Antisocial Media

Only lightly nerdy! Take that, Joe Barry.

I miss fireflies. I miss cardinals. I miss seasons. And man, o man, do I miss thunderstorms. We got a couple of real serious t-storms one of the days we were cleaning out Gaga's apartment. Here are some photos from that evening.

We came into Lansing at a little after midnight. Barry and Sandy picked us up and we drove back down to Jackson. We went to the hospital the next day to see Gaga. I don't really know how to write about seeing her. She looked so different from the last time we'd seen her, at Christmas. Her vitality was gone, maybe everything that made her her was gone, or maybe it was invisible, or resting in a hidden place. She had dozens of get well soon cards taped to the cabinet doors of her room, and framed pictures of herself and her husband, her kids and grandkids and greatgrandkids and greatgreatgrandkids (!) on all the available surfaces. Sarah's sister Rachael made a collage of family photos from the last fifty years. The hospital staff were so kind and conscientious, checking in to see how everyone was doing, bringing breakfast and snack trays, and just being really warm and supportive. Thank God for good people. Gaga died a few days after we arrived, the day before Adam...

Why the Sideways, Blogger? Anyway, Chris Murray's huge face will frighten you into buying a lottery ticket, apparently. Grizzo and Gabe. Sarah and Mt. Shasta, ala Alex Katz. Mt. Shasta.

So I was 0-for-2 in predictions in my last post. No Olympic Peninsula, no GA. When we left Oakland, we drove more than 12 hours up to Breitenbush Hot Springs in southern Oregon, where we tried our damnedest to relax, without really succeeding. Then we visited good buddy Shauncito in Corvallis, where he is finishing his PhD, and living with his PhD advisor and the advisor's family. Great to see Shaun, and wonderful to meet his hosts, but by the time we were driving North, backpacking was the last thing either of us wanted to do, much less any more time in the car, plus Sarah was sick and feeling crappy. So we detoured to Seaside, OR, and a youth hostel we'd stayed at on our bike trip. Man, did we stay there! Four nights, altogether. We cooked, read, hiked, canoed, went out for dinner...really swell, low-key vacation. Where the River Meets the Sea Sunset From the Back Porch of the Seaside Hostel Shipwreck @ Fort Stevens State Park, North of Seaside Sadly, our vacation was...

Yep--Sarah and I are outta heere! We'll be hiking in the Olympic Peninsula, and then in Portland for GA. So, uh...later!

My word! Like Tolkein said, it's dangerous business walking out your front door--you never know where the day will take you. This whole thing has been my first introduction to the "UU Blogosphere", and a good reminder that the creative conflict inherent in forging and leading in liberal religion can be messy business. One point made by many folks I've talked to about this is how different the tenor of the conversation would have been had it been conducted face to face. With some trepidation, given the amount of misinterpretation, projection, and sensitivity that has characterized so much of this online conversation, I offer the following cartoon from Penny Arcade : http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 Just to reemphasize: I am not calling anyone a "fuckwad." I offer the above cartoon because: it's hilarious; and because it is a powerful explication of an internet-characterizing phenomenon. PeaceBang herself, over the course of the last fe...

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to...

I ran into Becky at the Temescal Cafe today. We were both hammering out our final papers, mine on Jasper Johns and on the movie Serenity , hers on the privilege inherent in agnosticism. This was for her Eth(n)ics of Whiteness class, a 20 pager on the topic of focussing on one of your deeply held beliefs and examining the privileges and assumptions inherent in it. As an agnostic myself I was very interested to approach my beliefs (lack of beliefs? I just don't know anymore!) from this angle. I asked her to share her paper with me when she's finished, and (with her permission) I can present some themes and topics in this website as a digestion. At any rate, I looked up " theism " on wikipedia this evening--interesting stuff. The tidbit that jumped out at me: "The term is attested in English from 1678, and was probably coined to contrast with atheism, a term that is attested from ca. 1587..." Got that? Athiests beat you to it by *almost a century*. Th...

Here's the video for " Crosseyed and Painless " from the Talking Heads album Remain In Light . David Byrne: American Genius? David Byrne: Cultural and Racial Appropriator Par Excellence? Of note: video directed by Toni Basil, of "I Want Candy" fame. Also: anyone know of another video that features its generative source less than this one does? Or one that features such beautiful choreography and dance? One last thought: who cares if Viacom won't let Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's videos be posted on YouTube?!? As long as I've got access to such a wealth of Talking Heads rarities I can die a happy hermit.

The voice is a little weird, but I couldn't resist Kermit the Frog interpreting the classic Talking Heads song "Once In A Lifetime" ala Stop Making Sense (still my favorite movie of all time).

