before i speak, i have something important to say

[click image, via Agent BB2]

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JUST SHOOT ME.

They're dumping BUBBLE BATH on a nuclear meltdown, okay?

JUST SHOOT ME.

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4am the next morning....

Please forgive me checking out on you for the most of the afternoon and all of the night, but between a number of creepy things happening in the background of this sector of Outer Blogistan, my general dissatisfaction with the content of communicating on the tubes, my Plutonian sleep "cycles", the need to get my ass in for more antibiotics to hold me over until my root canal appointment, and the general draggitude and pain of this tooth thing demanding I get some serious sleep under my belt, I just had to drop off the radar.

Thank you, all, for leaving me a bunch of links. That is one great aspect of blogging, when your friends come by with stuff to contribute. I wish more of you had the time or the interest to talk outside this crap we are forced to call the zeitgeist, but that actually is the story of my life.

Speaking of which, I just made a couple new playlists of Michael Tsarion stuff from which anyone might benefit—mind control and tarot—particularly the discussions about how your consciousness is manipulated by people who look at you as though you were no more significant than livestock, but I keep wanting to hear him on tarot and numerology because I think these are wuwu, the affectations of bliss ninnies, and it has been made apparent to me that he does not mean by these things anything like I've been indoctrinated to view them. So I am working on dropping my mental conditioning to eventually come to know what he means by that. He's obviously serious as a heart attack and has proven to me his level of insight, so it's worth it to me to make a real attempt to understand it. Again, one must approach this sort of thing very carefully. One must DROP what one already thinks for the duration of one's listening and give it a special sort of attention I have been calling "thought experimenting". If you can't do that, it's useless to waste your time on him... or, for that matter, me.

And, then, while I was about it, I put it together for you to listen about HAARP, should you be so inclined.

Anyway, the creepy stuff is making me seriously consider moving this show to an entirely new blog, again. This time it might really happen. I'll think about it some more.

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love, 99
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i have not learned my lesson

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I seem to need to return to find a true original, or a person of real taste, or evidence of greater consciousness, or something. It's not enjoyable! It's worse than... no, no, no, it's not worse than the fake Zennies and "poets" of blogistan... I so needn't exagerate! It's as bad as all that.

So I've resurrected evidence of my irk from last month here, and may be adding to it while in the midst of rechecking for whatever the heck it is I keep looking for. I really think I'm wanting to stumble over some profound insight somewhere in the worldwide cobwebs.

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The trick to good muffins is stirring the batter just barely enough to get everything blended.

Strawberry Muffins

1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup chopped strawberries

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Prepare an 8 cup muffin tin, or use paper liners.

In a small bowl, combine oil, milk, egg and vanilla. Beat lightly. In a large bowl, mix flour, salt, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar. Toss in chopped strawberries and stir to coat with flour. Pour in milk mixture and stir together only to moisten.

Don't over-mix.

Fill muffin cups. Bake at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for 25 minutes, or until the tops bounce back from the touch. Cool 10 minutes and remove from pans.

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Another woman's husband asked her what she was doing with so many butterflies. She didn't know, but aren't they cute? She took about 700 pictures of them, from every conceivable angle, and posted them all on her blog.

She cut up a DICTIONARY toward this end.

There is a definite protocol to this. You may post bright colors if you have small children. If you're a grandmother, everything in your life is a variation on white. Lavender sprigs allowed. If you live in the country you can have piles of gewgaws in any color scheme or none, but you cannot leave out bits of straw and lots of shots of you and your posse at the flea market. You call Size 14 women "skinny".

A terrifying number of them have the identical template, and an only slightly less frightening number of them have music blaring at you shortly after you've clicked in, but every last one of them has at least one instance of this and it hurts me to see so many women with nary an original thought in their heads laboring away to rejoice in this stuff. Maybe you begin to catch why I was never in the kitchen talking babies and shopping at dinner parties, but out in the living room talking about everything in the cosmos with their husbands.

But, once in a while, you run across someone with something truly amazing to impart... well.... That's not fair. Each has something, but mostly it's interchangeable. I'm nearly expert by now.... Anyway, I knit like this guy does, so I don't.

Just hopeless.

A great many of these women try hard to make their houses look like barns. I want to make a barn my house.

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Mister North popped in recently to taunt me about my barn loft with bathtub up in the cold climes of Canada, knowing full-well my desperation, and wishing, I suppose, as boyz do, to pull my pigtails in class. Maybe it's a search for a feasible alternative driving me. Who can tell?

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Seleta says "faith and family are most important" while enjoying her "coastal beach home"... and, except for the unique location away from the welter of inland beach homes, that's pretty much the story across the board. I'm gonna go out on a limb here to say I'm pretty much convinced she means the Redneck Riviera and am hoping her blog isn't the only clean and healthy thing left in her life... but I really have to just hope it because I sure don't see any mention of it.

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I have been wrong all along. The white fanaticism has spread to parents of very short people. I also found a tumblr page by a young man who is heavily into sex, anything made by Apple, surfing, the word "fuck" and WHITE interiors. He, uhm, had many images of more hundred-dollar bills than anyone has lying around like that, and almost never veered from Malibu.

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<— I found this image at a number of design blogs... in white. I changed that part. Do you suppose they were giving themselves pep talks? Being ironic? Genuinely feeling it? Pleased by the name? Wearing it like a designer shirt? Or carrying it like an iPhone? Or is it just that we don't have the little snippets on paper anymore to tape to a mirror?

