I want you to picture something.
You work at a toy'r'us.

it's the saturday before christmas

you don't have any of the cool buzz lightyears that in the ad(and you only got three when you did have them any way)

the boss took the day off (presumably he didn't think it was an important day)

he also left you with less staff than you would have on a normal saturday.(approximately half of which are B-players you wouldn't even have hired much less have still working.)

everything profitable is locked up so you customers can't help themselves (even assuming that they knew enough about the product to)

every eighth customer tramples the six patient(they at least know that they should be embarassed to be shopping at the last minute) customers to blurt out "is this the right doll for my kid!?"

you have a slightly misanthropic nature in the best of crowds.

with that picture in your head I am going to bed.

I have a bimbobox. It's not like the standard ones from chrysler that are made out of a car. It's the chevy astro flavor wit light truck underpinnings. It has a relatively new motor and the frame and floor is perfect. The doorskins and rocker panels have succumbed to the great cancer that eventually claims all vehicles here in the Rust belt. For quite awhile I possessed this minivan without actually using it. Part of it was financial. I just didn't want to spend the money to fix it,but some of it was that I didn't really put being a bimbobox driver at the top of my priority list.

I am here to tell you folks I was wrong(insert social distortion tune here). Minivans are cool. you can load three kids, wife, and all their assorted paraphernalia into the van and go to the beach. Without drama. You can make it so none of the kids can even touch each other. they are cool.

plus you sit up high enough that you can look down into other vehicles. In western new york in the summer, that's a pretty nice perk

Have Imentioned that I hate the heat? In case I haven't i'll mention it again.

I have been peering internally to try and figure out where my nearly unbreakable obsession with going to see the new TombRaider. I desperately want to see it. The problem is this: My wife and I get out to see slightly less the two movies a year. I don't even want to ask her to go see this one. It's not that she won't enjoy it, but if she gets to go out to only one movie each year, she likes it to be something with substance.

So the question becomes why the obsession?

The knee jerk answer is Angelina but that doesn't really make the cut. My wife is at least that sexy and is married to me instead of billybob. The next obvious answer is the obvious eyecandy and effects. But I'm not that powerfully motivated by F/X either.

And then it came to me. Molly.

yes that Molly. the one he wrote out of the script when he realized that the movie would suck and he would lose the rights to use her again. And since Johnny dies before neuromancer even begins nobody cared about losing him.

"You want to get out of here, boss? People are starting to stare." She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.

How can you not fall in love with a girl like that. That sexy lithe sweet little thing, who just happens to be armed to the teeth, and ready to kill to protect you. Gibson isn't alone in his creation. Heinlein wrote Friday. parts of her trickled into America Shaftoe for Neal Stephenson.

So how did we(I say we because I know I am not alone) get this little obsession? This need for a girl who is sex, violence, death. and savior all rolled into one. For me I think I know the answer.

I first met Molly when I was fourteen or fifteen. I didn't fit in in school. I got my ass kicked on a regular basis(this was before I discovered the secret of not getting your ass kicked all the time. Once, just once, you have to react out of proportion to the offense. Billy Joe Jock hits you in some kind of locker room bullying, hit him in the side of the face with the combination lock in your hand. when he goes down hit him again. once he is on the ground just keep kicking him, don't stop till someone comes to pull you off. get him once more in the face with you booted foot as they pull you off. No jock ever hit's you like that again. the verbal abuse will continue but always from a distance.) I had been a practicing pacifist for years, even to the point that I wouldn't hit back in a fight. but somewhere inside there was a thing growing. A thing built of a pubescent male fantasy. the rescue thing. the sex thing. the need for a girl who's just not like the other girls.

In college(the first attempt) I had a friend who taught me to fence. She was good, competed nationally, the whole bit. Even after I reached the point where I was good, my six inches of reach advantage didn't mean i ever won a match with her. While she was very attractive, the sex thing just wasn't there for us. But the violence, that was there. In spades.

years go by. I meet a nearly perfect(although decidedly non violent) woman. Marry her, have kids and eight years into that it just keeps getting better. but somewher the is still that little fantasy part that knows I betrayed Molly. And that is one little girl you don't want to be betraying.

