Epistemic Ingemination

Missed it. Yesterday was Greg Lake’s birthday.

Baby played me Lucky Man on the radio; I’ll just have to refer you to this. In any case; Happy Birthday. Changed my world, This English Man, he did.

Elizabeth Gilbert (who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, a really wonderful book my sweetie loaned to me) gave a TED talk earlier this year.

She gives a very comforting and illuminating review of the creative process, and how we approach it. If you have a spare twenty minutes, it’s a thought-opener for sure. Here ’tis:

Here is a separate link to it: http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog.

Hey! I’m 51 years old today. I’ve now lived to reach 17 three times over. Perhaps I’ll finally get out of my adolescence on the fourth round…

Kerrville was just wonderful. I have to recommend Blame Sally again to you; they are just extraordinary. One of those bands that keep growing. (My original review of their music was here… that one still gets hit regularly, and the reason is a google search for Blame Sally. It stands and applies as written, but it is also eclipsed by the same band three years later.) Visit their site; buy their music; support them. Artists like Blame Sally are the reason that I got into this business, and the reason that I am still in this business, and that is no hyperbole.

The whole Kerrville vibe is a tonic for the soul. It’s about music. Compared to, say, an NAB or NAMM, or the old New Music Seminar or the current SXSW, it’s striking. There aren’t any rock stars; there aren’t any poseurs; nobody is handing out glossy press packs and dropping names. It’s about music, and songwriting, and craftsmanship, and above all, Art. Eddie Wilson once said that the neatest thing about the old Armadillo was that “lifestyle was considered to be an art form.” That fits nicely. It was both a gift and a privilege to be a part of last weekend.

…

So… my birthday present to myself is going to consist of looking at the stars and pondering a completed half century. I’ll let you know if I find anything out.

Be excellent to each other.

Ryan and I went down to the Farmer’s Market at the Triangle yesterday, and bought a couple of one-pound organic grass fed ribeyes, just because. I grilled ‘em over pecan and mesquite w/ corn on the cob, and made some green beans alongside, also from the market. I’m still in afterglow; that steak was one of the three or four best I’ve ever eaten. Yum.

So, I’m off the Kerrville this weekend to do some audio work. If you have XM radio, I’ll be mixing live broadcasts on channel 15 — “The Village” — from 7:00 PM to midnight on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The lineup will be superb; one of my favorites, a band called “Blame Sally” is playing; it’ll be a pleasure to see them again. The Limeliters (!) are going to be there. Terri Hendrix, Bruce Robison, Trout Fishing in America, Ray Wylie… just a whole bunch of my favorites. I’m a very lucky guy to be able to get paid for doing this stuff. (Shh. Don’t tell them that I’d be willing to pay them for the privilege…)

Oh, yeah. I haven’t seen this week’s Chronicle yet, but I am pretty sure that they’ve published my letter to the editor on the new sound ordinance. It’s on their website, anyway. It’s just a cute li’l snarky thing; enjoy.

Finally, for some reason, a wonderful story popped into my head this morning. I searched the archives and found it on a twenty-year-old disk. I’ll leave you with that for now. See you on Monday.

The Fisherman and American Businessman

The American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied only a little while.

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time?

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You Should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But senor, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15-20 years.”

“But what then, senor?”

The American laughed and said that’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.

“Millions, senor? Then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

Go out there and do something kind and unexpected for someone today, okay?

Oh, good. Later this year, we get to observe D.C.’s most structured and formal of their various Kabuki dances — the Confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice.

We’re probably going to hear a lot about the usual Marbury vs. Madison and Plessy v. Ferguson, and Miranda vs. Arizona, Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, Dred Scott, and even President Nixon vs. the United States & Texas v. Johnson, etc., argumentum ad nauseam.

JFTR, I’d much rather see Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad discussed. Or, rather, its presumption of the Corporation as a legal entity having the same rights as a natural person.

We could use a bit of judicial activism on that one. Just a thought.

Big Magic

AISD is calling it the “North American Flu.” Very good. In some ways, we have a good school system here.

Ryan and I were talking about the swine flu thing the other day, and he opined that maybe we should have some disposable masks on hand, just in case it turned into a pandemic.

I was in Walgreen’s yesterday, and on a whim, went looking for them. Sold out. The shelves were bare. Kind of interesting…

I’ve talked to a lot of folks who travel overseas; they’re plentiful in my biz. And almost to a person, the subject eventually comes up that our country has no idea what really goes on with the rest of the human beings in this world; we’re 300 million people trapped inside a mirror ball, and all we can see is a distorted reflection of ourselves. The subject has always interested me, but since I’ve never been outside of the mirror ball, I can’t really speak to it with any insight that isn’t hearsay.

But now, a writer named Joe Bageant has done a fine job of articulating his thoughts on the matter. He was invited to speak at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago and a couple of other places, and his observations are very interesting. It’s worth your time to read the whole thing (and it’s pretty long) but here are some excerpts to illustrate the gist of his piece.