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love, 99
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good news for feedheads and people with shrimpy monitors

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Blogger has decided to give you a passel of new ways to view my blog, including one that cuts the width of this puppy down by at least a third... maybe even shrinks things into submitting to your iPad cathexis problem... though, surely not for your phone.... Oh, my. Anyway, I checked it out and I think you get radically TMI when you use any of the image-driven views, but the one called "sidebar" could make life around here happier for you if you don't have a monitor big enough to take in the whole blogscape. I'm not going to be a bitch about all the work I've put in on my own sidebar over the years, solely for your entertainment and edification and consolation while trapped inside your home due to radiation alerts.... Nope. I'm Zen. No sweat.

You should know that the image-driven view modes do rock, but they keep loading and loading and loading and loading and loading and loading thousands upon thousands upon thousands of images from this blog and your computer might start giving off cesium-137 particles and smoking alarmingly before blowing up in your face, depending, I'm guessing, on your RAM and/or connection speed.

To check this out for yourself: GO HERE.

I'm pretty sure the default lands you on "sidebar", which is the optimal one for my blog, so then you can decide to risk a meltdown with the other ones or enjoy how this blog for once fits on your screen, and reduces loading time like maaaad.

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If there are comments already on a post, you can see them from that view, but if you want to comment on something that doesn't already have comments, you have to click in with the title, instead of any comment prompt. That's probably no different than usual for feedheads, but anyone switching to that view from the main page view needs to know it. What is different for feedheads is that you can view the comments from this setup at all... but I don't know if you can get it fed to you. You might just have to bookmark the link. I'm sure this will be evolving... and it won't work on any Blogger sites where the owner has switched off the feature.

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Although the views are pleasingly clean, the background is white and does not match my template, nor is there a feature for switching the background to something that gives off less glare. I'm just grateful it doesn't look as shitty as the ordinary feed views.

I see little comments here and there that the feeds thing is going out of style, so maybe that isn't all bad. I don't know. You'd think I'd go for feeds, being as how I'm so absentminded, but they're too damn pushy and esthetically depressing to me. I revile the idea of filling my inbox with notifications of posts from far and near as well. I like choices, but I don't like being buried. I've been told that the reason people become addicted to Facebook is that all their friends' likes get blasted over to them and soon they daren't so much as run for a pee or they've missed something. Sounds like hell to me. Bad enough one becomes paranoid about missing something off the news wires in the throes of maintaining a reputation as a "with it" blogger. I don't like being "out of it" or "with it". I tell you, it's hell being me!

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love, 99
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maybe i should spend christmas week weeding my blog

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I was going to link you to another Michael Tsarion interview, here, until I realized it was just another version of the one I linked last night. So I'm linking you to Jim Marrs talking to Henrik Palmgren instead, and thinking it will be great if you bothered to listen to Tsarion, which would make you consider not just defaulting to your conditioning when listening to guys swimming against the current—bearing in mind that rebellion against the mainstream is still mainstream, just the other side—like Marrs and Palmgren here. Just a thought, specially since they have something to say about the WikiLeaks thing too.

I'm trying to suggest we try not to just automatically go with people we like. Big no-no to just be gathering people to hang with instead of addressing actuality, and that's what yer doing when yer lapping up everything from your favorite sources. Hanging with others pretending to be thinking isn't good enough, and we need to do more than merely think. We need to see... so we can think. Thinking is worthless when we can't or don't SEE. And in order to see we must STOP and LOOK. Right in the middle of any sentence, any breath, you just flip out of your hive mind state and take a gander at what is really in front of you. The brain elisions running our show are so hard and heavy, fast and furious—SO FRANTIC AND SLIPPERY—it's as though we're all trying to sprint on an oil slick. It's a frickin' mess.

I'm getting the urge to wade through my blog and delete things that are mooted or whose links have gone dead and label other things better so there can be a more workable archive.... I do go through all the links on my sidebar every few months to make sure they're all still happening, a habit that is something of a virtue, I'm finding, because a lot of blogs still have links to other blogs that haven't been updated in years or just flat out aren't there anymore... but, really, the whole joint needs a big overhaul. Now that there's something nearing 2000 WikiLeaks mirrors, I'm pretty sure I'm going to make them into an updating post that can just be linked in the sidebar to facilitate page loading time.

[UPDATE: I made one link for the whole list at the bottom of my blog.]

Or. I'm just having a momentary urge for organization....

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Apropos of nothing, at this point, I suppose, except my sneaking suspicion yer not reading the cables: Where IS all the money anyway? Someone has to have it. TRILLIONS of actual dollars must be SOMEWHERE, only nobody's copping to it. Or was money, any monetary system EVER actually based on ANYTHING? Sure, sez you, GOLD. Except gold is not edible. It really isn't even that useful. The Aztecs thought it was only good for making art and artifacts. Pfeh. Señor Cortez? You want a room full of this shit? Here. Have two.

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And, for anyone staying up for it, THIS PAGE will automatically refresh with the latest on the Assange appeal. I want to dash in and whoosh him off in my gocart from the eighth dimension, back to the eighth dimension, where this shit just does NOT ever happen.

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If I but had the money I'd be on my way to Sweden to protest in the streets... and I'd follow them over to the high court in London and I'd handcuff myself to Julian Assange until they let him free just to get rid of me.

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MICHAEL MOORE POSTS BAIL FOR JULIAN ASSANGE... NO, REALLY.

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love, 99
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the trials and tribulations of outer blogistan

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You will note, please, the handy little toolbar gizzy has disappeared from my page. There were two reasons for this: [1] I didn't like it very much; and [2] they notified me that their free service will expire soon. The first reason was dispositive, but I didn't feel rushed. The second reason would soon become dispositive, but it pissed me off so badly I just yanked it immediately.