Maybe I'll go see TombRaider alone.

old news
after you read that go read this

I often tell people that there is no better place in the world to live than western new york. you get four perfect seasons. there are things to do. the apples and peaches are better here than anywhere else on the planet. unlike many people who might make this claim, i have actually been other places but chose to come back here.

there is one little thing i forgot to mention. It can get hot in the summer. like alabama hot. like 90 degrees fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity. one thing i can say about winter; you can always put more clothes on. after a certain point you can't get any more naked in the summer. hopefully this weather will be mercifully brief.

Here are some of the things I have done in the last few days.

I took a ride delivering a sailboat upriver and got caught in a vale of dogwoods so thick it looked like flurries.

I drove the family communal one ton stake bed Chevy truck out to the very small town where my inlaws live. circumstances dictated that I drive the stuck down the center of town, climb out of the truck wearing grease-stained clothes and walk into the combination gas station/subshop/grocery store. I am not sure if I can convey to you just how white trash I looked at that moment.

I brought the old chevy astro van that my father in law gave my wife(she promptly failed to take into account the small item of having to put back the oil that leaked and wound up with bits of crankshaft all over the road) in to the garage that one of my little brother's friends just purchased. Since the incident with the crankshaft the van has had another engine installed, but it's never run. Because I was constantly travelling while this was going on I was never close to the details and never really put the effort into figuring out what the problem was that I should have. Well, the hard unfortunate truth is that my brother's friend not only figured it out in less than twenty minutes when three other mechanics failed he did it whilst continuing to run all the paying customers through the shop. Frank's da man. I mean it. If you live in the area he has the old sunoco station just south of the 290 on Niagara Falls Blvd.

I became involved in the barter economy. See it works like this. My brother(who is a detail obsessed gunsmith who needs a shop) builds a very nice "AT&T" rifle for Frank out of parts that Frank pays for. Frank gets an incredibly accurate long range bolt action rifle for the price of raw materials. I provide a bunch of free semi-skilled labor to my brother while he builds some furniture on contract. My brother eventuall collects severall thousand dollars for the furniture. I get my van fixed for the price of the parts. Nobody spends as much money as it really costs (except the furniture buyer who is actually getting a price only couple hundred dollars less than they would have paid elsewhere). I got a running van for the price of the parts and access to a really nice shop when I need it for the other vehicles. none of this ever exists in the money economy. so I with the assistance of some other people enriched all of our lives while reducing the GNP proportionately.

I took my two younger boys to the hot dog stand on the canal that I very occasionally went to whe I was a kid.

A kid I knew was killed this morning. Granted I only knew him in the tangential way that you know the older brother of your best friend's girlfriend. But I live in a small town and we all know each other at least a little.

He was a bright kid. A bit prone to railing on about the injustices in the world but bright nonetheless. He was a skillful and caring hunter. His dad and he didn't get along very well. He adored his little sister. Who adored him even more.

He voluntarily served his country in a war which he did not believe in. Unlike the Vietnam Veterans, he came back to flags, fanfare and a hero's welcome. and a minimum wage job with no real future.

He was angry with the way he had been used in the gulf war. He was angry with the way our government treated certain bizarre religious sects. He was angry with the way our government treated people who were paranoid and afraid of the government(I interrupt this otherwise terse monologue to remind you that just because you are paranoid doesn't mean you are wrong). He was angry at the way small farm families were being treated at the hands of the corporations who actually had influence with our government.

He was just plain angry at a lot of things. Then he did something stupid. He let that anger fester into a rage while he waited for somebody else to do something about the things he was angry about. "They", to noone's surprise, didn't do a damn thing.

Then, to the surprise of practically everyone who ever knew him, he murdered 168 or so people.

There are, however, some things to remember on the event of "we the People"'s retribution:

Our government is still guilty of everything that he accused it.

there are lots of other angry ragefilled wackjobs out there

most of them have good justifications for their rage

we, the common people still have little or no access to government even at a local level(don't believe me? go down to your local school board and try to get a copy of their bylaws and policies without going through hours of paperwork and eventually having to threat a FOIA suit)

most of us would agree that it is better to effect change in a manner which does not kill people, but it only takes one person to screw it up for the rest of us.

our federal agents are fortunate that with the current administration's new focus on removing the first and fourth ammendment rights of U.S. citizens that they will be less likely to meet an untimely death at the hands of a very scared fourteen year boy. Fans of the first and fourth ammendments tend to be less heavily armed that do fans of the second.

