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Sunday, 11 March 2007 18:53:47 i have a friend who spends all her free time reading the wikipedia. it sounds a little scary at first, but if you think about it, it's really not. it's surfing the web (as we can all do for hours on end), just in a slightly more focused way. in any case, i benefit greatly from my friend's wiki obsession because i am oft directed to fascinating information i would not otherwise find. contemplate this as you sip your next cup of coffee: from the bbc....

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Monday, 11 December 2006 15:45:40 fantastically hilarious: from the bbc....

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Sunday, 10 December 2006 21:19:26 another shuttle launch seems like an opportune time to reappear here. i never tire of watching the launches. it makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. you can read about the cool things the astronauts of sts-116 are doing during this mission here. my favorite new way to make myself laugh is to watch commercials for red stripe beer, some of which can be viewed at red stripe's own site and the rest of which are conviently archived at youtube. this is my favorite one. i was turned on to this particular pastime by my buddy jackie. speaking of pastimes, going to see live music is a good one! we're starting to get out there again, and we'd love to see you all. check the shows page to see what's happening...

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Friday, 1 September 2006 06:25:57 ok... let's pretend i haven't disappeared for two months. things in my life other than music have been keeping me... well... let's just say busy and leave it at that. i've seen some mind-blowing things since i last visited here. the things that most stand out in my mind are the latest shuttle mission (sts-121) (textbook-perfect landing pictured here) and al gore's movie, an inconvenient truth. each was a stunning foil for the other, because i saw the movie and watched the launch of sts-121 (did you know about nasa tv, nasa's 24 hour streaming online tv station?) on the very same day. seeing the beautiful blue curve of the earth from space, the faint glow that is our ever-so-fragile protection against the unforgiving cold vacuum of space, and then learning just how close we are to damaging it beyond the possibility of recovery really shook me up. humans are capable of such carefully conceived, amazingly brilliant things and such terribly senseless, reckless things. i strongly encourage you to visit http://climatecrisis.net and find out all the things you can do as an individual to help. call your power company and buy green power, if it's available. if it isn't, do what i did and buy clean energy certificates from a place like 3 phases to balance out the carbon emissions created by your power usage. i also joined the league of conseration voters. there are other planks in a political platform, but really, if we have an unlivable planet, do any of the rest of the things matter? i saw superman returns when it came out, and i remember thinking at the time that i wish there was a superhero to help counteract all the manifestations of the dark side of human nature. so, to end on an lighter note, go here to design your very own superhero. anything is possible...

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Saturday, 17 June 2006 22:30:21 (i will not mention my long lack of entries.. apophasis, apophasis... ) there was a particularly intriguing bit in an article i read in the New York Review of Books. it is a review of Daniel C. Dennet's book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. the reviewer, Freeman Dyson, himself a formidable thinker, calls attention to the author's description of the role of belief in religion. and i quote from the review, "Dennett... observes that belief, which means accepting certain doctrines as true, is different from belief in belief, which means believing belief in the same doctrines to be desirable. He finds evidence that large numbers of people who identify themselves as religious believers do not in fact believe the doctrines of their religions but only believe in belief as a desirable goal. The phenomenon of "belief in belief" makes religion attractive to many people who would otherwise be hard to convert. To belong to a religion, you do not have to believe. You only have to want to believe, or perhaps you only have to pretend to believe. Belief is difficult, but belief in belief is easy." i find this absolutely fascinating. it is a perfect articulation of what i have observed in a lifetime of interactions with religion institutions. for example, among my catholic friends--and i have quite a few--not one believes literally in transubstantiation. they do, however, have faith, and they do find in the church a satisfying organization of their faith. i find in this a powerful truth, and i do not agree with Dennett at all that it is a basis on which to criticize religion, or belief. faith is faith. it doesn't matter if it's direct faith in a supreme being or faith in the power of faith. faith confers its power--regardless of its object--upon the faithful... a tremendous capacity for good, a boundless source of understanding and compassion. faith untwisted is a cornerstone of morality, and faith thus explained becomes a point of spiritual access for all, religiously affiliated or not. what have the giraffes to do with all this, you ask? these beautiful creatures are a miracle... a miracle of god, a miracle of evolution... why does it matter? it is impossible not to wonder at their very existence.