As psych students, most of you understand that there is no way you can escape being conditioned by your society, one way or another. You are as conditioned as any trained chicken in a carnival. So am I. When we go to the ATM machine and punch the buttons to make cash fall out, we are doing the same thing as the chickens that peck the colored buttons make corn drop from the feeder. You will not do a single thing today, tomorrow or the next day that you have not been generally indoctrinated and deeply conditioned to do — mostly along class lines.

…

Yet it all seems so normal. Certainly the psychologists who have prescribed so much Prozac that it now shows up in the piss of penguins, saw what they did as necessary. And the doctors who enable the profitable blackmail practiced by the medical industries see it all as part of the most technologically advanced medical system in the world. And the teacher, who sees no problem with 20% of her fourth graders being on Ritalin, in the name of “appropriate behavior,” is happy to have control of her classroom. None of these feel like dupes or pawns of a corporate state. It seems like just the way things are. Just modern American reality. Which is a corporate generated reality.

Given the financialization of all aspects of our culture and lives, even our so-called leisure time, it is not an exaggeration to say that true democracy is dead and a corporate financial state has now arrived. If you can get your head around that, it’s not hard to see an ever merging global corporate system masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. Or Japan for that matter. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information.

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Fortunately though, we can meaningfully differentiate our lives (at least in the Western sense) in the way we choose to employ our consciousness. Which is to say, to own our consciousness. If we exercise enough personal courage, we can possess the freedom to discover real meaning and value in our all-too-brief lives. We either wake up to life, or we do not. We are either in charge of our own awareness or we let someone else manage it by default. That we have a choice is damned good news.

The bad news is that we nevertheless remain one of the most controlled peoples on the planet, especially regarding control of our consciousness, public and private. And the control is tightening. I know it doesn’t feel like that to most Americans. But therein rests the proof. Everything feels normal; everybody else around us is doing the same things, so it must be OK. This is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of the soul, in which the prisoner identifies with the values of his or her captors, which in our case is of course, the American corporate state and its manufactured popular culture.

…

Yet, even if we think in that sort of outdated terminology, first, second and Third World, and most Americans do, then America is a second world nation. We have no universal free health care (don’t kid yourself about the plan underway), no guarantee of anything really, except competitive struggle with one another for work and money and career status, if you are one of those conditioned to think of your job and feudal debt enslavement as a “career.” High infant mortality rates, abysmal educational scores, poor diet, no national public transportation system, crumbling infrastructure, a collapsed economy, even by our own definition we are a second world nation.

But there is a shiny commercial skin that covers everything American, a thin layer of glossy throwaway technology, that leads the citizenry to believe otherwise. That slick commercial skin, the bright colored signs for Circuit City and The Gap (rest in peace), the clear plastic that covers every product from CDs to pre-cut vegetables, the friendly yellow and red wrapper on the burger inside its bright red paper box, the glossy branding of every item and experience. These things are the supposed tangible evidence that the slick conditioned illusion, the one I call The American Hologram, is indeed real. If it’s bright and shiny and new, it must be better. Right? It’s the complete opposite of tropical grunge.

There is much, much more, and I find it fascinating. I’ve traveled this country extensively; I’ve been to all lower forty eight states probably five times over, and seen much of the Canadian border provinces as well. But I’ve never been farther into Mexico than maybe three miles from the Rio Grande, and I’ve never been off of this continent at all, deep sea fishing notwithstanding.

Reading Mr. Bageant’s observations kind of makes me feel like the Neo character in The Matrix. There’s definitely studying to be done here.

Very Highly Recommended.

I’d like to commend to you a wonderful read (and a dangerous time sink, heh.) It’s an exchange over at The Well from last summer between Joe Nick Patoski and Ed Ward, generally about the writing of Joe Nick’s then-new Bio of Willie Nelson. But the nature of the two (both are serious Texas Music journalists) makes for some extraordinary reading.

Make a good cup of coffee and step into their world over at:
The WELL: Joe Nick Patoski: Willie Nelson, an Epic Life

Here’s a example of some of the places that it goes:

I like to cite the Doug Sahm composition, “At the Crossroads,” a song
he wrote in the late 60s when he was in San Francisco, pining for
Texas. Texas really is at the literal crossroads – halfway across the
US if you’re traveling the southern route, on the western edge of the
Old South, at the front door of the American west, sharing the longest
part of the border with Mexico, Latin America, and the Third World,
sufficiently far enough from either coast to be provincial, and big
enough to have its own distinct culture, of which music is the finest
of the fine arts. More important, it’s like Sir Doug said, “You just
can’t live in Texas, if you don’t got a lot of soul.”

