In the future I see, the bottom feeders are the breadwinners.

Friday zen to go-go:




The more I meditate on my life's great, long loves, the more my dashboard instruments indicate I'm hurtling toward a future of contented poverty as isolated as it is crowded with friends and lovers.

My dreadlocked or buzzed head bobbing under cans for LIFE, always a close rapport with my Wall Street Rapper. And more, not less, of the love/hate sword fight (more love, more love!) with Rence -- we're the dueling duo, fragile and invincible depending on when you ask who.

And music. Good godsmack, the music. No work and all play, lots of play, will be the very hard work of my life.

(I don't know what it is about Ben Kenney that makes all of this so crystal clear and stressful, but exciting, bright and inspiring, like a sun shower.)

Tours, recording, vlogs, intimacy with anyone who will listen and humility, humility, serenity. Hyperconnectivity. Everybody's hustlin'.

Balance. Yoga for the ears and wardrobe. Heavy metal, folk. Jazz. Electro, dance, pop. Post-punk. Brutal militarism, whatever.

Baggy, baggy pants. RJD2's "Chicken Bone Circuit." Don't know why he named it that way, but there's a reason for everything.

There's a reason for everything.

No waste! A life of fertilizing my jelly garden with last week's trash, filling my little clutch car with eggshells and walking on rubber everything molded from the melted down spoils of deep sea waste scrapers.

In the future I see, the bottom feeders are the breadwinners.

And vice versa, of course. Everything's a mirror, and there's always a parallel universe behind it. Remember that.

I will roll my flat feet across flat ground in flat city grids, singing for my dinner and making videos about everything.

And I will never be lonely for long.

111908 vlog [a taste of the quotidien]

They can't all be Tampicos and "Spencer's Road to Islam."

How to Handle American Automakers

Readers tell me offline that my blog is boring when I post about non-autobiographical topics but, while I appreciate their fidelity despite me, I don't really care. Some of this stuff is important.

Take, for example, this letter to the Toledo Blade (in Toledo, Ohio, USA) written by Joseph A. Munier of Maumee, a slightly smaller town to the south. It wraps up pretty well the way I feel about the concept of buying American cars to support our economy when all logic and moral indicators point abroad.

(As of late, I'm copying-and-pasting stuff in fear of future dead links, plenty of which can be found in this blog's back pages.)

Auto bailout should have strings attached

My first car, a 1965 Volkswagen, got 25 mpg in town, 35 mpg on the highway. Forty years later, this is still the best automakers offer. I would buy a new car but Detroit refuses to build me one.

I watched them fight economical, clean technology and squander resources on bigger, faster, thirstier models. They built vehicles to satisfy stockholder greed, ignoring the needs of consumers. Executive salaries would make a Roman emperor swoon. The guy on the assembly line makes twice what his kid's teacher makes.

In America we don't reward irresponsibility. They want $75 billion tax dollars. Who do they think they are? They are holding the American economy hostage. Do we negotiate with terrorists?

Bail them out on our terms. The money comes as a stock purchase. That's how we invest in companies in a free-market economy. The money should come with stipulations. All of it should be spent on developing environmentally responsible vehicles. Make the time frame for a hydrogen-powered car in the showrooms 60 months. Cap executive salaries at $500,000. Buy the automakers and run them like the Manhattan Project, getting what we need. Give the money only to end the madness.

Two years ago, Honda announced it would produce a hybrid vehicle with a combined mileage of 54 mpg and bring it to market for under $20,000. This spring you will be able to buy that vehicle. That's responsibility. Responsibility gets rewarded. Should I go with blue or silver?

Joseph A. Munier

Maumee









For the record, I drive a Ford and like it. But I consider the five-speed, two-door hatchback Focus ZX-3 exceptional to their model lines for quality and ecology.

Bill O'Reilly's Latest Apperance on The Daily Show

I'm reposting Bill O'Reilly's latest appearance on the Daily Show not because I'm an ultra-liberal hack who wants you to write him off as a douchebag, but because I think he and Jon Stewart had a particularly revealing discussion about American® Ideology and where the balance falls today.









Get all the goods streaming on TheDailyShow.com.

How I Lost Ten Pounds Without Even Going to the Hospital

As part of the long-stay visa application process, foreign nationals are required to have a medical exam as soon as possible after their arrival in France. For some reason the government gave me my card before this exam; my female comrades had to get checked out before.

