...more recent posts
have to say i am in joying my afternoons drinking rum at the bar des palmistes, watching the people, the old colonial buildings, this was once a hotel, one of the only hotels, where many an explorer stayed, now its bar, cyber cafe, video rental etc (staying with the times??)....
MB was asking about the medieval Cathars, relative to a wine label she's working on. Conveniently, along comes the New Yorker with a review of several books about them. They inhabited the Languedoc, a rich and independent area of southern France, stretching into northern Italy and Spain. They considered themselves Christians, but their dualism (similar to neo-platonic Gnosticism) marked them as heretics in the eyes of the Catholic Church, and they were mostly wiped out in intra-European crusades during the 13th century. The famous line, "kill them all; god will recognize his own" comes from one of these massacres. As practitioners of an "alternative lifestyle", the Cathars have been adopted as spiritual ancestors by mystics, French nativists, vegetarians, conspiracy theorists, and would-be heretics of all sorts. Not much is really know about them, beyond what we are told by their enemies, so it's been easy for latecomers to speculate, casting them in whatever light is convenient. Languedoc still produces fine wine, and it appears that heresy has enough cachet in some circles to provide a marketing rubric. There certainly seems to be good tourist trade built on the legends. As far as images go, this page from Google shows that, beyond their cross (a Greek cross encircled) the most persistent image is of a ruined castle on a crag, a romantic evocation of their promise and persecution, not to mention a great photo-op before the vineyard tour. Keep digging if you want to get into the really nutty stuff. This guy may know the secrets, but he wants $9.99 first. Disinfo has a treatment of the source I'm familiar with. This fairly levelheaded capsule comes from an interesting aristocratic site, which also contains a good collection of heraldic crosses. These may be of interest to Bill regarding the "surfer's cross" (see #86 & 102 ). But if you want to know what they did with the Ark of the Covenant (or was that the Holy Grail?), I'll never tell!
Tired of hearing the late conservative media honcho Katharine Graham described as a cross between Mother Teresa and Rosa Luxembourg? Read CounterPunch's anti-eulogy.
greetings from french guiana, this is a truely grand place, in the capital now (cayenne), just left the museè departmental which was full of stuffed animal's inc a giant caimen that washed a shore one day near by, the place was layed out beautiful and you get a real outback feel, yesterday when the plane pulled off the caribean and went inland a 100 miles my jaw allmost dropped, nothing but jungle and rivers cutting throught it--AWESOME--hope my luggage shows up (it was found in haiti) and my tour guide (he has my interior flights lodgeing info...)
Hey Frank, what's up? I've been missing you around here.
its all most 20 years since my first travels abroad, sitting here sweating pro fusely, i never sweat this much 20 years ago, no did i post to my friends--i dont consider my self adventerous, i dont eat sea urchins, but now 20 years later i,m in my 50th country/territory, its a great caribean night here, i really like this country, cool blended unspoofed at least where i stay, the rum gave me good thoughts but this keyboard gives me trouble so i must quit, onward into adventurne i go, i` will get some DEET and go to the jungle just my tee shirt and my malaria pills::::pack light i said in the early daze (this is the wierdest keyboard i have ever seen-the french must all ways be different/cult)
greetings from Guadeloupe-my luggage is lost--so am i--off to French Guiana w/o anything--hope it arrives of i may be going to the jungle not well prepared
The day you've been waiting for is here: blogathon starts at 3:00 pm (noon pacific time.)
nbc said 40% of all tech jobs were lost this year.
goodbye everybody:>)
take care
love you
"I'm a white boy, but I can be bad too."
On Boogie on
"A DJ who was known as Mr. Mark on my college radio station recently passed away. He introduced me
to the art of freeform radio through his interesting selection of wacky music interspersed with bizzarre,
sarcastic, made-up stories that intermix subtle references to the Lehigh Valley with political satire and
general making-fun-of life." WMUH - Muhlenberg College's radio station is paying tribute. Go to here
to find the link to the internet feed."
"As close to verbatim as I can remember a Mr. Mark story (listened to so many times that it plays nearly
automatically in my head)":
On last week's show we showed you kids how to call up a demon for show-and-tell. This week, we're
going to teach you how to make a pumpkin-headed scarecrow wake up and come alive. Most of you
already have a large collection of pumpkin-headed scarecrows which you've stolen throughout the autumn.
