, JZ, his gal Michelle, her dog Moose, and I formed Team Angry! Manatee for the second Hub Crawl organized by my former housemate Miller. The hubcrawl is a photohunt (like a scavenger hunt but you don't scavange per se, you just take pictures) with a little bit of puzzle solving for flavoring. You get bonus points for having more team members in the photo...

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Memorial Drive is taken over by Walk for Hunger. Which is cool and all, but the ice cream truck at one end seems a little out of place.

--via Horklog who gave me today's enjoyable title.

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I've been enjoying using forms of "to enjoy" as of late... I think somehow inspired by the use of the word embedded in this 2000 suck.com article:

Enjoyably, Critser describes fast food restaurants as the bathhouses of the childhood obesity epidemic, "the places where the high-risk population indulges in high-risk behavior."

I think enjoyment is an art that needs to be nurtured more.

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Pick up a reggae album at random. Any reggae album. Listen to it and you will find a far more accurate, reliable and theologically sound exegesis of the meaning of Babylon than you will ever get from Tim LaHaye or any other so-called "prophecy expert."

That site is so great, sometimes I wonder if my own spirituality would be different if his kind of left-leaning, activist voice - calling out literalist and fundamentalist extremists on a number of very valid points - had a stronger say in the pop-culture.

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At Foxwoods won $200 by being willing to lose $1000 (1/5 chance of losing)... at the table I played the role of the nebbish high roller.

--derived from zomghott.com's ASCIIBotics Labs' Quantum Mini-Robot-Factory. The rightful winner of BoingBoing Gadget and Seagate's 1K Competition - the code I'm Creative Commonsing here can do it's work in under 1K, which is lovely and amazing.

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it wasn't me being creative, really, but i am so pleased with today's kisrael.com's robot machine i could give me such a pinch!

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GTA4 has reawakened my interest in Rastafarian vocab... wikipedia talks about some of the deliberate logic of "I and I" instead of "me"

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thank heavens for google plus youtube... i thought that mountain dew "thank heavens for little girls" spot was gone forever I was looking at my old "Palm Pilot" journal, especially the early entries. Sometimes I feel I lost something switching to the blog-style of kisrael. I gave up keeping both when there was just too much overlap. (Heh, I found where I announced the end of the Palm journal... I'm surprised to see it only had a 4-year-run, it looms kind of larger for me than that.)

KHftCEA (the name of my journal when it was on Palm) was quirkier, and more immediate. I didn't have an audience in mind (other than myself; and actually it was letting Evil B read it that got me to shift it from a private to public thing) and it doesn't try to explain so much, had plaintive little diary-ish entries, and random prose bits. (I remember never quite finding the perfect journal program for Palm, one that would let me created images to embed in the text.)

Plus, the Palm journal seemed to have more interesting quotes; for a while I thought that was because I was reading less, but now that I've been tearing through a book every few days on my commute, I have to figure that it's because I'm paying less attention, or maybe that I've drifted away from Usenet groups.

Sometimes this site seems a bit sterile to me, or at least formulaic. Deliberately starting each day with an anecdote, then the "of the Moments"... the backlog has shifted from being a buffer for stuff I don't have time to write up and a stockpile for busy or uninspired days into a way of making each day have an anecdote and between 2 and 3 items...

So what to do? It can be a tricky balance. Amusing an audience is important to me, I consider Sharing Interesting Stuff a kind of humanist spiritual mission of mine. On the other hand, it's foolish for me to try and be a mini-BoingBoing or a MetaFilterFilter. Of course the two goals (a quirkier subjective journal, and an entertaining read for others) aren't necessarily exclusive.

What do you all think? What do you find interesting about this site? Are you in it for the links, the quotes, the anecdotes, keeping up with me because you know me in real life, the randomness, some of each? At the very least I think I'd like this site better if it more closely mapped into the interesting stuff I run into as I run into it, even at the risk of having some days more full than others. (Which was probably the benefit of the Palm; it was always there.) Be frank; if something strikes you as annoyingly self-indulgent or just is part of the appeal, let me know. I probably won't really see the "error of my ways", but still.