I don't have the moxie to run all over the tubes to find search functions that I like better and would work at least nearly as well as the Google option, and the same thing for translating. So, for now, I just will deal with it. The 99 button under the fancy new feed button on my sidebar, which is but a smaller version of the above, takes you to the entire sharing universe, bip bam. It is NOT as intimidating as it looks at first. Just starting to type the service you want, including TwitFace and MyBook and Ribbit and Dredggit and StumbleBum, the works, and what you want pops right up. Piece of cake. If you want to share the page, just click on the button and Bob's yer uncle. If you want to share a post, get on the individual post page and then click the button. Bob will turn out to be your uncle again.

I have been sighing so heavily all day I think I'm going to need to breathe into a paper bag pretty soon. So, well, I've done my best to be a nice, with it, accommodating, friendly freaked blogger, and I wish I could do it all smilingly, but, well, I'm just not so damn upbeat lately.

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YOU WILL SO LOVE THIS NEWS... NOT.

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love, 99
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i wish i didn't love you so

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I spent a bunch of time getting all the functionality stuck back in, and having to be extra clever at it because I'm me, then trotted off to rare haunts and smacked right into another toolbar, not Israeli, gotten in fact from Sabbah, so seriously unlikely to be of Israeli extraction. This meant a heck of a lot more fiddling, and I just damn well did it.

If people hate this, I'd like to know. I can set it to default to collapsed mode—which if you click the little arrows at the very rightmost of the bar, you will see how that looks—and then you could just open it when you need it, but... well... it's kind of not very obvious for newbies then what to do about this stuff. I could put a note at the top of the sidebar where to go for translation and sharing and searching and the feed link. I made a little 99 button that will take you to THE comprehensive list of any place at which you ever never knew you should be hanging. It's not as daunting as it looks. You can start to type the name of where you want to go and, bam, the list grows way manageable right away. I also stuck what seemed to me the least offensive choices for sharing on TwitFace. I think those buttons will get you to those places fine and dandy, but, not being a member of any of them, I can't be a hunnert percent sure.

I'm not feeling so damn modern anymore. I'm feeling old and tired. For such a daffodil, I really CAN muscle code into submission and make little icons and all kinds of things that would send my analog friends screaming off down the middle of the highway to flag down help, but the old laser is flickering.... Or it is NOW, after all these hours of hassling and my contacts growing dry from gaping at all these itty things.

I know full well that this is vacation week for at least half of America and things drop off like crazy till mid-September or so, so this is an ideal time to try something new that I'm not sure I can hang with, but it's the WORST time because that's when the fewest people will be around to opine on this matter. So. Hell. Pull over and go WiFi for a minute. I need yer opinion.

I'm still looking around for some expertise in making me a gizzy that pops out like the icon swooshes on Macs. I think I found something that almost works but needs more functions and so I'm trying to get advice on if it's doable to add to it. It's not so likely I can find a free and affable expert with the time and patience, but, well, surprises happen and then you will have a whole nuther toy to mess around with here.

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Oh, oh, and when I get the energy I can add a bunch of choices of search engines for the toolbar, and if yer really mortified by life, sorta frozen in yer tracks, try translating this to wild languages! It's amusing as heck.

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love, 99
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this IS the perils of pauline!

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OMG... after finally becoming comfortable enough for the moment with my new floating gizzy, I started familiarizing myself with the site somewhat better. Better late than never I guess, but... OMG... it's an ISRAELI company. So pft. Floating gizzy be gone. I am endeavoring to put it together to get something even better, but gotta ask some experts some questions first, so it might be a while. If it's going to be very long at all, I'll put back in the old shit until I can get it handled.

Jesus.

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OKAY.

Pending the finding or making of something more appealing to me, and to us all, I have put back the old search box and put in a goofy new subscribe icon. After much fiddling I have managed to get an itty ugly little orange icon for the footer of each post that will let you go to any one of hundreds of places you might wish. [different toolbar instead]

Maybe I can figger how to make myself a really elegant little toolbox for the sidebar that will let you do all sortsa things and get rid of all these blots on my blog at that time. In the meantime, at least I'm not helping people like an Israeli product. Sheesh. What a drag.

Oh, oh, and you'll love THIS: In the midst of fiddling with this floaty gizzy thing yesterday, I somehow managed to yank all my posts from my page. So I had to go to my backup template, and when I did THAT, it put the Google Analytics back on. IT IS NOW GONE AGAIN, and for good. I don't know what it was registering to, if anything, because I closed the account.

Anyway. I think I'll put a drap of brandy in my cold coffee now.

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love, 99
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i am such a darn modern girl

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And it only LOOKS as though I can't make up my mind. After all that dramatizing of my internet aggravations yesterday, they sent me a little email and told me how I could turn off that obnoxious feature of using their cool little toolbar, and so now I'm trying out that cool little toolbar.

The search function is now in the floaty gizzy at the bottom of your screen. You can switch between searching here and searching the whole web, which, in THIS configuration might actually end up making more sense to me than it did before. It's back to Google, but it works better and we need the stuff to work better.

If you want to subscribe to my feed, just click the little broadcasty icon on the floaty gizzy and Bob's yer uncle.

If you want to share stuff you find here at any of various sharing and gossiping social media, you just click the little plus icon on the floaty gizzy and yer happenin'.

If you want the fucking floaty gizzy to get out of your face, just click the little down arrows icon at the far right of the floaty gizzy and fspt it turns into a very cute little bitty floaty gizzy that can't possibly give offense... until, of course, the next time.

This has enabled me to feel both modern and affable, accommodating. Flexible. Positive. New. And, now life is at least as easy for you here as it is for those who take the feed... AND nicer by far to behold. Please give me your feedback on this new item. I can go back to putting the little unobtrusive icon thing under each post, if everyone hates floaty gizzies.

