I wouldn’t ordinarily describe so much firepower as, well, adorable. In this case, though, I think I will.
Adorable.
Still, it’s not hard to see why Sony didn’t go this route.
And yes, this was simply an excuse to play with the new embed feature from Google Video. Wheeeeee!
Another entry in the annals of short but surreal conversations I’ve had on the streets of Berkeley:
Man Evidently Craving a Cigarette: Hey man, do you have a light?
zalm: Sorry, sir, I don’t.
MECC: (sarcastically) What about the one in your head?
Hours later, I still have no idea what that means.
David James Duncan has a short meditation in the latest issue of Orion.
Here’s an excerpt:
On big Montana trout rivers, you often see fly fishers trying to do great things by fishing heroically, making great long casts out into the giant flow as if they’re thinking Operation Infinite Trout! But we can do no great things. So those of us who like to actually catch trout scarcely glance at the vast flow. Instead we parse the river, slicing off a tiny ribbon known as a feeding lane, where you target a single trout repeatedly rising. In huge western rivers, three or four hundred feet across, I’m talking about a ribbon six inches in width. Yet this ribbon, believe me, is where all the rising trout get hooked.
A fly-fisherly strategy for those who yearn to make a difference: Every morning, look for “ribbons.” One small thing you sense could be done with full-on attentiveness and love. And after you finish it, look for another. Ad infinitum.
I have no faith in any kind of political party, left, right, or centrist. I have boundless faith in love. In keeping with this faith, the only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist, or activist is by giving little or no thought to things such as saving the planet, achieving world peace, or stopping neocon greed. Great things tend to be undoable things. Small things, lovingly done, are always within our reach.
Politics may be love’s opposite. Politics are about such great things that they somehow end up being about nothing. Politics, increasingly, are about winning elections at any cost, via the violent manipulation of human opinion. But no climate of mere opinion is earnest enough, or even embodied enough, to answer our biological and spiritual predicament from moment to moment in daily life.
Sure, the Cheney-shot-a-78-year-old-man-in-the-face story is like so last week, but I loves me some headline malaprops and this story just keeps on giving.
For example, Tim noticed that Forbes and the AP teamed up for this beauty:
Sorta makes the Vice President seem like M. Emmet Walsh in The Jerk, doesn’t it?
My friend bestman loves these almost as much as I do. When I sent him the previous headline, he responded by offering another gem….
In last week’s Cheney-shot-a-78-year-old-man-in-the-face coverage, MSNBC ran a subheadline that probably deserves a story of its own:
I think this is what those in the news biz call “burying the lede.”
Y’know, I was going to blather for a bit today about how this site is now one year, 305 posts and 121,585 words old. About how a year ago, some encouragement and maybe even a little taunting from other folks I was reading at the time led me to launch this puppy with a few ill-advised piscene puns.
Which is fun and all. But today marks another anniversary of sorts, one that blows my one-year-old Salmon out of the water.
Ten years ago today, a few friends and I converged on Nashville for a set of concerts by a half dozen or so bands that we all liked. Some of the friends I’d known for years. Many of them I’d only known through trading tapes of live shows.
I probably didn’t brief a few of my friends well enough (sorry guys), but the primary reason I made the trip was to meet one person in particular. We’d gotten to know each other a bit over email and ytalk (remember ytalk? or pine? or mosaic? damn, the interweb was young). She lived in the city I was fixin’ to move to after graduation, and she seemed like someone I would enjoy hanging out with at shows.
Truth be told, though, I was hoping for a bit more than that.
I had no idea.
Ten years later, she’s my best friend, my greatest joy, my biggest encouragement — my wife.
And that, my friends, is worth celebrating.
I’ve seen a gazillion bus signs for this extravaganza: Finding Nemo… On Ice!