And:

The music aspect is hard to pin down. Most folks associate Texas Music
with Willie, Waylon and the boys. The funny thing was, when Willie
started blowing up in Austin in the early 70s, no one knew or used the
phrase “Texas Music.” Since then, it’s become a sound, a radio format
that’s popular in these parts, and an all-purpose appellation that can
cover anything from Texas country like Willie through Pat Green and
Roger Creager, to the Texas tenor sound in jazz, jump blues as first
defined by T-Bone Walker, the sophisticated R n B of Bobby Bland, the
country blues of Mance Lipscomb and Blind Lemon Jefferson, the city
songster blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins which can be directly linked to the
singer-songwriter tradition popularized by Townes Van Zandt, Guy
Clark, Nanci Griffith, Robert Earl Keen, and Lyle Lovett. Texas Music
in the rock and roll realm is Buddy Holly, who invented his style in
the isolated vacuum that is Lubbock Texas, Roky Erickson and the 13th
Floor Elevators, who in the great Texas tradition went ‘way overboard
in their interpretation of psychedelic music (understand, we’re crazy
from the heat), ZZ Top, who took the boogie beat to the great unwashed,
and modernists from Joe Ely to At the Drive In to Future Clouds and
Radar. Then there’s the Mexican influence on Tex-Mex, Tejano and
conjunto and even pop (think: “Tequila” by the Champs, “Talk to Me” by
Sunny and the Sunliners, or even Augie Meyer’s “Hey Baby, Ke Pa So”).
From Lydia Mendoza and Narciso Martinez who made records for Bluebird
back in the 1920s to Little Joe y La Familia, Selena, Flaco Jimenez,
and Esteban Jordan, the Jimi Hendrix of the Accordion, the Latin
element of Texas Music is as old as the tradition of the corrido, which
spread news through Spanish-speaking communities in song instead of in
print or on television. Corridodistas in San Antonio are still writing
topical songs today and having them played on KEDA AM, Radio Jalapeno,
the only conjunto station in the nation.

And:

Texas culture is broad based because there are so many cultures
within, but the essence is defined by the three traditional cultures -
African-American, Anglo-American, and Mexican-American. The voice of
each has been loud enough and distinctive enough to be heard,
regardless of segregation laws and other social pressures, and an
essential element of each has been music, the one art immigrants could
bring with them and keep with him.

Musically, Texas culture is based on stringed instruments and
storytelling – the songster – with an openness to adapt to technology
and outside trends (thus, the accordion embraced by Mexican conjuntos
and Steve Jordan interpreting Vanilla Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hanging On”
back in the late 60s as accordeon psicodelico; or Willie doing
Stardust). That crossroads thing is important since there’s so many
musical crosscurrents at work, so is the willingness to try something
new and completely different.

Non-musically that culture best translates into openness (visitors
always remark we’re so friendly; wait til you get to know us), being
loud and obnoxious, which I believe is partly due to our tendency to go
crazy from the heat, being iconoclastic (read the passage on the
original Iconoclast, William Cowper Brann of Waco), individualistic,
ambitious, persuasive (there’s that salesman thing again), and willing
to take risks, which goes back to being on the frontier; back then,
you’d have to have been crazy to settle anywhere west of the 98th
parallel, and yet people did.

Loyalty plays a huge role, too, but good loyalty, like Willie’s
devotion to his band and crew and vice versa, rather than blind loyalty
that fake Texans like Bush exhibit.

In a way, this book is trying to undo the damage done by Bush to the
Texan brand. He ain’t one, he never was one, and if he passes, it’s in
fake places like Washington DC or Dallas (I can say that because I’m
from Fort Worth).

It’s just a wonderful, freewheeling conversation between two noted Texas Music History Geeks, and I’ve found it to be fascinating. Had to take a minute to tell you about it; I still have several more hours of reading to do…

“I love creative dry spells, because it means I am subconsciously preparing to write something. I relax, do things, see friends, have dinners. It’s like being pregnant: one day, pop.”

– Steve Martin

My fellow citizens,

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many.

They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America – they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control — and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort — even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages.

We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment — a moment that will define a generation — it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence — the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed — why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

“Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

R.I.P, Eartha Kitt and Harold Pinter.

Mark Jason Dominus’ extraordinary “Higher Order Perl” is now available for free online, bless his heart. It is a twisty, turny maze of wonderfulness, a text (sometimes) about how to write programs that write programs, and will make your brain strong (and possibly drive you nuts, falling down an infinite-recursion hall of mirrors.)

Highly recommended, in a sort of applied Gödel, Escher, Bach sort of way.

Site Here.

PDF here.

You’ll never look at lexical closures and variable suicide problems in the same way again. Heh.

When making Beef Stew, if you add a finely cubed fresh beet, it will add a wonderfully complimentary and earthy flavor to the dish.

It will also color your Beef Stew a truly striking Florescent Magenta, which can prove to be anathematic to the less sophisticated diners at your table.

Just sayin’.

Yep, had to look again, but it is snowing in Austin Texas as of 11:00 PM.

Neato.

Brand new. The Monty Python Channel On Youtube.

Let’s revisit. How perfect can six and a half minutes be?

My email spell-checker regularly suggests that “Obama” should be corrected to “Alabama.”

I find this to be highly amusing.

Look at the cross until the purple dots go away.

Bonus trivia: there is no green dot.

I wanted all things to make sense
So we’d be happy, instead of this.

Vonnegut/Ambrosia — “Nice, Nice, Very Nice”

The “CEO” President has run another of his “companies” into the ground. One may say what one cares to say about the guy, but inconsistency is not one of his issues.