Saturday, December 29, 2001
how rude of me. i almost forgot to thank my secret santa for sending me a cd - nancy griffith's 'clock without hands' - from my amazon wishlist. thanks! i wish i knew who you were, so i could thank you more personally - but this will have to do, i suppose. i woke up this morning and decided that i was going to fast today. no real reason, i just felt as if i needed to push out the jive and bring in the love a little before the new year. i've been successful so far, and with 35 minutes to go today, i think i'm about home-free. i've been drinking lots of water, but i'm still hungry, - not a bad feeling - in fact it feels kind of good, in a cleansing, healthy way. quite the contrast from most days. i think i'll have a good breakfast tomorrow. Friday, December 28, 2001
it's been a busy week, and damn if i didn't almost forget to do my friday five: 1. what was your biggest accomplishment this year? being able to go full-time with my freelance graphic design business, for a time. 2. what was your biggest disappointment? having to make said freelance graphic design business a sideline again, to the infinitely less fulfilling world of law work; though i recognize that it was mostly my own damn fault... 3. will you be making any new year's resolutions? i don't know about new year's resolutions, but i'll set (and re-set) some goals, and try again to reach them. see if i can accomplish in 2002 what i didn't in 2001. "no matter, try again, fail again, fail better." ~samuel beckett 4. where do you wish you were celebrating? new years is a holiday to be with friends, so wherever my friends are. and it's looking like the critical mass will be right here in new orleans this year. 5. what do you plan to do for new year's eve? between friends and family, i've got a few parties to go to, so i'm sure amy and i will be making appearances at those... don't know where i'll be when the ball drops, though. Thursday, December 27, 2001
i had a good christmas day. i got everything i wanted - a vacuum cleaner and a george forman grill - and a few things i didn't - like a robot-dog, for example, and an electric back massager thing. both pretty neat, actually. oh, and my parents gave me bunches of clothes, because my father is of the opinion that i don't dress professionally enough, in or or out of the office. he seems to think that no self-respecting twenty-six year old should be seen in public wearing blue jeans, or in an office without a tie. so he gave me a couple of 'grateful dead' ties, too. he's maybe just a bit out of touch, i'd say, but whatever. he means well. in other news, my friends diane (she pronounces it dee-ahn) and dave are now (as of christmas day) officially engaged, after a long period of almost-but-not-quite-engagement... my favorite part is that since the actual ring was being re-sized, he proposed with a picture of it. pretty funny. oh, and i got to play with an xbox the other night - rod's father got one. i like. rod and i ended up playing "halo" for about four hours after i left work on the 26th. apparently microsoft bought bungee, the makers of halo, just so they could control the rights to that game and make it xbox exclusive. which is strange, because previous to that, bungee made primarily macintosh games, including marathon, a first person shooter game with a glorious every-man-for-himself deathmatch, which was a great stress-reliever in college, played over the student publications center's appletalk network. so, what would you name a blue robot-dog? Tuesday, December 25, 2001
merry christmas! flipping channels just now, i watched the president and first lady read christmas stories to children. laura read "if you take a mouse to the movies and dubya read "the night before christmas." the president read very well, but his delivery was a bit hurried for the first graders, and i think that as far as the kids were concerned, mrs. bush stole the show - you could tell she had been a grammar school teacher. she had the picture-book rhthym down, with all the right pauses for interaction ( "and what do you think the mouse wanted next?") and she has that "kind-but-authoritative" tone of voice... to be fair, though, dubya had a harder book, with words like "hurricane" and "obstacles" and "kercheif." and then the kids got to ask questions, which almost all centered on the white house christmas decorations and the first dogs. hehehe. tonight i made my obilgatory/traditional annual appearance at catholic mass - specifically the christmas midnight mass at my high school alma mater, jesuit high school of new orleans. these yearly visits are what allow me, i think, to continue to claim 'lapsed catholic' as my religion, rather than just "none of the above" or some such thing. anyway, midnight mass at christmas has become quite the tradition among my high school friends, as well as a stop afterwards at snake'n'jakes "christmas club bar", which is a small hole in the wall - dive bar that's decorated for christmas year round. it's not so much the going to church as it is the sentimental value of the annual return to jesuit. anyway.rod is in from shreveport, andrew and donnie from the dc area, and netty and her husband chris from california. i won't go into the history of our little group, but it is interesting that the the last three are all marine corps officers - netty is one of the first female combat pilots in the marine corps, and flies cobra helicopters. badass. talk tonight revolved around dc - where andrew and donnie live and rod wants to... i'm still enamored with that city, ever since my visit in april with charles (who will also be there next year, very likely.) an all of these people are leading very exciting lives, and being successful at it, and all seem very happy. which leads me to the conclusion i reach oh-so-often these days: i need to get out of new orleans. for career reasons, mostly, but certainly not least because all of my oldest and dearest friends will have gone away... anyway. such is life, we'll just have to see what happens. off to bed now, and then the family thing today... Monday, December 24, 2001
yay! i got my first christmas present today: wish for something better - the explodingdog book!