No matter what the media and other related spin doctors say, Timothy McVeigh was not a White Supremacist Christian Identity wackjob. Whatever kind of wackjob he was, he was one of the most vehemently antiracist people I've ever met.

p.s. lest any of you readers worry about my state of mind. Don't worry!! I'm not angry or going to blow anything up. Not only do I have a wife and three kids to care for, but in my old age I find that I am too feeble to carry on Rage for enough time to listen to a Ministry album all the way through let alone plan anything destructive.

here's a search query I like and look there I am number six on the list. but from number one one the list:

The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM's annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM's corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30.

And that boys and girls is just the economic havoc they cause. wait till you see the long term ecoligical damage from their monoculture pesticide and chemical fertilizer intense one size fits all approach to agribusiness does. in another decade or so most of the "breadbasket to the world" the midwest united states will be capable of growing slightly less food than the sahara.

ok I missed the memorial day post. i was busy doing stuff in meatspace. here it is late, but here.

i am just tired of the nonsense i heard this year about veterans on memorial day. it's not that i don't appreciate or love veterans. those of you who know me in meatspace and a great many of you who know me in cyberspace know this. I have spent years and still spend hours each month listening and doing what i can to heal the aching minds and souls of veterans. it's just that we already have a national day to remember them by. it's called veteran's day.

this is memorial day. it's for remembering(memorial) those fallen in combat. by definition a veteran is one who didn't fall in combat. they survived and became veterans of the war. whatever war it happened to be. on memorial day we honor the ones who didn't come home or if they did it was in a bodybag. there have been quite a lot of them over the years.

so i spent some time thinking about them.

that and loperamide HCl is a miracle drug.

something happened today to make me realize just how strong my wife is.

some background. counting today I have puked less than dozen times in my nearly three decades of existence here. my aforementioned nearly perfect wife has some health problems. they are incredibly complicated and not really something i want to talk about here. one of the worst complications is something that is remarkably similar to but not the same as IBS. the gist is that when the trigger event happens(a particular food, stress, etc) her body stops at the point where her stomach joins her intestines. every thing above that point is ejected immediately out the top, and everything below is sent very rapidly out the bottom. the whole process takes about an hour. it takes days to recover from the effects.

some time last night or this morning I ate something that didn't agree with me. I am not sure exactly was it was but i have my suspicions. the end result was that the above event happened to me for the first time in my life. I can honestly say that this was the single most unpleasant physical experience i've ever had. take note that this statement comes from a guy who has been laying on the ground unfortunately conscious while six much bigger guys kicked the shit out of him; from a guy that has had the cinch strap from his saddle break while ascending a rocky streambed and in the resulting chaos had his beloved quarterhorse step on him at least five times. this was much worse than either of those things. I survived this but not without a lot of whining and bad language.

the point to this story is that this horrible physical ordeal that i just went through is something she puts up with on a regular basis and with virtually no whining on her part.

oh yeah and opera5 for linux kicks ass! for all the hard core open source zealots who go berserk about the qt libraries. look at netscape and then look at opera. then go shut up.

one of the things about writing is that you have to do it almost every day if you are gonna be any good at it. right now I don't have that possibility. maybe in august or september. but the cliche "make hay when the sun shines" is just what I have to do right now. still I have things to say about what is happening in the world almost every day. where I can I'll talk about it here but else I might dig up some old thing i wrote.

so in honor of the morons from the earth liberation front getting headlines again. the only thing I really have to add is that these assholes will generate so much bad press by doing stupid and counterproductive thing that now, when the nation really needs sensible productive eco terrorists they will cause the focus of law enforcement types on the whole subject.

and for those of you who might be looking to me for guidance in just what needs to be done? Forget it! I have a wife and kids and just can't do that kind of stuff anymore.

sorry I haven't posted for a month. I've been doing lots of thinking and the like but find that much of it I can't post here. work is ... well, work and i can't go into any detail here lest my former boss(who stuck his neck out to get me here) think i am whining. There are things going on in our country that I am concerned about that I also can't talk about here. I need some things.