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Saturday, 6 May 2006 19:18:42 it's the weekend. it's staying light later. usually by the time i really notice the days are longer, the longest day has practically come and gone. i'd like to think i've noticed it earlier this year. i was thinking that even on the longest day, when the sun reaches a perfect zenith, there is only sunlight for a very short time in the deep defiles winding amongst the crazy formations of the badlands. the plants that grow there don't need much direct sunlight, i suppose. they know where they're supposed to grow, and they grow there. this is my cryptic message for today. ;)

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Thursday, 4 May 2006 13:50:21 a small recommendation for you... i did a show with bill santiago a few years back and he is totally Making It Big!! as i said to him, i absolutely love it when the good guys win. you can see his special on comedy central tomorrow (friday, may 5) at 10p / 9c. details here. also, he has a hilarious new column about the davinci code at www.motherjones.com

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Wednesday, 3 May 2006 08:01:49 after you start reading, you'll wonder what the photo has to do with anything, but if you keep reading, you'll get to it. (i don't approve of stories that don't end with some kind of redemption, no matter how subtle.) so, here we go... i've seen a lot of things lately in the "is this for real?" category. here's one (don't ask how i found it...): GrowTallerNow.com and a lot of things that feed into my paranoia about being surveilled: http://news.yahoo.com/ and a lot of things that make me want to stay at home--all the time: http://npr.org/ ... and it is in this spirit of incredulity, paranoia, and fear, that i wish you, belatedly, happy may day or happy international workers' day or joyous beltane (i knew pagans in college... really) or whatever strikes your fancy. seriously, though, all these things somehow conspire to remind me how grateful i am for all i have and how important it is to live in and fully experience the present. you can be casually making a right turn into a parking lot one afternoon and suddenly be gone (http://sfgate.com). notice the beauty, near and far.

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Wednesday, 22 March 2006 20:10:31 i was reading this article in the new york review of books about the "health care crisis," as we've come to call it, and it was quite fascinating as i read it, so much of it seemed to be common sense, and yet it's nothing that would've occurred to me had i not read the article (which is why reading is a good idea, generally, i guess). it got me thinking, for example, about how the furor over the future of social security is kind of silly when one considers the future of per capita health care spending. people are freaking out about the wrong thing, which is not so unusual in america, i suppose. still, it makes me aware of how the media steer me... even the good guys! check it out here.

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Thursday, 16 March 2006 20:19:11 i heard the most inspiring story on npr today. it's the kind of thing one needs to hear on those "poor me" days when life seems so hard. don't just read the text; listen to the audio. you'll be glad you did. www.npr.org/ also, check out this super-cool site: www.pandora.com/

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Sunday, 5 February 2006 22:46:43 [ok, so it took me a little while to complete this entry...] ah, once again i float in a shadowy interstice between congenial banter and politics... after watching the three and a half quarters of the superbowl, i saw a film tonight--part of the san francisco independent film festival--which i will choose to call "interesting." i won't utter its name, but you can read about it here or even go to the film's own site here. i feel utterly steeped in american culture and its occasional... well, maybe more than occasional... hypocrisy. it was particularly interesting to have the superbowl and the film juxtaposed, because the film actually touched on the janet jackson superbowl controversy. in any case, i think i can say, while maintaining my comfortably noncommital "green libertarian" position, that advocates of censorship-in-the-interest-of-family-values a) apparently haven't read the constitution and b) mysteriously have no objection to the values implicit in... say... the superbowl (as a phenomenon or... institution might be a better word)... greed, materialism, sexism, the list goes on and on... enough of that. i'd much rather think about the fact that a yellow lab found her person's breast cancer and saved her life. :) check it out: http://cnn.com american dogs rock.

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Friday, 3 February 2006 21:48:10 it's friday. woohoo! i feel the need to comment on today's "anne's link of the day," because "Nice" isn't on of the more revealing of her descriptive comments. ;) the link is about crops... very cool link, truly in the anne style. (you'll see "purdue," as in purdue university, in the link, in case you're looking for the link i'm talking about here in the list of past anne links). you can find out what is grown, by county, in any state of our wonderful union. i am wondering--and i'll have to ask her--if she was surfing in crop-land because of the whole "switchgrass thing." it's pretty interesting. i'm looking forward to reading more about it myself.

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Wednesday, 1 February 2006 17:14:34 ok... i assiduously avoid partisanship in this blog, but it's getting hard to do so. perhaps i'll describe my political leanings in such a way as to make them ambiguous. (wait... isn't "politial leanings" kind of an ambiguous phrase to begin with?... but anyway...) i'll describe myself, for the sake of argument, as a green (was the green party thinking, when they got this url, that many people associate "grp" with Georgia Pacific? i didn't go to http://gp.com by accident, mind you. i just saw the "gp" and thought "Georgia Pacific... billions of reams of paper made with wood from virgin forests... hmmm," but anyway...) libertarian. hey, i'm just as fiscally conservative as the next republican... but wait, are republicans fiscally conservative?... i'm confused by the current administration's spending. i'm confused by the implications of the current administration's stated priorities for our national deficit. and probably, now, you're confused by everything i've said in the preceding paragraph. see how i've tidily avoided partisanship again? and i even feel better! read the text of the State of the Union and form your own opinion: http://npr.org

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Saturday, 21 January 2006 17:46:59 one of those pieces of americana we all take for granted... (or at least, i took it for granted)... and who knew what an involved (it might even be called checkered) history it has: Home on the Range the evolution of the lyric is particularly fascinating, if you're interested in that sort of thing. click here to check it out. This makes me think, actually, of Stephen Foster's song My Old Kentucky Home, whose original lyric was as offensive as some of the earlier versions of Home on the Range.

