The Dancing Sausage Web Journal Archives

The Dancing Sausage Web Journal: Archives

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Tasty drink
Tasty Drink from Precious Roommate. | More...

Lost in San Francisco
Photos from Paradise Lost. | More...

WANT
LOLTheorists get theirs. | More...

System updates
About the blog and the move. At the moment, the best way to see EVERY new post is to follow the Archives page; click on the disco sausage icon in the new navigation bar at the top of the screen. Otherwise you can just follow academic posts (buck-and-wing sausage), more personal/informal essays (flamenco sausage), or ephemera from my Internet curation (breakdancing sausage). | More...

Bicoastal Library Problems
I have the hardest damn time putting any books in that last box. I'm not half the bibliophile some of my friends are proving to be, but I'm always loath to get rid of anything, much less books. What these decisions are about is the nature of my library, which has changed plenty over the years. What am I going to be using my library for in the future? | More...

Bellis is online!
Bellis Music Camp is alive and well and apparently not living at Canyon Meadows anymore but the kids still enjoy it. | More...

Vocabulary
A list of words and historical/cultural figures I learned from reading comics when I was a kid. | More...

Patrick Stewart funds novice international activists
Through Amnesty International. | More...

Rolling Bums in the Spirit of Giuliani
I mean, Harlem's residents don't need their kids spending unwarranted nights in jail. Harlem's residents don't need any more police harrassment, generally. But the buildings west of Frederick Douglass are gentrifying... | More...

Curating YouTube
Kellan said he hadn't really been into YouTube until seeing "my curating of it." Interesting to think of link propagation that way. | More...

Someone has hacked together an Eat Poop You Cat gaming server
and I can't get any work done sitting on this couch. | More...

Self-importance in the Bay Area
The Game Developers Conference was fun and I guess other people are blogging about it, and I ended up in a celebrity column from the San Francisco Examiner online. | More...

My Life, Through The Music of David Byrne
I've been back to making a lot of mix CDs lately. I keep going on about David Byrne, so he ends up in the mix a lot because people want to know what the hell it is I'm talking about. But when I try to figure which songs I would recommend, it's too hard, because I got to thinking, There is a song of him for every year of my life. | More...

Keep Your IP Laws Off My Body
Happy Black History Month? | More...

Grover in Literature
I never heard the writers on Sesame Street refer to Grover as a teacher of postmodern ideas, but maybe they were working under that assumption subconsciously. | More...

Holiday Pix
Pictures from Thanksgiving in Pasadena, subsequent trips to Prescott and LA, and Christmas in Ann Arbor. | More...

The Marketing Of This Group Will Be Legandary
Some 42-year-old's get-rich-quick scheme entailing the Internet, his back catalog of 137 songs he has written since he was 21, and a band of 15 people, or maybe it's ten, who are between the ages of 22 and 24. | More...

YouTube Socks
F00t f3t!sh display on YouTube. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: Enter the vaGinger
The cheese fries kind of take a backseat to the corporate dumpster diving and the vaGinger. | More...

NEEEEEAR??? FAAAAAAAAR!!!!
Documentation of similarities between Ulises Mejias's project of nearness and farness and its original inspiration, the "Near and Far" sketch performed by the Muppet Grover on Sesame Street. | More...

Loud Party in the Endgame
Everyone's singing along at the top of their lungs. If the music goes back to being decent, I might go down and demand that if they're going to keep me up they might as well invite me in. I'm not bold enough -- what would the cops think if they found the complainant at the party, and she went back upstairs when things dispersed? I don't want to be the snotty old lady upstairs, but I am. | More...

You, Too, Can Host A School Assembly
Just think... all their booking information is available right there on the Internet. I wonder if any of them need proof you're actually inviting them to a school? | More...

Chillin' With The Bear
in the TC library. | More...

Big Year For Publishing!
My review of Unit Operations is up on the TC Record site. | More...

Certifiable!
I got my letter saying I passed the doctoral exam, and the faculty who read my paper went out of their way to tell me they thought it went quite well. | More...

Statistically improbable phrases in Riddley Walker
The girt dants of the woal thing. Putcha Putcha. | More...

Quick Political Comics
QuickComic: Fiddling while Rome burns. | More...

Firsts: Academic article published
Fibreculture article on DDR. | More...

Visions Productions Debuts Online
Froderin, Madame Zola, and Ditz Bits. | More...

Oh crap a review of my life by Anthony Lane
and magical realism and Cow and Boy. | More...

It Doesn't Take A Nobel Laureate
to KILL THE PIG, SLIT ITS THROAT, SPILL ITS BLOOD | More...

Green Sleeves
A video on sneezing, from Maine. I love my natal state. | More...

Notes on Gender, Sci Fi, Comics
Octavia Butler; artists play around with viewing male superheroes with a sexualizing male gaze. | More...

The Omen: Where Are They Now?
To fall asleep, count sheep. To wake up, count lawyers. | More...

Accepted: To Hampshire
look! I worked in that colon! | More...

And that was only the FIRST panel
Colin Mochrie and Bruce McEldowney: two great tastes what taste great together. | More...

Appearing At
HOPE and BitchFest aftermath. | More...

Not that bus
I was not on the Fung Wah bus which crashed today. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: Poodle Fries
Spike's fries are excellent, but this post is Not Safe For Lunch. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: Not Safe For Work
Dolphins prefer chaps. We still prefer Round The Clock, but these cheese fries come close. | More...

Grand Theft Moral Purpose: Fear and Lovey-Googly-Eyes in Harper's
The Harper's Magazine back-to-schoolmarmishness issue this year consists of a panel discussion on video games, literacy, and education... and guess who doesn't appear in the discussion at all. Despite this oversight, the article has sparked some very lively blog interlinkage among various people whose opinions I respect. The following is my response to the article, and to comments that appear on Ulises's site. | More...

More Adventures on the Internets
Searching AOL's logs of one user's search terms, and wondering why the hell people approach the Internet this way. | More...

OMG PONIES!
Is it all a dream? | More...

William Shatner Is Creepy
Must... Capitalize... All... Posts... | More...

Ender's Brain: Science Fiction Models of Intelligence
Brilliance in Ender's Game, The Diamond Age, The Stars My Destination, and other texts. | More...

New article up
Serious Games Source publishes my article on Games For Change. | More...

Speaking at the Hacker Conference Friday
Hackers and Academia panel, HOPE 2006, this Friday through Sunday near Madison Square Garden! | More...

Vote Amazing Screw-On Head!
A definite must for all fans of Edward Gorey. | More...

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!
John Dean cites Theodor Adorno on the Daily Show. | More...

I can't sleep
Theremins and pole-dancing. | More...

My baby graduated!
Fabiola is going to college! | More...

Distributed Investigative Research
ePluribus Media will help you make a fact database and check it, too. | More...

Great Minds Think In The Same Space-Time Continuum
The Finnish parody Star Wreck. | More...

Unsubtle Hints
Sort of a birthday list. | More...

Things That People I Know Are Doing
Music, comics, going to help refugees. | More...

All The Reporters' Data
Notes on All The President's Men, from a comfortable armchair in a 21st-century department of communications. | More...

Quartet, A Lullaby
If you had told me I would be able to track down that song from my own living room, that I would with almost no effort take it onto a computer with a screen colored as vividly as a television -- more colorful than the game itself! -- and pull and snip and shape, with the movements of my hands, those same notes... | More...

Cerfimacashun!
These are pretty much the books which have been most important to my thinking to date. | More...

Effectively Deaf
without my cel phone. | More...

Dogwood Season (words)
What's it like not to be that last student? I don't know. Me, I'll walk around campus barefoot the way I used to at Poly in August, when summer classes were done. I'll get to know some classrooms I've never even looked in before. I'll say hi to the maintenance men. The security guards already wave me through even if I don't present my ID. | More...

From The Vaults: Why The Dancing Sausage?
body movin', body movin', body movin', we be body movin' | More...

The Nerd Room
Current working idea: Set up game playing stations around the EGGPLANT Lab where classmates could play games particular to each group of participants I spoke with. This would mean having a sports-gamer space, a casual-gamer space, and a nongamer space, and having the spaces not meet. Perhaps I could still populate the geek gamer space with my own geek items in an attempt to indicate that a LOT of academic work so far has focused on geek games and geek players, to the detriment of an understanding of the other groups. | More...

I take back any implication that Jon Land is going soft
His music is rad, and highly recommended to fans of KCRW's Nocturna or Metropolis. | More...

Pokey The Penguin Has A Posse
and We are It. | More...

So what's Jon Land up to lately, you may be asking yourself?
Two words: Origami quilts. | More...

Why not get them bronzed, while you're at it?
Saving your neonate's umbilical stem cells for later use. | More...

Dogwood Season (pictures)
New albums: GDC/Bay Area and around New York. | More...

The Further Adventures of Simulation
A focused continuation of the Bread and Circuits piece. | More...

Bread and Circuits
The physical conditions of computers and video games don't care how the hell we're shaped, how we feel physically, what we can do aside from sit and look and press buttons. They don't care which odors we find pleasant and unpleasant; a cheese you pick up may be called Stinky Blue Cheese, but you don't smell it. They don't care what our favorite foods are; nothing has any taste. The objects afforded your character in a video game don't support the attention to fine craftsmanship you might enjoy if you collected hand-tooled leather armor from a past era, or the piquant natural irregularities which you might seek out in gemstones. While the leisure objects of meatspace restore to us some of the sensations of which the workplace deprives us, the leisure objects of digital games are as flat, grey, and substanceless as an office cubicle. | More...

Better In Print
Cat and Girl mock my life. | More...

And what rough beast
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NO BABY NO BABY NO BABY NO BABY! | More...

Invisible Imaginary Horses: VHR Diary Day 1
Initially frustrated at the numbers-heavy interface and play, I've begun to warm to the game a little. First of all, you can link a picture from any website to represent your horse, rather cleverly mitigating the lack of graphics on the cheap. The major thrill so far is the prodigious breed list. | More...

Free the E3 Two, mama!
Free as in "lite" or free as in "freebie," something flimsy and useless people give you to convince you to give them your money. | More...

No Zantigen Eusa Com
It's all for you, Mom. | More...

Detritus: Notes on Pop Culture, Critical Theory, and Geeking Out
Notes from chats with Seymour Papert, and the project of developing a theory of geekdom and conformity. | More...

I wish there was more I could do
to fight spam than link to Michael S. Cox, that filthy, dirty, lying, cheating spammer. | More...

Miyazaki and Earthsea
Ghibli tackles LeGuin. | More...

Molk!
On Planet X, wooooahahooh, it won't be long now... | More...

From A Land Down Under
That is totally my hand and I am feeding a kangaroo in that picture. | More...

Preliminary Oz Pix
I have not posted mine yet, you see. Have you any idea what my life has been like? Two conferences in a row. Nothing but pizza for lunch this week. | More...

The Opposite of People: Narrative, Interactivity, Performance, Mediation
I just got done indulging myself and taking a little extra time doing my assignment for game design this week, which was an analysis of heralded narrative game FaÃ§ade. I then went back to look at an earlier analysis of Zork I did, and realized that even though I thought GDC had marked a huge revolution in my thinking, I was saying pretty much the same thing I was saying then. Nota bene, though, that where I was previously concerned only with the limitations put on the player, I've now flipped the script and have started thinking about the limitations on the game producer's side. Here are both analyses: | More...

The Gus Sindex, 2006
Summarizing just how far off the deep end I've gone. | More...

Talking with Broughton
How can a solution coming from such a complicated man be so simple? | More...

Why "Ebonics" Isn't Bad English
Wikipedia entry for African American Vernacular English. | More...

The Greatest Dancer
Combine those moves with the cackling laugh and you have one *wicked* blue-skinned package. | More...

Fries And Propaganda Down Under, Part 2
Rare cheeseless fries at P.J. O'Brien's. | More...

Fries and Propaganda Down Under, Part 1
Unrecorded cafe, King's Cross neighborhood, Sydney, Australia. Joined by local sherpas Mary and Andrew. | More...

Big Dogme On Campus
Criteria for digital-age research | More...

God Loves Nutjobs
Pastor Fred Phelps pickets the funerals of straight people. | More...

Final Appearance
so long, shamans. | More...

New blog
Debut of The Phenomenologist. | More...

Two Moments in Harlem
A small child in a two-piece and a guy with a very runny nose. | More...

Live in Prescott, but not so long it makes you hard; live in Enfield, but not so long it makes you soft
Advice on how to survive Hampshire College. | More...

You know you've been working too hard
on your game design homework when you have a dream that you've been assigned to create a game for class. About comparing your teeth to someone else's teeth. | More...

Flickrastination
Ten ways to have fun with Flickr. Via Webmonkey. | More...

Australia!
for spring break, somewhere between March 9 and March 19. | More...

Media Activism?
I'm beginning to think the mediatedness of any medium -- the fact that you generally aren't there in time or space to adjust the impact the things you're trying to say to change someone's mind -- is problematic for any attempt to make change. | More...

Also: What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Killing Time
Educators claim to want to harness the motivating elements of digital games to teach. But what if certain players are most motivated by submission? How does the fun of submission fit into our pedagogy? | More...

Count me in for the big muddle
Teen People website briefly ran a loving article on white supremacist Olsen Twins look-alike music group Prussian Blue. | More...

What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Faking the Funk: or, Why Some Games Won't Be Educational
This semester I'm taking a class with a developer from Atari, and today he said some things which I couldn't ignore about how an engaging game is made. Many of them go counter to what educators seek to accomplish; some of them even contradict some of Jim Gee's claims. | More...

Artificial Nut Zippers?
Very interesting. It appears Ken Mosher, a former member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, visited my site and posted a link to his new project in a comment to a very old post of mine. Or perhaps an Agent Of... | More...

Stop Badware
Because Esther Dyson says so. | More...

From The Vaults: Early Mac Woman
Continuing the investigation of my early technological literacy practices, here's some homework from a computing class, I think sometime in middle school. | More...

Knitting Communities Together
Over the holidays, my maternal grandmother, Deedee, re-taught me how to knit. I asked her to teach me because I wanted something better for me to do with my hands in class than picking at my skin, angrily IMming with... | More...

Well!
Right -- I submitted a comic idea to Tiny Sepuku. | More...

Christine has a good eye
Sushiesque; Yakov Smirnov. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: More Adult, but the Lack of Fry Generosity Persists
Old Town Pub, Ballard, Seattle, 1/6/06. Special guests Nat and Robert. | More...

Hate School?
You're in good company. | More...

Parrot-lag
One bit the button off Sarah's jacket. | More...

Towards A Place Of Blogging In A World of Assignments: Preliminary Notes on StudyPlace, Adorno, Robbie's Division Me Project, etc
(how's that for a colon-oscopy?) | More...

Human descent
Morphed pictures of animals. | More...

The Earth is Phat!
Google Earth for Mac. | More...

From The Vaults: Cheaticus Maximus
Instructions on how to maximize your l00t in Kid Icarus. | More...

Fries And Propaganda: Dorky and Awesome
Schultzy's, U District of Seattle, 12/29/05 | More...

The Inexorable March of Technology
I've started a Flickr stream. | More...

It's Christmas in Pasadena
Pasadena looks like Disneyland -- gaudy, overly cheerful stucco buildings with no flavor to them whatsoever, springing up everywhere, four stories tall. I don't know what next year will look like. | More...

Barney vs. Tupac
Just nice to hear him say "f---," you know? | More...

Bouganvillea proposes a topic
Now I have an excuse to play WoW for work, for once. | More...

Republican Crap.
The darker irony of this is that probably some of the cash spent on these items wholesale goes to companies in China. | More...

Warcraft Diary: The Radical Naked Baby Triathlon
If you participate in a protest in-world, does it begin to make you wonder if you could do the same in real life? | More...

Custom Cooptation
Custom ponies as high art, without recognition of the form's pioneers. | More...

The name Anzac?!
Australian Customs has a strange demand. | More...

How do you type with those things?!
The class tensions of nail length would make an interesting paper. | More...

Catching Up on Others's Blogs
Because I am terrified of this presentation I am supposed to do at NRC next week, I am procrastinating hardcore in a way which will not make me feel quite as dirty as playing WoW for hours. I am catching... | More...

Don't know whether to be pleased or appalled
"You see, these comments are a conversation. And contributing to the conversation... may even bring you some valuable traffic from the blog readers themselves." | More...

Boxes
which make my day. | More...

Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day
Oh, I'm ambivalent. Maybe I don't want filk in my life after all. | More...

Reproducing News
Media literacy dissertation having kids edit together professional footage. | More...

My Katamari is Tiny!
Pathetic! | More...

Radio Silence
Anyone trying to call my cel at the moment will not have an easy time of it. | More...

More Anguish
Because it's a fun to, any how. | More...

When a kitten comes to your house
Pictures of Frank Black and Sirius Black, foster kitties. | More...