A literary agent with connections to publishers that can get shelf space and don't mind publishing really thought provoking and controversial fiction.

about seventy five thousand dollars, although that could potentially be handled by the above.

a web host immune to subpeonas from the united states

about three weeks off to finish the novel for the above purposes

As some of you may or may not know my wife and I are working through the process of building a boat. We are very early in the process. Nothing is actually built yet. We have a design that is almost perfect for our needs. We have had discussions with the designer about what it will cost in design fees to make it perfect. and then what it will cost extra to get all the hull plates rendered into CNC files to be cut out on a giant plasma cutter.

Now, in theory, I am trained in boat design and building. In fact I have designed and built boats. However, they have all been under twenty feet and made of wood. Plywood mostly. In fact I am a pretty good small plywood boat designer and builder. The problem here is: I know jack about designing and building steel boats. I know slightly more than jack about putting interiors in steel boats. I have fallen deeply in love with the concept of a well designed and constructed Steel yacht.

So I have gone to a designer who:

Has four decades or so of building boats

Steel ones

tugs, small island freighters, and private yachts that resemble same.

that has lived a board a boat of some sort for most of those four decades

makes a habit of designing interiors that meant to be lived in not just visited on the weekend

has some experience in the type of construction I wish to do

has a good relationship with the companies who will do the thingd I want done.

has a stock plan that is within five or six hours of drafting time of the boat I want.

His name is Jay Benford.
There is a wonderful website for a boat that may be the first one built the way that I intend to. They detail it in pretty decent photos on the site. The actual constructor of the boat was Custom Steel Boats They have some wonderful photos on their site and a pretty description of the process used. The gist of it is this. Somebody (like this company) takes the plans and lofts (which means make fullsize patterns for the pieces of the boat) them into NC files for use by a company that specializes in cutting out bits of steel with computer controlled plasmacutters. the company who cuts them out would ideally cut the steel out of pieces that are pre sandblasted and preprimed with a weldable primer. This means that when you finish the boat you don't have to sandblast the entire boat, just the weld seams, saving both the labor and the problem of what to do with a hull with several hundred pounds of sand in the bilge. the cutting company then ships the whole lot to you (or your builder) with appropriate tab A into Slot B markings for your assembly. Once it welded and the seams are blasted and re-primed, the bilge sump is coated with several coats of epoxy to keep the boat from rusting from the inside out(which, incidentally is the most common way steel yachts die). The entire rest of the interior is covered with a couple inches of sprayed in place foam(not altogether unlike the stuff you might us to seal that bad patch of siding behind the gutters where nobody can see( go ahead deny it but you and I both know it's there)). The foam does several things all of them good:

it also seals the steel and prevents it from rusting from the inside out,

it prevents most of the condensation that would normally occur in a metal boat(many people who have uninsulated metal boats refer to the interior as "the rainforest"),

it keeps the interior cool in the summer and warm in the winter( surely you must know someone that has licked a steel flagpole in the winter?)

The exterior of the boat then gets primed with an epoxy primer and painted above the waterline with a pretty two part polyurethane, and below the waterline with a paint nasty enough to kill barnacles and the like(I should probably note at this point that I make my living selling just this sort of stuff and I'm damn good at it). Now you have something that looks like a boat. Now you get to spend about twice as much time as you have spent so far fitting in an interior putting a rig on it, probably an engine too unless you are some kind of nutjob purist. So let's make it three times as much as you have put in so far. But right now it looks like a boat so go ahead and woohoo if you need to.

In the process of researching this whole process I felt I needed to learn how to weld. I kind of know now but just the sort of stuff you do on a farm on an antique arc welder that is powered by the engine of the very same tractor you are trying to weld. certainly not the sort of professional look I would be going for here. So here are a bunch of links that I found to larn ya the theory and practice of bonding metals.