did you know that the us military tracks santa's journey every christmas eve? apparently they've been doing it since 1958... you can check his progress on the web, and this year they even have a webcam! as i'm posting this, he's flying above malaysia, though it'll be at least another twelve hours 'till he gets to new orleans. i hope they've got a couple of f-15s escorting him this year... Sunday, December 23, 2001
oh... those little white dots there are supposed to be snow, which i 'borrowed' from erica at epicede, who seems to be pretty cool, though her site's still under construction a bit. not that i'd know what falling snow looks like, being from new orleans and all. Saturday, December 22, 2001
i just read on cnn.com that a plane from paris to miami was forced to land in boston, because some guy with a suspicious passport was trying to blow himself up, feet first. i know it's horrible and it might mean that all this terror stuff isn't over... but explosive shoes? c'mon... there's something kinda silly about that, in a james bond kind of way. where's q when you need him? i particularly like the line, " The shoes were then taken to a field "and disrupted." " whatever that means.
i just watched shrek on dvd. what a good movie. now bed. Friday, December 21, 2001
yes, it's hideously ugly. but it's festive as hell! merry christmas, everybody. hope your holiday is whatever you want it to be.
does anybody out there know what's become of melissa, of augustsky? it's been over a month since she's posted anything to pie-in-the-sky , and there's no note saying she'd be taking a break... i'm beginning to be... curious.(not to mention her decor is like, so november...)
thankfully, it turns out that the scary concept that is coincidence design isn't real. thanks to some diligent research over at metafilter, it's clearly a hoax and a scam. let me direct your attention to blackharrier.com, which poses as a web designer's portfolio, but actually leads to five very similarly shady "business" websites, including coincidence design, which are all registered to a japanese company known as kurosawa net ltd. all five are written in very much the same style, and all seem to end in pleas for investment or up-front money. scam, scam, scam, scam, scam, scam scam, scam, baked beans and scam. even though coincidence design.com isn't real, the idea is still out there... i think what made it such a horrifying concept was how believable it is, and how possible - and that's still kinda scary. how did you meet?
1. what is the weirdest thing you've ever eaten? any "food" my grandfather serves at his house, eg., rice with canned asparagus and canned mussels, served with "peach sauce," which means peach preserves melted in the microwave. wait, would that qualify as 'weird' or just 'damn nasty'? oh, and i ate a handful of pennies when i was about three. 2. name one (material) thing you can't live without. my computer. i'm betting that the survey says that's the number one answer on the board for this question. (more specifically, i guess, it would be my hard drives and backup cd-rs. in a very real way, a good bit of my life history is contained in there...) 3. name something you've always wanted to do but didn't have time for. an extended roadtrip up the east coast to visit friends in atlanta, dc, new york, & boston. 4. what outrageous thing do you wish you had the nerve to do? go back to school for another advanced degree, money be damned. 5. how do you plan to spend your weekend? last minute christmas shopping, naturally. and hanging out with my sister Jessica, who just came in town from atlanta yesterday. Thursday, December 20, 2001
apparently i'm almost two months late in finding this, (at least on metafilter time) but i just found a tiny site full of cute little cuddly comics, with big things to say about relationships and girls and boys and such. it's called tiny sepuku. which, if you know what sepuku is, is very, er... cute, in a fraught with meaning sort of way.