For A War Stance
War rugs. | More...

We're An Accordion Band
...we're coming to your town, we make annoying sounds... | More...

System update
I've let a lot of messages slide. Bear with me. | More...

Pastafarianism
yea, I have been touched by His Noodly Appendage. | More...

Ideologies
In which I stumble into a nest of conservatives and become very upset. | More...

Warcraft Diary: Bouganvillea's Story/ Is That All There Is?
Bou woke up today in the Den and headed south to seek her first shaman quest. Instead, she found herself on a high finger of rock overlooking a lake. Succumbing to ilinx, everyone's favorite overlooked play style, she flung herself from the rock. Nearly cleared the shore. Didn't. Took 121 points of damage, almost her entire life bar. No matter -- the lake was inviting, with its unplumbed depths and invisible distant strands, so she strolled into the shallows. Where she was bitten in two by something unseen. | More...

Reinventing
I've done this a couple of times since college. Look, I'm an afterschool teacher! Look, I'm a media analyst! Look now -- I'm an activist! I'm a freelance writer! A journalist! A professional video game player! | More...

Detritus: Back to school, etc.
Catching up one month into the semester. | More...

Plotnik? Plimpkin? Punkin?
is getting married. | More...

Warcraft Diary: Reporting Live From the Emergent Plague
"Ya man/I saw some guy run by/POW/He blew up!/Blood brains and snot..." | More...

Further Adventures in Booze Literacy
White chocolate syrup Half and half Seltzer Malibu or other coconut rum Serve over crushed ice. | More...

George Bush Don't Like Black People
The Republicans, in general, don't like poor people. | More...

College Trip to Boston
Fab's first trip to Boston. | More...

A Modest Proposal for Teh Intarnets
Could we develop a separate Internet for the people looking for V!0xx? | More...

Things we did not know about the Leet
It's not listed in the Jargon File... Screw you, Eric S. Raymond! | More...

Advertisers and Geeks
The lie that advertising is about lifestyles when it's actually about profit bothers me, but the lie that there are a few narrowly-defined good ways to live your life bothers me too. | More...

Terrifying New York cockroach stories
Over the past year the roaches in this apartment seem to have developed a sense of drama worthy of a USC film-school graduate. | More...

Warcraft Diary: Presenting the World of Warcraft to Educators
Every time I log on I'm grinding, killing six crocolisks for their eyeballs or twelve rabid thistle bears for their rotting carcasses or twenty-four wailing Highborn for their ephemeral essences. Then I run to the questgiver, only to be given another quest. No questgiver ever says "Great job, why don't you go to Astranaar and enjoy the scenery for a while?" or "I like a gal who can take out sixty fleshrippers at a go. Care to join me for a swim? I know this waterfall that's off the beaten path..." It feels like fuckin' work! I keep expecting them to hand me a pile of textbooks and tell me to write 163 multiple choice questions. | More...

Native American Boarding Schools, 1880-1920
Since the paper I wrote in high school, primary source material on the subject has been put up online. | More...

Once I Was The (Bald) King Of France
This is just a shot across the bow of any atheist Randites out there: next time you try to tell me there's some universal truth out there I'm'a whip out the Latour and try to assure you haven't a leg to stand on. | More...

You can't have it that way!
McD's adventures in buying a better image. | More...

Warcraft Diary: Existential Blues
At some point it became clear that the other members of the guild were actually heading back to "the Tower" -- not the one we'd escaped from, but another one which seemed to basically be home. Even though I wanted to log off this didn't alarm me too much, because going back to this home state or logging off seemed to more or less be the same thing. I did worry, however, that the other guildies had been online for far too long already. | More...

More Maine News
Keeping track of the Keilt-Freyres, even though I don't keep up with them :( | More...

Crap -- Chute in an Accident
Carolyn Chute has suffered a hip fracture in an auto wreck. | More...

Andrews Family Reunion
Remember the one where Grandma barfed? We'll all look back on this someday and laugh. Right now the grass is still dead in that spot. | More...

Making Fiends Birthday Party
Making Fiends, Making Fiends, my friends are always Making Fiends... while I make a mess of my birthday parties. | More...

This is TOO Disgusting.
The Pentagon plans to nuke Iran if there is another attack on American soil. | More...

Home in Pasadena
Expect to hear a little less yearning from me, and a little less frustration with New York; deep down, I know I can't justify it anymore. | More...

Seattle and Vancouver: Details
Pix from the trip. | More...

Warcraft Diary: The World of Scarce Things
Sunglasses, sleeping, and not sleeping IRL. | More...

This Week's Highly Recommended
Big ups to the Extra Action Marching Band and a backhanded slap to the Hungry March Band. | More...

Finland: A Primer
Sauna, rolling in the snow, and Kalevala. | More...

The Aristocrats Joke
The filthiest joke ever told. | More...

Warcraft Diary Entries 3 and 4
Thousands of people logged on to these servers. A lot of them kids, but a good portion vocally annoyed enough with the kids to mark themselves as adults. At some point, everything we do will be deleted or otherwise lost. Think about this generation of humanity, doing this. I can't tell if it's better or worse than life has ever been. It's not as passive as the couch potatoes of the last generation, I don't think. But we make and move and fight and boast and dance in a world which is ephemeral: the question is how much more fragile is it than human culture has ever been? | More...

Warcraft Diary, Week Two
Let me tell you about it: that dust wasn't something my priestess would get to keep. It appeared in little bounded squares in the loot from kobolds, and I was supposed to collect ten and return them to someone who'd sent me on a quest. I don't remember who it was, and in the grand scheme of things, he wasn't going to matter to my play. That dust wasn't useful, or really even pretty or fascinating. In short, collecting the dust was not an intrinsically motivating part of gameplay. | More...

Reading and Writing Locally and Globally
I am trying to reconcile the ideas of folks like Sut Jhally and Robert McChesney, which assumes that audiences are helpless in the face of media hegemony, with the ideas of Henry Jenkins, who finds that audiences repurpose media texts for their own uses. | More...

By popular demand: RSS
In which I make it easier to find me using RSS. | More...

Boob's back; mash-up needed
Let the eagle soar... Tomorrow belongs to me (leer) | More...

Warcraft Diary, Day 1
Part one of my quest for a horse. | More...

I said it first
Cutting funds for Sesame Street is like strangling puppies. | More...

W.o.W., a.k.a. A.B.D.
Kiss your academic career goodbye... | More...

All Points Bulletin
APB the Bacon. | More...

Today's discussion topic
What do you do when there's a lecher in your field? | More...

Not Business As Usual At Hooper's Store
Merrill Lynch donates $5M to Sesame Workshop for the development of financial literacy materials. | More...

Naycher
Pictures from Mom's visit and the hiking trip to Harriman State Park. | More...

Adventures In Disorienteering
The further adventures of New York as it mercilessly destroys those who would drive cars. | More...

Ode to Hampshire Students
Oh, Hampshire students. They go about the world with their ears pricked up. You can see them! They are the rabbits listening for danger and the cats about to poke their noses where they probably oughtn't. | More...

Isaac's New Car; Around New York
Williamsburg, Central Park, Washington Heights, Columbia. | More...

NY Gets the LA Treatment
Retaining wall along the Henry Hudson collapses. (Useless) film (of TV reporters making sh!t up) in eleven minutes! | More...

Eureka! Why I procrastinate!
Tonight, having procrastinated every possible way I know how, but still having finished a presentable draft of a paper due Monday well before I thought I would, and even turned it in to both TA and instructor of the class, I was smote heavily with a blinding flash at 2 a.m. with the sudden realization of why I procrastinate. | More...

Exchange in the hall outside the EGGPLANT Lab
The luxury of going barefoot. | More...

500 Greyhounds At Risk
no, NOT "a bus?" | More...

Detritus: Interlude: Morning is the Long Way Home
Email and Leo Kottke. | More...

EGGPLANT meeting notes, May 2, 2005
Problems with the talk-aloud model; interactions between expertise and motivation; a formal feature breakdown of "challenges." | More...

Haircut
I don't mind your studio hair gel/ I don't mind the crazy way you play your casio... | More...

Arrivederci Espada
It's tiiiiime for uuuuusss to paaaaart... | More...

Everybody East Side West Side Heyyyy-oh Heyyyyy-oh!
Chris Onstad's blog. | More...

Neck Face In The Ivory Tower
Jessica Hochman of Teachers College displays a photo of a Neck Face tag in the course of a panel on grafitti as a form of youth-centered pedagogy. | More...

Ugly, But Functional!
Comments are working again! | More...

A Very Tiny Circus
A few months back I was daydreaming about the horse video game I want to create, and got a little ridiculous -- started thinking about the headshot I'd want if I ever got interviewed about said game. | More...

B!tch, B!tch, B!tch
B!tch publishes me, I promote Lynda Barry, again. | More...

Ol' White Guy News
Welcome to the second in a series of Crusty White Celebrity Guys Teach You How To Dance | More...

Mr. Rogers Was Wrong
How are we to love our postmodern selves, and where is the kids' show which will love us back? | More...

April: Epiphany
I spent a lot of time over January running around Europe and as a result didn't have the kind of time over that break to do the thinking I'd done the year before. I've spent the semester apologizing for not... | More...

Life in New York
Pictures from around New York and Columbia, circa January-March 2005. | More...

AAAAA OMG KLINGON PR0N!
MELOOOOOOTHAAAA! *smash* ooh. | More...

The Hands-On Imperative and Video Games
One last thought for the evening. I started writing a note to a friend who doesn't play video games tonight and once again found myself typing the words "I can't really explain them to you -- you have to play... | More...

Video Games and Violence: Enough already!
Having gone through a series of lectures and classes leading up to the official opening of the video games lab at school this weekend, and having talked to a number of people not of an age to have grown up... | More...

Major cult documents online
P00DLE! | More...

EGGPLANT Lounge Mural -- UPDATED
Pictures from the creation of the video games lab mural, the grand opening, and Tron Prom. | More...

My Trip Across The Pond
Pictures from Paris, London, and Tampere, Finland. | More...

carmen sandiego
rob scott. | More...

I make the papers nationwide!
My meme is all about homelessness today! | More...

T.M.I.
Can we talk about information for just a second, here? Is anyone having the same problem as I am? I came to a point tonight -- it was when I was looking for citations at the root of the debate... | More...

Another Musical Evening
and not just because of the beans. | More...

You, Rabbit! You'll get yours!
A MeFi link to Soviet-era cartoon invites childhood nostalgia. | More...

Nothing New Under The Sun
Someone's already created a MMO horse game. foo. | More...

Open Letter to Game Designers: Don't Make Me Be That Bitch (or, Boobies!)
You can't blame it on people drooling in front of the TV anymore, guys. The medium reinforcing the backward-ass ideas some kids have now is video games. It's you. | More...

U.S.D.O.E. v. Buster the Bunny
The ongoing adventures of a plucky little Republican administration in its attempt to destroy all good in the world. | More...

Oh my god, we're lost
Hunter S. Thompson dead at 67. | More...

Academic Video Insanity
Epistemologically Near and far-out player pianos. | More...

Back In The Saddle
New blog orientation. | More...

Standout Games
Katamari Damacy and Vib Ribbon. | More...

The Next Chris Farley
Dance along! It's as infectious as Yatta! | More...

Clean Your Screen For Free
*squeaky noises* | More...

Meaning in Experimental Contexts
I'm reading an article today by John Bransford and Kathleen Nitsch -- cognitive scientists -- which details the ways in which subjects in linguistic experiments understand sentences they are asked to process, and how this differs from the ways in... | More...

My Courageous Battle With Wheat Gluten
I'm more than a little disheartened; over the course of the day I've sunk into a pretty deep funk. Aside from being vegetarian, I am generally not one to refrain from eating whatever the hell I want. Good food makes me happy; life is depressing enough without having to eat food which drags on the soul. La vie est dure sans confiture, as an elderly French gentleman said to me once. It's why I've always been suspicious of vegans; they suck the joy out of everything. | More...

What I Can Tell You
Yesterday I went looking on my hard drive for some file which I was pretty sure had the word "what" in its title. I didn't find it, but I was rather amused by the list it generated, so I thought I'd share it with you. Here's a list of all the questions the computer thinks I could answer. | More...

A Multiliteracies Manifesto
Elaborations on "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures" by the New London Group. | More...

Glory Be To God For Pied Things
I'm in the Matrix and the only other real thing here is my cat! | More...

Hello Mudduh Hello Fadduh Redux
AIM class of '04. B(IM)FF! | More...

house clown
Sarah L | More...

Free To Be Whatever Gender Your Parents Artificially Choose For You
Want A Boy? Want A Girl? Choose your baby's gender. Safe, Effective & Natural. | More...

The Love Song
I read it again today and realized how little of the poem I had understood. In fact, I think its specific meaning escaped me entirely. From the context of an English class where I was struggling to be the best student, I conceived of Prufrock as struggling some overarching goal of artistic self-fulfillment, as I was. I somehow guessed Eliot was tilting at his own poetry. | More...

rear entry!
me and sly | More...

what is a truck
me, dad, and sly | More...

crystal meth
robert | More...

GOP necronomicon
glyph | More...

TV For My Dad
Penn and Teller cry Bullshit! | More...

August
Henry looks like Winston Churchill. | More...

IMpossible
It's funny, to some extent AIM has become a replacement for the notes Robert, Tinh, Lindsay, Catherine and I used to pass in Dr. Sheinkopf's class (sometimes on our TI-81 calculators, in a code we developed!) Big nerds that we were, we'd be talking about what we were reading for class as often as we'd be gossiping about how annoying we thought G-- C------- was. We filled in the discussion gaps where the rest of the class wasn't ready to go. Without passing notes, I might not have been as engaged with the reading. | More...

You Knew It...
mayonnaise sandwiches?!?! | More...

Death, Taxes, and Advertising
Fret no more, dear advertisers -- some a$$holes are hell-bent on reaching that lucrative 18-to-34-year-old demographic as they game, too. | More...

The Dark Side of Structures of Attention
I'd put many of the tricks of the public relations and advertising trades in this category. For example: talking points. You know who's doing a sledgehammer analysis of this particular attention structure? Jon Stewart, that's who. | More...

Kicking Republicans
-36 -40 -42 (grunt) Slimy Tonic fell on the floor! | More...

New! Special puzzling.org tee!
Answer: it's the grey one. | More...

Video Game Literacy
An hour watching a n00b try to jump a brick wall in Smash Brothers elicits a rumination on standards of video game literacy. | More...

batman
fabiola | More...

hooker economics
Neil | More...

Digital Debutante
(insert crystal tiara emoticon here) | More...

What's not to understand? Hey Steve's mouth exploded the universe,
and that blond guy did a tiny, tiny dance. | More...

From The Vaults: Poetry Jar
At some point earlier in my life I had decided this system of writing down and randomly choosing ideas would be my means of staying fresh as a writer, of staying disciplined and busy. I never made use of the jar; systems like that have a way of frightening me off once I devise them. So I'm getting rid of it now, but I thought I'd post the contents. | More...

Ugly Rumors About Hampshire
Grades? At Steve Weisler's request? | More...

Post Scoops Times -- In Alternate Dimension!
The Post reports that Gephardt is named as Kerry's running mate. | More...

Fourth (but actually my third)
Pointillistic wrap-up of my holiday in it's-pronounced-West-Topsam. | More...

New Literacies: A Review
Also, everyone I know who's been on public media in the last few weeks. | More...

No Phone
She was lookin' for a phoooonnne, just a lookin' for a phoooonnne! | More...

DSWJ Character Shirts!
Who's your favorite Sausage? Soft-Shoe ringer tee and Flamenco cami now available! | More...

Detritus: Meme-linky Madness!
I saw my first fireworks the other day, not lit ones, but sodden remains on a beach in Boston where I knew I had been before, on a less beautiful but no less loved day, a ferocious rain coming down on me and my man and making illegible the windows of the car we were in. This time it was a different man, a different ex, a moving van, a brassy day recently polished by a June rain. | More...

names like crawford
martino | More...

Things Are Looking Up
Cheney booed at Yankees game. | More...

Dude, I keep telling you already,
the LA Times is pretty lefty. | More...

high school marriage
Bill Crosbie | More...

Hey Lady! Give My Name Back!
I heard she changed her name from Gilliam, but that could just be a rumor. | More...

Regular-type Web Journal Post
Charlie: The people in that movie were set up to be laughed at. Me: It's not actually the director's intent to have you laughing at that kid specifically because he's never going to have sex. For other reasons, sure, like when he yells at the friend who called him while Denise Crosby was interviewing him. But you were specifically rewinding to laugh about that shot again. You know he's going to have sex someday, so why are you laughing? Charlie: It's not like he was there. Me: Yeah, and if he'd been there, you would have been nice to his face and laughed behind his back. Charlie: I'd like to think I wouldn't. | More...

brain fair
scrabble game in which James was trying to say "brain fart" | More...

softee conspiracy
brooke | More...

severed hand
alyissa | More...