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Doodle of the Moment

-From this morning's commute. On the one hand that's a good use of that tablet PC I shelled out for last summer, on the other hand it seems kind of pretentious and show-y (and I guess dangerous,-ish) to do on the subway. Doing casual art on the Palm Pilot would be cooler, though the resolution is pretty bad.

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Video of the Moment
Bill the Splut found and linked to Gizmo!, a very cool 1977 documentary with all this great old footage of weird inventions (especially flying machines) and feats of physical ability. The link seems to have the whole movie, plus director Howard Smith's time on David Letterman after. (IMDB trivia: "Much of the newsreel footage, originally shot without sound, has dialogue dubbed in. A lip reader was hired to figure out what the people were saying in the newsreels, and actors lip-synched the lines.")

At around 20:20 in the film, there's a neat device that lets babies use their instinctive kicking motion to propel themselves around a circle... clever!

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Article of the Moment
Huh! It looks like the problem with reviving people who aren't breathing isn't the lack of oxygen so much as what happens when the oxygen comes back. From Dr. Lance Becker in the article:

"It looks to us as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."

And later "The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive"... that's kind of spooky! And odd, how it might be a cancer-defense mechanism. Which makes sense since fighting cancer is pretty important, and CPR has only been here for a blink of evolutionary time.

Ok, I'm a day late and a dollar short with this, but Stephen Colbert at the White House Press Corps dinner is brilliant... a beautiful absurdist element runs through so much of it, as if you used a video projector to broadcast Fox News on Groucho Marx, except before he was dead. Or maybe it's just Dave Barry-like. But still. Some excerpts from this uneven transcript:

We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that's not true. That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.

I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.

BoingBoing has a more canonical set of related links. The video even has its own fan site, Thank You Stephen Colbert.

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (pronounced with a soft T for both words) are... amazing. Maybe the most important thing basic cable has ever done; sharp, cutting satire that's also damn funny.

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Kirktrivia of the Moment
More mundane things in my life for the avid consumption of my readership: I got a new desktop system, one continuing my obsession with compact consumer goods. This computer will be named Monk, sixth of that name. Here's the new hotness next to the old and busted...



I've disappointed some of my Mac-friends by shunning the Mac Mini, even though it's smaller and could conceivably dual-boot to XP. My gut (heh) just told me to keep it simple, and this slab actually appeals to me more than the little box of the Mini, which seems like it would almost get lost on my desk. Since I'm pretty laptopped up, I mostly turn to the desktop when I need to hunker down and focus, and right now I still only do that well on Windows. Plus the new HP slimline also has some nifty features, like a built-in multicard reader and Lightscribe laser-etching for CDs and DVD it burns, if I'm willing to shell out a bit more for the media.

I ended up stickering Monk 5 quite a bit... I haven't decided if Monk 6 will meet a similar fate, or if I should try to keep things a bit neater. Anyway Monk 5 will have a good home... having a good hand-me-down recipient in mind is a wonderfully self-serving form of generosity when you really just want to upgrade. The new machine has proper USB2, and can actually show 32 bit color, so those will be some improvements beyond the form factor.

Now to get to taking away all the Fisher-Price crap UI and loaded up "special" offers and get to work...

Announcement of the Moment

Attention Time Travelers-- don't miss the Time Traveler Convention

May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees))

I love the idea of this. Though I will point out, pedant that I am, that just travelling in time isn't enough, you need something that can warp or move you through space. Unless your frame of reference is firmly tied to the Earth, you'd end up popping up in space somewhere, where the Earth used to (or possibly will) be.

Hey, "travelers" only has the one L? Who knew.