i think everyone's familiar with the strange social dynamics that exist, almost exclusively, in elevators full of people. it's like a closet full of strangers avoiding eye contact, silently staring straight ahead with varying degrees of politeness. some of us play that game every day. but what do you do when you're in an elevator, alone? after being cramped up in some stuffy office all day, or whatever - do you just stand there, numbly looking at the battered brushed-steel doors? yeah, most of the time, i do too. but some days - some days, something happens when those doors open and i see that there's no one else there. i'm suddenly seized by a giddy and irresistable urge to do something goofy, to move: to dance or jump or just generally gyrate, for no one to see, just because i can. today i walked in the empty elevator on the sixth floor, pressed the "1" button, and immediately began doing some random free-form, tai-chi-type slow motion martial arts moves ( and i don't even know the first thing about tai-chi.) it was fun and crazy and cathartic - a release from all the tension, the pomp and circumstance of office life... this wasn't the first time, and i'm sure it won't be the last... these episodes are made all the more exciting by the ever-present possibility that the elevator will stop unexpectedly on the way down, and the doors will open on an appalled cluster of middle-aged, bespectacled investment bankers, and you'll be busted. in the midst of your best john travolta "stayin' alive" performance. i find the elevator is also a good place for james bond-style, cell-phone-for-a-gun posturing; shadow boxing; air guitar; and even just making faces at your reflection in the doors. of course, you time everything so that just as you reach your destination you snap to attention, put on your cheery-numb-automaton-business face, and walk out as innocently as possible. i guess it's a good thing that the elevators in my building don't have cameras. that i know of. Wednesday, December 19, 2001
i've seen lots of design sites, but coincidence design is something different altogether. and vaguely scary. got $80,000.00 and an obsessive crush? they'll hook you up. (link via trippyswell) Tuesday, December 18, 2001
there's something wonderful about going to sleep at a reasonable hour, and waking up in the middle of the night, groggy and convinced it must be morning (because it usually is, when you wake up after 3 hours of sleep) - and then realizing that it actually is still the middle of the night, and you've got hours to go before you wake. a very pleasant discovery. Monday, December 17, 2001
whew! a long but productive night doing backend work on the site: santacon new orleans 2001 pics are finally up, on the photo page. i know, lots of blurry ones... but they look pretty cool, don't they? especially all the blacklight glowing, dancing santas. also, no captions as yet, maybe when i have time... also, i've implemented permalinks! yay! so now you can link to every single literary gem i've ever posted, individually and with due specificity. or something. i know that makes you happy. and even better, i just got comments working! so now you can put your 2¢ in, and give me some feedback. i know that makes you even happier... so try it out, and let me know what you think, and if something's not working... props to dan at foreword for what was once dotcomments... (yes, i realize it's more than likely that neither the permalinks nor the comments will get much use, but it can't hurt to have them there just in case, right? and it makes me happy, ok?) Sunday, December 16, 2001
ok. better late than never, my answers to my first blogger insider interview questions from scott: you talk about food a lot in your blog, do you think that new orleans has the best food in the world? if not where is the best food? new orleans (and southern louisiana) cooking is just unique. we've got some very unique culinary traditions, personalities, restaurants, and foods; we're unafraid of strong flavors and we like spicy stuff. we've got an amazing range of restaurants, including many that are highly ranked nationally and internationally - but as anywhere, it's the little local neighborhood places that really give the city its flavor. nothing like a half and half po-boy, dressed, (that's half fried oyster, half fried shrimp: and a "po-boy" is a french bread sandwich like a hoagie, sub, etc... and "dressed" = with "everything on it") at domilice's. and no experience like a springtime crawfish boil with about 40 of your closest friends, eating the tails and sucking the heads... food is a way of life here - an old grocery store ad used to say, "in other cities they eat to live, in new orleans we live to eat." are we the best? i don't know. but we've certainly got a great variety, and given a choice, there's nowhere i'd rather eat. has your blog/blogging changed you? how? i think it has - it's made me more conscious of what i do every day, even beyond just thinking, "god, this will make a great post!" i've always wanted to keep a journal, but i could never make myself do it, until now. when i sit down to update, usually late at night or early in the morning, i have to kind of consider everything that's happened, do a bit of personal inventory that i don't think i ever did before, and look for little insights and anecdotes that i might have forgotten about otherwise. and it being a constant work-in-progress, i've always got something to work on or think about if i want to - tweak this, fix that alignment, add this page. and then there's the community aspect. i've read about, met, and in some cases become friends with some really amazing people via their blogs, and mine. not to mention it's great practice at writing and design, and a great outlet for my creative and emotional energy... i really can't imagine not having it, now. has anyone elses blog changed you? whose blog, and how? i don't know if anyone else's blog in particular has changed me, but collectively i've learned that i'm not alone in my twenty-something confusions, indecisions, ups and downs... i've been inspired by the strength