All Things Considered, It Still Tastes Like Mucilage
Fellows! To-morrow I shall be on the wireless descrying a homily on the moral lassitude of frozen-custard vendors! | More...

A Day of Mourning... For the Bomb
Dad sold the Vista Cruiser. We cry now. | More...

Flashback Summer: On Overheard Remarks
"Mood is especially important for children because of the ways in which they view television and overhear remarks... There is no framework of understanding into which their reflections can be placed. It is as if children's education were dominated by the overheard remark... It is not as if they see the adult world as separate and of no interest to them. On the contrary, they show such interest that they struggle hard to make sense of it in their own way..." Cedric Cullingford, Children and Society, quoted in PowerPlay: Toys as Popular Culture | More...

Washington Heights Impex, Ltd.
A list of items being shipped in or out of my apartment this week. | More...

Sadly, there's your solution:
A national day of mourning for Ray Charles. | More...

How He Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Israeli Army Laundry Soap
"All recruits are given a physical "profile" number, the highest being 97 (it is said that the extra 3 points are taken off for circumcision)." | More...

Gus Sindex Mini: A Semester in Pictures
Interpretive dance and getting old. | More...

Things Made Out Of Hands
Return to Trevor Van Meter's site. | More...

Yay! More Cancer!
Life stinks, but air fresheners stink worse. AND they cause cancer. | More...

The Following People I Know Will Be Sent Off To Die
It's anyone ages 18-26, male or female. You know who you are. You know who your brothers, sisters, lovers, sons, daughters, roommates, friends, and co-workers are. | More...

Psalm for Washington Heights
Recent events force a narrow range of conclusions. The lock is off my building's front door again. First it was the latch, then the entire body of the lock, a jagged metal hole in the building's defenses. A brilliant, beckoning signal to anyone who might be casing it. At least the trail of dead roaches is gone from the foyer, after some guy claiming to be an exterminator came through with a sinister-looking canister spraying all the floors and offering glue traps for the rats, who still leap out around my feet when I take my trash down to the bins. | More...

funny thieves
bacon | More...

grope ass
Jen | More...

matching sunglasses
james | More...

Found Documents: Diary Entry From El Capitan/Refugio, May (June?) 1995
Begins with a reference to a Tanqueray ad campaign of that time in which a photo-collage old white male figure said mildly scandalous old-white-male things about a lifestyle vaguely related to alcohol to an unseen secretary. We would have seen... | More...

Vanity Searches
and finds she was a criminal in a movie she'd never heard of. | More...

Can't Keep A Good Dog Down
Neil's latest project: Sparkplug the Dog. | More...

gold undies
itamar | More...

zamboni
itamar | More...

Now You Can Buy Spam, Too!
The Spam Letters hits the press. | More...

Taking Requests
I have a great quantity of iron-on letters lying around. Will not apply them to your forehead. | More...

Things to Wear
L.H.O.O.Q. pants, Dancing Sausage shirts and buttons. | More...

abortion providers mad lib
pia, catherine, jamie, me. | More...

Bagpipes in Washington Square Park
I have been in New York for four years now, but somehow, the procession of purple-robed, mortarboarded adults coming down Washington Place and proceeding through the park on a Wednesday afternoon felt like the weirdest thing I'd seen in the city yet. | More...

Blogger?
The Teachers College version of PacManhattan. | More...

L.H.O.O.Q.
Epater les bourgeois! Avec un pantalon de sueur! | More...

Hup!
Mooserider Jenny, away! | More...

I still don't know if the instructor ever went to the arcade
Death to Your Mother. | More...

Awwwww.
I am now a contributor to Adorablog, the folks what introduced you to Strindberg and Helium. | More...

Anatomy of Finals Week: Writing a paper on reality and television
... and coming nowhere even close to talking about reality television. | More...

The Further Adventures of Herd Mentality
I still worry that the CIA's gonna get their hands on all this data someday. Or advertisers. | More...

En La Esquina
Tonight confirmed one of my hunches about the usual shouting at the station. Tonight it was back to normal: ardently but not angry shouting from a bunch of middle-aged Latino men in working-class dress, throwing hands in the air and smacking at articles in folded newspapers. I paused at the elbow of one of the men. De que estamos hablando en est'esquina? I asked. Politica. Cada noche, politica. | More...

My Sister Rocks!
Oh f*** it, she's so much cooler than you are i can't stand it. | More...

HOPEfully you'll be there...
Is your attendance going to be noted in your FBI file? Absolutely. | More...

We're making progress
Hegemony, Dominance, and Ludic Space | More...

handbag
Dana | More...

De La Vega facing jail time?
A fish out of water. | More...

Detritus: Those Who Fight Further; Distributed Amnesia
People in my department talk about "distributed cognition" -- the process of using your environment and the people in it to think. Sam and I are currently going through distributed amnesia. I mean, I really feel it. Like a Borg I feel it. It doesn't matter that he's the dumb partner in this pairing; with the end of the semester upon us, his memory is just as important to my success as mine is. | More...

Detritus: A little meme spread; definite nostalgia
I think our next joint project should be creating a temporary Xephreniaq museum with artifacts and installations. We should do a gallery opening with fancy wine and cheese and invite people who need to know us better. | More...

fish grotto
Sarah L. | More...

porn is fun
crosbie | More...

Dear Sylvie,
"Eggpants" is for you. | More...

Functional Fixedness
Actually, text-based games often sucked because of the amount of functional fixedness they asked you to overcome. For crying out loud, how was I supposed to know that if I didn't get the bag of peanuts, I was going to lose the Hitchhiker's Guide game when Arthur boarded the Vogon ship? But we certainly learned something: to look for unorthodox uses. | More...

HAMMER SMASH!: A belated breakdown and synthesis of themes from the Princeton video games conference
This is the intro. Please see subsequent articles. | More...

Genres
EverQuest, Minesweeper, and Dance Dance Revolution are all video games. To make sweeping statements like "video games encourage violence" or to ask questions like "are video games really motivational?" in light of this starts to seem clumsy. | More...

Specific design features to consider: Play spaces
Striated and smooth ludic spaces, and concepts still less transparent in name to the everyday player! | More...

A multilayered model
Nick Montfort and Lawrence Konzack suggest multilayered models for understanding video games. | More...

Movie elements in video games
No, her breasts are huge because Pamela Anderson's breasts are huge, not because "video games are evil"! | More...

Modelling and scaffolding expert thinking
Can graphics-based games scaffold expertise as well as text-based ones can? | More...

Identity and motivation to play
What Video Games Have To Teach Us meets the "Tetris defense." | More...

Problem solving, critical thinking, and metacognition
Are they better developed with games or with simulations? | More...

The field; play, work, and playfulness
All work and no play makes Mario something ludic something. | More...

Finally: playing a new video game as "approaching a void"
I will play Peach, and I will still 0wn j00!!!!!1 | More...

Before You Send Me That Forward
check www.snopes.com | More...

The Other Homeschoolers
They've sent seven interns to the White House. And your homeschool? Has sent seven kids to the treetops. Who's likely to make the most change, here? | More...

Who Am I Reading With?: Genres And Audiences: Or, The Sudden Unwanted Appearance Of Colons In My Blog
Came up with an idea today to go back and address an issue of Internet literacy I obsessed over earlier but didn't know how to describe. Some work has been done on children's understanding of genre and intended audience of television shows. In general, kids are pretty sophisticated in their understanding of genres. They are also good at identifying target audiences, as in "this is for kids" and "this is for adults." But what about their understanding of themselves as a community of watchers? | More...

heteronormative bagel
Jamie | More...

No Pants, No Chekhov
Anton Chekhov is alive and well and living in DC. | More...

The Bad Dream of Showing Up Naked
Does I exist if I cease to do my homework? | More...

Today's serendipity
Burakumin and Pipe Dream. | More...

Bar Code Scanning for Consumer Empowerment?
For social justice? | More...

Tapa tai!
"Don't think of this as a black show. Don't write 'Blackety Black Santa In The Ghetto' type of shit." He told me, "Take your Conan quirky stuff and do the exact same thing here, because nobody in black comedy is doing that. Black audiences are being fed the same gangsta horseshit comedy, show after show." -- Chris Rock on Pootie Tang, as reported by Louis CK | More...

Our Princess Is In The Ivory Tower
is what they would have titled the article, if the newspaper-reading audience of the US was even mininally 133t. but it's not. | More...

Geometric walky things!
MaMaMedia, SodaPlay, and friends. | More...

Not Tonight, Dear, I'm On Fire
THOUSANDS DIE FILM AT 11 | More...

Detritus: The Homefront
Butt in the air, hands on the keyboard, chickens in the shed. | More...

Boxing Day? No, Valentine's Day!
Better than the one about Mrs. O'Leary's cow, but not as good as the one about mummies and classical jazz. | More...

Attention cowboy journalists:
HEY KIDS! BRUSH YOUR TEETH AND BOMB THE PENTAGON! | More...

lipstick-red prune
Sarah and Gus | More...

cheap silk shit
Brooke | More...

I like coloring books.
Especially coloring books developed by the CIA! | More...

The Bohemian Index
"What can one say about Tottenville, except that it is less bohemian than the Fresh Kills landfill." | More...

Cinema Chocobo
I just finished analyzing screenshots from Final Fantasy VIII for a class I'm taking. | More...

Photo Finish
If you found a shot of what looks like a chocolate d!ld0 being admired by a My Little Pony, please drop me a line. I'd kind of like it back. | More...

internet titty
Christine | More...

We Are The Crapflood Of The Blogosphere
Argh. | More...

Experts See Patterns, That's What Makes Them Experts
and we see obfuscation! | More...

The Problem Of Skills In Role Playing Games
RPGs offer a number of advantages over other game models, for teaching. They require minimal dexterity, offer the player opportunities for emotional connection to the characters, produce large rewards for minimal input (some might say in the same way that science does), and work within a narrative, offering context for knowledge. But what skills can they teach? | More...

When Teachers Try To Be Cool, What's The Worst That Can Happen?
"One of the important signs of our Lord Jesus' presence is the development of nuclear bombs that have the capability of annihilating all life upon earth many times over... Such bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, and were influential in bringing an end to World War II." | More...

Metacognition Semester: Socio-cognitive Literacy Imbalance!
It seems totally ironic to me that these people who are writing about how people learn are completely unable to put their ideas to practice to effectively communicate the interrelations and importance of those ideas to me in a simple goddamn book. | More...

Metacognition Week: The (Heavily Drinkies) Semiotic Domain of Graduate Students
"Gus, the rest of us aren't addicts." | More...

More grafitti robots
Imagine Ruckus trying this baby out. | More...

Meta-metacognition Week: The Semiotic Domain of Cognitive Science
My understanding of cognitive science, based on my observations of departmental politics at Hampshire, was that it was anathema to social scientists. Happily for me, as I always felt myself straddling the gap between the cog sci professors in Adele Simmons Hall and the social scientists in Franklin Patterson Hall, the stuff that I am reading so far suggests that not only are the two fields cohabiting somewhat peacefully, there is much to be done in exploring their overlap. | More...

Metacognition Week: Computer-Assisted
And then there are my own marks, stars and boxes, hatches and underlines of varying weights for subtle cues, all of which I have perfected over time. To read without these, even if the reading is enriched by links and commentary, is reading handicapped. | More...

hideous things
Jamie | More...

Keep CBS From Censoring MoveOn's Ad
because the Super Bowl is about getting the eyes of millions, not about the heady euphoria of victory and beer. | More...

Unionize Everyone Now!
SAG attempts to organize reality TV. Take THAT, Taft-Hartley Act! | More...

Metacognition Week: Study Strategies
If you're lucky, your professor is aware of current work his field, conceives of the subject in a way that overlaps relatively well with your interests, and isn't suffering from diabetes-induced dementia or wholesale subscription to Stalinism/ neoliberalism/ free-marketry/ fifty-year-old notions of a canon/ Christian fundamentalism/ ersatz Buddhism/ academic backstabbing/ the cult of himself/ [your horrific memory of attempted indoctrination here, sing it with me now]. If you're not lucky, your time gets wasted on lectures and readings which won't contribute to your pursuit of answers. The solutions? The Hamster Technique, and considering yourself a Person Outside of Homework. | More...

Books and Cats: Go Together Like Coffee and Pie
When in Northboro, visit the bewitching Booklet Wallenda! | More...

Metacognition Week: Reading
Earlier this semester, in trying to explain myself and my goals to a professor, I wrote something about books being my friends and instantly knew it was a lie calculated to impress him. The truth is that books used to be my friends. Now I'm scared of them, even hate some of them, and have spent time over the past few years avoiding them. | More...

hall booty
perrin | More...

Biting The Alma Mater That Feeds Me
the local population is 60% Latino, and your student body is what percent again? | More...

Bacon!
is for connoisseurs. | More...

The Last Temptations of the Albatross
New York City will have vengeance. God save your gas-consuming soul. | More...

interpretive dance
glyph | More...

System Update
High sides on twistedmatrix.com! | More...

Fries and Propaganda: F-R-A-U-G-H-T
Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go drink Pabst Blue Ribbon... | More...

A Photographic Update On The Past Month
Album from winter break; the Cats of Linoleumhaus 30-month no-dates photos-only calendar. | More...

Jewish Dub And Reggae Are Alive and Well and Kicking Out The Jams in Brooklyn
just in case you missed it. | More...

jews for jesus equals happy hour
Bill Eidtson | More...

panty guru
brooke | More...

german child
Robert | More...

sponges
fuzzy | More...

pus free milk
bacon and me | More...

Support the Nauru Detainees
A 21st century detention camp in the bombed-out remains of the path of colonialism and global capital. | More...

Bus Blog
Bacon and I found this and we were pretty sure it was a blog post. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: Return to Diane's
A lake of cheese in the last place Kurt Cobain was seen alive. | More...

Our Best Chance To Make The TeeVee Say "Drop Bush, Not Bombs!"
MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contests -- still time to vote on the funny ones! | More...

Chengwins of Fire
(cue Vangelis theme) | More...

David Byrne on PowerPoint
and, um, he made some jokes about arrows and bullets, they said. | More...

hell or fort lauderdale, clamato
catherine, stranger, james | More...

Why Johnny Can't Post
I've hoped that the multidirectional quality of communication on the Internet would encourage people towards criticism of the worldview fostered by movies, advertising, and television, but is that really going to happen if people aren't able to decode what they find on the Internet? | More...

I am 1337!
I make Archaeology! | More...

Update
A farewell to Albatross? | More...

"Have you ever stopped to think how much better blogs would be if Hollywood scriptwriters got ahold of them?"
"Of course you have... you're not an idiot!" | More...

You know your neighborhood is gentrified when
it has its own blog. | More...

My Jaerb
Link to ugly picture of me and the rest of Charlie's Angels. | More...

Woodcuts make for dramatic porn!
Erotic bookplates at the San Francisco Public Library, also Russian woodcut animation. | More...

Chu-chu rocket -- The cat is scary!
And now, the dance remix! | More...

"Don't hafta. Not tellin'."
Berke Breathed is back in the comics pages. | More...

Hey Ariel, are you out there?
Family photos from a couple of years ago now up online, come and get 'em. | More...

I Heart Sight Gags
Jon Land has designed a thong. Intended for wear by women. Mmmmhm. That Jon Land. | More...

intestine fanny pack
jacob | More...

crotch frosting
actually it was probably Charlie. | More...

Sideshow Dolls
Men without legs; undies made out of shirts. Get Crafty. | More...

Change
"How do you ever intend to effect sustainable social change if you keep moving around?" I asked him, cheekily. "Who said I did?" he responded. When I pushed him a little more, he allowed that he wasn't sure he believed in change. | More...

god hates a litterbox
roomies. | More...

Planning Ahead
Going to Seattle in January. Who will be there? | More...

the blood of oil rig workers
glyph | More...

Grey Hair
Two of them, right in the middle of my scalp. | More...

except the dogs
Bacon | More...

my ass on a bad day
kermix | More...

the ear is the first step
Kermix | More...

Weenie
Can't wear the old Star Trek uniform, either. | More...

Airplanes, boxcutters... Quakers?
Alternative colleges portrayed as accomplices to terrorist acts. | More...

The unavoidability of spam has
Christine | More...

Now it's time for a little braggadacio / While I swing my arms like Ralph Macchio
to MC Frontalot, because nerd-core hip-hop is what you're all about. | More...

but hoarser; it comes / No Credit Checks / No Interest Chargeas the effects of delirium.
Normally I don't read spam, but this one with a headline suggesting it could "make the government return your tax money" caught my eye and made me wonder what flavor of rhetoric I would find within. | More...

Wushu? Who knew?
Janice Yeung has made the US Wushu Team! | More...