And, yes, really really late appearance today, because the first thing I did online was listen to Scott Horton interviewing Lew Rockwell and it made me feel like the room was spinning around me. I have a fair level of respect for both those men, but if I have to hear them talking together like that again, I might have to break something. Then, of course, I set about the headache of getting everything done about the floaty gizzy and removing, improving and moving other stuff on the page here.

So. Welcome to the thoroughly modern n e u f n e u f....

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NOT.

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peter b and sibel talk to ray mcgovern — UPDATING

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... Vladimir Putin's opposite number in a state spy organ. Just needed to reïterate the asininity of thinking Putin is some kind of devil because he was a KGB agent. Putin joined the KGB at age 23 and resigned at age 40. McGovern, after serving as an intelligence officer in the military for a couple years, spent twenty-seven years in the CIA, and decorated by Bush for his service, before retiring. I am not besmirching McGovern. I'm saying you're being a thoughtless ass for thinking Putin is some kind of demon on this basis.

It's also my opinion that you are being a thoughtless ass if you think Putin has been killing all those journalists and spies, when he has so many murderous billionaire oligarchs working full time to discredit him. Yes, if I were Putin, I'd have rounded them up, locked them all in the slammer and thrown away the key. Putin only told them they could keep their filthy lucre so long as they NEVER interfered in politics in any way. A distinctly anti-fascist move, designed to get the most for the Russian economy while protecting it from further depredation by billionaire crime bosses. He has been as good as his word. He leaves them alone, but the moment they start trying to take over media organs and political movements, kabam, they're locked up. Much more difficult and dangerous than my way, but probably better for the people of Russia, given all the givens.

I don't know Putin's soul—haven't Dubya's powers of insight, I guess—but I want you to quit solidifying around all the bullshit propaganda you've been fed, and hysterical raving and finger pointing by people more avid to lap that up than even you are. If you have seen nothing else by visiting this blog, you have to have started putting it together that our minds have been being controlled for our whole lives, that our time in school was about planting all the basic misrepresentations upon which to perpetuate our exploitation.

We have no viable basis for dissing Putin or Russia, while Putin and Russia have a multitude of bases for dissing us.

And I've given up on the Wikileaks controversies because they have now muddied it all so hopelessly that it doesn't bear comment anymore, that it's actually wrong to comment on it at all now... even though, obviously, others don't see it that way.

So, viva Wikileaks.

If you listen to McGovern droning, here, all the way through, he seems to be making a pretty good case that the danger of Israel attacking Iran any day now is high....

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For your entertainment...

I just went out to inspect my garden, pluck bits of tree duff from the Scottish moss, see if I oughta water, scrutinize the daisy scene, ignore for once the weeds, that sort of thing... and my neighbor yelled out her window that she thought I ought to write a book and call it The Barefoot Contessa. I told her I thought that had already been done. She says a sequel would be just the thing.

Sigh.

I should have asked to speak with her husband, just to goose her....

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For your convenience...

I've noticed people coming in from various social media sites and so I got over myself enough to make it easier for you to share this stuff when you are inclined. Find now itty little unobtrusive buttons under posts toward this end. I still don't approve of your participation on those harbingers of doom, but I do in fact want your life to be easier.

I tried doing it with this cool gizzy that floats along at the bottom of your screen and might even have used it, despite its search function being Google, except that it put a big blot on whatever image was on the screen, instructing you to click it to share it. I'd thought merely clicking in the floating toolbar gizzy would suffice, but... noooooo. So I yanked that puppy, pending some ability to make it stop being so obnoxious. [Got rid of the obnoxious part the very next day.] [It's a damn Israeli company and I can't do that.]

Having thus put myself on the precipice of a headache, I will now engage in my coffee thing and chill.

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For my aggravation...

Not having my medicine coffee yet, I just noticed that now Blogger has put stats on my dashboard... on top of the whole comments and spam malarkey.... No sooner do I nix Google Analytics for being Google Analytics on TOP of not being accurate, which none of them are, none—let me repeat—none of them are accurate, and not very edifying at all, being mostly geared toward people wishing to gauge themselves against targets they set for themselves, or some such twaddle, than they decide to put their bullshit stats on my dashboard!

What is this?

The Perils of Pauline?

Crikey.

Anyway, I think Blogger must be feeling the pain from too many moving over to WordPress, because they are trying to make this have all the functions of WordPress blogs. I'd've moved to WordPress if they'd let me have my goddam template. They would if I pay, and they would if I wanna use their software on my own site, which involves paying too. So I guess Blogger/Google is trying to prevent more defections or something. They could probably recoup a lot of popularity simply by returning to conformance with their old motto; to wit: DON'T BE EVIL. But that, I guess, would be too much like altruistic or something, and fascists aren't having ANY o' dat.

Right. Coffee.

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For Edna's edification...

Someone by the name of Edna, I hope not my aunt, wants to know how I can be so assertive about stats being inaccurate. I know because I have had friends who were obsessed with stats and popularity ratings on certain ratings services. I have NOT been able to hang with that stuff, even as I have tried to be a good neighbor, a good Netizen, and do what I can to help, with links and joining services, the works. I tried to go along peacefully with that stuff, but then I started noticing wild anomalies, which put me in mind to try out the various and sundry popularity enhancing tools and stats services and ratings systems... all that shit... and see if I could find some measure of uniformity, or even a trend toward yielding up a viable notion when combining them all in some abstract formula. Zip. Bubkes. No dice. The places purporting to keep track of who's linking to you miss shitloads of them. The places purporting to rate your popularity miss shitloads of them AND adopt some completely inscrutable formula for deciding your popularity rating, and, sure enough, your rating goes up and down, sometimes by hundreds of points, with NO correlation to any other measuring device extant. At whim. Not any of the services that count your visitors, at least none of the free ones, agree on Thing One. They can diverge from hundreds of hits to thousands of hits, according to cosmic alignments only.