A few days late for Mother's Day, but so it goes. Growing up as the son of an epidemiologist, public safety concerns were a prominent part of my upbringing. In particular, the importance of wearing a bike helmet when riding a bike was well and thoroughly established. To this day I think I could total up the number of times I've ridden my bike helmetless on two hands. I definitely owe a large part of my making it through childhood without suffering a traumatic brain injury to my safety-conscious mother. So, when boingboing featured three articles related to bike-helmetry on three consecutive days it just seemed proper to provide links, and to give my beloved mother some props. Plus she's one of my only commenters, so I've gotta keep her happy. ;) Why wear a bike helmet? Baseball bat wielding thugs! Why wear a bike helmet? Protection against getting your head run over by a truck! Why wear a bike helmet? It makes jerk drivers harass you! And as Mom remembers bel...

I went to one of those once. Once. It was across State St. from The Chocolate Shoppe, which has been a Wisconsin-centric ice-creamery since I can remember. I spent my entire Cold Stone experience staring out the window at The Chocolate Shoppe wondering, "Why, oh why, couldn't I have spent my $$$ there, instead of at this corporate hell-hole?" Click on the title of this post to find a happily vicious article on salon.com about Cold Stone Creamery. The author hits the nail right on the head with the description of the Cold Stone ice cream consistency: a vomit-inducing concoction, like lard coated with Kool Whip. [my paraphrase] Yes, it's Finals week. Yes, I'm posting about ice cream instead of finishing my Hungarian exam. What's it to ya?

Maybe it's Finals, maybe it's the Warriors poised on the brink of elimination from the NBA Playoffs, maybe it's just the change in the weather. Whatever it is, there is a weird feeling in the air today. The loud, obnoxious middle-schoolers on BART were louder, the homeless people talking to themselves are angrier, the drivers are more aggressive, and I feel my own hackles up higher than usual, my defenses thinner, my frustrations closer to the surface. It's been cloudy and windy all day, a gray formless layer of uncertain height and a cool wet wind off the Bay. I biked to the Downtown branch of the Berkeley Library and had to BART home after checking out too many books. Okay, time to face up to my last obligation to Hungarian: the dreaded final exam. Then I'll take my five academic credits and skedaddle, thank you very much.

This is ...stomach turning? A cool idea? A guarantee that you will have awkward neighbors if you live here? I'm still chewing on this one... One thing is for sure--I would like it better if the concept was "Tolkein as seen by Thomas Hart Benton " rather than "Tolkein as seen by Thomas Kinkade ." Again, thanks to Madam for this one--Whoa. Also, check out her blog for some serious Knittering.

This one's actual size! Oh, to have a Tolkein rarities collection, and the $$$ wherewithal to build my own real-life Hobbit Hole in order to house my opulent library in style. This is from the back page of Fine Homebuilding, a cool magazine my Dad used to subscribe to. Each month the back page features some outlandish house, or house-building artisan. I love seeing the far-out things people do to their living space, and as my Dad pointed out, an outlandish percentage of the featured homes are in California where the gentle weather lets you do shit that would be impossible in colder, wetter climes. This one, at least, seems to be from out East. It also looks unbelievably cozy. I can envision curling up in a big leather Stickley armchair in front of that hearth on a cold, snowy December night, smoke curling up from my pipe, Black Lab at my feet, snifter of brandy in one hand and The Two Towers in the other... A guy could give himself an infarction with how great that sounds! T...

I should have posted about this earlier, but I was too choked up. Why must the good ones die so young? Your honest, hardcore, take-no-prisoners brand of numbah-krunchin' will be missed, H-Dogg. Here's one of his earliest articles, a wild cry against the powers-that-be entitled " Keep Your Fucking Shit Off My Desk. " Carry on my wayward son/ There'll be peace when you are done/ Lay your weary head to rest/ Don't you cry no more. See you on the other side, homeboy.

Elizabeth's comment to my previous post makes me feel like I should write a little more about what that crow meant to me. I want to write my thoughts about it before I read Leon's book, just to put out my own thoughts on the matter before involving another's thoughts. I knew that crow would follow me within the first few seconds after I heard and saw it. I knew that it wouldn't follow me past the freeway underpass. And I knew that it was important for me to listen to it, even though I didn't understand why, or what it was trying to communicate. In Norse myth, Odin the All-Father is accompanied by two crows who travel the world, reporting back to him. They are one source of his fabled knowledge and wisdom. When I stood in the alley/pedestrian walkway between Oak Grove Ave. and Claremont, listening to the loud crow, I wasn't at all surprised when the second crow landed on the tree across from the first. It was almost as if the first noisy and insistent crow ...

I just got back from a jog around the neighborhood. I ran out to College Ave. and just after I'd turned around and was heading home a crow flew in front of me, cawing lustily, and up onto the telephone wires. I kept running, and after I'd gone just a few steps, the crow flew down from its perch, still cawing, to a tree branch ahead of me. We leapfrogged like this for a block. I turned a corner into a pedestrian walkway between blocks, and stopped when the crow followed me, still cawing down at me from a pine tree. I looked up at the crow, trying to understand what was going on in its head, but it just kept cawing, glancing down at me occasionally, and flying from branch to branch every so often. Another crow flew up, silent as the first was loud, and took in the scene. When that one flew off after a minute, I decided to keep running. The first crow followed me through the walkway, across and down the street, and around the corner, still cawing. When I got to the Highway ...