Here's something I hadn't thought of
Art talk vs. craft talk. Discuss. | More...

This is exactly what should happen.
Welcome back, Goldie. | More...

OK, Frank, I took my thirty minutes for serendipity
and found something about Gorey aubergines, frogs, and Tigerlillies. | More...

Talking Title Nine in the Ashram Blues
or, Don't Stand On Your Head If You're Menstruating. | More...

Happy Birthday, Tricia
Remember the Michigan Militia? | More...

Think antibiotic thoughts
Estrellita is sick. | More...

Anatomy of Homework
It is the presence of roommates which leads me to stand in the kitchen asking myself "Donut? Or sandwich?" It is the absence of a midterm break which keeps me up until 4 am with nothing to do. | More...

You would be excited in the hot battle of Mashimaro
and a police man chasing after Mashimaro. | More...

I just changed someone else's website!
Watch out! They're coming! At you! With their red pens! | More...

Kim Jong Il
Mack | More...

Cmon, people, am I the only one in this little blogoclique who speaks Spanish?
No comment. | More...

Security 'Sploits Make Me Sigh
Inteview with the "Homeless Hacker." | More...

Little Star
This is my new cat, Estrellita. | More...

Quick (Qualitative, Not Quantitative) Poll
Should I get an "I'm Blogging This" T-shirt? And why won't Wil Wheaton quit dorking up my hometown? | More...

Operation Moral Compass
Comic brilliance from the relatively new Rock On A Spring project. | More...

Ask yourself: With what satanic force are his eyes glowing?!
Arnold Schwarzenegger hawks pep drinks in Japan, laughs maniacally. | More...

Hello Ideant!
"Similar to the open source software movement, what is needed is an open ijtihad movement to create a multitude of sites for reinterpreting Islam..." | More...

What's Going On, Here?
When Rat Fink meets Engrish on a pulp novel cover, it's really not something you pass up. | More...

Full Waffle Jacket Watch
Once Upon A Time in Mexico must really be bad, to drag our almost-three-years-lapsed blogger out of exile. | More...

main class
Kristen, Gordy, and Vince | More...

Basic Update
The subway is freaky. The home life is not. | More...

Telvision Is Not The Message
Celebrity, pop culture references, the Internet and a model of media critique which is starting to sound old-fashioned. | More...

Chopping, slamming, and tricking out... Models!
Bod as hot rod. | More...

We're Live!
Moveable Type is working again. | More...

The Deadline
Personality gels at 27. | More...

Women Versus Men (in Blogging)
Women journal-blog, while men blog about politics, according to a Blogcensus survey. | More...

My Favorite Rock En Espanol People
(Sorry, can't be bothered to fix that tilde-less N.) Cafe Tacuba. | More...

Internet Becomes TV, Chapter 1(5,673?)
The Smoking Gun picked up by Court TV. | More...

Sympathetic Nature
Two days before I was set to leave the Sunnyside house, it was overrun by a hoarde of bloodthirsty fleas. | More...

Impact of Presidential Visits
1) Chase locals from their homes. 2) Cut down trees. 3) Bring your own furniture; everyone knows how unreliable that African furniture is. (?!) | More...

Better comebacks than me
which, granted, is not hard to do. | More...

Part Two: Backwaters and Intergroup Strangerhood
Even with highly-connected avatars like God, the Borg, Camel Toe et al connecting you to people you do not know, there will always be people on Friendster to whom your connections do not extend within a reasonable number of separation degrees. | More...

Failed Non-Celebrity Encounters: or, Strangers
Our generation is bound to have a very different concept of strangerhood than past ones. | More...

Gregory Hines Dead at 57
and that's the Ethiopian shim-sham. | More...

fun sheep
itamar | More...

space language
glyph | More...

Gary Coleman anti-posse
kermix | More...

Open Letter to Bacon
Bacon: The Other Extroverted Meat (tm). | More...

dude, Harold Ramis
Mack | More...

100 Fleeting Thoughts on Information
Mary, and Mom, and Serial Commas. | More...

Dance With The Skullboy What Brung Ya!
Strip Search contest ending! Vote Skullboy! | More...

Dear John and John,
you are officially not my favorite band anymore. | More...

destroying dick cheney's dears
glyph | More...

Good News I Have Been Waiting For
Teenagers and young adults spend more time on the Internet than watching television. | More...

weapons-grade plutonium
gus: I told you [your present is] here in my room glyph: it could be in your room... on some sort of digital media gus: heh... what could I possibly give you that you don't already have? glyph: weapons-grade plutonium... | More...

When The Light Rail Returns To Pasadena
Not as beautiful a sight as the swallows going back to Capistrano, but just as heartening. | More...

Birthday Mixes
Songs from the Kissinger pinata. | More...

Matrix Ping Pong
My jaw *dropped*. | More...

Parties That Didn't Suck
It was more constructive. We built a 5x5' dance floor. | More...

Bitch Watch
Bitch Magazine has published my article on "Like." Subscribe! | More...

Sunday In The Park With Kissinger
No matter how trivial the conversation may seem when I am together with my oldest friends, there is something deeply nourishing to it. We can rehash the same decades-old event a million times, weigh the weaknesses and strengths of a personality of someone we knew as children still see through the lenses of teenagers, and it fills the holes dug in us by college failures and adult uncertainties. | More...

We are truly blessed
KCRW to present concerts in NYC. | More...

Can someone please explain this?!
Gray Davis is going up for recall, and the Democrats aren't backing a replacement?! | More...

They're Chewable!
EAT or DIE. | More...

Fascinating diseases
"I can feel them herpeying around up there!" | More...

Name That Rash!
This is as close as I'm getting to putting nudie shots on my website. For now. | More...

Preview
Saucissons dansants. | More...

BIRRRTHday (I would like you to dance!)
I am going to have a party in Central Park on Sunday, July 20th starting at 3:00 in the afternoon, weather permitting. There will be a piñata. It will be shaped like Henry Kissinger. If nobody shows up, I will beat Mr. Kissinger my own damn self and go swing dance and hang out with Thoth. | More...

Detritus: It's Too Darn Hot
Dance class like math class, questions of purpose, activity on the Crip Walk site, and how I would change other people if I could. | More...

Churts
This is what passes for "marketing surveys" around here. | More...

Trends in Lower Limb Amputation
it's really just a cool title. | More...

Freelancer's Journal: Article on Sesame Street
12:32 My sister Sylvie has this way of dropping her jaw in an open-mouthed grin which I find totally incapacitating. She does it when she's trying to bolster an obvious lie, or put an amusing face on a pathetic situation, or just when she's playing around. I think I actually do it too. I know one or two other people my age who will; Wade is one of them. But our parents do not do it. Where did we learn this gesture? | More...

More milestones
I didn't do it on purpose. | More...

So Long, Oolong
Internet superstar Oolong the Rabbit, dead at 8. | More...

Rock on a Spring
Announcing one of the funniest narrative humor writers ever. Plus, how to handle your Gus. | More...

Just what I've been looking for!
Pido desculpa que mi presidente es un idiota. No vote por el. | More...

Detritus: G is for Growing Weary of PR Flacks, A is for Agar, Y is for Yuppies...
Researching for Sesame Street sets my brain on fire. Also: I have a crush on the Chrysler Building. | More...

(cue minor key music)
It looks like a centipede, it looks like a daddy long-legs, it hangs out over my bed and doesn't have a very good grip on the wall -- what's not to love?!!!! | More...

My Birthday
is July 16th. | More...

One Hundred Unfinished Projects
Unfinished projects are definitely my demons. I feel better having purged them. Enjoy. | More...

Today's Illustrated Delight
All eyes and little skinny legs: Don Hertzfeldt. | More...

incestuous
JWH | More...

Fries and Tammy Faye and Propaganda
Trailer Park on 23rd in Manhattan. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: Wake Up and Smell the Bacon Cake
Rainbow Diner, Woodside, NY (take 2?) | More...

System Update
Stout went down, blocking my email for a weekend. Were YOU affected? Wait til you see the SHOCKING new results Fox Five News turned up. | More...

Unfreundlich
Two degrees from Martha Stewart. | More...

I've met Eric Raymond. I've conversed with Eric Raymond.
My nick is SR. E-SR. | More...

Dialogue from the Office
The sky is falling, and so is the world's water level. | More...

jesus-shaped monkey
ml | More...

Quote of the Day
"Korea is a part of China, right?" | More...

Poll Time
Where should I work this summer? | More...

Small World Dept., Bureau #33411
Cat and Girl and Eugene. | More...

"Remove her clothes and give her a hub, say 'Thank you!'"
Shirt with a tie, basic of a gentleman. Huh? | More...

PUPPET EMERGENCY
Gizmonics.com up for sale! | More...

Hyperbolic Estate
When we hit the first line of the studios piece, about the skyrocketing prices of Manhattan real estate, she went all Old Faithful on my ass about how Manhattan has always had wildly overpriced housing, even back when her grandmother was young. "To live in manhattan, you had to live like a god or you lived like a king. There was no in-between," she said. | More...

Trixie Belden Yaoi
Jim took Mart roughly by the scruff of the neck and said, "C'mere, you scamp... the horses have gotten out of the barn and we're all alone..." | More...

Activism: Powered by Guiltium (tm)
I did not singlehandedly save the country from the relaxation of FCC regulations. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa... | More...

SEE! The Dancing Sausage Live In Performance!
Thrill to the strains of a song that sounds like it refers to Michael Lesy! | More...

Quotes of the Day
If you don't know the difference, I'm never sending you to the store for a motherboard. | More...

Slammin'
ROSEN. blaaaaaattt.... | More...

You can't deny it --
Donald Rumsfeld. Sam the Eagle. | More...

damn lawyers
James Grimmelmann | More...

Diary of a Procrastinator, Day 2
12:33 Do I really know what "vicissitudes" means? | More...

Anatomy of Freelance Work
I know I have a good story here. If I publish that here instead of turning it over to my editor, is it stealing? | More...

unsolicited commercial email
Glyph | More...

Comics To Buy
Shill, shill, shill. | More...

best choices
Howk | More...

Blood Hunger And Haiku
I just had this line I wanted to write, is all. | More...

Boulevards of Death
That's a kind of silly title, isn't it? I mean, HIGHWAY of DEATH sounds imposing, but "boulevard?" | More...

Adventures in Communication: Bulleted Lists
Men who won't get off the elevator, subway riders with monster balls, public officials with marbles in their mouths and doctors with REALLY BAD HANDWRITING. | More...

The Temp Index
Number of days since I started here that Jacques Brel’s Jackie has run through my head nonstop: 2 | More...

DDRcana and Other Geekery
PYYYYYCOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!! | More...

Detritus: Physical Attributes of Queens, etc.
Baby birds, the end of the universe, the beginning of graduate school, and weak men. | More...

Memory-Limited, or, From the Hip
Went running today. My dad, an inveterate marathoner, used to encourage us to note whether we were leg-limited or lung-limited during a given run; it's only recently that this kind of take on a body has to me seemed limited.... | More...

You're From Coney Island, And Little Coney Island Is Famous For You
Because you eat fire and shake your tits on stage. The song doesn't mention that part. That's my job. | More...

The Dancing Sausage Comeback Special
DSWJ not dead; television's inflated self-importance, while little Coney Island is famous for YOU; premenstrual dysphoria disorder in the arms of the pharmaceuticlappers. | More...

Command Decision
Goodbye. | More...

Panthers, in flagrante delicto
The spy who loved me, and also loved Tina Cocumelli's viciously-cast musicals. | More...

They don't like educators, either
POODLE. POODLE POODLE POODLE! | More...

Notes From The Bowels Of A Pharmaceuticals Advertising Company
I have heard my boss describe our division over the phone as ï¿½an educational company,ï¿½ but it is an arm of an advertising firm. If these surveys are in my hands, in this office, it is evidence the conferences are marketing tools. | More...

Problems with comments
and a teaser. | More...

... We love you, you're a jumbo hero sandwich, top it off with Peter Mansbridge, two huskies and a bucket of poutine...
US says Canada too namby-pamby about liberties. I'm so moving there. Tomorrow. | More...

The Secret Lives of Want Ads
Seeking social-justice-oriented BLT for long walks on beach, snuggling, office-related S/M scenarios. | More...

Hairy Shearer's
thank you very much, uh-huh. | More...

Jon Land and the Shambling Beebs
He says it adds ten pounds and an extra chromosome? | More...

Socks!
Life's too short for matching ones. | More...

Randy in the Hills of Thailand
Imagine what that would mean to someone from the UK. He goes by Davis now. | More...

Neil wants to hoard it for himself, and Jacob doesn't want to go,
the Bowery Bowel Movement Comic Jam. | More...

OK, so maybe Canadians aren't so great...
Hammy the Hamster?! | More...

Something in the air
Nina Simone died. | More...

Bruce Haack! Bruce Haack!
Haack vs Eno: big fight! | More...

A New Meaning For "Polyphony"
I love Bruce Haack and Emperor Norton Records. | More...

Impressed by cars
This is why we need to go back to being impressed by cars. And wearing hats. And saying "Good day." --Jacob Chabot (when I told him that scientists on Long Island were working on a project which, if botched, could... | More...

Worse than beef?
KidsCom: Your kids, for fun 'n' profit. | More...

My next job will be working for a meat-industry site...
Beef: It's coming to get your daughter. | More...

An Army Without A Harness
To write you need to see, and to see there needs to be some measure of visible light. Right now I am operating out of a zone of total lightlessness. | More...

Useful
Across the room Jen is smiling beatifically at me, and I don't know why, and then I hear ducks quacking, and this loopy vocal music issues from her laptop. | More...

Fries And Propaganda: Let's Go Crazy Amherst Style!
The Miss Florence Diner. See The Good Senator for the Whately Fillin' Station. | More...

Fries and Propaganda: The Lost Diner
Queens Diner; Itamar guest stars. | More...

The Gus Sindex 2003: Arenotations
"Does not suffer fools lightly." | More...

How to waste your time today
The dialect survey. | More...

Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pussy
Being Jon Land. | More...

feces
me: If I tell her it's crap in an educated way I figure I'm set. Catherine: feces is a good fancy-sounding word for it. it'll make you sound 'educated.'... | More...

Shut 'Em Down!
IMF? Shut it down! War in Iraq? Shut it down! Capitalist exploitation? ok, now we're getting into too many syllables for a good chant... | More...

blood
Sylvie | More...

Name That Dread-Inspiring Sound
The iMac internal combo drive says, "Hee-haw!" | More...

Get Your War Gone
From Craigslist: War is hell. | More...

Stalin-y
bacon:His character is sterling! me: Stalin-y? bacon: No, sterling! me: I thought you said Stalin-y.... | More...

It's All Over...
Ringy padingy paDING paTONG... | More...

One Less Safe Place to Play DDR
Shootings at Broadway City Arcade. | More...

That Envelope Did Look Suspiciously Skinny...
Grad school acceptance tally. | More...

Ari "Motherfucking Kissinger" Fleischer
Ari & I: Watch press flacks dodge bullets. | More...

This one's for Irons
It's a Bargin! | More...

Two Down
First Riverside, now UCLA. | More...

Happy Belated Birthday
to The Twins. | More...

Happy Belated Valentine's Day
Beetlebug Valentines, 2003. | More...

Help Me Out, Here
Self-induced insomnia. | More...

Getting To Know Our Future Homeland: TV Station Banner Ads You Won't See In The US
Chaud time on Canada's First, Canada's Finest TV station. | More...

Over Two Hundred Scientists Named Steve Agree...
that "Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences." | More...

Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys!
Where did that phrase COME from, anyway?! | More...

LLLLLLLLLOINCLOTHS!
Now, don't go getting any funny ideas. | More...

Anal Sex, Absinthe, and Bacon
Dlove and a special sauce. | More...

sack
I am the angry indignant sack. --Alyissa... | More...

Incredible commentary on the WEF
"The rich... are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes." | More...

Various personal notes
Problems with my iMac's internal CD/DVD drive; no problems with UC Riverside; I am no longer living in the stone age. | More...

LE FRENCHY-FRENCH SITE DE WEB
We here at the Dancing Sausage Web Journal are officially changing our name to Frenchy-French Website A L'Enseigne Du Saucisson Dansant Tout Amoureux Du Peuple Francais! | More...

Peace Through Puppetry
A pretty well-known means of promoting peace, these days... | More...

100,000 Body Bags
It's not an urban legend. | More...

Beast vs. Beast
Perfunctory wrap-up of the February 15th protest against the war on Iraq. | More...

What Happened To The Writers Who Were In World War I
From Cat and Girl. | More...

Detritus: Push Me Pull You
Temp agency appointment the other day. Is there some reason that so many temp agencies in this city hire Irish women as receptionists? I would guess it's the accents, but maybe there's some network involved. There certainly is one for... | More...