My appointment was yesterday.

I don't have a scale here and am not interested in buying one only to throw it away or lug it home in May, so I was excited by the prospect of being weighed and measured yesterday. Especially because I haven't been feeling quite my physical self since the middle of September.

The result wasn't shocking until I went home and did the metric-standard conversion. It turns out that my weight of 66 kilograms equals 145 pounds, which is ten pounds less than my normal average weight. Which almost never fluctuates.

I suspect this isn't even the total extent of my emaciation here, as I've been inhaling peanut butter sandwiches and liters of whole milk in horse portions over the last week. (And bananas -- thinking of you, Dad.) There was actually a point about a month ago where I felt skinnier, paler and more sunken around the eyes. Things have improved since then.

Still, I am incredibly malnourished. I haven't been this light since high school, and I was shorter then. And despite the concern my mother expressed yesterday that I might be eating less to save money, that's not the case. I happen to be eating cheaply, but even if I bought a skillet, I'd have nowhere to keep the steaks cold until it's time to cook them, and hunting around here is lousy anyway.

My hot lust for a Galley Boy (or six) from Swenson's is no longer just that, but more of a dietary need.





Send hot dogs and protein supplements.

AOL Gets Public Flogging On Its Own Blog

Unless you're total n00b (in which case, welcome to the party, we're really happy to have you here, yadda yadda), you know that America Online is an exclusive service provider zith some of the saddest, shoddiest implementations of features that are widely available and free from webmail services like Yahoo! and Google. You also probably know that they deliver their insulting sludge in one of the clunkiest user interfaces --a program you still have to install on your computer in an age when every other service is browser-based and thus portable-- known to man.

Oh, and I still don't think you can close the stupid "Welcome!" window cramed with rapidly rotating Who Cares "news" that explodes in your face every time you sign on.

Anyway, these clowns recently had the audacity to mock Gmail for integrating features AOL claims to have been offering to all five of its remaining subscribers years ago. Instead of "LOL's" (again for the debutantes: LOL = Laughing Out Loud), they got a massive backlash of common sense, which really stings when it's not in your favor.

In the likely chance they'll have to delete the post to spare themselves further humiliation, I'm going to copy and paste it below along with some of my favorite comments. Enjoy.





An Open Letter to Gmail: Happy Halloween! We love your costume!

Posted Oct 31st 2008 12:56PM by Webmail Team

Happy Halloween Gmail! We knew you would have the best costume at the party, and who can blame you? We think it's great that you're using this holiday to pay homage to the one who started it all, who got 35 million people online at once, gave them all email, great content and messaging capabilities, and even created a forum that encouraged them to speak in emoticons.

That costume is fabulous...clearly, the devil is in the details... and what's that you've got there? An "experimental" instant-messaging feature built right into your mail service so people can use it to send text messages to their contacts' phones? We love it – that was such a hit when we first introduced it so many years ago. We tried to make it easy: telling users to simply open the AIM panel in their email type "+1 and the 10-digit cell phone number" into the To: Screen Name box. It's kind of fun, too – good choice!

And those sidebar options – talk about getting it right... Adding gadgets to email that allow people to manage their calendars, access their favorite content and best Websites? Nice work. The idea of adding a side panel like that was one of our best. Giving people the ability to get to their favorite places on the Web, manage their schedules and IM right from their email home page tripled the convenience of our service. We're sure you'll get lots of compliments.

Finally, is that an "attachment warning" popping up on your back? Nice touch. We know nothing is more embarrassing than having to send an email twice because you forgot the attachment. Our users love this little reminder, and they have been praising it since we first implemented it back in 2007.

They say imitation is the best form of flattery, so Gmail, we thank you and we are indeed very flattered. Putting together a costume that is so dead-on could not have been easy, and you've got it down pat. Trying to convince all the other kids at the party that the only thing to use is Gmail and putting out a press release every time you add a new button to the service is just so 1998. We're telling you – this outfit brings back memories!

Here's a tip though... the Web's getting more personal, and people are really savvy at customizing their own services. When you don this same costume next year, make sure you check out www.tunome.com first and add some third party services (see our new Yahoo! plug-in) – you can't be all Gmail all the time any more – it won't be such a big hit next year!

Happy Halloween!