that some people out there have in the face of difficulties much greater than my own; i've been impressed, and challenged to do better work, by bloggers who are more talented than i am at their various arts. if i had to pick one, it'd be alison at bluishorange, who has proven that this online journal thing we do, even in just talking about what you did or thought that day, can be beautiful and inspired and is really an art. if you write enough posts and read enough blogs, you see that there are flashes of brilliance and strength and inspiration all over, and you can't help but be changed and made better by that. how do you feel about strangers talking to you in the mens room? um... not into that. did you design the color scheme of your site around the colors in your shirt? no, the site existed, in those colors, long before i bought that shirt. the shirt was close, but is actually kind of more navy blue - in fact i had to tweak it in photoshop a bit to make it match the site better. i do actuallly have quite a few blue and orange clothes, though, and i've been asked if that's because of the website... but it's not, i just like those colors. you could be a fly on the wall, whose wall would you be on? mine, because i don't own a flyswatter and tend to be gripped by either guilt or some kind of live-and-let-live zen thing in that critical moment just before i attempt to squish a bug, which results in a higher-than-average number of live capture-and-release-outside operations for the creepy-crawlies in my house. lots of hyphens in that sentence. is there a cure for "polka-dot disease"? nope. no vaccine, no cure. once you get it (or even just know about it), it will recurr sporadically throughout your lifetime, usually in cars or near windows, during rainstorms and carwashes. but that's ok, it's painless and attacks never last long. you learn to live with it. you are stuck on an island. all you have is a pen, paper, bottle, and cork. what does your "message in a bottle" say? either "hello, world." or "help! i'm stuck in a bottle!"... actually i think i'd use the pen and paper to write a will and a goodbye, and then break the bottle, bite the cork and take myself out with a sharp piece of glass. better than dying of dehydration and hunger. if you had to move to somewhere else in the world, where would it be? i've actually been thinking about this a lot lately, for several reasons. somewhere strong in both of my would-be professions - graphic design and entertainment law - and where i have established friends - current thoughts are new york, dc, nashville, or atlanta. i also love dublin and edinbrough, though. what is your fondest childhood memory? days spent in my grandmother's kitchen, 'helping' her cook tamales and platanos fritos and arroz con pollo, or make empanadas or obleas or flan; the air greasy with cooking oil, in an apartment that smelled of cigarette ash and rose-petal rosaries.
i just got in from santarchy new orleans, 2001, carousing through the french quarter with forty or so other jolly santas... and i can't imagine having had more fun on a saturday night. i was the santa in the black santa suit, ringing the bell, and giving out hershey's kisses and hugs to all takers. best of all, i got to meet jessica from peacedividend and her husband - and she's as cool as i figured she'd be. anyway. more later, it's late and blogger just ate my much longer post... i'm working on getting my pics up as soon as i can, but for now you can see me in my santa suit on the webcam page. Saturday, December 15, 2001
i had the most wonderful dinner last night with amy, at lilette. i'd never been there before, though it's just around the corner - it's a spiffy, trendy kind of place, far too small for it's own good (how can you be trendy, or sell drinks at the bar, if you don't have a wait?) and the food was quite nice (though nothing unusually remarkable) but the company and conversation made it exquisite. and that's a word to be used sparingly. and then, amy had to be at the airport for ten, off to tampa to spend the holidays with family. :( Friday, December 14, 2001
my friday five for this week: 1. what did you want to be when you grew up? i wanted to be an exotic animal/zoo vet, and/or a marine biologist... not that i've really decided yet. graphic design firm principal and entertainment attorney are my two current favorites. 2. do you have any nicknames? i answer to "ab3" at work, and i'm "ace" to my aunts and uncles, which is better than the still persistent "little allen" of my youth. in college, i was "layout boudreaux" to the newspaper staff. 3. if you could change something about yourself what would it be? i'd improve my self-esteem; be a better time manager/planner/goalsetter; be more assertive, and less prone to being a pushover. 4. have you ever bought anything from an infomercial? no. but i have been given some of that oxi-clean stuff they sell on an infomercial, and it works, i swear it's like magic. and my parents have a george forman grill, which my mom swears by. 5. how do you plan to spend your weekend? if all goes well, i'll be carousing merrily through the french quarter tommorow with a bunch of santas, including jessica. it's santarchy 2001. i just need to find a santa suit in time... other than that, charles and amy are leaving town for the holidays this weekend, so i'll probably just spend lots of time at work. and christmas shopping. oh, and i just finished trading questions for my first "blogger insider" interview. basically, you're matched up with another blogger every week; you read each other's sites and then you send one another a list of 10 to 15 personalized "getting-to-know-you" sorts of questions; each of you then posts the questions and answers on your blog. sounded interesting, so i'm doing it. my first interviewee/er is scott, of scottyjay.com. he sent me some pretty challenging questions, but i think i returned the favor... should be fun. Thursday, December 13, 2001
since i know she's reading my blog these days, i'd be remiss not to tell the world that it's amy's birthday today. she's 26. happy birthday, cowgirl!
