The way home

The air­port shut­tle woke me up this morn­ing – not a good thing when you aren’t already all packed. My alarm went off at 6:45 and I don’t remem­ber a thing again until 8:10. For­tu­nate­ly, I only packed for one day and had lots of room in my bag. I dragged on my pants and shoes and stuffed every­thing else in my bag and went. The dri­ver cov­ered for me by say­ing that he was … Read the rest

Have I forgotten?

I’m in the air­port shut­tle some­where in Wash­ing­ton State between SeaT­ac and Ever­green. I haven’t seen this many rust­ed out cars in the front yards of trail­ers since I was in the Carolinas.

The shut­tle dri­ver has the radio on the coun­try sta­tion. (Yes, Ham­mer­head, I remem­ber. The dri­ver choos­es!) It illus­trates some pret­ty pro­found cul­ture shock that in just a cou­ple hours I’ve gone from a place where they’re play­ing War Pigs on the radio sta­tion to a place … Read the rest

Cowardice

As I was about to get off the the #14 bus today, a cou­ple kids were giv­ing anoth­er kid trou­ble. There was some ruckus and swear­ing, and I heard one say, “give me your watch, take off your watch!” As the bus stopped the noise turned into phys­i­cal com­mo­tion and as I got up to get off, one of these kids – a skin­ny olive-skinned boy of about 16 I guess – tum­bled past me and his scoot­er crashed … Read the rest

First they kill her, then they attack her mourners

It’s a damn good thing I’m not in Israel. I might do some­thing regrettable.

Memo­r­i­al Ser­vice dis­rupt­ed with tanks and tear­gas (thanks to Erik for pass­ing this link on to me)

I know… hav­ing more than three or four peo­ple gath­ered in one place is a secu­ri­ty haz­ard of some sort. There’s a rea­son that we have the right to assem­ble writ­ten into our Constitution—it’s the sort of thing that author­i­ties are scared of, so the U.S. founders want­ed to make … Read the rest

Israeli Bulldozers: 1 American Protesters: 0

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2855263.stm

I met Rachel at Burn­ing Man and we trad­ed a few emails. I real­ly liked her a lot and I was hop­ing to get to vis­it her up in Wash­ing­ton at some point. I had in mind that she’d still be alive when I vis­it­ed, now I’m try­ing to make arrange­ments to go up there for a memo­r­i­al service.

Shit. Ain’t no two ways about this: it sucks.

It’s sort of bit­ter­sweet to real­ize that I’d … Read the rest

I need to be less geeky or else more geeky

OK, it’s not like I don’t know how to pro­gram my VCR or what­ev­er, but I have to learn to start record­ing Star Trek and watch­ing it at a civ­i­lized time. It used to be on at 11:00, and then they moved it to mid­night, which means get­ting to bed no ear­li­er than 1am. Now it does­n’t start until 12:30 and some­times I think it would be nice to get to bed ear­li­er and … Read the rest

That got my Chi flowing

I’m insane­ly grat­i­fied by the fact that I got home tonight and found that Lau­ry Ostrow wrote email to me to com­pli­ment me on an arti­cle I wrote on his now thrice-defunct ven­ture, Chi-Pants.

Hey, check out my crotch!

I have a few pair, and they’re damn fine pants. Just think­ing about how I can’t get any new Chi-Pants makes me mad mad mad.

Read the arti­cle. Geeks have real­ly gone downhill.

I just hap­pen to be wear­ing Chi-Jeans right now. … Read the rest

Daredevil

I was afraid I’d wast­ed my mon­ey on my tick­et to Dare­dev­il on the IMAX screen, know­ing it would prob­a­bly be pret­ty bad, but damned if see­ing the League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men trail­er was­n’t total­ly worth it.

Dare­dev­il was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly good, but it was­n’t as bad as I thought it would be. I liked the spe­cial effects used for his radar sense – it made more sense visu­al­ly than it ever did in the comics.

All in all not a wast­ed night.… Read the rest

Friends

Last night I was chat­ting with some girl from Tehran and she asked me if I have many friends. I had to think about it, and sad­ly the answer is no. There are many many peo­ple who are good friends to me, and very few to whom I am a good friend.

This is sad because if I’ve dis­cov­ered even uncon­scious­ly that it’s eas­i­er to make friends than to keep friends, what kind of mon­ster have I become?

I detest … Read the rest