I then took each in turn and did everything I could to test the patency of their information. Not only could I not make them count or reflect any of these testing maneuvers with any reliability, but as though by karma, things would happen, accidental discoveries be made, that showed it was NOT just me. It was happening to everyone. And systems you felt you could contribute to in order to boost someone or some post you admired, could be and WERE being GAMED by maniacs, to actually make it more harmful to speak up for some truth teller or other than to just nut up. It seems that if you insist on these things, the best way is to just pick one and tell yourself to believe that, which I, of course, do NOT endorse, delusion being very low on my totem pole. I kept ONE of the stats services because OCCASIONALLY it lets me identify an asshole... which I am happy to report is not necessary very often.

Maybe paid services are more reliable. Probably not.

I'm sure it's all new and improved from the satanic games at Digg and Reddit over at MyBook and TwitFace and SpaceBuzz, for whatever other failings I'm certain inhere, but I'm crazy enough, thank you. You are welcome to go there, and now you can even go some of there from here, but that's as far as I can go.

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For my entertainment...

I rented "Brooklyn's Finest" since Richard Gere is in it; "The City of Your Final Destination" because I have to find out; and "Date Night" because that Carell guy is so pleasantly putzy. I need a rest from my doctoral blitz. That stuff Farrell was talking about last night fried my circuits. I gotta slow up to get all my wires back in order.

I may even put some brandy in my evening blueberry thing.

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For your information...

Date Night was a dud, with some very, very funny spots in it. Steve Carell is so entertaining, but I was disappointed by pretty much all the rest of it.

Brooklyn's Finest was sad and horrible and Richard Gere was the very least engaging of anyone in it. That was hard to bear. He just wasn't convincing at all... or rather... went sooooo far into the empty shell he was playing that he was just, well... completely empty. Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke were riveting... even though the plot lines and situations were outright horrifying. The movie really slammed the living shit out of upper level law enforcement, and placed the cops down here with us human refuse. Still, I don't think it excuses them. I won't think it until they start realizing who they are and who we are... and pick the right side.

The City of Your Final Destination was mostly a day dream, a dream of love and gorgeous loneliness. They had to throw in a bit about the parents who had to flee the Nazis, the parents who didn't feel safe anywhere, just had to elevate the suffering of the chosen while it went about making us dream. Great acting, mostly, and gorgeous setting, but I really hated having to be jarred awake at the end.

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i'm cleaning up my blog

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Thought maybe I had all kinds of sage things to say to you today, but just managed to blurt out the most urgent of it in the one post. While waiting for the rest of what I had to say to bubble up, I began dealing with the completely outrageous list of fleeting cleverisms that turned up as labels here over the years, and lumping stuff I'd separated out for our convenience back together again, because they are, like, so, way so, ancient history. If you have historical urges that I've thwarted thus, sorry man, but most of it wasn't posted such that it was very googlable anyway. If it's life and death, you can wade, or maybe I can even help you wade, but that goddam label list was dizzying and making it HARD to deal with my label thing at all.

Along the way, I came across some seriously, seriously dead posts, with no living links and no context left to put something back together, so I deleted them. I know there are tons more of that ilk, and may someday have the spit to tackle that, but it was the most urgent to get a grip on the labels. Done.

I also changed some of the sidebar image links to ones that are more suitable for NOW, and tried to find as many dead guys over there as I could, and hope you are remembering to notify me when/if you come across anything over there that's pft on us, so I can do something about it and keep from aggravating future visitors.

I recently added some fancy ass feature to my feed, that included the ability to "email the author"... but... I have a sneaking suspicion that feature does not work. This may be due to newness, but if yer ever in the mood to try that feature, please do, and we can see if it works or not for real. I've gotten a couple of invites to things from the "no reply" thing, but I'm unsure if that's my feed emailer or some organizations' emailers. Basically, I have a loathing for useless "features" and will nix the sucker if it doesn't work for you guys out there in feed land.

Also, while about my business today, three cool links came my way: [1] It Pays To Riot; [2] Sour Grapes Over Putin's Manliness and Involvement With the People of Russia; and [3] A Peutiful Image of the Sun's Corona in Eclipse. So those things ought to make up for my hours and hours of housecleaning while you were left hanging.

xoxoxoxox

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my 'morning' has not measured up to my transcendental dreams

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Guess what! I am again victim of experimental upgrades in my commenting system! I have already botched it... not too badly... but it's going to add quite a few steps to my daily blogging regimen, that's for sure. At least we know BB2's comments didn't fall into the void. They fell into a black hole. Blogger doesn't like his little editor gizzy he uses to make comments and it called him spam. I was not alerted until today that there even IS such a thing as a spam folder and comment management now happening on my blog. I deleted a whole page of comments, thinking I was only taking them off a list, not deleting them from my blog. Sheesh.

It has to be karma that they like to do this to ME. Use ME as their guinea pig. They probably think that if this DITZ can get the hang of it, anyone can. But, not having had enough coffee yet today, and still swooning from my recall of bits of a long adventure in my sleep, I didn't realize Blogger, aka Google, is making a big effort suddenly to emulate Wordpress, give us some of the features enjoyed by those who use that system. I did not switch to Wordpress because they won't let me customize my blog. I have to pick one of their templates and do that. I guess this is not true if you have your own domain, but for us plebes who blather away on free blogging platforms, no dice in the customization gig... or at least last time I checked. Mayhap they are trying to accommodate people wanting to shift from the Evil Google now. I don't know.

