abating the inevitable

the above photo is pretty much famous now. it is significant for two reasons: one, it's me and and my nephew phoenix when he was almost 1, reading hustler at my brother's house when he lived in LA. today (10.10) is his second birthday, so happy birthday to my main little man. two: the author of this photograph of infamy is my best friend sarah, who went to LA with me to see a taping of the price is right. today (10.10) is also her birthday, so happy birthday, sarah.

i'm trying to get back updating this thing because i know nobody is reading it and i need some exercise in futility that doesn't have anything to do with: (a) trying to meet interesting women in brooklyn; (b) the fanzine; (c) the fanzine's long-drawn-out tax status; (d) cutting my own hair; (e) national and world politics; (f) internet pornography. i always try to update this blog late at night, so before i get distracted by (f), i'm trying to force myself to do an update for all you non-readers out there. first, i updated the maine trip finally with some brief observations of peak's island and my times spent there. two, i don't want to take away from the post i made earlier today, with the always great billy bragg doing "waiting for the great leap forward" (updated for these times) on craig ferguson's show a couple nights ago, so i'm leaving that as its own post. watch it and have a better day.

i have a couple short pieces lined up for fanzine this week: one—actually both—related somewhat to the billy bragg video. they're still brewing somewhat, but i need to get them done pretty quickly before the news goes stale. i wrote up a couple of news items about them on fanzine. one is an extension of my piece on the north korean ICBM test this summer and a somewhat satirical look at their recent nuclear test (was it or wasn't it?) and bill o'reilly's assertion on monday that north korea and iraq/iran (to him, they're the same country... so probably about half the country also believes this... FOX is where most of the country learned osama bin laden and saddam hussein were brothers-in-arms right? that they both planned 9.11? right?) are attempting to influence next month's elections by increasing violence and detonating nuclear devices. terrorists would love to defeat bush and weaken america, and installing democrats into congress and the house of representatives by any means necessary is a surefire way to do that. democrats, in the essence of o'reilly's argument here, are just like terrorists—putting them into office means a weaker america that's more open to terrorist attacks, and the two go neatly hand-in-hand as a sort of puppet regime, one can suppose. and following this line of reasoning, so are denny hastert and his fumbling crew of clowns.

meanwhile, there are over 2700 U.S. soldiers dead in iraq (we don't even bother counting the tens of thousands of dead iraqis as a result of the war), and millions of people back in the states have been affected by their absence, deaths, post-war trauma, the futility of fighting a war we are increasingly realizing we cannot win and despite numerous official assertions to this effect as well as the fact that we can't turn back, our republican leaders hold fast to their (unfounded) ideals and (wrong) beliefs that ultimately we will triumph.


take comfort, all you worried souls. we got this: flat daddies, almost as good as the real thing.

i also want to do a closer look at the YouTube/Google merger. Google bought YouTube, the source for this blog's, and countless others' video links and sourcing, on Monday for $1.65billion (mostly in stock options), harkening back the to early nineties' dot.com explosion and securing google's place as the leader of pretty much everything public on the Internet. however, it also means a lot of combing for the new YouTube, since companies have been dying to sue the fuck out of them for copyright infringement pretty much since they started (think of how many tv/movie clips you've dug around and linked from there... hell there's five of them on my myspace acct. already and i just posted another one earlier) and now that they're owned by Google, the biggest moneymaker in recent virtual history, there needs to be some big changes if Google expects to keep most of that money. it's likely YouTube will lose some of its teeth while under the responsibility of Google—even if they had enough money to handle the thousands of copyright infringement suits, they probably wouldn't. i like Google, and i love YouTube, but this brings G one step closer to owning the Internet.

what the fuck. i'm leaving myself pretty open to getting my shit stolen, but everybody is a fucking "writer" these days. which is probably why i can't get a real job. blogging has made everyone a writer, everyone is their own editor. this is why i see listings for jobs that will pay me 50 cents a page for articles. fuck this. give me a real fucking job.

oh yeah, got exterminated two weeks ago. kate ended up doing almost $50 worth of laundry. i did about $12 worth and was bummed, but didn't think i had room to complain. so far we haven't had any bed bug issues or seen any, though earlier i thought the two i caught a couple weeks ago had escaped. hopefully they never come back. oh yeah, i think i got crabs from the strippers in AC.