For those of you that don't know I have recently switched from my previously and tenaciously held view that privacy is a must have freedom that is to be defended at all cost with every thing from crypto to violent revolution. I have switched over to David Brin's image of a Transparent Society". It's a concept put forth convincingly in both his novel Earth and his nonfiction book The Transparent Society. Go out and take the time to read these (and I do mean time. Earth took me two weeks and I go through books like the folks down on genessee street go through Crack), but the gist of the idea is this. In a world where noone has privacy not even and ESPECIALLY governments we could all trust that what we say is happening is really happening and begin to hold individuals, corporations, and governments responsible for their actions. With accountability comes a sort of freedom we have only imagined in large scale but have never seen. The anarchists dream society. You can do whatever you want as long as you are willing to be held accountable for your actions. You can even listen to an hour and not quite twenty minutes of Neal Stephenson trying to sell Brin's idea over dinner at CFP in Toronto if you are still not sold on the idea.
Now I don't for even one second think this will be an easy task. even brin depicted the rest of us bombing Switzerland flat as Kansas in an attempt get them to sign the treaty of openness. I think something not quite as drastic would be needed for our government to let go of it's pathological need to keep secrets as well. In the meantime there are some people already starting to push in the own quiet way for openness.
Now there is one character in the news lately who has taken this to quite an extreme. Unfortunately for both him and us, he is possessed of a case of terminal can'tshuthisdamntrapitis and has not surprisingly fallen afoul of the feds. They have an extremely weak interstate stalking case against him for attempting to collect just exactly the sort of information that would be needed in the hands of citizens to make good decisions in holding our civil servants accountable for their actions. Unfortunate for him because he is probably going to go down for a crime he either didn't commit or isn't actually a crime. unfortunate for us because those of us less extreme in our views will have this awful precedent set and it will make it much more difficult for us to assemble accountability mechanisms that don't involve hunting down and killing bad people.
There are still some permanent accountability options but I'll leave that discussion to another post.
Given these type of situations I am not about to be giving up my encryption tools just this moment.

about a month or so ago I was reading a piece by Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba(it's available for the palm from Memoware. It was one of the last things he had published before the Company had his head and hands buried separately. For those of you not familiar with Che and his writings He was brilliant man who hated several sorts of go for the jugular capitalism. In the part of argentina he grew up in he was exposed to it from several directions. His father was at different points in his life a wealthy landowner and at other points a shiftless jobless poor layabout.(some of this was brought about by the failed boatbuilding business owned by his father's cousin German Frers(yes that German Frers)). Any how he was a brilliant guerilla organizer who in spite of a pretty terrible asthma condition was also a passable jungle fighter in his own right. He will probably be forever remembered as the guy who got Fidel a job. If you look deeper you will find that he wasn't much of a communist. Fellow traveller yeah probably but in fact a pretty shitty marxist. (damn good thing too!, as that crap certianly didn't work out like they thought) Any how the point of this whole intro is to highlight a few quotes from this last little article and point out that as Che was predicting how communism would fail That he turned out to be right fucking on the money.

We can attempt to graft elm trees so that they bear pears, but at the same time we must plant pear trees.

Translated "you can remove despots and even temporarily replace a despot with another more to your liking but if you don't have a better plan you're gonna starve"

Our job is to keep the present generation, maladjusted by its conflicts, from becoming perverted and perverting the new generations. We do not want to create salaried workers docile to official thinking nor "fellows" who live under the wing of the budget, exercising freedom in quotation marks.

I don't even think I need to translate that one. Right on the money.

If a man thinks that in order to devote his entire life to the revolution, he cannot be distracted by the worry that one of his children lacks a certain article, that the children's shoes are in poor condition, that his family lacks some necessary item, with this reasoning, the seeds of future corruption are allowed to filter through.

It is awful tough to continue a revolution when you have infront of you solid proof that while you have thrown of the yoke of oppression you're children are starving and those still "oppressed" are having no trouble feeding their kids and indeed even buying them jeans and playstations.


Come to think of it maybe it wasn't the CIA that had him wacked. It might've been Fidel.

yes it's been awhile. and now you're going to get a great big pile of linked goodness.

While we are on the topic of thieving intellectual property I have a few more links. the first is more flash than substance right now but it does have a copy of the CIA's Psychops in Guerilla warfare. You can go out to a bookstore and buy this ( I know that at least a decade ago my university bookstore carried it) but if you're like me you might just have the attitude that your tax dollars already paid for it and damnit why should I have to pay for it.
the second is a neat idea of open content with a liscence similar to the GNU LPL. Lovely idea but the implementation is a little pedantic. I'd like to see something similar but without so much of the baggage that academics carry into the life.