dimarts, de febrer 20, 2007

oh NO

I won't be joining my family in Maine after all. I've worked out an arrangement with my father that will make my life much easier over the summer.
Plans for our Amsterdam trip, on the other hand, are nearly finalized. With the exception of two nights in Brussels that my dad is booking with his points, everything is booked and paid for.
We fly direct from Houston into Amsterdam, stay there for three nights, then on to Den Haag (The Hague) for a day, then Brussels for two nights, then we terminate the trip with two nights in Rotterdam, which is an hour's train ride from Amsterdam, so the morning we leave we'll have to get up early and take the first train up. Our flight is in the afternoon, but we would like to have a few hours in Amsterdam before heading off to Schiphol.
While in Rotterdam, i would like to stop by, or at least walk by, OMA. Maybe we'll even see Rem, but I'm not going to get my hopes up about that one.
It should be lots and lots of fun, and I am very excited.

dijous, de febrer 15, 2007

Kennewhat?


I spoke to my father on the phone today and he told me that for the [family] summer vacation we will be going to Kennebunkport, Maine. Instead of Maui. Hawaii.
At first I was just plain confused, and a little disappointed that I wouldn't be seeing the Pacific this year. But I think Kennebunkport will be great. I will have to get a pair of boat shoes, some seersucker shorts, and several polos, all in bright colors. I really don't know what to make of this choice for a vacay destination (my stepmom visited Maine as a child). I mean, we're doing all right, but we are certainly not rich, and certainly not New Englanders. I will enjoy it nonetheless, and am pretty much just as excited as I was about Maui. We will fly into Boston, where we will stay for a couple days (before or after is TBA), then drive up to Kennebunkport. Such a long name. I looked up the Bush house online, and found which part of the beach it's on, though there appears to be three residences on Walker's Point, so I'll have to do a little more research to find out where to leave the sack of rotting potatoes.
In other news, Roy and I have made some more plans for our euro-trip. We are going to stay in a hostel, as the savings will be tremendous. We plan to make side-trips to Brussels, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and maybe The Hague, if only so Roy can bathe in the glory of Jeroen's throne. Hostels can be quite noisy I hear, so we will have to drink ourselves to oblivion every night in order to get any sleep.
My mom still has nightmares about the movie Hostel, so I wasn't surprised when she asked me today if we would really save that much money.
I watched Night Watch tonight, and am very disappointed that I will have to wait two years for the sequel and even longer for the one succeeding that.
I'm reading Camus's The Plague. It's good.

Demasiado italicization?




A candy-colored clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper
Go to sleep. everything is all right.

I close my eyes, then I drift away
Into the magic night. I softly say
A silent prayerlike dreamers do.
Then I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you.

In dreams I walk with you. in dreams I talk to you.
In dreams youre mine. all of the time were together
In dreams, in dreams.



But just before the dawn, I awake and find you gone.
I cant help it, I cant help it, if I cry.
I remember that you said goodbye.

Its too bad that all these things, can only happen in my dreams
Only in dreams in beautiful dreams.




I thought this was neat, it's a simplified map of the US interstate highway system:




diumenge, de febrer 11, 2007


hahahaha
Ah, socialist naivete



I don't buy all of what this guy says, but it's interesting anyway:

Ten Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society
By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com
http://www.alternet.org/story/47705/

Editor's Note: James Howard Kunstler is a leading writer on the topic of peak oil the problems it poses for American suburbia. Deeply concerned about the future of our petroleum dependent society, Kunstler believes we must take radical steps to avoid the total meltdown of modern society in the face looming oil and gas shortages. For background on this topic, read Kunstler's essay, "Pricey Gas, That's Reality."

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions" to our looming energy crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here are my suggestions:

1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.

3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami ...) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components -- at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.

4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.

5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.

6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.

7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).

8. We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.

9. We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.

10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.
At least they'll be close to Dallas
Like a Maquiladora, but a prison





Nights in white satin,
Never reaching the end,
Letters Ive written,
Never meaning to send.

Beauty Id always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I cant say anymore.

cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.

Gazing at people,
Some hand in hand,
Just what Im going thru
They can understand.

Some try to tell me
Thoughts they cannot defend,
Just what you want to be
You will be in the end,

And I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.

Nights in white satin,
Never reaching the end,
Letters Ive written,
Never meaning to send.

Beauty Id always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I cant say anymore.

cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.

cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.




I was listening to this song w/ my mom in the car and I told her how The Moody Blues were one of the few groups that Charles Manson allowed his "family" to listen to.
Poor Roman Polanski.

dijous, de febrer 08, 2007

Haha:


Oh my god, somebody give me a gun
FREAKIN' SWEET


I found out the other day (much to my dismay, naturally) that Inland Empire was actually released LAST YEAR, and I found out (after an exhaustive search on google) that it is only playing in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. It was playing at ONE theater here in Austin last week, but no more; I called today and the guy had no idea if/when it would be playing again. Doesn't David Lynch know that he has a fanatical cult following and that we want to see the fucking movie NOW?!
I guess I will have to wait until the fucking SUMMER for it to come out on DVD. I'm really upset about this.
In other news, I really want to see Children of Men.
My brother told me that he is going to buy a motorcycle this weekend, and it just so happens I will be there to celebrate the purchase; he has been wanting one for a long time.
The link is to the specific model he is getting; I'm not just trying to illustrate what a motorcycle is.

dilluns, de febrer 05, 2007


I don't think this carpet-bagger will win. I hope she doesn't, anyway; I doubt she has what it takes. Though I must say that it would be hilarious to see Bill Clinton back in the White House, president or not.
I think Joe Biden (D-Delaware) is a good possibility, but it's too early to tell.
I do NOT have this Obama fever, or whatever the hell it's being called. Let him finish at least ONE term in the senate, then MAYBE we'll talk. Your hope is Audacious, Sir.


Neato shot of NYC:

divendres, de febrer 02, 2007

In Boston last week, there was a big scare because some retards thought that some glowing neon signs placed randomly throughout the city (an Aqua Teen Hunger Force ad campaign) were bombs. So some people were arrested, and this is them at a press conference after being released from jail:

people are so fucking stupid.