So I was on a long trek, or pilgrimage, or escape from disaster, leading a bunch of people. Someone important, all important, was at my side. It didn't even get through my plastic wrap who was with me until we cut away to a scene where there was no ignoring this spectacularly lovable fact. So completely had I given up on this one coming to me, there was a need to kind of GET my attention. I feel as though too much of it has drifted back into my fog banks, but at least I know it was there, came with love, and I wish I could describe to you the kind of love I mean by "love" here. It's cosmic.

I have put the Shadow Stats unemployment graph in my sidebar and shall try to remember to keep it up to date. That video of that mob coming for a couple openings for HUD housing has broken my heart and powderized my bones. I am, of course, unsure and mistrustful of ALL stats, hate statisticians and the plagues they have brought down on our heads, but as far as I can see, all the most truthful people rely on Shadow Stats. If you look at their chart, you will IMMEDIATELY see why. They make an effort to estimate actuality instead of to cover up performance deficiencies.

Basically, the way you read that graph, the unemployment numbers from the beginning of fudging the stats for political relief, is the red line is TOTAL bullshit; the gray line is somewhat less bullshit; and the blue line is closer to not being bullshit.

Anyway, Hospice has been called to come help take care of my Poppa. This is a horror and a relief. Now he will be clean and the injuries caused by unskilled caregiving will cease hurting him, will heal. He won't be getting out of bed anymore, I don't think. I'm in the middle of freaking out about my mother and countless others insisting children should not see their parents in this shape, should be allowed to remember them when they were hale. I do not know who to kill. I have never heard anything so asinine in my life. It's akin to the incogitance of farming our incapacitated loved ones out to some institution when we have the means to help them at home. Everyone agrees this is the right thing to do... and it would be if you could not get the relief at home. I'm not saying anyone needs to be Superman to be decent. I'm saying that if it is possible to maintain any measure of quality of life while dealing with this stuff, YOU DO.

I can't kill my mother. She can't cope and in her inability to cope she is causing this to be exponentially worse, but she's like a wild animal whenever any fault might be lit for her consideration. She and everyone in her circle think this all has been the very best that could be done.

I am from another planet. This is way beyond just family baggage, but there is plenty of that too.

I bellowed, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN 'I DON'T WANT TO SEE HIM LIKE THIS'!?! HE'S BEAUTIFUL! HE'S GORGEOUS! HE'S STILL HIM!" But that's as much as I could bellow at her because she's going to snap. I don't want to call my wonderful second cousin again to vent, because it really just boils down to us congratulating ourselves for not being emotional midgets, but I might have to call her anyway because the intense frustration of being so powerless in this just doesn't ebb. Actually, that's another thing I don't understand about consensual reality! People say you get over this feeling in a couple weeks. BULLSHIT. If you are a HUMAN you do not. If you are a delusory version of yourself I guess you THINK you do.

I was in such a state that I almost missed the help that came in my sleep.

Maybe I oughta go over to my big chair, balance three sets of cheaters on my no nose and read the sutra aloud for a little while. Or maybe I should have some more coffee before I do another thing.

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monumental irk befalling your sweet-tempered hostess

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It seems Blogger has decided to REALLY shave how much you can have on your front page in this big effort to make our blogs the fastest-loading blogs on earth... and this is seriously cutting into what I can do with my posts... my newfangled arrows may have to disappear altogether. Or I could just post the image and MORE you if you want to see if I've made any post to go with it. I think I may have to run off for a bucket of ice for my head in a moment... or I could strip naked and run out in the rain, scare the living crap out of my neighbors. SOMETHING needs to wipe my state of vexation.

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you may recall

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I alluded to this here a year ago, but I don't remember where I actually came all the way out with my feeling that the ONLY reason Cinderella was dazzling Prague and, ergo, supposedly the world [certainly the Nobel Committee] with this ridding the world of nukes bit was because we had something better. This isn't really the inexactitude of my memory thing so much as, back a year ago, I was breaking my neck every day to monitor one blog and keep up active participation in a few others, on TOP of doing mine. Found myself working really hard to raise the conversation in as many places as possible, but one cannot expect people to keep behaving beyond the very second you stop manipulating them... daring them to be good... daring them to put a toe outside their boxes. I collapsed all the particulars into a singularity that is now out in the cosmos somewhere sucking up stars. So I only remember that I was explicit about it somewhere. Maybe here. Maybe in an email. But probably on a thread somewhere long subsumed by the oceans of cyber-flak spewing from every direction.
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I've been obsessing on the speed, but it seems we already have that speed for nukes... I'm not sure though. The NYT piece makes it sound a lot faster than ICBMs, and whut do they mean by "pinpoint" accuracy? Haven't we heard that before? What kind of propulsion and guidance are we talking? Are we even talking about the generally accepted version of the medium through which these missiles would be traveling?

I know, I know, I've been listening to too many space lizard researchers and "whistleblowers" who insist we have technology, fully functional and functioning technology, waaaaay beyond what is known by the general public. Thing is, as you will note below, we are now forced to cut out the bullcrap about "conspiracy theorists" if we want to stay dealing with a full deck. So. I wonder.
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today in outermost blogistan

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I'm linking this piece BB2 mentioned in the comments because a ton of people only ever follow this blog via the feed on their readers. I can see how that would be easier for some people, for busy or forgetful people, but you really do miss a lot on blogs when you do it that way... especially since so frequently what I have to say about something involves noting the labels I put on posts. Those don't show up on the feed. Neither do the comments. Neither does the sidebar. I put new quotes in the sidebar when they strike me they're worth contemplating. I add and change out links and images there too. Plus, people are finding it handier to go to the label "cloud" now at the very bottom of my page when they want to find stuff about a certain country or subject.