Pick your favorite and lay him out on your examination table. At this point you'll have to wait for a bolt of
lightning to course through your mad-genius equipment. Let's check today's weather -- clear and sunny,
what a bad break. Plan B is to clip on a set of jumper cables, one to the pumpkin-head, and the other to
your own earlobe. When you step on the gas, your mind will go into the scarecrow's body, which is the
next best thing. Now, run amok, and terrorize your neighborhood. Remember to take your pumpkin head
off and throw it at people for a quick thrill. And remember to avoid fire, the living scarecrow's deadly
enemy. Listen to your local fire chief when he says: Attention arsonists. Keeping you people from burning
your own homes down out of sheer carelessness is like trying to stop the tides. They're cutting our budget
again, and you oily-rag-saving, cigarette-tossing barbeque chefs and trash-burners are breeding like
rabbits. Soon we'll be outnumbered, and the united planet of earth will go up like an origami paperweight.
---------------------------------
"OK, just one more. I had to go back to the tapes for this one (thanks, Bill) and transcribe. But realize also
that reading it and listening to Mr. Mark read it are two different things altogether."
---------------------------------
Hello, folks. I’m Mr. Mark, with a wintertime riddle: how many giant-sized cyclops vultures could hatch out
of a forty-foot egg, in your opinion. The answer can be found through a close examination of our nation’s
freeway system. Socrates observed more than two thousand years ago that snipers may kill passing
motorists in order to get their unborn babies through a crude cesarean section. But the motorist may then
behead the sniper and write REDRUM in blood all over the turnpike, making the roadway slippery, and
causing a 13-vehicle pileup at rush hour.
On the other hand, when a wealthy rock star choked on a hamburger in Philadelphia yesterday, a team of
medical experts arrived to take him, via helicopter, around the world on a sightseeing trip to take his mind
off it. Sure enough, somewhere over the Cayman Islands, the piece of burger in his throat dislodged, but he
died anyway of a broken heart when the engine died and they fell into a munitions factory.
I’m Mr. Mark, with a wintertime riddle: what do you get when you sneak into a discount drugstore, after
hours, dressed as a priest, and try to buy a prescription oriental slave girl over the counter without legal
I.D.?
If you know the answer, you could win a major Allentown dairy, lock stock and barrel. Or a dog food
cannery – the whole business, including all debts and liabilities. Listen and win.
* * *
Hey folks.
This is Mr. Mark with a public service announcement from the Department of Motor Vehicles in
Harrisburg. Once upon a time, there was a gun-packin’ maniac who had a crazy grudge against mooses.
Now this particular maniac had never seen automobiles before, because he stayed indoors, and didn’t have
a TV set. So when he saw a car for the first time, he thought it was a square blue moose and shot at it,
whereupon the gas tank exploded and knocked the maniac up into the sky, through the radiation belt, and
back down again.
Well, the radiation affected him, and after he landed he became a criminal genius and organized a gang of
juvenile delinquents. With hi-tech weaponry and computers, they sought the arrest and execution of all
mooses on earth. The FBI ambushed these crazy extremists after they blew up a plaster of Bullwinkle in a
miniature golf course, and placed them in suspended animation until a future age when there’d be enough
jail space to sentence them.
Well, when the maniac thawed out ten centuries later, he found intelligent grasshoppers had taken over the
world, and they sentenced him to go back in time to the twentieth century, as an Allentown dog food
executive for twenty years with no hope of parole. But when he arrived, the scent of moose meat in the
slaughterhouse sent him off on another one of his spells, and he killed three fourths of the stockholders,
after which the value of the shares skyrocketed, and the company gave him a bonus, and a percentage of
the gross.
Little did the maniac know that all the while a trap was being laid for him by a vengeful moose, who had
human hands grafted onto his front legs. The killer moose caught him in the booth of an adult bookstore,
and plugged all the holes to adjacent booths, and the maniac died of loneliness, and lack of air.
This has been a public service announcement from the State Department, and your local division of police
informants.
And there’s no factory.
No "Who Cares" Yet : GWB's own words
fulify your website. it says it makes pages ugly but nothing could ruin the elegant layout of df.
I don't particularly recommend this article offering armchair Bush psychoanalysis, but it's interesting that "who cares what you think" has been picked up by bigger media. How long before it appears in the Times (Dowd)?
He does seem to have a mean side. This can be seen in the chilling relish he displayed in an interview with Talk magazine when imitating death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker's voice ("'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me'") and the alleged Fourth of July incident in which he dismissed a man who said he disagreed with his policies, saying "Who cares what you think!"
heres a strange page on which to find a link to fink.