Some of my Favorite Comments

They appear at the top, right under the original post. So much the better.

1. Somebody should have used google mail goggles before making the decision to publicize this letter :-)
   
   
   
2. One big difference between the two services: GMail has never stolen money from me. After canceling AOL service, we had to contact the card company and ask them to block all the continuing charges from AOL. Nice business model: deliver substandard services until people quit and then rape their credit card for a few extra months.
   
   
3. I'm not sure I get the joke - did Gmail don a clunkier UI today for Halloween?
   
   Seriously, AOL will always have a place in Internet history, but the present, and likely the future, belong to Google.
   
   Gmail was free first, more intuitive, more customizable, and better at communicating new features than AOL mail. I used to work at AOL, and I had no idea about that text message feature. As a g-chat user, I do miss my old AIM file transfer capabilities, but that's about it.
   
   Oh yeah, one more thing -- scoreboard:
   TWX 10.09
   GOOG 359.36
   
   
4. Some of us older internet geeks still remember the day AOL connected its routers to the rest of the Internet as The Day The Internet Died. There was a reason that *@aol.com hit so many killfiles.
   
   
5. How about NO SOFTWARE TO DOWNLOAD OR INSTALL!! Try that AOL! I seem to remember getting bombarded with free CD's in the mail. Then going to my favorite store to see free CD's at the counter. I still have yet to find a Google CD.
   

Obama Still Obsessed With Bin Laden

According to Reuters, president-elect Barack Obama is still all up in arms over Osama bin Laden, who tried to take credit for those terrorist attacks back in '01 and has been hiding out in caves somewhere in Afghanistan ever since?

Who?

Turns out he wants to refocus American efforts in Afghanistan and put more into finding these washed up has-beens rather than solve ancient rivalries between religious sects and build Wal*Marts in Iraq.

Seriously, Obama. We've got democracy to spread and I'm not going to vote for you on this absentee ballot I just got so you can pursue some half-cocked vendetta against a guy who tried to kill your dad.




::Palin wink::

110508 vlog [Victory]

I've been hesitating to post this vlog for a few days (it's been artificially back-dated) because it's less than eloquent in some parts and I'm not very proud of the way I expressed myself.

The overall message is important though, and the occasion of Obama's victory should be marked. I just hope it hasn't lost meaning in the delay.

This is largely for you, Maureen and Chava, and for anyone else who wonders why I haven't said anything about the end of the election.










In case you've been in a coma for the last two months and think I'm exaggerating the negativity of the McCain campaign, Colin Powell spells it out pretty clearly:








For purposes of the search machine, this post is about Barack Obama, who promises hope and change and says "Yes We Can" a lot. I'm a voter, I voted, I vote, I am from Ohio. I currently live in France. Search search search, Google Google Lycos Dogpile.

110408 vlog [Barcelona]

We were touched so profoundly by the King of Creep's latest flick, "Vicky Christina Barcelona," that we decided to go there on our All Saints break.







In case you missed those links, the Barcelona photos are on Picasa, with more on Facebook.

a few things

UPDATE 13:30 11.04.08: The video's done, despite my machine barely having the muscle to play it back post-export. Sigh. Watch it.

1. The Barcelona video is on the way. I was working on it last night when I unplugged my laptop's AC cable and the thing just shut off as if it didn't have a battery. It wouldn't boot up again until this morning, which was terrifying but expected. Although this has happened before, I maintain that an iBook G4 is one of the best computers money could ever buy. With few exceptions like last night, mine works well with minimal maintenance. I'm leaving the battery out for now to drain it before recharging, and without it, my machine has a bad bout of amnesia following each reboot:

I have to reset it every. Time.

• Until that video's done, dig the photos on Picasa or Facebook for more.

2. The weather's exceptionally crap here. It's constantly wet from endless misting that sometimes musters enough juice to maintain a steady drizzle. It's better than freezing temperatures and snow, I realize, and I try to keep that in mind. At least I can leave my windows open and I don't feel too wasteful about leaking steam heat.
   
3. I love steam heat. I'll be real stingy about radiotors the next time I'm looking for an apartment. Good thing I'll be too broke to support myself when I get back.
   
4. Get Skype and call me sometime (video chat. It's the waaave of the future). Plain old "colinmorris" was taken, so search the user name "colinmorris.net."
   
   Even my parents and their friends are doing it.

Cheers.