it seems as if, at least once a day, when i look at a digital clock - on my monitor, in my car, on my cell phone, clock radio, wherever - it's 12:34. this is easily explainable by the fact that it's just a more memorable number, and i look at clocks a million times a day and the time just doesn't stick in my memory the way that particular sequence does. and the more i think about this happening, the more likely i am to remember instances of it... but it still weirds me out, every time. Wednesday, December 12, 2001
oh, right. a few minor changes and additions around here. on your left, you'll notice a bit more link-love than was there yesterday, and few more pull-down menus, 'cause they're nifty and save space. above and to the right, you'll find a link to my new webcam page (it's a new page, not a new webcam - i just decided last night i should be using at least one of the three that i own) which despite being kind of silly and gratuitous, might be fun, once in a while. the portfolio page and comments are next on the list, and then css-ization. the saga continues.
it's been a strange, overcast morning. most days, i get up, get dressed, and get to work without ever encountering another human being. today, people were everywhere, and none very pleasant. first there was an old woman in a tattered sportscoat and tie walking outside my apartment complex, who looked at me quizzically and turned immediately around on the sidewalk and started walking back the way she came. while i was still in the act of being puzzled by this, i was glared at by a young black man, tall with tight, short braids and obviously, from his uniform, a student at a nearby public school. he looked not very happy, and was walking like there was someplace he'd rather be than walking to school. and as i was leaving my building i got a bitchy get-out-of-my-way look from some bitchy get-out-of-my-way looking home-nurse-type person, on her way to take care of one of the multitude of geriatrics who inhabit my complex. i'd be bitchy too. finally, in the elevator at work, a salty old partner from the big law firm upstairs was carrying two heavy briefcases, and it appeared to be about as much physical exertion as he could handle. he was nice enough, after i held a door and pressed the elevator button for him. "do you think we'll ever see the sun again?" he asked.
it's a sad day in the world of indie-rock weblogs, the end of an era. amplified to rock has left the building. thanks for the words and the webring, nanette. cheers. Tuesday, December 11, 2001
the full google usenet archive is online, and it is amazing. i could almost cry, for the sheer nostalgic enormity of it. twenty years of computer and internet and culture and really, world history, as told by people at the time, on usenet. right there, in its searchable, full text splendor.(ok, well, so it's kind of a geek-eyed view of the world, but hey, you read weblogs, so you're used to that, right?) it googles the mind. (heads-up courtesy of my friend jonathan nolen, who as far as i know is still, inexplicably, siteless.) Monday, December 10, 2001
my mom got braces this week, at the young age of forty-nine... were she to read this site (which i know she doesn't, because she's completely web-illiterate and a technophobe and won't even let me set up an e-mail account for her) she'd be none too pleased with me for telling that secret, because it is a secret - she got the inside kind, the ones that go on the back of your teeth, so that nobody knows that you're nearly fifty and have braces. i wonder what she tells people when the ask her why she's tawbking wibth mawbuls in hub outh. she says it hurts. a lot. she can't eat anything but soup. and they've only put on the top half - the bottom ones go on next week, and she's sure she can't handle it, she's claustrophobic and she's having anxiety attacks every time she realizes she can't take them off. i have no pity. i know exactly how she feels. this is the woman who made me suck it up for four years of having my braces tightened weekly in grammar school. "it's not that bad, is it?" well, now she knows. i know i'm getting a great deal more twisted pleasure out of this than i should be, but i just can't help getting that 'what goes around comes around' smirk every time i think about it... "it's for your own good, you know..." Sunday, December 09, 2001
in case you're interested, i've just put a whole bunch of new mini-reviews (just little commentaries, really) up on the music page. if you're interested.