"Do you keep the misguided gifts from mother and father with inscriptions? Mother is older, so you keep the one’s from her and donate most of father’s."
space saving tip: rip out the inscription page of all misguided gifts, stash in draw, give books to housing works....
survivers party
"It's not the heat, it's the stupidity"
this is not the french guiana i will see next week:<(
Eudora Welty dead @ 92
For Mr. Wilson: the fat birder webring
Sad news about the quiet Beatle.
I blog because I hope that if enough people are exposed to points of view that expand consciousness the attended world, there is hope we can transcend our current folly. Thus, the accumulated weight of the community of blogness is a force of transmemetic nature that may even make a massive difference. from abuddhas memes
I just learned that author J. H. Hatfield, an early casualty of the Bush presidential campaign, recently committed suicide in a hotel room in Arkansas. You may recall that his book, Fortunate Son, alleged that Bush did community service for a cocaine bust in 1972. Karl Rove & Co went on the attack, tipping off the right-wing Dallas Morning News that Hatfield had done jail time for a bizarre conspiracy to car bomb his boss. Immediately the media attention shifted to Hatfield, who was humiliated and cut loose by his publisher St Martin's Press (who had rushed his book into print without thorough fact-checking). After that, recall that nobody talked about GWB's coke use for the rest of the campaign. NYU media prof. Mark Crispin Miller wrote a foreword to the recently-released 2nd edition of Fortunate Son; it's worth reading.
Following the unconnected thread to Jims's "hey, hey, hey, what kind of clock is that ?" intrusion. I offer the latest stroller Mom incident. I'm sitting on a park bench in Van Vorst park here in JC, petting my dog in a way which removes the shedding hair from her back. So I'm grooming for a few minutes when I notice the toes of a pair of womens shoes pointing at me. I dont look up but I notice them still there a few minutes later. When I finally do look up I see some 30 somthing Mom is pointing her baby in a sling at me so's they can both drink in the sight of man with doggie. I can't think of any other senerio which would allow someone to stand and
stare point blank at a stranger and gawk. And I dont find that excuse acceptable either Keep walking Mom. Bah.
Good Morning Sinners
Scratchy vanity 45s, pilfered field recordings, muddy off-the-radio sounds, homemade
congregational tapes and vintage commercial gospel throw-downs; a little preachin' and a little
salvation.
"Hypocrisy is better than no standards at all."
This mornings hard copy nyt had a picture of stacked shipping containers, 3 high for as far as the eye could see, lining a street to block stone throwers stones.
"Modern mechanical tattooing was invented in New York City at the end of the 19th century. In his shop in Chatham Square on the Bowery, Samuel O'Reilly modified Thomas Edison's "Electric Engraving Pen" and created the first device which could mechanically enscribe a tattoo into the skin. The speed and accuracy of the new technology revolutionized the artform and introduced it to the possibilities of the modern age. Surrounded by the modern urban setting of New York, early tattooing borrowed its imagery from various popular culture sources as it expanded and became more sophisticated."
Reminiscences of New York by an Octogenarian (1816 - 1860)
the oldest site in new york that has continously been used as a drinking establishment is ...?
Why Is New York City
Called "The Big Apple"?
The Congregation Anshe Chesed building at 172 Norfolk Street (now the Angel Orensanz Foundation) not only is New York’s oldest surviving synagogue (erected 1850) and one of its largest (capacity 1,200) but also was the first building on the Lower East Side erected specifically as a synagogue. The designer was Berlin-born Alexander Saeltzer, architect of the old Astor Library (now the Public Theater) on Lafayette Street, who modeled it after the monumental Gothic-style cathedral of Cologne.
plucked this one off the fmu message board :
Kathy Graham ckane@wpost.org
Bush Bush In The Puss
Wed Jul 18 12:31:31 2001
Who Cares What You Think?
Here's an honest to God (?) account of one person's meeting with the President in Philadelphia last week:
"So when the President was here on July 4, I had the opportunity to shake his hand. I wasn't sure if that was a good idea or not but I did it anyway, and said to him, "Mr. President, I hope you only serve four years. I'm very disappointed in your work so far." He kept smiling and shaking my hand but answered, "Who cares what you think?"
His face stayed photo-op perfect, but his eyes gave me a look that said, if we'd been drinking in some frathouse in Texas, he'd've happily answered, "Let's take it outside." A nasty little gleam.