It occurs to me that someone could spend many, many days coming up to speed on what's actually taken place in the world if they worked all the clickable things here. I mean, mox nix, I guess, because I'm glad you bother your eyeprints with what I have to say, but, well, just sayin'....
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As for this Drill Baby Drill crap, I hardly want to go there. I had the duty of defending refineries for a large chunk of my life. On the one hand, it wasn't as bad as you might think, because refineries get sued for a lot of stuff that is completely not their fault, but on the other, OMG, what a drag. My very FIRST experience with the internet was in, I think, 1990, and it involved researching the toxicity of the drilling muds they use/produce on these rigs. It is outright TERRIFYING stuff—don't think that because you are still alive you haven't been killed grotesquely by this stuff—no, really. I dropped into the void at the Environmental Protection Agency for about 18 hours, most of which were not billable, because I just couldn't tear myself away from the deepening horror of each click. Even when these rigs don't blow up, their lethality is beyond the pale, beyond anything any reasonable person would call semi-sane. There IS no benefit to humanity that can compensate for it.

Period.

That experience put me off the internet for another fifteen years. It's more horrifying now. I think, really, it's a testament to a measure of Zen realization that gave me the moxie to come back at all. So, I really GET it how you can be too wimpy to FACE this stuff... but we just HAVE to... or we're dead. I'm here to help.

I can't MAKE you see. I can only just be here for you if you WANT to see. You can't fake that.

No one can fake that.
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No, no. That was my SECOND experience with the internet. The first one was in 1989 researching Reggie Jackson's collection of collectables, particularly the muscle car thing, but all of it. He had warehouses full of this crap and I had to get to the bottom of what all of it was and how much it was really worth because his insurance company was having kittens about how much he wanted for the fire that brought down one of those warehouses.

The best part of that one was going to a big deal car auction and meeting some of the maniacs from around the country whose lives revolve around this stuff. Outrageous amounts of money were being slung around that day, and no wonder the insurance company was freaking, but I ended up with this hick dressed in his finest overalls for this big day. He thought I was THE most sophisticated babe he'd never even dreamed of, and I ended up giving him a tour of the Bay Area he will NEVER forget.

So. Sorry. Had a senior moment there.
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Okay, okay, NOW, I've stuck myself trying to nail down the exact years for this stuff. I'm thinking the drilling muds flip-out may have been in 1989 and the muscle car thing in 1988... and then I can't get my fingers around when exactly it was I started dicking around on Scott's AOL account when I housesat for them. And, THEN, and I do realize I'm beginning to sound like the Keith Carradine character in Choose Me, but I'm pretty sure I was managing the law firm representing the fraud artist fundamentalists who put up an outbuilding for the first servers in what was to become AOL. I'm thinking this because I remember feeling it was a filthy thing for guys like that to boast anything connected to America... but I might be mistaken... and I'm thinking that must have been in 1983 or so... about the same time as I was drilling that bozo I mentioned the other day, trying and, evidently, failing to teach him how to ride... or would that have been 1982?

It's all turning into a blur, so I'm going to give up on my little impersonation of exactitude and have faith that you get the drift.
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blogger image servers are[n't] kittywompus right now

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[Possibly all clear at 1:15pm... possibly.]
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So my blog is pretty apt to look darn weird and take forever to load until they fix this....

Also, I'm having to bit.ly most of my links to get them to show up on the page, and that isn't even working all of the time, so, hell, I guess you could just hunt for them with your cursor, or you could scream to the cybergods....

Not to be paranoid or nuthin, but Wordpress blogs are being darn stubborn this morning, too. I think maybe China is having a full-blown cow about all this free-wheeling blog blather and messing with us....

Or a crucial tube is leaking pixels...?
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Here's some links while we wait for the tubes to regain their fitness:

Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters... and we're shocked, shocked....

Statement on Obama Administration's Housing Initiative... it's damn weak, and... we're shocked....

Handy-dandy list of "bubble barons" we can definitely use for reference....

Smoking something....

My darling Gilad....

TREASON....

I'm New Here....

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oh, sure, sure, that's what they always say

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Some of us aren't fooled one little bit. Others, I'm sure, are agonizing over such a tantalizingly near miss. Personally, I think it would be cool to be strapped to it, or to ride it like one of those dumb flying lizards in the movies.

I've made the mistake of looking at some of the beta features for Blogger this evening and am fooling around with things here a little. I don't know what I'm keeping and what will be going, but if yer on a reader maybe you want to click in and take a look around, see if there's anything you like about it. I mean, now you can just pass some sort of generalized judgment without bothering with commenting... but I've not left open the option to curse me out there. Maybe you want to suggest more appropriate boxes to check, or maybe I will think of ones that amuse me more, or maybe I'll just nix it altogether. I put Blogger's version of a tag cloud at the bottom of the front page and I don't know if that'll stay either, but since I am such a jerk about not getting all the names and specs into each post to help make the search function more useful, here or on the search engines, it might help somewhat when you are trying to find something I posted and have a general idea what category I might have put it under.

Or, you could damn well pay closer attention! That's an option! I'm sure it would be helpful if I could make up my mind about certain aspects of blogging that run afoul of my bodhisattva vow or my personal tastes... but... well... other things do press, do weigh on my mind as well.....