this linguistic profiling test at abcnews.com (via metafilter)is one of the more interesting things i've encountered on a news site in a while, and brings up some interesting issues... do better elocution and apparent education play a part in our automatic identification of ethnicities? it's pretty evident that they do, and i think that though that's not really surprising, it's kind of sad that we can make those assumptions, and be correct. i did better than i thought i would, 9 out of 10 correct. maybe i did well because i grew up in a bilingual household - well, sort of - so maybe i'm especially attuned to those sorts of things. but i wonder if you could tell that from my voice. Saturday, December 08, 2001
i wasn't going to say anything, but what the hell, the suspense is killing me... hurry and sign up, only 2 days left!  Friday, December 07, 2001
ok, to hop on the meme-wagon, (albeit a bit late) i think i'll try this week's friday five: 1. if you were to go to a movie this weekend, which one would you pick? i still need to see monsters, inc. (or maybe i'll go see amelie again, with amy this time.) 2. what movie would you like to rent this weekend? just rented amores perros yesterday, and plan on watching it sometime tomorrow. 3. what one tv show do you always try to watch? um, none. i need to catch up on buffy episodes. i often end up laughing at bill o'reilly quite a bit on fox news late at night, though. he's funny, in a kind of scary way... 4. if you (and your s.o.) were cool with it, what five celebrities (at the most) would it be 'ok' for you to have a fling with? audrey tautou, parker posey, janeane garofalo, chloe sevigny, julia stiles. not necessarily in that order. (and since the s.o. thing has only come about just recently, i'm not vouching for her approval on these.) 5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? working, christmas shopping, going to christmas parties, working, hanging out with amy, working.
happy birthday, tom waits! is it just me, or does pearl harbor feel much more distant, now that our generation has experienced its own day of infamy? Wednesday, December 05, 2001
there are lots of magical things about new orleans, but the fog is one of my favorites. in the garden district, where i live, the live oaks reach out over the streets: massive, solid trees stretching out on tippy-toe to touch their counterparts on the other side, like linebackers dancing ballet - creating intricately filigreed vaults and arches of leaves and branches and shade. and on moist, cool autumn nights like this one, the fog is present but not oppressive - it floats thickest just at the level of the oak canopy, filling in the gaps around and through the branches, hiding the sidewalks and houses with just the lightest gauzy haze, and diffusing the orange light of the sodium street-lamps into a soft-focus glow. you come away with the impression that you're walking through a clearing in a dark fairytale forest, and you just can't see through the trees, for the fog. Tuesday, December 04, 2001
i was just thinking about chinese food for lunch (though i'll probably skip lunch today, as usual) and thought that the past few days have been like something out of a fortune cookie... so due to a seizure of silliness and a quick search, i found an (slightly lame) online fortune cookie, and tried it out. the first fortune it gave me said, "your job will not teach you about life." the second said, "it is right in front of your nose." as to recent events in my career and relationships respectively, that about sums it up. how odd.
whereas: the whole point of the web is that it's hypertext. one links to other sites so that the reader's experience is interactive and goes beyond one's own publication. whereas: corporations that have a problem with this should stay off of the internet. whereas i own and maintain a website. whereas i have free will. whereas information wants to be free. whereas no united states intellectual property law prohibits one from creating links to whoever the hell one wants. therefore, KPMG! KPMG! KPMG! KPMG! KPMG! KPMG! KPMG! KPMG! (courtesy of kottke.org, via uffish thought) oh, and my mom called me at 7:15 yesterday morning to make sure i was up to watch the official unveiling of "it/ginger" on good morning america. as everyone knows by now, "it" is a scooter. a gyroscopic, speedy three-grand technoscooter for grown-ups, called the "segway". though it should be called the "segue", but that's just my english major talking. anyway, all this talk of scooters has reminded me of my all-time favorite scooter. Sunday, December 02, 2001
this is to my mind one of the stranger things turned up by this whole war. an american boy, only two years an expat, converts to militant islam, and ends up fighting for the taliban against the US. and he'll come back to the US as a prisoner of war. what an odd world... Saturday, December 01, 2001
far be it from me not to pay homage where homage is due. i listen to a lot of different music these days, and i have a pretty diverse cd collection - but it all goes back to one day when i was about thirteen,and the first cds i ever bought, on my father's recommendation: the beatles' abbey road and sergeant pepper's. the white album was next, and then rubber soul, and then revolver, and the magical mystery tour. goodbye, george harrison. guitars all over the world gently weep.
it's finally cold here in new orleans, now. |