Anyone who fondly remembers Susan Cooper's young-adult fantasy series that started with The Dark Is Rising... probably will NOT want to watch this movie trailer. Seriously. You will be sorry. It ain't good.
Digby has always had the best-written, least pointless, and most clearheadedly passionate political blog I've seen. Unfortunately she's extra-good when things really really suck. So if you want to read a good response to the very bad suckery of the surveillance bill that the supposedly Democratic Congress just passed, read this. (Follow all the links from there too, if your head has been reinforced against exploding.)
Of course Diane Feinstein voted for this. Clinton, Obama, and Pelosi didn't - and I guess I've gotten pretty damn cynical, because that surprised me.
Some will say what the hell, they've probably been spying on everyone for years anyway. Then why would they bother with this bill? My best guess is that they don't worry about the NSA getting sued, but once they started getting phone companies into the act on a larger scale, they needed more formal ass-covering.
And, I can't remember whether it was Digby or someone else who recently floated this theory: the real reason so many politicians and journalists have turned into frightened little babies and caved to Bush on nearly everything is, Cheney's spooks have been quietly spreading rumors and pseudo-evidence that there's some big terrorist disaster right around the corner - and that even mentioning it would ruin our top-secret defense plan -and no one wants to be the one who blew our chance of stopping the next 9/11, or (if it couldn't be stopped anyway) the one who voted against surveillance right before the disaster. It's really sad that that's almost a comforting theory. The alternative is that Cheney has naked pictures of them all with dead sheep or something; or they're just frightened little babies for real.
Rudy Giuliani's Five Big Lies About 9/11. This is the first time I've seen any explanation of why (besides stupidity) he decided to put his zillion-dollar emergency bunker in the Trade Center complex. (Basically, one of his pals owned the place, plus he didn't want to walk more than a block from City Hall; he used to bring his girlfriend there too.) He also lied about having investigated the Klinghoffer murder; classy!
Wayne Barrett is just about the only good thing left at the Village Voice since it got bought by the SF Weekly folks. They're no longer allowed to take sides in local politics, but Rudy's not local any more - now he's everyone's problem. God what an asshole, hope he's not President.
The most beautiful interactive animations ever made are Vector Park, Levers, Acrobots, and now Feed the Head (which just consumed most of an evening for me and Becka).
It's not exactly a secret but neither is it obvious that the author of these is Patrick Smith, a graphic artist in Brooklyn who's best known for his work on The Ganzfeld(*).
Hey look, some of the folks I know in the East Bay/SF have gotten together what looks like a pretty solid show in Oakland next month. Each of these people has two or three pieces, so you can probably while away hours and hours there (at least if you are high). I'm guessing I will end up being the designated Morbid Molly, because the only 2 self-contained pieces I could find that fit the general theme ("dirt", in any sense) were kind of disturbing. But I'm happy, really! Go to the show!
Dirty Drawings by Dirty Drawers
Work by well-travelled young underground cartoonists of the Bay Area. Featuring Andy Hartzell, Brian Kaas, Calvin Wong, Daria Tessler, Eli Bishop [Hob], Francois Vigneault, Fred Noland, Gene Yang, Geoff Vasile, Jared Katz, Jesse Reklaw, Joe Sayers, John Isaacson, Josh Frankel, Julia Wertz, Lark Pien, MariNaomi, Mark Haven Britt, Melanie Lewis, Rina Ayuyang, Trevor Alixopulos, Vanessa Davis.
Rock Paper Scissors Gallery
2278 Telegraph Ave., Oakland
Reception: Friday, Sept. 7, 6 - 9pm
Exhibition dates: Sept. 7 - Sept. 29, 2007
One of the nice people at The Daily Crosshatch liked my neurotic comics. Plus, according to the first paragraph, I am now "men"!
In three weeks, I'm leaving my clinic job and I won't be working as a nurse. I've done this before—only had RN jobs for 6 of the last 8 years—so who knows, but this feels a little more final. Or at least, now I feel like if I do this again it'll be just because it's a thing I can do, and not because I have something to prove or because I think it'll become great if I just try harder. I've been trying harder ever since I moved out west, and just about everything else got better in the meantime, but this didn't.
So it's back to being an artsy-techie-dilettante, with the techie part being the only one that corresponds to any kind of jobs for now. It's something I have a real love-hate thing with—I just really liked to play with computers as a kid, now they've taken over the world, and the industry is closely entangled with many things that are dumb about how we live now—but that's true of health care too, and a good auto mechanic is a good thing to be (a good guillotine repairman, not so much). I'll miss the people for sure, but most of the time the work and the craziness kept me from dealing with people as people much. And having to always react to one thing after another tends to make me even more passive and lazy and antisocial after I get home, which gets in the way of a lot of things, not just art.
Anyway, first I'm getting ready to go to Burning Man. First time there, kind of scared, curious. I'm glad my sweetie will be there. I don't expect it to change my life, but it seems appropriate to do it right before this other change, just to remind me in a really blatant way that there are different places to be.