In the midst of this, I find that they were trying to get me to identify as an "uber-leftard" and I was going there if it could be "uber-leftard of love", but then Herman piped in with his "fairydust lefty" thing and I took to that more readily. This could mean all kinds of head-scratching to create more uniformity in the chaos. Or it could mean more chaos.

But it has all put me in mind of the fact that I haven't checked the patency of my sidebar links in too long, and I never finished going through my archives and deleting all the stuff with broken links. The longer I don't do this, the more agony it will be to try to keep this place a veritable sky castle of mystical connection to fundamental reality... and... well... I am a little queasy about the kind of information that SHOULD still be accessible, but is getting yanked out of the public domain. I'm not looking forward to experiencing that bit of fundamental reality, believe me.

Worst of all, I found it has been ages since I last whined and bitched and pissed and moaned for my wealthy socialist gentleman! You guys think I'm kidding! I can't believe I'm still here.
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tell me if this doesn't seem the most plausible scenario

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He was shaking. He didn’t resist anything. It’s just hard to believe that he was trying to blow up this plane. He was in a trance. He was very afraid.

The guy's father reports his recent religious fervor to the embassy, just in case, thinking he will prevent his son from doing anything foolish; the intelligence guys in charge of failed terrorism headline grabbers keep him off the lists, nab him on Christmas, shoot him up with something disorienting, dress him in these underwear, put him on a plane, and one of them hits the detonator in the talcum powder sac sewn into his new underwear at the correct moment. End of story for fervent Muslim rich kid.
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[You'll pardon me, I hope, for neglecting you. I was up till dawn reading about ways to do my own website myself, got a few hours' sleep, with fast-escaping dreams, and woke up with a bad headache and telling someone their image of a face was really an image of a black hole, only upside down. I've been continuing with my reading on the own site thing and I gotta get ready to do the Malloy fill-in gig again tonight... starting at 6pm Pacific... so... well... I'm out of it. The good part is that it may lead to something really cool.]
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2009 quark winners are out

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Some good reading ahead of you
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code phrase cher thirty-two

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Yesterday was a long day. I had things holding over in my head to talk about on the tubes, comments, emails, and a bunch of podcasts and lectures I wanted to get through, beside the usual poking about and picking things to mention to you, beside the half an eyeball on the comments yonder, beside the fiddling with images thing and freaking out about all the bugs in this new operating system release and fantasizing that they must have had to fire all the programmers who were Motorola chip aces and hire Intel chip aces... which... uhm... would be people Bill Gates has fired... which may in fact be badges of honor, but, sheesh, still appalling.

I was getting that loopy dropsy feeling at a semi-sane hour and was very near getting in bed when I decided I ought to go back and look at a thread I'd commented on, since it had generated some emails from a dear friend. Well, to my abject horror, I had put this darn cogent comment on the WRONG thread in all my flying about, catching up with the stuff that had held over in my head... and so I think that has to automatically make the comment dippy or even insulting... but I was too loopy and too exasperated, and am leaving it to today to sort out... or maybe just let stand because it might actually apply also on the thread I did post it on... but... sheesh! Mortifying. I have to go back and sort that out once I've had enough coffee, if they haven't managed to delete the comment.

On the one hand, how does this bit differ from me trying to pour the cream for my coffee in the sink instead of my cup, or running out to light a cigarette when there's one lit and sitting in the ashtray already, or making a careful list of all the stuff I have to buy at the store, being extra-careful to make sure that sucker is IN my pocket so it actually gets to the store with me, only to do my shopping without remembering the list is in there until I'm going for my money at the checkout stand? It's, like, normal by now, isn't it?

And how does it differ from the very thing I was at pains to write such a long email about yesterday, a discussion of the economies of attention in a brain determined to strip particulars and skip the mundane in the overriding search for elegance? Isn't that a good excuse? Does it have to be senility? I can plead genius, can't I?

No. Dammit. UNacceptable. I'm trying to help a bunch of smart youngsters get a clue about stuff they have to live another thirty years to get on their own and this just will not do.

We can say I'm helping them fear the advance of senility so much they will be more apt to perform, now, while their cookies have not crumbled yet. Or, best, they caught my request to delete it before too many others had to endure it.

So I got in bed, and put this high vexation out of mind, and began to read myself into the head swimming so deeply I don't know what I'm reading mode, which is the almost dirt certain prelude to actual sleep, and I'm reading about big rifts in the top ranks at Apple and it's seeming to bolster my theories that the bean counters were taking big advantage of Steve Jobs' transcendency while he was busy struggling so hard for his life, and that there are PC-mentality hacks putting out not-good-enough, customer-riling and perfidiously-obtuse excuses for product, and he's not happy about it either.

And then everything went black. Yes. Fade to black.

Then this really upsetting and undeniable urge to pee made me get up in the middle of intense dreaming and trying to note the dreaming's Zen application AS I'm dreaming it... damn bodily necessities... which really changes the character of all that dreaming and tends to wipe the slate... and it then, diving back into bed, relieved, put me in the flipping from dreaming to awake mode, flipping some nine hundred times before I finally realize I am awake and not flipping right back into dreaming.

All that stuck was "Cher 32"... and me having the notion that it was the code phrase demanded of me by somebody trying to tell me things in my sleep.

slow loading

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One of the several Blogger image servers is behind the beat, so to speak, so I can't really do anything about how slowly this page is loading right now....

As you can see, I've started in on the process of undoing the hairdresser's hard work already. Have to. Have to. Have to jump up and down on it until it starts looking like my kind of hair storm....

I'm listening to an interview with Banisadr right now that I can barely follow... but it occurs to me my Persian-speaking readers might have an easier go of it....