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Hail is falling from the sky. Tiny wet hail. It’s just like rain only they bounce better and when you catch them, you get tiny white pebbles in your hand.

Oh wait, it stopped.

I have waay too many bookmarks in Firefox.
Here they are. Some I use 20 times a day, some I haven’t touched in years. I’ll let you figure out which is which.

Continue reading ‘Way too many bookmarks’ »

I found Eternity Road’s strong disagreement with Daniel Dennett’s new book Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon lacking. Actually, his disagreement was only with the New York Times Book Review of the book.
It was so lacking that I think I’m going to read the book. It was pointed out to me by TJIC who agrees with Fran.

Years ago, I made it through the beginnings of Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. I gleened some of his major points and was very impressed. My (poor) excuse for not finishing it was that it’s damn tight, damn slow reading. I became exhausted after having to re-read most pages twice. But to his credit, each one of those pages had 3 times the intelligent commentary of most books I’ve ever read.

I just put Darwin’s Dangerous Idea on my bed. I’ve got some reading to do tonight.

Out of left-field… I went looking for the NYT Book Review and was at once dismayed and encouraged when I saw The Da Vinci Code as the number 3 Best Seller (dismayed) on the Hardcover Fiction (encouraged) list. But that’s an entirely different discussion… mostly.

After I look closely at the review and get the book, I might make a call for a book club reading of the thing. That might be interesting.

I’ve got one of those old fashioned VHS tapes. Trouble is, I don’t have one of those old fashioned VHS tape players.

I’d like to be able to play the tape… even better if I could convert it to DVD. You wouldn’t happen to have a VHS player and/or be able to convert it to DVD, would you?

I’ve mentioned Warren’s Pony Trouble before…

From Warren Lynch 3-10-06

We signed Ye Bigge Deale today with Brain Damage Films!

On Tuesday or so we should receive a copy with their signature on it.

The next month will be spent incorporating and making a sound-separated version for dubbing in other languages. 3 months after that, we will get our first royalty check for Pony Trouble. In the meantime, Pony Trouble will be placed in Best Buy, Blockbuster, Amazon, Netflix and European television (UK and Germany), plus possibly on Comcast if we’re lucky.

Yes, all of you who acted in Pony Trouble will soon have international cult fame. And perhaps dozens of real dollars, or more!

So time for another party. Scott is having one this weekend some time, and we may have an additional party at Plastopia on a different day. We should have 100 parties!

Also, in 2 weeks come see Pony Trouble’s first festival screening!

Fri, Mar. 24 2006
Boston Underground Film Festival
Carpenter Center – Room B04, Cambridge
Harvard Film Archive

9pm! Dont miss our FIRST FESTIVAL SCREENING! B.U.F.F. Showing with an AFTER
PARTY at HOFFAS right around the corner!!! Free Food, Drinks, DJ Addam Idiom and
More! Come celebrate with the cast and crew of Boston’s most insane underground
movie ever!

for more info or to purchase tix online:

http://www.ponytrouble.com
http://www.bostonundergroundfilmfestival.com

This story is from about 2 years ago….

A friend of mine, “Joe” (not his name) told me a good story about how he collected a debt owed to him. He says that he has a lot more of these kinds of stories too. I’d certainly like to hear some of them.

He called up a guy that owed him a sizable amount of money for a business debt, something like $10,000. He had owed Joe this money for a year or so. But the guy said definitively, “Sorry, I don’t have the money for you. I can’t pay you right now.” Joe felt that he had been waiting long enough and wanted this debt settled. So Joe told him that if he couldn’t pay, he’d have to talk with his partner about the matter. Joe went out on the street outside of where the guy was working and ran across a very large, scary looking black guy. Joe held up his arms for me, showing me how big this guys shoulders were and how long his arms were. This guy was big and ugly and scary. Joe ripped a $50 bill in half and handed one half of the bill to this big guy. He said simply, “I’d like you to go pick up a check from an acquaintance of mine. If you get me the check, I’ll give you the other half of this bill. If you don’t come back with the check, I’ll still give you $20 for your trouble.

Joe pointed the big guy in the right direction and waited. Low and behold, 20 minutes later, Joe’s “partner” came out with a check! Of course, Joe didn’t actually think that the check would be good. But he figured it would offer sizable proof to a judge that the money really was owed to Joe. But low and behold, the check didn’t bounce! The debt was settled!

