floorpie

You are being watched

I have a bad feeling about this. The news is some seven months old, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.

President Bush has created an organization called the Citizen Corps an organization who’s aim is “public education, training, and volunteer opportunities to support community and family safety”. Among other things, they will provide support to over-taxed police departments, training for citizens in disaster preparedness, and coordinate medical volunteers in aiding during large-scale emergencies. This is all fine, good, and noble.

The fifth arm of this little cabal, however, is called Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), a:

a nationwide program providing millions of workers who, by the nature of their jobs, are well-positioned to recognize unusual events, with training, materials, and a formalized way to report suspicious activity to the nearest FBI field office.

As planned, an eventual 1 in 24 Americans will effectively be spies. This gives me shuddering reminders of 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 in it’s “subversive”-squashing overtones…not to mention McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to have to be paranoid. Is my friend really my friend, or is he checking up on me? Will I start to question the patriotism of my peers? I don’t want to live in an environment of distrust and suspicion. This sort of thing makes me nervous and sad.

(via alt text)

So I’m experimenting with selling some stuff on ebay; as a prelude to selling some bigger, more valuable, stuff. At the moment it’s just some old computer games and junk, but if you’re into that sort of thing go nuts.

Also, please disregard the cheezy descriptions, or the fact that I actually own any of that stuff…

If you happened to have been watching my site for the last 15 minutes hour, you saw it go through some rather alarming convulsions. I’ve been vaguely thinking of redesigning my site in positional CSS (as is all the vogue) instead of the mess of tables that I had set up, and I feel that the first step was to convert my current design to that. It came out fairly well, although there are a few things that I can’t (nor wish to bother trying to) figure out.

At any rate, Blogger seems to only be capable of swallowing template changes in small doses, which is why there were a few minutes of in-between stage there. Of course, seeing as I’m the only one that obsessively looks at my site, I’m the only one who probably noticed.

Anyway, I will, as mentioned, be vaguely working on a redesign as time allows…

PS when you first load my page you get an error (at least I do), that reads:

Line: 2

Char: 1

Error: Syntax error

Simple, right? Well I can’t see what the problem is for the life of me, so if you can, please let me know…

PPS This effort has lead to trying to get my site to validate as well. If you’ve tried this at all, you know that it is entirely too much effort. Unfortunately, Blogger itself is part of the problem, as, if we take advantage of some of the great Word-like features of Blogger’s simple posting capabilities, it automatically inserts
for carriage returns…as opposed to
as W3C dictates.

Besides that, it’s mostly a matter of closing out all your HTML tags, specifically using all the variables in your tags (ie alt=”” title=””, etc), and generally being super-anal (I can’t wait to see what kind of search strings “super-anal” generates) about pretty much everything. Of course, all this effort will be for the best…

…and I’ll let you know what that “best” actually is once I figure it out!

Things ADG’s property manager has told me that I don’t at all believe. First in a probably long series

– that he has multiple degrees: one in physics, and the other in chemistry, and is mere units away from an MBA

– that he used to make acid, coke, et al and was a major supplier

– that he was called upon, on several occasions to bring said wares to many a movie set where he did assorted drugs with Steven Spielberg, and John Travolta, and Michelle Pfeiffer, and Bob DeNiro and the rest

– that he’s a professional chef who not only knows, but is on par with, Wolfgang Puck

– that he used to be a paratrooper

– that he is a martial arts master

– that he knew Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and hung out in La Honda

– that he’s a cancer survivor

– that he attended Stanford, and UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz

– that he has no credit cards and only uses cash because the government is far too interested in his whereabouts.

Things ADG’s property manager has told me that I do believe. First in a very short series

– that he lives in a tiny studio apartment

– that he conspicuously never has any money for someone with such an education, and talent, and connections

In a veritable orgy of cultural events, ADG and I went to see Henry IV, Part I; hosted by the Festival Theatre Ensemble at the dubiously-titled “First Annual” Los Gatos Shakespeare Festival. The event was complete with everything you’d expect from an outdoor theatre event: pre-show picnic, somewhat cheesy backdrop possibly constructed largely from cardboard, 14 and 15 year old “employees” selling water and cookies instead of being out with their friends like all the other kids they knew with mothers not in the show, Lady Shakespeare as a Wal-Mart-ian greeter who replaced the ubiquitous “howdy” with “Hail sir well met”, and a host (ie about a dozen) other theatre-goers huddled under blankets and the delusion of Ol’ E.

Again noted, by the way, was the apparent fact that we were the youngest audience participants…which I repeatedly take as a compliment.

At any rate, the show was actually very good, and the sword-fights were simultaneously remarkably sophisticated and comically involved for a fledgling theatre company performing in the middle of a nowhere park. In fact, the fights were strangely reminiscent of all of our remembered play battles where you’d fake a punch (or sword-thrust) and punctuate it with that pu-ISHHH sound effect you’re all undoubtedly familiar with… And if you think by “reminiscent” I mean to imply that it only reminded me of those fake fights of yore instead of actually being just like said fights, in that the grown men actually were making those sounds, as if subconsciously, and in deference to long-ago summer-days…then you’d be mistaken.

Also, Sir John Falstaff was super-funny.

Last bit of funny [not funny “ha-ha” but funny interesting] observation: the first five minutes were virtually unintelligible, but the Bard’s English started to grow on me thereafter, to the point where the dialogue was easily understood by the end of the play. Weird.

I just threw away my cell-phone.

The fact that I meant to throw away the piece of paper in my other hand is hardly the point. I should probably go get my shampoo out of the freezer before it hardens…

In a virtual re-creation of our first date, ADG and I went to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and saw Cloud 9:

…a topsy-turvy play about race, class, history and sex, Caryl Churchill uses the backdrop of 19th century colonial Africa and 20 th century London to explore the hypocrisy of “normative” social expectations…

So funny, so gender-bending, so recommended.

Also, we were by far the youngest people there, which I somehow take as a compliment. And, as always, an evening with ADG was wonderful.

Now return to your places of business.

I choose, in the next few lines, to complain. It will be not witty, nor interesting, so save yourselves:

Every day. Every. Fucking. Day. Every Gawdamn Motha-F’ing Day, there’s a guy outside my window with a leaf blower! Yes, I appreciate the pristine path leading from the mailbox to my apartment door, the resplendent sidewalk leading to and from the pool, the walkway so clean I could eat my fucking breakfast off of it if my breakfast ever consisted of anything more than a handful of chips and a Pepsi…but every damn day?! I know, I know, the schedule would be invisible to me if I had a damn job and didn’t have to sit here in the heat all day and stare at monster, hotjobs, dice, careermosaic, bayareajobs, socalTECH, thebestjobs, careerbuilder, headhunter, and a multitude of direct sites to companies that don’t want me until my eyes cross more than usual; but, I don’t have that salvation. So, every day, seemingly for interminable lengths, there is the whine of a motor and the faint sound of blowing leaves. The same leaves, mind you, that he will blow back behind the bushes tomorrow. It occurs to me that if he were to actually blow them into a manageable pile, and then, say, pick them up, he might be able to take a day off now and again.

And don’t get me started on the trash guys again.

Water balloons at the ready.

Nifty… Non-sensical, but nifty.

(via The D-Train)

ADG and I rented Waking Life last night…totally compelling, thought-provoking, and interesting. We paused the movie several times to talk about the ideas presented and what we thought about them, at no detriment to the flow of the movie, or the loose storyline. I would fully recommend it in anyone interested in thinking about the nature of reality and your perceptions of it.

Word of warning, though: Corky Romano it is not.

PS so very very hot here. so very very hotttttttttttt