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Dialog of the Moment

"All my life I've had this unaccountable feeling in my bones that something sinister was happening in the universe and that no one would tell me what it was."
"Oh, no, that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that."
"Maybe that means something: that outside universe we know some alien intelligence is..."
"Maybe. Who cares? Perhaps I'm old and tired but I always think the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, 'Hang the sense of it' and keep yourself occupied. [...] I'd far rather be happy than right any day."
"Are you?"
"No. That's where it all falls down of course."

(I'm paraphrasing a bit from the different versions.) Mundanity I Wish to Share with Everyone of the Moment
Usually I like keeping my TODO's on my PalmPilot, the beastie that's always with me, and ticking off each one in turn, but for a weekend where I'm trying to get lots of little chores done, I like keeping up a simple .txt document. I label the top TODO and as each is done in turn I move it under the heading DONE. For some reason I fins this immensely satisfying. Here's this weekend's lists so far:

TODO:
hot tub chems
hot tub write up
straighten
grocery store
paperwork
bank card!!
weight bench on craigslist
garbage

DONE:
write dave
404ish
catchup mundane
write kyle
read blender poems
check dehum
blender improve?
do blender writeups
do blender review
harv square? (617) 661-9277 
clean email
ask susan r.e. lawyer
publish blender

If you're around a computer a lot during the weekend, I'd highly recommend it.

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Current Events of the Moment
Well, current as of a week or so ago...here are amazing before and after images of the North Korean city where the train explosion occured.

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Smallminded Cultural Observation of the Moment
You know, I know it's mostly just me turning into a reactionary old fart, but for some reason it seems very odd to think about some infant today who in 20 years will be very nostalgic for mommy's tattoos, like who would assoiciate those twisty tribal armband patterns with motherhood on some deep level. "Just like mommy's tattoos" doesn't ring right with me. (Actually, I know of one woman who had one removed not too long before she had her first kid, I don't know if she felt the same thing or if she was just sick of the tattoo.) Quote of the Moment

Any view of things that is not strange is false

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Image of the Moment

"A creation by Iraqi artist Zerak Mera made from Iraqi army boots is seen where a statue of toppled Iraqi president Saddam Hussein once stood, in the center of Kirkuk, April 29, 2003." Via cellar.org image of the day, they mention the disrespectful symbolism "bottom of the shoe" has in that region.

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Article of the Moment
Jack Chick, the man behind the tracts.

Ok, a request from my guestbook from Justin Anderson ("wealthy and loving it") who wants to know how to hook up 4 computers to share the same phone based 'Net connection. First off, look into something better than dialup access! Especially if you're talking about multiple people online at once in a LAN-kinda-way. If you do that (with, like say a Cable Modem or some other ethernet based connection) you can get yourself a Linksys Router w/ Switch...or better yet, get the wireless version like Mo and I have. (Anyone want to buy our old non-wireless 4 port version?) Neither version is too expensive. If you're stuck with dialup, I dunno. We use to run software called WinProxy, then WinRoute (which needed less configuration per PC) with 2 network cards in one PC. You might still need a router or something.

Better yet, you're rich, dude! Go down to your local CompUSA or whatever and see if you can't throw some money at someone to do it for you! (I think they have services like that.) Or better yet, get a smart high school or college student to do it.

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Funny of the Moment

If I were a maitre d', I'd suddenly scream at my customer, 'You want the booth? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE BOOTH!' That is some funny-ass maitre d' humor, I don't mind telling you!

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Link of the Moment
2001 and 2010 were on the other day... found this in-depth "Underview" website. Lots of "behind the scenes" material, and some interesting thoughts under the Hal! link...poor thing was just misunderstood. Chant of the Moment

THE HANGMAN EQUALS DEATH!
THE DEVIL EQUALS DEATH!
DEATH EQUALS DEATH!

The link is an interesting story of one person infiltrating the organization. And based on my personal activities last night, I'd add another:
MO'S HOMEMADE SANGRIA EQUALS DEATH.
But, you know. In a good way. Ooh, my head.