From the "Wish I'd Written That Headline" Department
"Grateful Dead now 'Dead'" | More...

All this time...
I was convinced the word "erstwhile" meant "earnest." | More...

I'm going to link to UFP again, OK?
It's all about the puppets. | More...

Protest Permit Denied
February 15th permit denied; how to get involved. | More...

go to trade shows
a: I [have sex] to prove I can. that's a form of control. b: I just go to trade shows.... | More...

From the Vaults: Eyebrow Problems?
The Eyebrow Problems advertisement was eventually used as a party invitation. | More...

things go right.
things go right sometimes, too. not this year, admittedly.... | More...

Look Out, Old Macky Is Back
The IAC announces a new round of McCarthyism. (No, not LED by the IAC...) | More...

Strangely Cosmopolitan
Cosmo goes Volapuk; Glamour asks questions. | More...

War Is Hell
Photo essays which may or may not stay the hand with the sword. | More...

Where It's At: I've Got Two Turntables And A Malfunctioning Copy Of HyperEngine
The records from Laurie's basement which I've been turning into MP3s. | More...

TempNYC
A must-read for anyone out there who is temping or considering it. | More...

Owls
I really shouldn't ever post anything at 3:00 a.m. It's no better than being drunk. | More...

Planting Cacti: A Photoessay/Lesson Plan Aid
Documenting a day spent replanting cactus with the fam. | More...

Axiom #353
Editors are like boyfriends: | More...

fruit activities
i hate everything except fruit and fruit-picking activities... | More...

The Man Behind The Moogle
Yoshitaka Amano and Arthur Rackham. | More...

Mr. Fancy Pants
No, he's *THE* Mr. Fancy Pants.... | More...

If It Wasn't For Rigid Gender Roles, *They'd* Be Scoring On ESPN
Stupid ESPN ads. | More...

That's Jillette, Not Like The Razor
Penn Jillette gets his crank yanked. | More...

India-ana -- Indiana? Indianiana?
Matrimonial ads, lovemaking suggestions, Nixon papers, Rhythm Dhol Bass, Rukus Avenue, Swapnil Shah. All with chutneyyyy flayyyva! (j/k) | More...

Limited-Use Poetry
Mom's poetry. | More...

Oh, Right -- I Got Published.
Article in the Star News. | More...

buster's
do they have intense short-term relationships as well as chai?... | More...

miserere nobis
qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. | More...

The Word-Processing Niche That Time Forgot
Eminem's problems ain't got shit on newspaper filing systems. | More...

Kiosk
But what would we rent the kiosk for? Oh, causing accidents.... | More...

And now, your moment of Zen:
That's My Little Valuable Plastic Horseflesh, to you! | More...

Things To Read Compulsively, #34,964
Found Magazine. | More...

Detritus: When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Crawl Into My Mailbag
Yes Men, the Crip Walk ethnography, eBay auctions, Japanese African music aficionados, bad mail from Hampshire's alumn office and Glamour Magazine, fellow travellers, and a device that helps women pee standing up. | More...

Multicultural Day Rant, Part I
Listening to Fela Kuti on the way back from Buster's, I think about Multicultural Day. | More...

In Defense of P2P
Tim O'Reilly on P2P: It's not piracy. | More...

THANKS
more grad school angst | More...

Blimpmobile
She got to take a turn in the Blimpmobile?... | More...

Mainstream Comics To Watch Out For
Marvel says Slap Leather! I say Hothead Paisan! | More...

Photographing Your Plastic Nag For Fun And Profit
Selling my ponies. | More...

Conservatives: anal sex
It's funny, but I find it really easy to ignore super conservative people and still have fun shocking them with stories of anal sex.... | More...

HELP
Pre-grad-school breakdown. | More...

Detritus: It's Only Ever Detritus When I Go Home And Unclench
ME72, Typing of the Dead, The Handmaid's Tale, The Hall of Gravitas. Dear Mr. Moglia: Get bent. How's that for a mixed bag? | More...

Don't Buy It!
KCTS Seattle's media education website. | More...

Six Degrees of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie
Kukla, Fran, Ollie, Joel, and Jules. | More...

Brown Recluse Bites Overdiagnosed
Spider-stomping outbreak! | More...

Christmas List
I've already had some inquiries into what I would like for Christmas, so I thought I'd start my list. I'll add to it over time. Here are some things I would like: Anything at all by Lynda Barry (books, framed... | More...

"If I have two or three days without dancing, my bottom won't be OK!"
Congolese grandmothers dance the rhumba. | More...

Tattooing Robot
Erratic early tattooing attempts?! | More...

mölk!
melk? mölk!... | More...

Fries And Propaganda: New York, Winter 2002
Manhattan Diner, Georgia Diner, Pomme Pomme, and Cafe 82. | More...

A sadder and a wiser man/ He rose the morrow morn.
Albatross. | More...

Car Vs. Computer
That new old dichotomy: machine vs. machine. | More...

Linguistic Causes Of Dyscalculia?
Long periods of silence, and then -- out of the blue -- a horrible piece of pseudo-academic claptrap. | More...

I Know What You Did Last Halloween, Or At Least I Have A Vague Kind Of Sense Of What You Were Up To
Halloween pictures from Petridish. | More...

Like, totally.
Val-speak filter for websites. | More...

That's the letter F and the letter U...
Bert and Ernie gay; the old feminist song sketch on Sesame Street. | More...

Jacob Wins!
Jacob wins Dark Horse, but Brooklyn ninjas loom on the horizon. | More...

Phone trouble?
Both of my phones are busted. | More...

Last Chance -- Vote Jacob!
Voting for Jacob's Dark Horse entry. | More...

Electronica Primer
Well, if it's got a beat of exactly 133-141 bpm, then it's OBVIOUSLY applecore. | More...

Failed Celebrity Encounters #10: Janeane Garofalo Gives Me The Finger
Janeane Garofalo: evil genius of the almond cookie? | More...

The Negro Problem!!! Fuck, fuck, fuck!!!!!
It's a band, don't get your undies in a wad. | More...

Message to America: Lay off the goddamn mutherfsking air fresheners, will you?!
Give me unwashed crotch or give me death! | More...

New Wallace and Gromit Short
Cracking contraptions; a brief nod to Atom Films and Bill Plympton. | More...

Dancing at Diwali: Safety and New York
An afternoon in Jackson Heights; also Bowling for Columbine. | More...

Muppets: What *Can't* They Do?
Muppets in Afghanistan, Dwight Conquergood, The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down. | More...

Thomas Builds-The-Fire-And-Is-No-Slouch-At-Self-Promotion,-Either
The Business of Evan Adams, Sherman Alexie, filmi and fancydancing. | More...

What You Call Those Random Sayings You And Your Friends Have
Macros2000. | More...

in-laws?
Romeo de la Cruz Carambas | More...

Cel Phone Symphony
Like cicadas. | More...

Statement Of Intent
I finally get down to writing most of what I've wanted to say about monogamy, community, and family. | More...

Saddam Hussein's Beautiful Idea
Hussein suggests a duel with Bush, and I say More power to him! | More...

I am Basho! I am Bashooooooo!!! (pumps fists)
Haiku and props for said. Did I mention the right-hand column is all about self-promotion? yeah. | More...

I'm A My Little Pony Melter
So prisoners in Pennsylvania prisons aren't eligible to sue over medical experiments performed over them in the sixties. What kind of precedent does this set for My Little Ponies brutally manipulated by 40-year-old collectors? Will there be no opportunities for... | More...

George Wendt
ben | More...

Biffids?
Bonbon animation. | More...

What NOT To Do With Photoshop
Stupid Photoshop tricks; intimations of a Steve Madden campaign. And the Venus of Willendorf. | More...

Emotion Watch
ope! Ope -- OPE! There's EMOTIONS done bein' displayed over to bumppo.net! Gee howdy Christmas! The man's leaving town so FINALLY he has some kind words to say about the woman who loves him so much. Oh -- my mistake,... | More...

...
The vacuum non-sequitur. | More...

Windswept
Halfrobot's name-the-websafe-colors page. | More...

Collective Creation of a Font
Hive-mind font creation. | More...

Accordion Guy
Accordion Guy's website, Jebus Is Lord, and another anti-fundy rant. | More...

New Features
Artwork, feedback form. | More...

From The Vaults: Ley Fuck You
An early attempt to get into Michael Lesy's class: road trip to Magog and points north. | More...

titillate an ocelot
titillate an ocelot (+10) --sly's contribution to 1000 blank white cards... | More...

The Public-Screaming Clause in the No-Meddling Agreement
Irons, for the hundredth time, man, there are certain things you have to do when you have a girlfriend, not for the sake of appearances, but for the sake of being kind to a person you love. One is acknowledge... | More...

Deeply #2
The Poop Report. | More...

Antidisestablishmentarianism? Fuhgeddaboudit!
Googlewhacking woes. | More...

Earthquakes and Protests
9/11/01 retrospective. | More...

Lebensraum
Excavating the Sunnyside house, the Altadena house, Sly's shack and Salinas. | More...

Voices features highlights
Ice cream, Frankenfish, and the guy who dances salsa with a doll. | More...

dr00000l...
Rediscovering the MIT Media Lab. | More...

Modding your DDR pad
Our man in Williamsburg, VA -- the one what made the Linux port of DDR, aka PyDDR -- pointed me towards his tips on modding your DDR mat for durability and stability. I can't endorse it over other mods, since... | More...

Subway Sightings
ReRed campaign sightings. | More...

Norman Rockwell's "Long Walk Off A Short Pier"
James and I were standing on a corner on the Upper West Side, at a conversational impasse. I wouldn't look James in the eye, but I knew he was sticking out his chin in that pout he has. This was... | More...

Social Discomfort And Social Diseases
A night with German Cars vs. American Homes; a morning with the security guards. | More...

Looking for a media career in a growth industry?
Layoffs got you down? Hey, the Navy's got your number. "What will I do?" you might ask? Well, the job posting on HotJobs replies, "As a videographer with a combat photography unit, you might develop a training video for an... | More...

I can dance this!
and so could most of my fifth-grade class. Tinikling is a Filipino dance style which involves jumping over bamboo poles. (Warning: auto-loading midi file. Actually, there's a better auto-loading file -- an MP3?! not smart -- here.) One explanation is... | More...

Stupid Media Tricks: Hyperion Books
Where I'm staying for August the browser is set to boot to ABC's news site. I noticed yesterday that the headline news was about a book about September 11th. The headline is still there today. Curious, I thought; why is... | More...

We Get Results
Results of the Red campaign. | More...

Testing survey software
I'm trying out some survey software. Click here to help me.... | More...

Detritus for Elokuu
Going to college; The Making of a College; why we don't crimp and program at the same time; no talking, just head; empty threats and Fred. | More...

Mr. Softee
Like all street vending, ice cream trucks are more of a phenomenon in New York City than they were in suburban Southern California, where I grew up. As a result of my sheltered upbringing, I have a tendency to see... | More...

"No, I don't know anyone from Puerto Rico. Why do you ask?"
We get some weird stuff in the mail at work. Today it's a link to the website of Guyana, USA!, which claims to be a Guyanese political party. It suggests Guyana should become a US state, commonwealth, or territory. It... | More...

Post 'Em If You Got 'Em
It's like when people got arrested on the subway wearing their new red power suits... | More...

Good God
One degree of separation from a Memepool story today was Ship of Fools, which bills itself as "The Magazine of Christian Unrest." Every earful of religious questioning I catch makes me deeply relieved. Check out their "Fruitcakes" section.... | More...

San Diegan Teen Prigs Say "Go Back Home And Sit On Your A$s -- It's Healthy!"
San Diego Union Tribune article demonizes DDR for drug imagery. | More...

Pynoman Back In Action!
The devil has work for idle hands. | More...

Credibility
The life and death of a community newspaper editor. | More...

Penn and Teller Rip Your Ignorant A$s Up
Lo: Teller riffs on grammarians (much more concise than my own) and Penn flashes his Fourth Amendment rights to National Guardsmen. I didn't know the two of them share a website. (insert exclamation here)... | More...

City of Boredom?
Talk or don't talk, all right? Enough with this pussyfooting around about your blog full of "random rants." | More...

Who needs Michael Moore
when the president sets himself up like this? ``We're celebrating a victory in the House, playing golf with House members who helped convince their fellow members that trade is good for the economy and trade is good for the working... | More...

Better Than Abstinence
www.technicalvirgin.com and faerie porn. | More...

Desultory Music Review
At H2K2, there was a guy who addressed peer-to-peer music sharing. (Later, he made a pass at me, and I apologized and said I was taken and gave him my card. Where did he go? silly.) One of the things... | More...

Does this make my blog look phat?
Hey, can y'all check in and let me know how the DSWJ looks to you on your different browsers/monitor sizes/OSes? I have had some comments that Netscape makes it all ugly (which is weird, because MT seems to be otherwise... | More...

streeeeetch, streeeeetch (hand gesture)
streeeeetch, streeeeetch (hand gesture)... | More...

absinthe and bacon!
absinthe and bacon!... | More...

I like it, it smells like geeks
I like it, it smells like geeks... | More...

that's where the money is, in the two cats
that's where the money is, in the two cats... | More...

Thunderbirds are GO!
Sweet! It appears everything's back to normal around here, or at least patched up enough to give a semblance thereof. *cracks knuckles* Main column, right column, category headings... well, the archive page is still busted, but that's easy enough to... | More...

Youthful Escapism
Pictures of me trying to escape as a baby. | More...

H2K2: Social Engineering (Will Get You What You Want)
ed note 7-26-02: Two weekends ago I attended H2K2, the fourth Hackers on Planet Earth conference, put on by the folks at 2600 Magazine. I wrote most of the following super-gossipy, not-really-relevant-to-anyone-but-myself notes shortly thereafter but didn't finish them because... | More...

The Death of Recycling, and Possible Solutions
Those of you following New York City news know that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has rescinded recycling in the city for everything but cans and paper. I haven't been unable to recycle since before Pasadena adopted the practice, which must have... | More...

test5
test5... | More...

work damn you
| More...

Good Creativity and Bad Information
Yesterday I set out late in the workday to arrange the printing of our Ethnic Press Directory, and managed to come back with the most unbelievable loot. Not to imply I was slacking; I made sure the designer got through... | More...

No More I Leave Yous / About The Author
I spent the last week in California on what turned out to be a sort of fact-finding mission about my family, mixed in with some furious groping about my academic future, a rite of passage for my little sister, and... | More...

Great, it's not just mouse poop, it's CORPORATE mouse poop
I love my little sister. She's come up with the bestest, most cutting-edge advertising campaign *ever*. Herbuveaux: hi SolonsRoz: hey you wanna hear something gross? SolonsRoz: MOUSE TURDS Herbuveaux: mustard SolonsRoz: ALL OVER MY DESK Herbuveaux: ew! Herbuveaux: at home... | More...

The Horse In The Living Room
Last year the Kentucky Derby was won by a horse named Fusaichi Pegasus. A striking name, not so much on its own terms as it is for its inclusion of a Japanese neologism. (It doesn't really mean anything; it's the... | More...

Goings On About Town: On About Town Goings-On (Ongoing)
Had a press club today at work. This is one of the many things our ambitious little nonprofit does: arrange for speakers to come and talk to reporters from the minority, immigrant, and community newspapers in the city (we say... | More...

Capture the Flag
Coming back from work today I walked by three lightly-thugged-out young men. A taxi passed flying a blue and white flag from the passenger side window. The young guys pointed at it and started making snide remarks. One of the... | More...

The Myth of the Uncommunicative Father
I read Sharon Olds and Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, all these writers of recent rebellious generations, the ones of whom it was said you can never go home again -- people who dig out the viscera of their relationships... | More...

I give writing advice to Wil Wheaton! Eee hee hee hee hee hee!
After getting 150 accolades from adoring fans, Wil Wheaton wrote that he wanted to pitch this piece to This American Life. So I gave him a little advice on pitching to them. My comment was at 1:47 p.m., his response... | More...

From The Vaults: Summer Evening Dinner With Seismologists
July, 1998 It's berry season, so for once there was a lot I wanted to eat in this non-vegetarian house. There were few dishes not based on berries. Dried-cranberry challah. Deep-dish pie with blackberries, raspberries, and tiny champagne grapes. A... | More...

Hardcore, No Others Need Apply
So I have this friend (let's say) who works in a nonprofit. Her org is in a position to hire an entry-level staffer, and she's the one in charge of the search. She's showing me resumes, because she values my... | More...

Let Me Clarify
for those of you whose monitors are miscalibrated and can't tell what color it is: -- it's basically a few shades more intense than Barney.... | More...

Everything Else Just Looks Less Purple Now.
No, that's not a wig.... | More...

It's Overrated
Routine, routine, routine: Leave work early, make it home in time for the Simpsons, DDR and stretching between Simpsons, more Simpsons, shovel some kind of vegetarian paste into myself, and when I waddle upstairs to the computer around 8:00, it... | More...

