"Freedom of the press belongs to
     those who own one." AJ Liebling

6/21/05 Personal: Mom died this first morning of Summer, as a friend of her's and I held each of her hands and we listened to a Bach fugue.

* Japanese Death Poems. Motifs: Seasons & Travel.
* Travel: How to use a cell phone worldwide.
* Travel: reviews of gear for travelers.

* Bram Cohen calls MS Avalanche "vaporware".
* Linus Torvalds on the future of MS.
* Richard Stallman on software patents.

6/20/05 Personal: I thought we were losing Mom last night. The livingroom was full of family and a couple of neighbors - my uncle Jack is still in town. We broke open the morphine last night and the phenobarbital today. Alot of the suffering is in respiratory distress, the muscles in her diaphram are very weak. She continues to indicate that she is at peace. She wants to go, but I think it's hardest on Bill. He's the man she's been seeing for 2 or 3 years. I believe they are in Love. Perhaps the biggest frustration here is that they won't get more "golden years" together.

6/18/05 Downing Street Memos now impacting big in the U.S.
* U.S. Sen. Durbin on Guantanamo: fisking Right Wing responses.
* Mercury, Vaccines & Autism debate entering Main Stream Media.
* NASA "CXV": alternate Shuttle aces early test.

6/17/05 Music: live, acoustic version of a favorite song: Cause=Time by Broken Social Scene. [lyrics]. [And the studio, electric version.]

* Trans Siberian Railway: traveler's weblog. [via]
* Rainbow Family vs U.S. Forest Service, again.
* Science Fiction: Grand List of Overused Cliches.
* Humor: Unified Field Crossover History of the Universe
* Humor: "Business Time", by Flight of the Conchords.

6/16/05 "Never Say Exit": U.S. Congressional Republicans call for Iraq exit victory strategy - want timeline for removing troops. [Props]

U.S. Politics: Dems call for probe of Downing Street Memo.

U.S. Lawmakers chip away at PATRIOT Act. Democrats and traditional Conservative Republicans joined to outnumber Neo- Conservatives in voting to remove a provision allowing FBI access to borrowing records of Public Libraries without a (traditional) warrant. The Congressional amendment was sponsored by a Vermont Independent, and was attached to a Justice Department appropriations bill - which the White House has subsequently threatened to veto. Traditional American Conservatism has always favored "less government", and those Republicans not yet converted to Neo-Conservatism joined Democrats in this small but highly symbolic victory. Washington D.C. is all about the perception of Power, and the accumulation and exercise of such perceived political capital. This vote significantly undermines Bush's recent push to make the "sunset" (temporary) provisions of the PATRIOT Act "permanent". [C.S._Monitor] [The Hill] [Reuters]

6/15/05 Tsunami Warning in N. California after offshore quake.

Arianna Huffington was a guest on the O'Reilly Factor Monday. Bill O'Reilly said that the 234 detainees so far released from Guantanamo's Camp Delta were "no longer useful". Ms. Huffington countered that they had been mistakenly held, because they clearly were no longer considered a threat to the U.S. [i.e. Enemy Combatants]. Bill O'Reilly told her that if anyone could name someone mistakenly held at Guantanomo Bay [and released], he would show their picture on his show and send them a donation. An April 19, 2005 Associated Press report [alt] refers to two men who - according to Pentagon spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers - were "cleared of accusations they were enemy combatants." The men's names are Gul Zaman and Abdul Rahman. My email to Mr O'Reilly.

* Exxon hires Bush's Global Warming Expert.

6/14/05 Between Geeks & Autism: What Is Asperger's Syndrome?
* Kottke's proposal to American Public Broadcasting System (PBS).
* Microsoft censors Chinese blogs: "freedom" & "democracy" blocked.
* Rumsfeld notes image problem: "US notably unskilful in diplomacy".
* Senators end filibuster threat, apologize & criminalize lynching.

6/13/05 Second Downing Street Memo emerges. "An eight-page memo written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq shows senior British officials saw the Bush administration as bent on war in Iraq and inattentive to postwar consequences, concluding that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a 'protracted and costly' postwar occupation". [WaPo]

In April 2002 Tony Blair agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush. And Ministers were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

Freedom Fries Jones: "Republican Congressman Walter Jones, who led the move to rename French Fries in the U.S. Capitol cafeteria says he'll introduce a bill to start bringing troops home from Iraq."

"Newton's Sleep" is a phrase coined by poet William Blake refering to a preference of a mechanical view of the universe over a spiritual view. "But Physics per se cannot causally determine the outcome of human creativity; and Physics by itself cannot explain any behaviour that is adaptive and depends on context, for example, beaver dam-building and the dances of bees. It is plausible that these also emerged at late times in the expanding Universe as higher-level autonomous behaviours, made possible but not causally determined by the underlying physics and chemistry of matter. Conditions at the time of the decoupling of matter and radiation 14 billion years ago were such as to lead to the eventual development of minds that are autonomously effective. Such minds are able to create higher-level order, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem, [and teapots,] that embodies a purpose and meaning not in existence before. The human mind is physically based, but there is no hope whatever of predicting the behaviour it controls from the underlying physical laws. Even if we had a satisfactory fundamental physics 'theory of everything', this situation would remain unchanged: physics would still fail to explain the outcomes of human purpose, and so would provide an incomplete description of the real world around us." [ALT]

