94582267

Lost In America

Last night was very cool.
For my birthday, I got tickets to go see “This American Life” on the road as part of their five city tour. What fun.
It is hard to describe the making of a radio program on stage. TAL is not like Prairie Home Companion, its PRI radio cousin. It isn’t a radio show necessarily crafted to be performed before a live audience. But it was a treat nonetheless. Ira Glass sitting at a desk, headphones on, mixing his radio documentary live as you listened. Jon Langford and his five piece band singing his country punk rock including a special bit by a discovered band member playing the theramin and then . . . the good stuff.
Sara Vowells gave a history of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, culminating in a huge concert-hall-sing-along of the famous song as the packed house at the Paramount Theater in Denver joined in to “His Truth Is Marching On.”
Jonathan Goldstein, the Canadian straight version of David Sedaris, gave his testament to losing his virginity to a whore and a hilarious telling of masturbating as a 14-year-old.
And one of the best bits, Found magazine founder and frequent TAL contributor Davy Rothbart shared many of his favorite found pieces that included an impromptu reading of a four-page play with only pages 1,2, and 4 available. The three audience members who participated where great.
Ira Glass and comic book artist Chris Ware featured a multi-media documentary piece on the loss of the Chicago architecture of Louis Sullivan with audio and original comic book art.
The whole show was a fund raiser for TAL and part of the deal is you buy their merchandise and it is funny stuff. A-paint-by-numbers set with art work inspired by pieces presented on the radio show.
What a nice time it was.

94580615

QuickOffice

Pages after pages after pages of internet stories uploaded each day, filtered by me to this blog- how does he do it.
Someone asked me just the other day if I actually read this stuff that I upload.
Yes, I do. But not usually in one sititng. It is a lot to take in at times. But before the internet, I was always an avid newspaper and magazine reader, devouring issue after issue of several magazines a month.
Now, with the magic of the Handspring Visor, coupled with one of the coolest bit of software I have ever purchased, I carry most of this stuff around with me and read it on my PDA at my leisure. The QuickOffice suite, including QuickWord for the Palm Pilot is a nifty little piece of software that allows me to cut and paste an online article into Microsoft Word, then save it as a QuickWord document and download it into my PDA. I usually have about four or five articles in there at any one time, along with a day or two of Salon Premium, downloaded as text as well. I highly recommend it. For $29.95 it is a good buy and you will get more use out of that PDA you haul around, besides playing mine sweeper and using it to remember to call your mother.

94538709

Just Shut Up Anne Coulter!!!

A few months back someone asked who this Anne Coulter chick was.
I was floored.
One of my flagrantly liberal friends had not been apprised of the one person whom many liberals consider the evil personification of all things wrong with the vast right wing.
But who is this loud mouthed blonde. She appears regularly on Bill Maher’s show, she is a syndicated columnist and she is about a year away from saying something so abominable out loud that she will wither away into obscurity.
The UK Guardian (a great web site for what we American’s are doing, as seen across the pond, by the way) raised these questions and reading it, your jaw will drop.
She makes Bill O’Reilly look almost balanced.

  • An appalling magic
  • The anti-coulter — a rebuttal site
  • Eric Alterman’s fact checking of Coulter
  • Friday Fives

    Friday Fives

    1. What drinking water do you prefer — tap, bottle, purifier, etc.?
    Generally filtered through the tap. I have used a Brita and a Pur water filter in the kitchen for a few years and they work and taste great. I don’t understand the concept of buying bottled water – especially out of the vending machine. It is a concept that confuses me.

    2. What are your favourite flavor of chips?
    Salt and vinegar and kettle fried so they are extra crispy. And as a splurge, Pringles. Not really chips but yummy.

    3. Of all the things you can cook, what dish do you like the most?
    I am a pretty damn good cook. My three favorites, since this is number three on the list – my homemade French bread kicks ass. I make a damn fine Green Chili for a gringo and a decadent Lasagne.

    4. How do you have your eggs?
    Basted, sunny side up.

    5. Who was the last person who cooked you a meal? How did it turn out?
    My sister. She grilled some chicken and made some homemade mac and cheese and green beans. A good ol’ fashioned home cooked meal. It was awesome.