From The Vaults: Letter To A Timid Traveler
This is why I don't like travelling into the city. It's an ordeal, and scheduling is an absolute nightmare. You are seriously overreacting. Four hours on the bus and half an hour in Port Authority is probably the mildest... | More...

From The Vaults: Opinion Poll
Originally published in the precursor to the DSWJ, 02/09/00 THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY SEEMS TO BE VERY INTERESTED IN MY PERSONAL HABITS! THEY CALL ME AT HOME AND ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT MY PRODUCT PREFERENCES! THEY COOKIE MY COMPUTER! THEY SEND... | More...

Tragedy Strikes In Sunnyside, Queens
H.W. Nam's NY Dance Sport has closed. The store housed four-to-six dance simulation arcade games (DDR and Pump) at any given time, as well as selling Hello Kitty and Orange Story merchandise, doo-rags and giant bling-bling medallions. Nam was a... | More...

Edible
The sensual pleasures of an evening in New York. | More...

Homesickness
I had a flash of panic this morning as I struggled to remember what the leaves of an avocado tree look like. * * * There are four columns of businesses named Emergency Locksmith in the New York City telephone... | More...

What Goes In The New Yorker -- A New Feature
It arrives at my house every Tuesday, and I ought to ignore it. The subscription is free, replenished yearly for my absentee landlady by some unknown donor who seems to think filling her friend's vacation house with unread copies of... | More...

Just Another Word For
I had a really great night last night. One of my co-workers was having a late Passover Seder and so another of my co-workers picked me up and took me there, in a car even. It felt like it had... | More...

Thoth Wins!
Thoth, the street performer about whom I wrote an article for the Village Voice, was the subject of a documentary film which was nominated for an Oscar, and apparently it won. Though not without Thoth getting harrassed by guards for... | More...

The Tingley Report, or Full Waffle Jacket Watch
As of 9:03 p.m. EST on Tuesday, March 19th, there were no new posts on Full Waffle Jacket. FBAEW.... | More...

Slid
Dogs were very appealing at that age; they’d look right at you, and you could give them the crookedest smile back and it wasn’t going to unbalance the universe. As for the boy who worked at the shelter... you couldn't say we ever made conversation. | More...

Metropolis and Hiroshima
I saw the anime Metropolis the other day and I have a lot of thoughts that relate to it, but I've been revising a review for moviesareawful.com for three days now and it still isn't coming together. Let me just... | More...

Leavin' weather.
Sometime this morning I woke up fevered from another nuclear holocaust dream. Sometime last week my neighbor got robbed. Sometime tonight I have to take out the garbage; I don't think I'm gonna even though it's spilling over the rim... | More...

The Gus Sindex, 2002
Number of hours I have spent playing Final Fantasy IX: 70 Number of Pokemon toys in my bedroom: 15 Percentage of a century I will have lived as of this July 16th: 25% Approximate number of people I interviewed for... | More...

From The Vaults: I Hate New York In June
Excerpted for a piece I wrote for the Omen in April(?) of 1999 MY SPRING BREAK This spring brake I went to NewYork city I did not go with my mom or dad i went With my freinds. Newyork City... | More...

Drown Out Ashcroft
I have too many harebrained schemes, especially late at night. Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 01:49:26 -0500 Subject: Drown Out Ashcroft's Song From: GUS I just can't stand it anymore. That godawful song John Ashcroft sang on the news the... | More...

A Reason To Call For The Separation of Church, State, and Entertainment
Am I the only one to whom the song Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote and which he is apparently trying to force his staff to sing bear more than a passing resemblance to "Eyes of a Child," the final credits... | More...

Nothing. We have seen *nothing.*
There's a DDR seventh mix. I didn't know there was a 6th, even. You know, we're not going to be able to convince future generations that the United States is the greatest country in the world if the Japanese keep... | More...

Oooh... Capatown!
I've posted my first review to Neil's site, movies are awful (formerly movies show limited promise). Should show up in a while, pending approval. If you're leftier than me, don't read it. If you like trashy campy films, go for... | More...

Jesus Christ, this is news?!
I can't believe this story on AOL's news ticker. Yes, Nixon wanted to nuke North Vietnam, but this isn't "news" -- I sat in the Hampshire dining commons four years ago and listened to Daniel Ellsberg tell us the exact... | More...

White Collar Crimes
The rule in my house was you do your homework first, and then play. So I learned to steal time from myself. | More...

Stuck Together Like A Ready-Made
LED posters. Sylvie alerted me to their existence. She's right -- they're tacky. I would recommend them to an updated Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, should one be produced. (Dad gave me the book upon my graduation from eighth grade; I... | More...

YOU SEEM TO BE HAVING AN ALLERGIC REACTION TO MANNA
Somehow I thought the market for stupid cartoons had dried up. I mean, before September 11th we had a nearly-inexhaustible reservoir of postmodern angst. I didn't think anyone was buying Family Circus-style comics for anything aside from camp value. But... | More...

I'm becoming the person my geek friends hate.
This morning Lee Spector, best-quality-finest-kind artificial intelligence professor at Hampshire, sent out a note requesting that alumns working in technology drop him a line. Apparently, the college wants to list its techie alumns on its website in order to convince... | More...

Sucks To Be You, Andrews!
So yesterday James asks me why my blog is blue and white... knowing full well it wasn't, I duly freaked out. Turns out all my files were moved to yada, and thus into the maw of my formerly dormant Moveable... | More...

Object Lessons
One knife through the metal detector. One ring to bind her. | More...

From The Vaults: The Heart's Dandelions
(This has another part somewhere. Check the archives for the bit about opals.) My roommate came back from vacation outraged about a friend of hers, a boy who had been to her parents' at Thanksgiving and had apparently been flirting... | More...

Purge Cache
It has been one month since I posted anything to this site. One month. Exactly. Unless I'm mistaken this is the longest I've gone without writing. Combined with the scanty month before, I'm totally out of the habit. To celebrate... | More...

Detritus: New Year Inside A Cloud
Really, that's not a comment on my mental state -- I'm at my dad's house in the foothills, and the house is literally engulfed in a cloud. If my dad walks out to the garage, it gets hard to see... | More...

We Stand For The Neighborhood (A Fantasia on Songs From "The Capeman")
Good. One more thing James and I have in common... I bet we're the only people of our generation who know what "The Capeman" was, and actually care, and cared enough to end up each of us with a copy... | More...

Working Undercover Against The Man: Report From The Walk For Capitalism
I showed up early today for the Walk For Capitalism, which turned out, unfortunately, not to be a joke put on by rtMark -- at least in New York City; I still have my suspicions that Prodos, the head of... | More...

Step
Listening to Frankie Ruiz, La Leyenda, disc 1. As "La Rueda" unrolls, I find myself thinking that salsa is really an ingenious dance, really perfect for the music it goes with. In its "street" form (as opposed to its performance... | More...

Peeps: A Bad Candy For All Seasons
Mr. Stelter, our late, sainted chemistry teacher from high school, was known for his "discrepant events" -- flamboyant demonstrations where he would, say, take a cattle prod to his belt buckle to explain properties of electricity. One day, to demonstrate... | More...

Fries and Propaganda, Redux: Empty Threats and Fred
Diner named for some Cypriot or Greek chick, Chelsea, NYC Jen: These are quite reviewable fries. Gus: It's like a baked potato inside a French fry. Jen: Inside a baked potato. Elderly man sitting behind Jen: I don't want fried,... | More...

Americorps: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
No joke. Not only has John McCain endorsed a huge, semi-militarized, FIVE-FOLD expansion of AmeriCorps, as Jen pointed out, but the President has already initiated an expansion of the program into the hands of the new Office of Homeland... | More...

Sooooooop Of The Eeeeeevening, Beyoooootiful Soooooop
Meet the (new) fam. That's LT on the right, looking cute, and FD on the left, pretending to be a black smudge. The picture doesn't show it well, but they're only slightly larger than a gold Saccy. I liberated... | More...

SATs, GREs, And Other Standardized Tests: I Got Nothin But Hate For You, Yo
I'll confess: Testing was very low on the list of things I was trying to escape by going to Hampshire. I was always pretty good at tests, so proud of how I did on them that I still remember the... | More...

From The Vaults: Remembrance of Martín Espada's Class
...one time we were sitting in class and we hear this dreadful cheer from some not-far-distant football game and Martin looks to us wryly and says, a la stenography instructor, "Yes, young people, this is fascism" then, in his normal... | More...

Detritus: What's Shakin'?
No, seriously -- would someone tell me please? We seem to have had an earthquake here in New York again, at about quarter to two this morning. Either that or they finally blew something else up. I can't stand it.... | More...

My CCS Div I, Continued: Sociolinguistics of Like
My boss Abby asks me today if I'm a Valley Girl. Yes, I say, and then reconsider, and say No. There are reasons to say Yes, most of them simply linguistic. A former Humboldt County-area boyfriend of mine, visiting my... | More...

We Bring More Than A Paycheck To Our Loved Ones And Families
I went a little nuts at the hardware store today. Paranoid? Well, the environmental health director of West Harlem Environmental Action says there's elevated levels of lead, dioxin, chromium, and asbestos in the air in Manhattan. I work just blocks... | More...

Magical Thinking In The Modern Technolgical Age
The communications karma gnomes have been particularly capricious in the last few days. Today they caused Galataea, my computer, my beautiful blue second mind, to have a catastrophic grand mal seizure resulting in an hour of blankscreen and a mangled... | More...

Got Published, Still Down
Exchange from the Xephreniaq listserv: Casey: What a society we live in where hermaphodically themed soloperas are performed in nonsense languages, hundreds of people flock to see them, movies are made about them, and our close friend from high school... | More...

I'm Totally Unable To Do Anything But Rant Tensely and Self-Mutilate
Mom: you should see how much her handwriting is like yours, when she writes small. Got a letter from Carolyn Chute today... not good. She says she is losing her house and land; she's hurrying to finish up a book... | More...

Squirrels Are Metaphors For People
The guy who is fixing the house came by to bang the storm windows outside off early this morning. As a result, squirrels have taken up residence in the sash gutter of my bedroom window. | More...

Notes From Around New York
Chinatown Friday night the cops' interest in passers through the Canal Street boundary line cooled a little. Still we had trouble getting our speakers in for the panel discussion we were doing on Walker Street -- they'd been at a... | More...

My Essay On Flags
Flags aren't as dense here as they were around Boston when I visited James last weekend, but lots of people still have them. Stores have prefab flag posters cut out from local newspapers in their windows. They make me think... | More...

Something Better To Do: Read Stuff By Eqbal
Yahoo linked to Dawn, Pakistan's English-language newspaper. I like their editorial section. (If I felt like I had any kind of control or authority over information at the moment I would say something other than I liked it, and that... | More...

Comedy and Liberty
They told us to get back to work... but there weren’t any jobs available for a man under his desk in the fetal position... which I gladly would have taken... –Jon Stewart I'm sitting here listening to the Daily Show... | More...

The Gus Sindex, Special Edition
percentage of my outgoing email subject lines since 9:00 a.m. Tuesday which have contained the word "ok": 45% number of forwards I have received in the past 24 hours which have included a clause instructing me not to disseminate the... | More...

the day before, I was watching TV....
all the ads -- all of them -- were for political hopefuls -- for mayor, for city council, for public advocate, for comptroller for g0d's sake, democrats and republicans, everyone talking about how they stood up to the mayor or... | More...

Portrait of Midday, Unemployed
Awake at eleven into a total communications breakdown. Not the kind you have with your loved ones; my sister and I have great conversations; the love life is percolating happily; Dad and I are on better speaking terms than we... | More...

Dispassion and Distance
I need to start writing about things I hate. I knew this, in the pit of my heart. When there started to be trouble with the Dance Dance Revolution article I did for the Village Voice -- when it was... | More...

Special Abilities
Gareth leaves the house maybe twice a week he has taken to role playing the sixteen-sided dice are all over the table I say this is called Depression, my friend, he says No it's not I can show you the clinical definition of depression (weaponry: DSM IV). | More...

Terrifying Celebrity Encounter #1: Campaign Season
I saw a sign advertising Mike Gioia for City Council today as Roger and I and James were heading out into Queens. "How do you like Green for Mayor?" I asked Roger. Roger figures Green as a center-right liberal, and... | More...

Detritus Peripatetica: Nothing To Report But Little Moments Of Social Brilliance
Scene: stoplight on South Lake in Pasadena. I pull up alongside two young guys in an SUV. They start making little dog-whistles, in the way some guys do just to get you to turn and look at them. I hate... | More...

The Angeleno Flower Cycle, Coda: A Vigorous Game Of "Why God Why?" In The Alta California Savannah
written last night I have exactly twelve hours left to be at this antipodes of the country, this blissfully ignored nether end of America, the toejam between Hollywood and Vegas... this place where people who just want a decent life... | More...

Re: Not To Mention The Rose Of Jericho
See, we need to get you familiar with the corporeal being of bougainvillea. I don't know, maybe you've encountered it as a houseplant -- that's not what bougainvillea is all about. Bougainvillea, left to its own devices, is a force... | More...

Remodelling
As you can see, I'm redoing the DSWJ at the moment. Believe me, it's not going to look like this for long. The remodel is intended to make a distinction between the mindless link propagation and shorter observations I sometimes... | More...

Anarcho-Hibiscus
Sylvie and I went out on a cool feminist walk and we talked about how we hate 99% of the women in this country and we talked about models for marriage and we talked about c0ck and we talked about... | More...

Failed Celebrity Encounters #8
James waits until after "Lisa Picard is 'Famous'" to tell me that in the ticket line, he was standing behind Wallace Shawn. Wallace Shawn! I say. Do you know who his father was?! and am instantly smitten with migraine-force deja... | More...

Typing and Light Housework
I'm considering finding myself a job in an afterschool program again this school year. I'm finding I'm no longer motivated by the desire to actually impart information to kids; I've lost all my romantic notions about that. That process is... | More...

Misuses of Data #305,756
Drinking wine makes you smarter!... | More...

Why There Are Looney Tunes Branded Minivans
While I was teaching an elective on media monopoly at the workshop this summer, the discussion frequently turned to "synergy," or the "beneficial" mutual ownership of diverse products by large corporations. (Before companies were so keen to put a positive... | More...

Termite Television
Browsing the Paper Tiger Television (they're an activist video collective) link list, I found the Termite Television Collective's Life Story project, in which people have five minutes to tell their life story to the videographer. Onward and upward with alternative... | More...

It Also Said, "The Other White Meat"
I’m home, waiting for packages to be delivered. The blast of a truck horn sounds down in the street, so thinking there’s an off chance it might be the mail dude, I head downstairs. What there is is a funeral,... | More...

Failed Celebrity Encounters #7
Just as the poodle I'm walking squats to take a dump... along comes John Goodman, heading up Columbus with someone I didn't recognize. I have things planned that I would say to Joel Hodgson, or Denise Crosby, or Ben Stein... | More...

Testimony of the Hibakusha
Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Yahoo provided links to testimony from survivors. I have been deeply concerned with atomic warfare ever since I was very little. I have always had very vivid and surreal nightmares about... | More...

Letter: To Know Is Not Enough, We Must Dance
Maybe things are exactly as they do not seem: Out with the dog on his last walk of the evening, just before one a.m. As I approach the bare face of the school, a hulking figure shambles into the sidewalk... | More...

Forum: The Big Questions -- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
The workshop counselors from the 2001 sessions spent two nights together in a retreat in the Virginia "mountains" after everything had wound down. On our last night together, after the dishes had been cleared, our director spurred us into a... | More...

Like a Dead Elephant/Garbage Like Dead Elephants
Leanne and I had an unconscionably heavy bag of garbage to lug out to the dumpster. We ended up carrying it on a stretcher made of a baby-blue towel. It's like a dead elephant, Leanne said, wrestling it into the... | More...

A Month In Lesson Plans
or, Arts And Crafts For The Spiritually Drained Post-Graduate or, Non-Alcoholic Drinking Games For The Graphomaniacally Inclined Another Web Tutorial These are my last days at the workshop. I have driven the last of my kids from web staff to... | More...

Death in Genoa
A protester has been shot dead by Carabinieri police in Genoa. I would give you an Indymedia link, but I can't rouse either Indy main or Indy Italy -- maybe you'll have more luck. This is the first known death... | More...

It's Ice
Think about going backward. Think about going forward. Think about hard surfaces. Think about slick. This is the first time I've been ice skating since I learned to drive. | More...

Blink And You'll Miss Us
Kube and I went out to the Lawn today and performed for the University's RotundaCam. We were there right before sunset, standing right in front of the statue in the foreground forming letters with our bodies. Watch for the couple... | More...

