Ephemera

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Manny or No Manny?

Manny or No Manny?: "I wonder: Should Manny Ramirez stay in Boston? He is one of the finest hitters we have ever had and has never had a bad year, except for perhaps last year when he hit .292. However, I am tired of his constantly wanting to be traded to another team. It pisses me off. I think that he wants to stay, keep him, but only if he is going to commit."

This is from Your Name Goes Here

Cretinizing Baguette

This is where life began, back in Geocities, in Yahoo. Too bad I never kept a copy of the first version in Geocities. What would have been even cooler is if I could put my hands on my very first concept for etail "Stupid Shit, CHEAP!"

Basically, I was going to have it be like Ebay, except there was no Ebay back then. The only difference would be that people would sell each other stupid stuff, cheap, just for the fuck of it... not because they were really trying to make serious money. I saw it as a Dadaist gesture.

I guess I underestimated people's desire to make money. Or I overestimated people's desire to make Dadaist expressions.

Yeah, probably both of those.

Anyway, Ebay seems to be a pretty good idea, if you're into that sort of thing.

It's fun to lie. Sometimes it leads you to where you're supposed to go.

The Garbage Diaries: "The other day, I was in a bad mood. It seemed like maybe I should find
another occupation, and I browsed the Help Wanted Ads for a while, but
it just made my mood more... BADDER."

This is slide and glide.

The Garbage Diaries: This is where I was at three years ago.

The Garbage Diaries: "self-evacuating vacuoles of the cerebrum. the mind excretes what it
cannot use; this is how time and space continue to exist. if we needed
these things, we would have kept them in mind. physical reality is what
is left over from a prior existence. we wake up in the catlitter box of
our own device."

Monday, November 21, 2005

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

Wind or something more than wind
clatters ladder to the ground, sings doom songs in the trees
and branches of my nerves.

The wind or something in the wind--
It wants in or wants me out,
paws the house with curlicues and eddies,
tests each window by my bed,
whispers promises and when that fails
to open window to its kingdom of the air,
it speaks in lower tones
of places more empty and more vast.

At last I do go out, to check on the ladder
to make sure the noise is what I thought it was,
not something other than the wind
for such things as this need looking after--
though once I would have slept on unaware
of wind or ladders or what the wind brings or takes,
now I am tasked with such, for it must be done.

On the dark side of the house,
the ladder lays in grass and shadow.
A lucky thing when something is the way you thought,
and not a way beyond your thought and mind's small compass.
Even so, something moving in the grass startles;
my shadow cast in thin starlight.
How funny! though the darkness or the wind plays tricks
on balance and perception
and every step seems going downward.

The Garbage Diaries

The Garbage Diaries excerpt from 2003: Here There Be Monsters

How funny that I clicked this at random after writing that last post.


Sunday, November 13, 2005

Hunter and the New Plane




Hunter and I built this plane today.

Shouldn't be doing this..


It's very late. There is barely any time left to sleep.
The woodpecker has lured me away again.
This is a random picture.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Log in, tune-out and get rich. Ebay is just the beginning.


Sometimes the things kids say acts as a catalyst for poetry. Yesterday, my six year old son asks, "Has World War Three started yet?"
What a question!
This morning, as I was reading The Oregonian, my son's question gave me a rather chilling perspective on the litany of horrors to which I insist on subscribing. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrorism in Jordan, the possibility of a bird flu pandemic: it all seemed to point to a strange new dark age in the world. The gap between rich and poor widens in the west as the middle class erodes, jobs are outsourced, and new opportunity for wealth... or poverty... present themselves. With the surfeit of more and more computing power for less and less cost, it seems the only sensible thing to do is log in, tune-out (i.e., all the doom and gloom speech) and get rich. When the leadership of the country reward capital-owners, it's time to get jiggy with it and do the capitalist dance. Maybe everybody should stop being so obsessed with jobs. Maybe people should focus more on making money and creating wealth. I really believe that the huge increase in server capacity, processing power and proliferation of open-source coding is going to create huge opportunities for the next generation of people who help empower the down-sized and the laid-off to concentrate on their strengths and increase the economy's flexibility, adaptibility and efficiency by an entire power!

Sunday, November 06, 2005


This is my dad in his 1933 Ford dump truck. Posted by Picasa
This would be my dad. Posted by Picasa

This is a test of the blogcast system.

Hmm. Made changes to the template, and now new posts are going below old posts.

Doesn't get more Oregon thatn this.

Snapped this picture at the Oregon/California game this Saturday in Eugene.
Three beers at half-time: $15
Rain suit from Fred Myers that someone had already worn and damaged and returned to the store as "new" : $18.99
48 degrees out with wind and rain at U of O for 3 hours... priceless.
Seriously, though, I don't think I've experienced anything remotely similar to this since I went to my last Dead show a million years ago.