The moral of the story is that physical intimidation -can- work. It is just one more tool in the debt collectors belt.

Joe told this story in light of Richard Grasso’s $140 million dollar compensation package… We were thinking that sometimes the legal system’s jail-threat has to be coupled with the even more real threat of physical violence to keep people from doing really really mean/stupid/awful things… It’s just a thought.

We all know that this is all crazy conspiracy crap. So then why do I feel such disquiet after watching this video?

LooseChange911.com

It’s a documentary noting all of the hundreds of discrepencies in the reports on 9/11. It goes into very little detail hypothesizing about what the true history isbut that is because this video is about all of the very well documented discrepancies of the event. most of the video is clips of news broadcasts with commentary by a narrator. It is most chilling because it does not embellish the truth at all. These are news reports that I remember seeing and many were discrepancies that I considered briefly myself.

You can watch the whole hour and a half movie here

And if that link fails, try here

I was talking to a friend about this recently and she said that she had seen that movie about how the moon landing didn’t happen. She said that it sounded extremely convincing while you were watching it. I think that I am going to have to watch that movie soon. It is really quite an interesting phenomenon. Or maybe it’s not a phenomenon… . . . I want to believe.

…
…
Hmm, I have just read several reviews of the movie, “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon” and it does not compare to the movie above in any way.

Hmmm.

"SebastianBassi" from Rentacoder.com and Bioinformatica.info just finished pulling some 400 old posts from my pre-Wordpress journal into WordPress. I’ve now got 803 posts in WP. :-) It involved him doing a lot of manual file renaming, slight modification of HTML by hand and moving files around. It would have been a big bother for me. He did it for less than $200. I still had to do like 2 hours of review work and pointing out things he missed. But I'd recommend him. 

I’m quite happy with the services recently rendered to me by SB at Bioinformatica.!

I was planning on writing a chronicle of my 10 day drive west from New Jersey to San Francisco. I got tired. I got bored. Here’s the first 1/2. It’s boring. It’s not written with any inspiration. But it’s all you’re getting.

The night in Longmont, CO. I got to see Stevie, Kim and Benjamin in their beautiful new home. They look pretty happy there.

The night in Denver, CO. I met up with Zim, his wife and son. I hadn’t seen him since I left college over ten years ago. He’s joyously the same person and he’s met his equal in his wife. I’m so very happy for them! Zim gave me a ride on my first performance motorcycle and it was completely thrilling in a very similar way to my skydiving experiences… it’s like skydiving horizontally! Though I feel sure that I could get used to the sensation and be able to ride without my brain exploding. The three of them are seriously thinking of moving to New Zealand. If you’re looking for a house in Denver with a terrific garden, give them a call!

The night in a hotel in Idaho Springs, CO. The next day, I went to The Argo Gold Mine and Mill. My memory is hazy but I had been there some 20 years ago! It was a real trip and a half! I mailed some of my pannings home and told family and friends that there’s gold in them thar hills! Later in the day, I climbed to St. Mary’s Glacier. It was freaky; I was standing on snow on a sunny 80 degree day at the end of June at 12,500 feet! I said to myself, “It sure is hot, maybe I could use this snow that I’m standing on to cool off.” I bent over, grabbed some snow and yelped at how cold it was! Freaky!

The drive toward the Grand Canyon was pretty cool. I took some unreal pictures of the highway while the sun was going down. I pulled over and almost stayed the night at… I think it was “Lee’s Reservation” or somesuch. Although the sun was setting, I didn’t dig the vibe so I went on. The Jacob Lake Inn was full so I drove toward the north rim. I ended up drinving around aimlessly, looking for a good place to set my tent. The bugs were HUGE but once the tent was up and I was inside, things were cool and I got some nice rest.

Arches National Park was pretty cool. Hiking along and seeing myself drink what would normally be a tremendous amount of water reminded me how dry the air was and of the desert outside Reno… :-)

Loveland pass was the most emotional point in the trip. I got out and walked on the path for a few minutes. I took a water bottle from my car and cast water down the eastern side of the pass… toward the Atlantic Ocean, saying a prayer to what was behind me. I then cast water down the western side of the pass… this water would eventually reach the Pacific Ocean. I said a prayer outloud to my future.