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Wednesday, 18 January 2006 21:04:43 once in a blue moon, i stop thinking of my responsibilities and surrender myself to pure childlike enjoyment. i did that over this past holiday weekend, and i'm here to tell you that if you haven't done that recently, you should. and on a completely different topic (or, come to think of it, maybe not so completely different after all)--don't you think that if these two can get along, we humans, with our infinite capacity for reason and compassion, should be able to do the same?

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Sunday, 8 January 2006 22:31:51 hello, hello, and happy new year to all. what've i been doing, you might ask? i'm not sure, but i know it's been incredibly consuming and exciting. ;) i hope all of you have rung in the new year with high expectations and with no regrets! in 2006, i have renewed my resolve to decrease my own personal contribution to global warming, which--truly--is happening, as inexcorably as it is rapidly. if you need convincing (that global warming really is happening, that is), read this from the new york review of books: http://nybooks.com/ here's a cool incentive for buying that insight or prius you've been eyeing: http://cnn.com/

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Thursday, 8 December 2005 13:26:35 somewhere, somehow, people have too much time on their hands. click here for proof.

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Wednesday, 7 December 2005 22:07:42 doesn't it make you feel better to know that there are giant catfish in the world? it definitely helps me put things in perspective. and, totally unrelatedly, X2: X-MEN UNITED is a highly underrated scifi/action/adventure flick. (or maybe it's not highly underrated and i was actually living under a rock in 2003, which is actually entirely possible.)

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Saturday, 3 December 2005 21:52:56 today's required reading... a great book i started today (or at least, it's shaping up to be great. u.c. press fiction seems to be consistently high-quality. check it out: http://amazon.com/

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Thursday, 1 December 2005 22:10:52 stuff like this just blows me away: http://cnn.com/ do yourself a favor and click on some of the galleries in the "RELATED" box that you'll see on the right if you scroll down. i can never quite believe that photographs of celestial bodies are photographs (or spectrographs, or whatever). for a moment, i think they must be fabulous artist renderings and think sympathetically of the moon landing hoax crowd. but then i remember that it really is this amazing. we are really this small. it is really that beautiful out there... maybe more beautiful than it is cold and dark and hostile.

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Wednesday, 30 November 2005 19:21:10 is there really such a thing as a "reverse commute" these days? well, i think we can say DEFINITELY not in los angeles. but what about in the bay area? san jose, oakland, san francisco, everyone living someplace other than where they work... i just don't know anymore. the "reverse commute" into san francisco is jammed at 7:30 at night. come to think of it though, i can't blame anyone for wanting to drive over the bridge into the san francisco skyline after the sun has set. here's a live webcam that doesn't capture what i'm talking about in any way: http://kron4.com/ what it looks like is actually more like this:

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Tuesday, 29 November 2005 14:48:31 well, since we're talking about fascinating man-made materials. (are we talking about that?... i guess i am.) yesterday's was GRG (glass-reinforced gypsum). the material du jour is DIAMONDOIDS. some of the futures we've seen in the movies are so close: http://www.chevron.com or http://www.wikipedia.org ... and in case you were wondering, there are people concerned about the implications of the injection of diamondoids (hmmm... maybe literally. imagine having little microscopic machines in your body--creepy...) into our lives: http://crnano.typepad.com/

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Monday, 28 November 2005 18:49:45 can one make a thanksgiving resolution? if so, i resolve to speak more here. (as if you are deeply concerned about the recent lack of non sequiturial babblings from me... *spoken with some self-deprecating sarcasm*) it's been busy. it's always busy. for everyone. i wonder if one day i will accept that it will never be not busy, but for moments here and there. writing in this weblog is, like so many other things, a "just do it." it's fun and--at least for me--occasionally illuminating. so, why not? we haven't been playing out much, as you may have noticed. we are each of us curled in our hibernacula. we'll be back. here are some non sequiturial links for today... ;) glass-reinforced gypsum has long been a fascination of mine. i don't think i've thought about it since the advent of google. i searched, and--imagine that--it's still around. i haven't read enough to find out what consumers have to say about it, but it's pretty interesting. check it out: http://www.strombergarchitectural.com/material_links_pages/gfrg.php being an avid watcher of evolving language, i love this site: http://www.urbandictionary.com/yesterday.php

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Tuesday, 4 October 2005 13:13:03 so much talk about this "stealth" nominee, and i've heard not one person bring up the fact that she wears entirely too much eyeliner... does no one else find this (as my friend John McGivern likes to say) spooky?...