Best Birthday Elective Ever: A Web Tutorial
The Workshop continues to deliver the best birthdays I've ever had, despite my seven-year hiatus. I took seventeen kids out today for an elective I called Intro to Culture Jamming. I didn't have high hopes, because political stuff can be... | More...

We Love Anthropomorphic Little Blobs
There is a Flash version of everyone's favorite classic, Puyo Puyo. Please don't start playing if you're working on a term paper.... | More...

Just Call Me Mr. Butterfingers
Just looked at Emo Phillips's Website for the first time. Check out his list of times he's been struck by a typewriter, and his recipe for cole slaw.... | More...

I Am Looking For Something, And It's Not Here (Baby Gonzo II)
Scene: A high-ceilinged bookstore, downtown Charlottesville. White pillars. The air is cool. I'm on the scene keeping an eye out for the workshop's nonfiction class, who are on their highly sensitive Gonzo Journalism assignment. I am looking for a book... | More...

From a letter to James G.
things are going much better here. The [kids] from first session have left, and in their place there are now 40 alumns and 48 older and wiser newbies. They don't wait for us to hold their hands; they know what... | More...

Smalltalk
Sleeping and showering and eating and hanging out with the same people all day, every day, I am reminded how much I hate smalltalk. I go sit with Carlos at lunch. I hang my head over my same-iceberg-lettuce-ad-infinitum salad and... | More...

Arse Poetica
Why I gave up writing poetry. | More...

Baby Gonzo I
I'm going to be real casual here; writing at a workshop is fsckin hard, and I haven't been able to make coherent sense of anything since I got here. Nothing seems of universal importance when your job is to hang... | More...

Henry Kissinger, Oh How I'm Missing Yer
One of Tony Lake’s and my assignments after each of the sessions in Paris with Le Duc Tho was to doctor the transcripts so that Henry would look good for posterity. There was a deliberate and conscious and very... | More...

Pa'lante La Dada: The Internet, Where Smalltalk Becomes Meaningful
Seen on Yahoo: Hot Topics · Talk about the Weather! (among the subtopics: Best Weather, Extreme Weather, Acid Rain. A lot of these people are asking about http://news.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?action=l&ft=1&board=42905355&sid=42905355&tid=bestweather&title=Best%20Weather">what the weather's like somewhere else, like the Grand Canyon and McAllen, Texas.... | More...

The Antisocial Animal
I am spending the summer at a writing workshop far from New York. I may be writing less as a result; it takes a concerted effort for me to want to write in so social an environment. Though of course... | More...

Dogs
There has never been a Kuro5hin story that struck me quite like this one. Innovative, and interestingly written. Ultimately I guess it's petit jeux, but it's a worthwhile etude to think about the effects of domestication. It also provided a... | More...

I Had A Thought For No-One's But Your Ears:
There are certain video games whose characters we empathized with when we were small, even though they were represented by lumps of inhuman-looking pixellated blocks. Why do we cling to this artifice? | More...

Why Dance
I have been out swinging the past two nights, as has much of New York -- it is Dawn Hampton's birthday, and there's been four days of swing at various venues around the city. Everyone goes, because everyone knows Dawn.... | More...

Department Of Stupid Media Tricks: Reverse-Engineering AP Articles
Some AP and other newswire articles seem to be not just flatulent prose taken straight from PR bulletins (be that from companies or tourist bureaus), but also take on a coating of cheese from the fatuous personal fixations of the... | More...

Backwards And In High Dudgeon
(written on the anniversary of the post-parade assaults in Central Park) "This is a local train, right?" "Local?" The mustached man doesn't seem to understand what I am asking. "Local train, right?" "Local train." He's hanging on the same pole... | More...

Lo Siento, Me Despierto
Karma is rubbing my nose in my lack of Spanish fluency... yesterday I confused "lo siento," the words for "I'm sorry," with "me despierto," meaning "I'm awake." Today, almost everything I see features the word despierto -- videos, comics, songs.... | More...

We're Live!
Great googly moogly! My site's back up! Prayz lawd! Man it's been a while. Protest.net got hacked last week, and it *took* a while (cough) for the Anarchist Powers That Be to get it back up. uhh... Many thanks to... | More...

Contemporary Art
Today's selections: A gewgaw which makes art out of bot-crawlings. (Extra points to the site creators for recognizing the connection between fly-blow and Google.) Tony Earley has excerpts up on Salon. I do wish it was more than excerpts. Tony... | More...

Rock Climbing
I went rock climbing tonight, with Randy, for the first time in years. My arm muscles are in revolt now; they remember supporting my whole body weight off tiny little chips of bolted-on rock, and they don't want to type.... | More...

Virtual Near E-Death Experiences and other detritus
At about eight tonight I logged onto protest.net and discovered the server thought my files didn't exist. Soon after, the international cabal of geeks managing prot.net and indy fixed it up. Thank god I didn't have time to panic about... | More...

Pre-Moistened Howlette
from a letter to Xephreniaq Alas, my life also seems to be full of brutishly short relationships with guys who have crippling emotional problems. This may sound like more of the same to you, but it's a bit of a... | More...

Left Cred
Today Kim held her annual hootenanny. I went, even though I think "hootenanny" is the most gormless, ungainly, mawkish word in the English language. Stephan's shortening it to "hoot" did nothing to cut its calculated rusticness; it sticks out with... | More...

Little Trips
Went down to Chinatown on Thursday to, uhm, cough… well, I went looking for a place on Lisbon Street (I thought) which a friend recommended which had a lot of Japanese Playstation games, if you grok my drift, but I’d... | More...

Should You Invest In An Ant Farm, A Llama, Or A Skunk?
Stupid internet gimmicks #304,033: AOL has a little gewgaw which will tell you which pet is best for you. It's telling me a gerbil would be better for me than a guinea pig, but that hermit crabs would be most... | More...

Double-Dutch Season
Though it has been brutally hot in New York for the past few days, it is still double-dutch season in Aftaschoo, and everyone wants to be outside. Ropes, it would seem, are not readily available; my favorite student has twenty... | More...

Happy May Day
Happy May Day from IndyMedia, rtMark (which wants to reminds us that May Day is a holiday, and which was the launching ground for distribution of this flyer today at Nike stores around the world), and Reuters, which is sort... | More...

Short Attention Span Theater Presents: Mindless Desiderata
Always gotta purge, after a huge piece, with a few spurious links to meaningless desiderata. At Free Vengeance, films made on Game Boys. I like Joueur de Flute. also: Baseball teams made up of independent movies, among other things.... | More...

Eating Gas
Note: This is just a blow-by-blow first-person of what happened last weekend. It has simmered in my posted-but-not-published queue for a week, and I have missed out on writing any number of other things as a result. I've never felt... | More...

From The Vaults: Essay I wrote for a really awful nonfiction course at Smith
On Grammar, Syntax, Punctuation, Spelling, and Capitalization Punctuation Gandhi once said that a society could be judged by the way it treats its animals; but in truth punctuation is the one true measure d’une societé, the one true measure of... | More...

Race
It is time to post this. I've spent too long on the draft, I've forgotten the perfect title I came up with for it, and the fire's dying. In 1966 and 1967, Apaches at Cibecue portrayed "the Whiteman" as hippie... | More...

...well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
Went out in mixed company tonight -- American and French -- to an Irish pub, to celebrate Samuel Beckett's birthday. The music was loud, so we ended up communicating by writing on the paper placemats. For reasons I wasn't clear... | More...

En La Tierra Que Hay Detrás De Mis Ojos...
(actually posted yesterday) It is my fault. Granted, I have yet to have a real immersion experience in Spanish -- the sum of my childhood in Los Angeles, nor my elementary spanish classes, school trips to Baja, the class I... | More...

6^WD 1Z 3L337!
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure how comfortable I am with a blog written in ersatz h^x0r which devotes so much space to praising the Christian deity.... | More...

From The Vaults: Vacation Diary August 1999, San Francisco
Crappy motel. Proof positive that the "sani-bands" on toilets mean nothing: I pull it off our room's toilet cover and find drops of urine all over the seat. Hotel's neon sign is right outside our window. Trolley goes by every... | More...

Detritus: The Man Under The Marine Layer In The Coco Helado Suit
I've finally brought All Mirth No Matter Productions, my ridiculous little fantasy about producing short videos, to life. Currently Internet Explorer doesn't read the page right, so you won't get the video loading in the right frame like it's supposed... | More...

Detritus: "um, Whatcha eatin'?" "CHHHALK!"
Things of note: First of all, y'all Cali-haytas can step. If y'all still don't know why to like California, my sista take yo a$s to schoo. Captures the character of the local biome succinctly and vividly. Nextly, check out Ariel's... | More...

Stupid Newswire Articles #2034
Clinton buys a Cuban cigar in a London airport. His other purchase, a tie with frogs on it, warrants Reuters attention. And the continued embargo against Cuba? And Castro's policies, benevolent and malevolent?! What do you have to do to... | More...

The Bearer of Bad News
I have never been called upon to be the sole carrier of really bad news before. I frantically cast about thinking of someone else who could do it. | More...

Shameless Self-Promotion/ Shameless Self-Congratulation
the writer's dance I have (I think, in retrospect) committed a horrible faux pas and posted an entire story as a comment on Kuro5hin in response to this story. It was something I'd been meaning to post to my site.... | More...

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are a brand. Let's just admit it, all right? Not people, a brand. Thanks to the reporter who stated the obvious in this article about their new magazine. It's called marykateandashley magazine. Clever, right? Did you... | More...

Vinyl Causes Cancer
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, writing for the Corporate Predators mailing list, noted in their latest column that tonight PBS will show an exposé detailing the chemical industry's silence about vinyl, which they have known since the 1950s is a... | More...

Found Documents: Among Other Things
Cleaned up my files today. "Files" being a wicker basket of crap, four plastic in/outboxes of crap, and the dust-bunny-riddled piles of crap all over my floor. Among the things I filed were the following: the above Bazooka Joe... | More...

Canadians: Better Than Us?
Normally I'd say yes. Especially because it's Canadians who have devised a number of really fun blocs, including the League of Radical Toy Airplane Pilots, for the upcoming protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. (The FTAA, or... | More...

Requiem (Habits of Coexistence)
While I was away in Seattle, my birds died. Still I sometimes catch myself inadvertently looking to the cage. | More...

Detritus: You're Not Serious About Donkeys!
Jeff Sharlet, a Hampshire alumn and a former editor of mine, appears to be editing an online 'zine about religion: Killing the Buddha. Of particular note is their Manifesto. The world needs more special-interest magazines like these and fewer magazines... | More...

Detritus Peripatetica: Queens on St. Patrick's Day
Now that it's getting warmer, it's nice to walk around Sunnyside again, even in the rain. Sokin and I went out for a stroll around the neighborhood last night, looking to have dinner and dessert. We approached a grocery store... | More...

:*
Perils of modern romance: You learn the emoticon :*, meaning I Kiss You, from one lover. | More...

Announcing the Animatronic Repurposing Project
The moment you've not been waiting for has arrived. I've started a page about the repurposing of battery-powered critters I've started to fool around with. Can anyone recommend some simple texts on electrical engineering? Back from Seattle. More on that... | More...

Fries and Propaganda
I'm in Seattle this week shooting a short video, collecting animatronic critters for reprogramming, and trying to detox after my year of government service. This is Part Two of a dialectic review of french fries at area eateries, a joint... | More...

Winners
The Fingernail Lady first gestures to a carousel of videos. Everyone oohs over the novel possiblity of getting their job training that way. The Fingernail Lady runs a coral-tipped finger over spines of books with titles like How Hard Are You Knocking?, You're Certifiable, and Postal Clerk and Carrier. "So these are resources," she says, vaguely. | More...

Dance Dance Epiphany
I was organizing my bookmarks today and rediscovered a page called Team Gwailo. I had to load it to remind myself what it was. This is what it was: a Dance Dance Revolution devotee page. As far as I can... | More...

Marquise McGraw
Once again I'd like to direct your attention to the homepage of Marquise McGraw, one of my fellow shock troops in the afterschool program. He's added a little more to his site recently. Marquise's eloquence constantly amazes me, especially in... | More...

Why Teachers Don't Talk Ghetto
The word "Birmingham" proved mortally humorous for the discussion, for reasons that escaped me. They giggled and repeated it - "Burrrrrrminghayam"-- until I threatened to make them sit quietly with their hands crossed in front of them. One of the girls, Catherine, was hell-bent on getting out of the class by hook or crook. She cut me off. "Why teachers don't talk ghetto?" she asked. | More...

TV Go Home.
TV Go Home. Hooray! "8 Facts" leads to other good British web shite. What The Onion would be if it were TV Times and British. I especially like this one... "Largest Conceptual Schism Between Faceless Product and Contrived Mardi Gras... | More...

8 Facts
8 Facts: some people are still making blogs that count.... | More...

Bonsai Kittens.
Bonsai Kittens. Don't try it at home. Just don't.... | More...

Aquaframe, I was wrong, it's an ordinary day...
I am now the proud owner of an Aquaframe. An Aquaframe is one of an increasingly diverse line of products which feature little plastic fish which, as if by magic, swim around in a plastic tank. Apparently it has something... | More...

Today on the Subway
I've got a new blog up called Today On The Subway. I'm hoping to find other people who are interested in observing subway life to contribute. There have just been too many weird and beautiful things happening on the subway... | More...

Internet-Correspondance Repair
With the long-distance help of my dad, I am fixing a lamp which was a New York street find. This follows in a peculiar tradition of long-distance repair between the two of us, the most notable moment being the time... | More...

Bush movements
Somehow I expected that Bush would be cutting corporate welfare, but I'm still a little startled... Why did I guess this? Well, Clinton did all sorts of things to betray his party in being so middle-of-the-road... doesn't it stand to... | More...

Si Fulano...
When did Paul Simon and David Byrne switch personalities without my noticing? A review of Simon's "You're The One." | More...

The Temporary Home Of The John "Chauncy Berry" Seabury Fan Klub
Hey look, gang! My cousin was nominated for a Grammy! Way to go, John! Gee, I wish someone had told me EARLIER (ahem); I would have cast my precious Recording Academy vote for him, but you know, Billboard was all... | More...

59th St., N Train
There is a poem by Jack Agüeros I like: 59th St., N Train 10 o'clock. She rides east. I ride west. I ask God to do things for me And when he does, I don't notice. He made me a... | More...

All Your Base Are Belong To Us
It's sublime. Finally a winner in the ongoing worst-possible-translations contest. Also in the category of portentous incongruous juxtaposition. Makes the little hairs on my back stand up straight. Sub Lime.... | More...

Pat Boone and Eminem
Pat Boone and Eminem, sittin' in a tree...... | More...

Found Documents: California Calendar Journal
I discovered that I'd written the following down in the back pages of an old wallet calendar. Sometimes in college a situation or discussion seemed so important I decided I must write it down right then and there for a... | More...

And I don't like anybody very much.
They're rioting in Africa. They're starving in Spain. There's hurricanes in Florida, And Texas needs rain. The whole world is festering With unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans The Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs South Africans hate... | More...

Bronx hair? Anime hair?
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Bhangra On the Eve Of Napster's Demise (draft)
In my last year of high school a heartthrobby brown-eyed boy named Nil took the stage at the student-run after-hours talent show -- a notoriously tough venue -- and performed a dance routine which had won him the Mr. India... | More...

Found Documents: Trivial Pursuit Award
Found in a Trivial Pursuit box at a place where I'm housesitting. Small notepad sheets tied in one corner with dark blue yarn. To whom it may concern: Mazel tov! Congrats on a mind boggling victory. Take pride in... | More...

Detritus peripatetica
Coming home at night I smell dinner being cooked all over Sunnyside. People are making better food than I do. I think this is because they are not making it for themselves alone. I feel like I haven't said what... | More...

Look at these babbies!
Look at these babbies! Aren't they dear! They remind me of my gang. Oh, I wish Xephreniaq had had a blog in high school. I wish we had a blog now (AHEM.) Salutations, kindred spirits and fellow travellers!... | More...

More Dirty Socks
I've added one more picture to the Death Valley series :)... | More...

The Museum of Weird Consumer Culture
I need to look for more things like the Museum of Weird Consumer Culture, with its Consumer Kachina, online.... | More...

Never sent
You see, this is probably one of the most jarring revelations of your path towards sensibility: people on the right have a deep faith in the essential goodness of their fellow man. I'll let you fill in the comparison... | More...

Chapter Nine: In Which I Think Only Of My Harper's Application
I am linking to this blog only because of the picture in the margin. I would include this picture in my application to intern at Harper's if I thought they would understand just how eerie the juxtaposition of Anime-style art... | More...

Well well lookie!
I have fanboys! Nice to meet you, Flip and RJ.... | More...

Facing the End
Facing the end of my term of government service is really a b!tch. I have to consider once again whether I'm competent to suppport myself with creative work in any medium. Ego gets all tied up in that. Then I... | More...