But he was (fortunately) constrained by Presidential propriety. But that was the end of it until I turned away and started scribbling the quote down in my notepad, so as to remember the "Gift" forever. When he saw me do that, he got excited and craned his neck over the rubberneckers to shout at me, "Who are you with? Who are you with?" People started looking, so he made a joke: "Make sure you get it right." But he kept at it: "Who do you write for?" I told him I wasn't "with" anybody and pointed to one of his staff people who knows me a little, and said, "Ask him, he'll tell you."
Then I split.
Half an hour later, my boss (who had helped organize the event we were at) came up to me and said, "Did you really tell the President that he was doing a 'lousy fucking job'?" "No way," I said, "I was very polite, I just told him what I thought." Fortunately, he believed me. He wasn't happy with me, but he believed me.
But anyway, if you ever wondered if the Prez really is kind of a jerk, I'm here to tell you, he is, and I got The Gift to prove it. I'm thinking of making up T-shirts so we can share The Gift with everyone: "Who cares what you think?" - President George W. Bush, July 4, 2001.
Andrew Hudson
Spokesman, Mayor Wellington Webb
1437 Bannock Street, ST. 350
Denver, CO 80202
Direct (720) 865-9016
FAX (720) 865-8791
Pager (303) 640-0780
Cell (303) 880-9521
For information on Mayor Webb's Office
Do The Mouse
forgive me but I could not pass on Hippie Chick. The seller just contacted me letting me know that he has a bunch of others from the same shoot. He will send me some scans so I can decide. Oh, I've already decided.
ive got some of those comments that wont go away. how do i clear those out?
"Dow Jones is discontinuing the "ownership and maintenance of indoor plants" in a bid to save $40,000 a year at the Wall Street Journal and its other properties.
"If you would like to take over the maintenance of any of the plants," staffers were told in a memo, "please attach a yellow Post-It note with your name to a visible part of the plant container."
I haven't bought the times in weeks but I do get a summerial e.mail from them every morning / todays includes this :
How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote
A six-month investigation by The Times shows that under intense pressure from Republicans, Florida officials accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws.
From Wired:
When a family of ducklings fell down a Vancouver sewer grate, their mother did what any parent would do: She got help from a passing police officer. Vancouver police officer Ray Peterson didn’t know what to make of the duck that grabbed him by the pant leg while he was on foot patrol in a neighborhood near the city's downtown. He pushed her away, but the mother duck persisted, grabbing Peterson's leg again when he tried to leave, and then waddling to a nearby sewer grate where she sat down and waited for him to follow and investigate. "I went up to where the duck was lying and saw eight little babies in the water below," he said. Police said they removed the heavy metal grate with the help of a tow truck and used a vegetable strainer to lift the ducklings to safety. Mother and offspring then departed for a nearby pond.
bill, tom, steve how was the concert--i had to run i felt it would have been rude to leave during show and i had been there a bit and neede to work at home
They're Back :
"According to the official Ninja Tune website, a Portland, Oregon radio station has been fined $7,000 by the FCC
for playing "Your Revolution," recorded by DJ Vadim featuring spoken word poetry by Sarah Jones. "Your
Revolution" appears on DJ Vadim's 1999 release, USSR: Life from the Other Side. The trouble stems from the
opening line of the song, "Your revolution will not happen between these thighs." The FCC has deemed that the
song features "unmistakable patently offensive sexual references."
Ninja Tune is encouraging fans and listeners to contact FCC Chairman Michael Powell at mpowell@fcc.gov or
1-888-225-5322 "to voice your concern and support independent music and free speech." KBOO-FM stands
by their decision to play the track, and has 30 days to respond to the formal complaint. Those who are interested
in reading the full report (including the lyrics in question) can do so at the FCC's official site."
friendlier than an Arkansas handshake........
another reason to telnet. email wiretapping
Some conversation at Bill's party about unusual grooves on vinyl records (that's the actual needle-vibrating, spiraling cut, not rhythmic "grooves"). Maybe Tom could compile the cites, but the guy I was trying to recall, who had a record with two different spindle holes, was Rhys Chatham. Check out his "Is Rock Dead" essay if (like me) you're nostalgic for the future circa 1990. I really thought ecstatic dance music was happening, but instead of My Bloody Valentine and the Orb taking over MTV, we got Nirvana (great as they were) and another cycle of the same old Rock myth (and nobody in the Detroit I lived in ever heard of Techno).
Was it someone they ate?
Woman visits tribe that ingested her ancestor.
Now them's fireworks!
A conversation with playwright Lauri Bortz
We can't keep up with her. I have to go to bed. She keeps going. You wake up and she's still at it. After 15 hours she's radiant.(via robotwisdom)
Nick hasn't been the same since his trip to Hyper Space