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Friday, 30 September 2005 14:19:44 i decided earlier today that i have a classy bathroom. and it's not about the decor. i was, i dare say, in the bathroom, and i began to think about all the w.c. reading fodder i've seen in my life--the old farmer's almanac, the best of the far side, assorted issues of time magazine. these i've seen often. i've even seen the occasional men's health, sports illustrated, or redbook, even the economist on one occasion i can remember. as i was saying, i began to think of this as i thumbed, for the umpteenth time, through a volume i've come to take for granted as part of the ethos of my bathroom--the unassumingly royal blue cardstock-covered SLH directory. what is an SLH directory you ask? i must send you here for the answer. how did i come to be in possession of an SLH directory? well, we'll save that story for another time. the SLH directory, with the corners of a good number of its pages turned down (but i try to be discreet about the whole turning-down-the-corners thing), is, believe it or not, not the only classy thing in the bathroom... for tastefully positioned in a handled picnic sort of basket underneath the bottom-most of the clear glass shelves on the wall is a quite large stack of New Yorkers. what more could you want, really, in a bathroom? the photo has nothing to do with any of that, btw, but i will send you a free cd if you can identify it. cheers!

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Wednesday, 28 September 2005 20:12:36 this picture is intended to pique your interest. you'd never guess that where i'm trying to lead you with the picture is to a renewed commitment to carpooling. it's a long chain of thought... in any case, i heard the audio version of this story about changing conditions in the arctic (from a biological point of view) on npr this morning. like most global warming-related stories, it was incredibly disturbing. it managed to be incredibly inspiring at the same time, though... the unabashed wonder of the sleep-deprived scientists (and these are full-grown adults with PhDs, mind you), the very thought of hundreds upon thousands of as yet undocumented lifeforms, the images of turquoise blue melt-puddles. and in a frighteningly small number of years, there may be, literally, no more arctic ice. so, turn off the engine while you're waiting to pick your kids up from school, carpool to work one day a week, do the tiny things that become big things if everyone does them. ironically, i had to think about that myself when i almost, without thinking, left the engine running so i could hear the end of this very story on the radio. i caught myself and turned it off. you can listen to the radio without the engine running, you know... ;) i linked from that story to the NOAA site, which was cool. the connected story there is very interesting, but there's a ton of other interesting stuff and amazing imagery there. amid the dizzying array of government projects and agencies, there's really good work going on. so this is one of the many amazing pictures on the NOAA website. i recommend a bit of surfing there to you. i'm sure anne, my link of the day guru, (or, in all fairness to her, because of my delinquency, her link of the week-or-so guru) would approve. more soon...

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Wednesday, 14 September 2005 07:55:23 someone forwarded me the text of steve jobs' stanford commencement address. it is at once inspiring and... well... hard to read, because it's hard to do the daily-look-in-the-mirror he speaks of. so many of us, i imagine, go to great lengths to avoid doing it. i read an article about another inspirational (at least, she is to me) figure--bonnie raitt. so talented and accomplished, so committed to putting her celebrity where her mouth is, if you will. she works tirelessly for a number of social and environmental causes. the article was in yesterday's sf chronicle, and you can read it here. from tomorrow until the 26th, i'll be somewhere with no internet access. i'll report afterwards on what that was like for a true web addict like myself. ;) i imagine there will be a few days of withdrawal and a few days of relief. we'll see...

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Friday, 9 September 2005 18:50:55 another week has gone by. i haven't been feeling so articulate. there are a couple of things to look forward to coming up... gillian welch will be in san francisco at the fillmore in early october. susan werner will be at an as yet undisclosed venue in the bay area in late october. wait... i have to go... more later. :)

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Friday, 2 September 2005 14:00:55 no one knows what to say about what's happening in the gulf region of our great nation. i am no exception. i can only read the words in stunned silence and stare in awe at the images. there are, as you know, so many ways to help. here's one of them:

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Saturday, 27 August 2005 23:00:33 well, this is a banner day (without banner ads... ha!). this is my first true blog entry. browser-based. ftp-less. woohoo! this development, as those of you who are familiar with the Way of Upload know, is vastly superior and infinitely easier. hopefully, you'll be hearing from me more often. :) i want to say that the world of science has been a source of joy and fascination for me lately. some of my favorite little current event bits have been from discovery-land. this picture you see is the first cloned dog. did they clone a goofy-looking dog on purpose to draw attention away from the fact of the cloning?

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Sunday, 14 August 2005 20:11:01 To access earlier entries click here.

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