Lists: Miss Angeles Calls Roll
Lucky me -- I got to compare the list of after-school kids with the list of school kids at work today. The woman who handed me this task looked at me apologetically. It's hard to convince people that I don't... | More...

Update
OK, so for all of you who have been so kindly inquiring about my health in the wake of the Ultrasound essay, I had another appointment with the doctor today. Surprise-- I'm anemic! And apparently I have a serious B-vitamin... | More...

This post has been arrested for posession of an incendiary device.
| More...

Report from the Coup
So I didn't see as much action in DC as I might have liked, although there was in fact action-- Presidain't's car stopped and then sped through a roiling protest zone on the parade route, people stripping in the freezing... | More...

This Is A Website About Ken Burns
So today I come home to a big juicy envelope from Hampshire College. Oh goody, I think. My transcript? Maybe a copy of the alumni magazine, which for some reason I don't seem to get? No such luck. It's the... | More...

Community Service
The material scarcity or sensory overload of inequity does a great deal of educating in and of itself. | More...

Bodies: The Ultrasound
I tend to think of myself as being one piece. If I must be a number, I would like to be an integer. Whole. On the ultrasound table, I thought I should re-figure myself. | More...

Detritus: Leftist links, Langston Hughes
I am really not sure how VoteAuction.com got past my notice... here, to make up, I will proclaim my hipness by noticing that rTMark affiliates the Yes Men slipped a fake WTO rep into a conference in Austria somehow. Breathtaking.... | More...

Pa'lante La Dada: Capitalism Becomes Surrealist Humor
I love the Internet. When you do searches on certain search engines, they will give you suggestions of where to go, mostly pointing you at places to buy things. So when I did a search for a bread icon on... | More...

Dirty Sock Redux
Alex Hessler has put up some pictures of our trip to Death Valley. Boy haz some photo skillz! In addition to the great shots from Dirty Sock, I'm really fond of this very hep one taken atop the Stovepipe Dunes.... | More...

New Year's
New Year's: I was still in California. Now I am back in New York. The trade off? Here I have dried skin from the water locked up in snow. There I have the desert, which also leaves me dry. Here... | More...

Hash Browns In Dirty Sock
I awoke this morning in Death Valley. I had been dreaming that I was training a dogsled team along with a little girl with dark curly hair. My mushers were a mismatched bunch of terrier mutts from the local pound,... | More...

From The Vaults: A Leg... Now I Get It...
from a family trip around the West, junior year of high school ...Montana has always seemed to me to be a big grey area, the border of the known universe, the last bits of accessible territory on a Nintendo game,... | More...

A Date With The Cousins
Home for Christmas. Back with the family. My cousins Chelsea and Sofie graciously humored their abstentee cousins and came over to make cookies a few days ago, even though they'd spent the entire day before baking for everyone they knew.... | More...

And Down The Stretch they Come
Cleaning the house. Cleaning cleaning cleaning. Mixing Pine Sol and Windex and Drano and Kleen-King bleach-laden scouring agent without regard for my safety. There isn't a drain in this house which isn't clogged. Nothing like getting down there with a... | More...

Detritus Verité
In which everyone acknowledges their debt to Frank Zappa. Do not be so eager for the end of the year 2000. The planets are in line. The statue has cried real blood, and the people of the village are exclaiming.... | More...

Clementine season
By Christmas even the idea of citrus will turn my stomach, just in time to return to California. | More...

Day: Minutes
"Are you still our teacher?" they kept asking me, sizing up how much it would take to drive me away. They know they can do it. I'll be in California in two weeks. Suddenly I felt very very out of place. | More...

Laundry Monitors
Leave it to MIT students to monitor their laundry machines on the web. This system was apparently created so students didn't have to trek all the way to the machines only to discover they were full. Hampshire comp sci... | More...

A Day Without Weblogs
title="[A Day Without Weblogs]"> src="pic/dw2.gif" alt="[A Day Without Weblogs]" />... | More...

Detritus: Meant For A Long-Running Unfinished Work
Today we found a working pencil sharpener in class-- one of those objects which draws attention as if it were an enchanted carpet or broom. The sound of it grinding away elicited a deep urge in all of the kids... | More...

Victoreeee!
The Popo Village project, which I started a year ago in an attempt to make the Annotated Hypertextography Of My Interests (i.e. collection of links) more interesting, is FINISHED and UP and now you can always visit it by clicking... | More...

Detritus: A Luaka Bop P0rn Thanksgiving, In Which I Address Celebrities
I'm not really sure what the fuss is about Thanksgiving. So many people I know dread having to be with their families for a whole meal. Despite my family's divorce (two generations of it on one side), Thanksgiving has never... | More...

Rats.
So if I don't start improving my sleep patterns, I'm going get steadily dumber? stands to reason, I guess. So much for the Fight Sleep campaign.... | More...

The White Girl Imagines For A Moment That She Can See The Future And It Is Just As Jimmy Santiago Baca Has Said
There is a shift in the atmosphere in the cafeteria, a low-pressure zone where the director usually stands-- the electricity before a storm which makes animals run around like they're touched in the head. | More...

Sandra Cameronites And The Big Lindy Goodbye
I returned last night to the swing scene after more than three months' absence (I'm not counting the lovely evening I had at the Supper Club with the Squirrel Nut Zippers and the cute Canadian grad student). The venue was... | More...

Blogging
I finally got around to reading the article in the New Yorker about Blogger. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought. In fact, it was kind of frivolous; felt like a return to the bad old Tina Brown days. I... | More...

Everything Sank
En ti se acumularon las guerras y los vuelos. De ti alzaron las alas los pájaros del canto. Todo te lo tragaste, como la lejanía. Como el mar, como el tiempo. Todo en ti fue naufragio! --neruda I'm frustrated with... | More...

Down For The Recount
Something worth writing about happened today. What was it again? Ah yes. The election recount protest which went on in Times Square today. Or actually, not the protest, but a few specific moments. At one point, having exhausted my film,... | More...

My Life In The Bush of Gore
Casting my vote was the first event in what stretched into a week of vertigo-inducing lessons on what democracy really looks like. In Brooklyn, whole polling places full of those tanklike voting machines turned out to be broken. Some wiped out hours worth of registered votes. | More...

Chat Rooms
I have been using chat rooms and other written forms of electronic communication for seven years now, but every now and again the openness of the medium makes me giddy. I enter a chat room: what does that mean? I... | More...

The Leadership People/ Halloween and the Great Uninterested
There is an industry out there which is training people to run workshops like this. A folder full of xeroxed truisms and a few hours spent falling into each others' arms to demonstrate trust is its prescription for everything from strained labor relations to troubled youth. | More...

Mongol Citgo Gas Cap Hat
In characteristic idiosyncracy, my boss left an article about a tribe of Mongols in my box today. I admired their ponies and their social structure. The Mongols have things I want, now that the cold has made the walk between... | More...

Today's brightly-colored amusement
Here's today's brightly-colored amusement...... | More...

Like some expulsive ebola-like virus
The article containing the phrase "And I have no doubt that at least one of the people I listed will lose control of her curiosity and do the same thing I did, spreading [it] like some expulsive ebola-like virus" has... | More...

Anarcho-Syndicalism
Today I am reading about Anarcho-Syndicalism. I am not reading any of the stupid manifestos, only the practical stuff. If you think anarcho-syndicalism is only about throwing rocks at policemen and staying up past year bedtime and eating only sugar,... | More...

Bad News For Public Everything
this blog has been brought to you by the letters L and Y. The other day at school some of my kids were waving around a program schedule for the local PBS affiliate. I guess the administration or a teacher... | More...

Now this is ridiculous.
Now this is ridiculous. I wonder if Gore will even see this petition. I do wish there was a better way to effect coalition-building in this country...... | More...

Jonathan Saves The Day
Jonathan always wears a sweater vest over his uniform shirt. His hair, when I rumple it, is sticky to the touch. He has decided my name is "Ms. Android"-- he didn't misunderstand; he's joking. | More...

from a letter to Chase
Subject: I laughed until tears came to my eyes (which wasn't too much of a stretch, seeing as it's one of those perma-tear days at my house... I screamed myself hoarse at my afterschool class of third-graders today, and then... | More...

Pika-your-bum!
Pika-your-bum!... | More...

Vote Bush. I mean Gore.
I first heard from Emmanuel Goldstein about this story... as he said, this is too good to be true. The Democrats and Republicans must be using the same ad agency... Update 10/26: It was too good to be true. It... | More...

From The Sick Sad World Department
I thought the headline of this article alone was revolting. In the days of JFK Jr.'s airplane crash I stole all the signs from the LA Times newspaper bins I could around town... they read "KENNEDY CRASH" in big white... | More...

I Don't Want To Sleep
so here's some more classics from the CACFP vaults. scrambles egg cornflakes kellow pulm cold fish home nad soup gronala bars grean salan Feach toast biskets spag spam twigs yely chicken soap carras sticks totot mix green sala orka fruit... | More...

Laabsta.
I just figured out what the "Blog This!" function of Blogger does. So in the future, you'll be seeing a lot more things like the Unofficial Lobster Camera Image Archive here...... | More...

What's For Lunch
Every once in a while at work I volunteer to help check the menus we get from child care providers in compliance with the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program, or CACFP. The basic idea of the CACFP-- at... | More...

Carolyn Chute Has A Posse
Today while I was stitting in a meeting of New York's IMC Print team, one of our geeks wandered over and slipped a xeroxed booklet into my hands. This is something my friend over there produced, she said to the... | More...

Personal History: A Love Letter To Computers
Early computers were great resources for experimentation-by accident. The fact that they crashed and broke easily and their workings were relatively transparent was fun. | More...

Best In Show
the presidential debates, 10/03/00 I'd like to ask now why should the American public entrust the education of their children the stewardship of peace in Montenegro and their golden years should the economy fail to you see my suit my... | More...

A Morning with The Billionaires
There was a rally for Nader this noontide in Washington Square Park. It was mostly the usual suspects there, both for the park (scruffy-looking poor and crazy people) and the protest (scruffy-looking college-educated people). I hope there was at least... | More...

JOY! GLEE! I finally
JOY! GLEE! I finally figured out what was wrong with my blog. Stupid stupid technical problem. Hurray! I'll be posting much more frequently now, seeing as I have a blazing-fast new iMac with a functional browser.... | More...

Quoth The Raven, La Puebla Unido Jamas Sera Vencido...
It took us a moment to fiddle with the church lock. There were about a dozen of us trying to look inconspicuous -- we were wearing all black and should therefore have been indistinguishable from any other group of New Yorkers, but we were also wearing large cardboard raven hats and carrying a ladder. | More...

IMC Process Paper
I have written a document with some thoughts on mission statements and suggestions for a somewhat more concrete plan of action for the IMC. It is here. I am proud of it. I am also thrilled that I summoned up... | More...

Castro Is A Fairy-Tale Knight
Castro's speaking in Harlem tonight. We've got webcast. His voice is older and reedier than I might have thought. When I tune out and let his speech spool through the back of my mind, I start thinking I'm listening to... | More...

Turlets
as the plumber I've been negotiating with so charmingly calls them. The seats of the toilets at work are invariably spattered if not flooded wwith urine. This is in the women's room, mind you, not the men's. Apparently it is... | More...

Birth Announcement: IMC-NYC
Well! I'm spending all my time after work this week at the New York Indpendent Media Center, which is finally looking like a real IMC. I don't judge this by what we've managed to produce; the measure of an IMC... | More...

It's SCIENCE!
Selected headlines of articles on intelligence from brain.com Smarter teens delay having sex Mar 03, 2000 (Reuters) Parents influence IQ more than birth weight does Jul 20 (Reuters) Surprisingly Smart: Hollywood's Educated Icons Childhood intelligence linked to timing of menopause... | More...

Ira Glass/John Linnell Fans Rejoice!
Even if you love They Might Be Giants a lot a lot, I bet you haven't heard this one. TMBG sings "I'm Sick" (Of This American Life) on This American Life in 1998. I can't believe that after five years... | More...

Proposal for IMC dispatch
I've finally hacked together a proposal for how the IMC should manage its information better. It's very technical (not like it involves deep knowledge of a computer; this is just really the brass tacks of it, and who's interested... | More...

Detritus: Do YOU Know The Way To San Jose?
Monkeys! it's SCIENCE, you know! * * * * * Things I learned at work today: If you walk into a room when someone is talking about you, you will have a long life. If you hold the toes or... | More...

Detritus: Boricua Hasta La Muerte!
well, not really. I just said that because Frankie Ruiz was singing it, and because no matter how fluent they are in Spanish, most of my Californian friends probably won't understand what it means. Puerto Rican is not the same... | More...

Detritus: The Only Good Thing About Tuesdays...
...is that I am one of the first people in New York City to get a fresh copy of the Village Voice. My dance studio's right next door to the Voice, so even though my tango class at Sandra Cameron's... | More...

Technical update
It looks like my archives have not disappeared, but I am going to have to do some work to get them back into viewable shape. That'll happen when my "vacation" in Manhattan's done. Also: Glyph says the web is dead.... | More...

If you were around today...
If you were around me today, I'd probably encourage you to go check out the Indymedia coverage of the Democratic National Convention multiple times, finding ways to slip it into the conversation at all sorts of inappropriate moments. I'd also... | More...

Ugly, ugly, ugly.
Ugly, ugly, ugly.... | More...

Apparently in twiddling with
Apparently in twiddling with my settings I have either made it impossible to get to my archives, or I wiped them out entirely. Goddamn it. I will try to remedy the situation as soon as possible.... | More...

Notes from a Sociopath
updated since yesterday It's cold tonight in Manhattan. Not short-sleeves weather. What happened to summer? I find myself missing the humidity. I'm not liking the age of twenty-three. It's awkward. I wish I was older. My superiors at work are... | More...

Hello. This is an
Hello. This is an attempt to see if I can remove content from my blog by using the edit command.I apologize for the ugly blot on my otherwise immaculately edited work.... | More...

(this post removed)
it's like the blank spots in the Nixon tapes, no?... | More...

Notes From New York: The City Encompasses Everything And Puts Us In Mind Of Lost Places We Once Knew
adapted from a paper journal, one of those things you should hunt down when I'm dead. Smalls. A basement jazz club somewhere down in the really expensive southern artsy part of Manhattan (10th st.) Not for nothing the name. Large... | More...

I'm sick and tired of waiting around to get famous before someone asks me what my favorite album/food/book/human trait is!
I found this in my hamp account. It's one of those obnoxious forward-polls that people send around, which I filled out but never sent to anyone because I'm trying to cut down on cluttering others' mailboxes, especially with self-important tripe.... | More...

Is this what democracy looks like?
On the train this morning I was remembering a conversation I had with Kellan in the midst of the madness in DC last April. We'd snuck away from the IMC to look for a restaurant sometime in the evening, and... | More...

Local schools and the etymology of "mamí"
(adapted from a letter I sent to my former roomie today) I went to a meeting of local parents about the school system today. It was, of course, infuriating. I found out that the school next door to where I've... | More...

Cancer!
I told you so!... | More...

Links For The Day
Links for today: Look! It's Slashdot! For Pokemon! (This is another Blogger-powered site. Thanks, Blogger!) Anything that looks like a Mad Lib is fine by me. My Dadaist pals and I used to play them every day at lunch,... | More...

Teach Your Kids To Invest!
I find this really disturbing. Teach your kids that playing the stock market is a better way to make money than working?! Not only does that idea make my skin crawl-- I'd rather see people try to change this... | More...

Why I Don't Trust Anything That Comes Over The AP Newswire
Three reasons for starters: Exhibit A: Some guy shot a bunch of people in the halls of Congress a few years ago, around when I was working at Sunset Magazine and started browsing headlines every hour or so. The bulletins... | More...

Polka Your Eyes Out
This is disturbing... Someone's created a device designed to identify errant behavior. This kind of thing only makes me want to grab the giant puppets and go caper around in front of the damned surveillance camera, y'know? ("Ope, the alarm's... | More...

The X-Men
I love long weekends, and the Fridays which come before them... Today, out of idle good spirits, we are playing Who's Your Favorite Superhero? at work. Mind you, this is among a bunch of social services professionals -- welfare... | More...

Detritus
Something substantial fell into place for me yesterday at the main branch of the New York Library. I was supposed to be there digging up curricula on day-care related issues and having little luck when I came across a book... | More...

Grey Flannel
(Written June 22nd, posted late due to continuing browser issues.) Another cloudy, windy, slightly warm day in New York City... The oppressive heat, the Summer-Of-Sam heat that cracks open every fire hydrant and makes the whole city nuts, hasn't... | More...

First Post
(This was originally posted 6/20/00 on my site, a day before before I discovered Blogger.) What are you up to? Falling in love for no good reason, hating my job for no good reason, enjoying New York and all... | More...