What good am I if I’m like all the rest,
If I just turned away, when I see how you’re dressed,
If I shut myself off so I can’t hear you cry,
What good am I?— Bob Dylan, “What Good Am I?“
In one of my earliest posts last February, Dylan’s probing question led me to confess that I lacked a good personal response to the homeless people I meet every day on the streets of Berkeley.
I’m not sure I’ve formulated any better answers after a year, but I have tried to be more helpful, more bold, more compassionate. Most of the time, though, I fall far short of anything remotely resembling loving generosity.
One suggestion that Kevin offered at the time was that I should keep a few fast food gift certificates in my pocket so I could offer something tangible to someone who said they needed a meal.
That’s a suggestion that I never acted on. Until yesterday, that is.
Well, sort of.
As I was walking to grab some lunch, I was not surprised to be approached by a homeless person. But this bedraggled older man started things off a bit unexpectedly:
“Do you eat at McDonald’s?” he asked.
“Um, not usually,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”
He thrust a set of McDonald’s gift certificates towards me. I thought that perhaps he was afraid to go into the store to redeem them. I’ve known other homeless folks who’ve been treated pretty shabbily by local restaurants, so I could understand why that might be the case. So I asked him if he’d like me to go into McDonald’s to buy him some lunch.
He answered quickly, as if he feared that any pause in his speech would give me an opportunity to exit stage right: “No, sir. I was actually hoping that you’d buy these certificates from me. I don’t like McDonald’s, so I don’t have much use for these. What I’d really like is to get me a big ol’ chili dog.”
As much as I hate to admit it, all the old suspicions tumbled back into my head…. Someone gave him these certificates as a gift, isn’t he being ungrateful? What if he wants to use the money for whatever his destructive habit of choice might be? Why isn’t McDonald’s good enough for someone who’s hungry?
Shameful, really.
The thing is, I don’t like McDonald’s either. How could I fault him for sharing my distaste? And while I’ve certainly known people whose lives were ripped apart by alcohol or crack, what did it say about me that I assumed something similar about the life of this man? Was I willing to make such a dignity-robbing assumption just because he was poor and black?
Hell, maybe the dude just wanted a chili dog.
If I wasn’t pounding away at a deadline at work, maybe I would have bought him that chili dog. Maybe I would have sat and eaten lunch with him. Maybe I would have learned something from him. Even if it was only his name.
Waiter, do you have a table for two dim reflections of the imago dei?
In the end, I bought the certificates from him and gave him a buck or two extra. I wished him well and sent him off to his chili dog or who-the-hell-knows-what-else with a smile.
I guess it was the least I could do.
And now I’ve got some McDonald’s gift certificates to give to the next person who tells me that he’s hungry.
Andy Whitman experiences the glory that is Sigur Rós and wonders if this is what it will be like around the throne of God. Can’t wait that long to find out? Check out God’s house band on Conan. (via)
I don’t understand the Grammys.
I mean, I really enjoyed U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and The Arcade Fire’s Funeral. They were among my favorite albums.
Of 2004.
Seriously, can anyone explain to me why these albums are even eligible for Grammys in 2006? Hell, when Funeral was released, Bush and Kerry hadn’t even had their first debate yet.
This is only one of the many, many reasons I just can’t bring myself to care about the Grammys.
But in their honor, I give you a random selection of some of my favorite tracks of 2006. And by 2006, I of course mean 2004.
Mega Church: The Game! “With network play enabled, you can steal members from other churches and earn points just like you saved them yourself.” Why oh why isn’t there a Mac version?
As long as we’re enjoying unlikely trailers, here’s another: Brokeback to the Future. (via)
Liz Hickok is a local artist who works in a rather unusual medium.
Jell-O.
That’s right, she constructs scale models of various San Francisco cityscapes and landmarks. Out of Jell-O.
The resulting photographs are just dazzling. And yet as someone who lives a mile or two from a pretty significant fault, I find these images to be fairly disconcerting.
No, wait. ‘Disconcerting’ isn’t exactly the word I’m looking for.
Oh, I know what it was…
Terrifying.
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