    Now, I am hungry.

    via FridayFive.org

    94397044

    Grrrrrr I Have To Eat Crow

    I recently cast a wide net of dispersions to all my friends who use MSN 8 as their internet service because it doesn’t support pop3 email. How can you enjoy the internet, I shouted, when you are told you can’t control your own email content.
    But it seems my internet provider – TVMax, through Broadband now, has decided to make their email service suck even worse.
    They just don’t send it.
    Call after call for a week and I get a different answer every time as to why none of my email is being delivered. I can send it out, and I can surf the web, but don’t try to get a hold of me, because now that ATT has been swallowed up by Comcast, my cable company, it seems, has decided to fill that void left by poor service and crappy network that ATT was so famous for.
    It is as if the good people at TVMax got some new head of technology and he was sitting at his desk sharpening pencils and saying aloud “How can I make my mark, how can I make a difference? I know, I will ruin everything and then redesign it from the top up!”
    In the last two months they have had a major fiber break that took the network down for six days. At least once a week the service is down completely for a few hours and starting last week, unannounced to their subscribers, they began moving all of their email to new servers, leaving people without the major reason they have the web in the first place – email. Calls to the call center the last two days go unanswered. I am not talking long hold times and long queues – I am talking about no one answering the phone. It just rings and rings and rings.
    If this mysterious plan is followed out, they should be just like ATT in a matter of days.
    And to think just a few short months ago, I used to brag about these guys.
    Sigh.

    94396497

    How To Play Hooky

    This is absolute genius – How to slack off at work. From the venerable pro business Wall Street Journal come a few tips on how to get away with doing nothing at the office.
    “It has never been easier to be a white-collar slacker.”
    Virtual networking, high technology, cell phones and the blackberry are highlighted as is a great way to take a long lunch – leave a fake wallet, briefcase or purse at your desk and then head out – the premise being that co workers will see that you left your biggest personal possession so you must surely be coming back. And hilarity ensues.
    Via the good people at Metafilter.

    94269741

    Mayhem in Texas

    In Colorado, a contentious fight over Congressional and state legislative redistricting has made the news. But no one is going to go to jail over the issue. It is not the same story in Texas. The Texas GOP-led state house is seeking the arrest of the Democrats who have stymied a gathering of a constitutionally mandated quorum by taking their party members – 59 of the 62 members of the Texas state house of representatives – to Oklahoma while they work out a deal to handle other issues instead of redistricting.
    The current plan is to gut the court approved model and make a more GOP friendly version approved by U.S. Congress’s Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX).
    According to the Associated Press “GOP House Speaker Tom Craddick locked down the House chamber so lawmakers who did show up Monday morning could not leave. After a roll call, he ordered the missing lawmakers arrested and brought back to the chamber.”
    Ahh, Texas. You don’t mess with Texas.

    94209086

    Fossil Fuel Debate Thickens

    The Bush administration’s campaign promise to significantly fund exploration and development of hydrogen fueled vehicles is finally taking shape. And although most of science and most environmentalists agree that a renewable energy fuel, like hydrogen, (which can easily be extracted from water and then reenter the atmoshere as hydrogen, and thus turn back into water) is a good thing.
    However the Bush plan doesn’t plan on using water and instead has allocated millions of dollars to be given to oil, gas and mining companies to work out ways to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels. Isn’t that what we are trying to get away from?
    Oh wait, the oil and gas guys are rich Republicans and already at the trough. What was I thinking.

    Another tirade! How can we even be thinking of reelecting this guy.

    via the Top 10 conservative idiots

    94208666

    Brits Told No WMD

    No ones cares about this any more, since the war is over television is now on sweeps week, but apparently Senior White House officials have admitted to the British Press that there are no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Irag and the occupying armies won’t find any either. No one says it out loud, but it is probably because UN weapon’s inspections work as a way to keep countries armed foces manageable and a way to peacefully solve the world problems. That isn’t the message most of us took away from our little war in the desert. The message instead is that when you as a people and a nation get impatient and don’t get your way, when diplocmacy and a “Win/Win” situation isn’t in your interest, just bomb the hell out of the place, kill a bunch of people and move on. We are no longer following the tenets of Theodore Roosevelt, which is to walk softly and carry a big stick. We have taken it a step farther and now storm loudly and wave the stick around, beating heads where we can.

    94156020

    Geeky Blog Moment

    I found a cool link for a pull down menu for the blog archives on this page. Pretty cool.
    If you care, the link is at Blogger scipts. I had started to hate the long list of archive links growing on the right hand side. This takes care of that. Nice, I think.