6/12/05 Hidden Bohemian Hearth: "Arriving from New York in the late 1930's, poet Elsa Gidlow holed up in a derelict house in the rural Northern California town of Fairfax. She was forty years old. Facing winter solstice alone and unsettled, she decided to perform what she later described as a 'transforming ritual.' As a storm raged outside the leaky house, she built up a roaring blaze of madrone logs. Slowly, Gidlow sensed the room fill with the spirits of all the mothers and grandmothers who have ever tended fire, all the way back to the Paleolithic. "I knew myself linked by chains of fire," she wrote, "to every woman who has kept a hearth." In the morning, Gidlow honored this rather neo-pagan vision by wrapping some of the cold coals in foil and red ribbon, and keeping them for next year's solstice fire. In 1954, Gidlow brought one of these solstice charcoals to her new home, a junky five-acre patch of rural hillside on the edge of Muir Woods redwood forest... The resulting settlement of Druid Heights became "a 'beatnik' enclave years before the term was born or needed, and later a party spot for famous freaks. Scores of sculptors, sex rebels, stars and seekers lived or visited the spot over the decades, including Gary Snyder, Dizzy Gillespie, John Handy, Alan Watts, Neil Young, Tom Robbins, Catherine McKinnon and the colorful prostitute activist Margo St. James. Too anarchic and happenstance to count as a commune, Druid Heights became what Gidlow jokingly called 'an unintentional community.'"

Europe's Oldest Civilisation: 7,000-year-old temples unearthed between Germany and Pakistan are older than the Pyramids & Stonehenge. "Across the world, man was beginning to see his surroundings as something that could be organised or curtailed - to be farmed. That is a profound change and it did not [necessarily] displace an innate sense of reverence for nature. The first civilisations therefore dedicated effort, more often than not huge, into reflecting that in monumental structures."

Personal: my Uncle Jack is visiting from Victoria for a second time since Mom's diagnosis with ALS. After his flight got in yesterday, we satisfied his unusual hankering for a beer by going to the New Zealander, a recently renamed 122 year old bar near my house. After we found two open bar stools near the window, I recommended he try the Fat Tire Ale. And I asked for their Near Beer. I then retold the story my Mother recently shared with me of how as an 18 year old, she had left the local Four Square church. He then proceeded to tell me his story of leaving the same church 7 years earlier at the age of 14. While he ate Salmon Pie, and I had Cheese & Crackers, he told me how he was informed he needed to give up the use of a borrowed Trumpet if it was true he was planning to play in a newly formed "Dance Band" - as dancing was against church doctrine. He was lent the Trumpet a year earlier by a man who then went on to become engaged to the Minister's daughter. At some point the Minister must've told her son in law to-be that he should deliver the ultimatum to young Jack. Some 30 or 40 years later, the couple, still married, moved to a house near Jack's place on nearby Shawnigan Lake. And when they then met again after so many years, there were of course no hard feelings. Jack says the gentleman has now been dead about 5 years, but he did see his widow at the store just a few weeks ago - now in her mid-80's. This morning, when we told my Mother all of this, she remarked that she had talked with the same lady at the funeral of her own Mother (my Grandmother, in 1984), and the lady had remarked then on just how "demanding" her own Mother (the Minister) had been.

  [Permalink]  [albion at stryder dot com]

* Wheelchair Rugby Documentary: Murderball [2005] trailor.
* Roe v. Wade resulted in precipitous decline of U.S. crime.
* Canada: 1st ever ban on publication of Internet addresses.
* Roger Waters rejoins Pink Floyd at Live8 [25 yr split].
* School of Lost Borders, boundaries & limitations.
* Trip to China, 2005: a travelers' pictures.
* Google Search syntax cheat sheet.
* Copyright tips for Bloggers.

* War: Time report on Gitmo, "Inside the Wire".
* War: Torture taxonomy [types/categories].

6/11/05 Chalkboards replaced w/ giant, touch-sensitive computer screens.

Hubble Telescope to view NASA sponsored Deep Impact comet collision.

U.S Politics: Opinion. Whether or not Howard Dean's recent well publicized remarks characterizing Republicans as mostly caucasion armchair Christians were to any extent "true", they certainly weren't in any way helpful, compelling, or even interesting.

6/10/05 Paperless Voting slammed in NY Times Editorial [ALT].

Downing Street Memo: news of the memo has finally broken the veneer of U.S. media - on today's Lehrer News Hour [alt]. [text of the memo].

U.S Supreme Court: interesting conservative interpretation of recent Medical Marijuana decision Raich v. Gonzales.

* Elmo & Big Bird on Republican hit-list?
* Oklahoma Zoo to add Creationist exhibit.
* Christian Research Institute Answer Man.
* Skype & Yahoo in merger talks. update
* Humor: How to make $1,000,000.
* Bush' latest approval rating.

6/9/05 Newsweek Quran story vindicated by Pentagon.

* Edvard Munch serendipitous banner ad.
* Patriot Act to be expanded.

Google to map San Francisco in 3D. "Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco, and eventually other major US cities. The move would trump Amazon's A9 service, which offers two-dimensional photos of buildings on US city streets."

6/8/05 San Francisco writ large: dotcom boom town legacy center of the web?

   * | * | *

the webwww.stryder.com

some rights 2005 * fez at s t r y d e r period com

"You are who you love, not who loves you."
-Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation, 2002

We came whirling out of nothingness ...

*