 | September 14, 2009 |
Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in “The Basketball Diaries,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.
September 11, 2009
Shutterbug Friday #3:
John G. Moebes and the Rest of the Story
John G. Moebes was a photojournalist employed by the News & Record of Greensboro, North Carolina. He is perhaps best known for images he captured during the nascent hours of civil disobedience in the Civil Rights movement. When not documenting lunch-counter sit-ins, however, he photographed the balance of Greensboro citizens in more prosaic settings and circumstances. Here is a sampling of that work:
 Frank Zappa, Philly Joe Jones, Earl Freeman, Louis Moholo, John Dyani, Grachan Moncur III and Archie Shepp. |
I want every uninsured man and woman who comes down with swine flu to go sit in the waiting rooms of their elected representatives.
That’s it. Just sit there – coughing. Throwing your used Kleenex in their trash receptacles. If they want us to suffer, they should have to look at at the logical consequences of their inaction. Tell them you’re going to keep coming back until they manage to pass something that’s actually going to help people instead of lining the pockets of the insurance companies.
If the weather gets cold, set up a tent in the parking lot, put a sign on it that says “Waiting Room: Waiting for Affordable Health Care” and call your local media.
So, this buddhist monk walked up to this hot dog vendor and said, “Make me one with everything.”
Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia
because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers
couldn't compete successfully with poets.
-- Kilgore Trout (Philip J. Farmer) "Venus on the Half Shell"
Blogs used to be like reading books. Twitter is like endless reruns of Billy Mays commercials.
In the land of the night
The ship of the sun
Is drawn by
The grateful dead.
Geeks among you might jump to the conclusion that I am talking about Linux and a document management system. HA!
I was sitting in the side yard contemplating if the sprinkles were going to be enough to drive me back inside when they came. Apparently they were drawn by the red hat that I was wearing. I sat stock still. The first one circled and then hovered so close to my left ear that I could feel the wind from it wings. The second, not to be outdone, jockeyed for a dominant air space position. I sat stock still. Fast moving blurs in my peripheral vision and the trill drum beats of their wings let me know they are dancing mid-air over my head. Just as suddenly they were gone leaving only silence in their stead. Okay, just one geek aside... the red hat or more properly baseball cap was a swag gift from the Novell folks who came to speak at out techno-group a couple of years ago. It was my reward for asking leading Linux questions so they could amplify and sing their product's praises. Ah but the hummers don't really care about all that, they just like to posture and dance.EU funding 'Orwellian' artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for "abnormal behaviour"
The European Union is spending millions of pounds developing "Orwellian" technologies designed to scour the internet and CCTV images for "abnormal behaviour".
A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as "agents" to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.
Its main objectives include the "automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence".
quotable quote 
On a whim I unearthed my old typewriter, an Underwood 225. Just a tank of a machine. No frills. Hardly any features. This model doesn't even do Tabs. When I brought it out my son (15) asked what it was. I opened the case and his eyes got big. I chuckled, "This is something you haven't seen before." The concept of a manually, totally unplugged, typing device was completely foreign to him. "How does the carriage move?" he asked tentatively pressing the space bar.
So I set up a couple of milk crates in the shed and rolled in the first blank piece of paper. The monumental in-the-moment sense of facing the blank page came flooding over me. As I found the home row and tried to type the date at the top of my letter I was stumbled. How much of this country's or this world's business/history/correspondence was beaten out on this type of mechanical monster. How great was the hand strength of all those secretaries who forged the written word long before the advent of electricity - and even beyond. The letter I produced for Rosemary, away at college, was filled with faint letters, missed spacing and overstrikes. Yet it is a letter by my own hand in real time. I found myself wonderfully centered. I have to construct each sentence and place it correctly the first time. I have to be cognizant of each keystroke as I have no cursor to move at my leisure and Cut&Paste my mistakes. I do not have a spell-checker to correct my atrocious speling (*smirk*). I do not have a grammar checker to alert me to run-on sentences or improper pronoun usage or even the dreaded double-space between words. If you have an old manual monster quietly collecting dust somewhere I heartily recommend you drag it out and give it a try.
