...that it's been a year between posts. I've been awfully work focused lately. Very few brazillians. Wondering a lot about how to pay people for gathering news. Mostly outside of work. But also not.

How come you don't write?

I'm re-watching The Wire (after finishing the fifth season last week) again from the first episode of the season one, thanks to iTunes. Impossible as this may seem, I'm starting to believe it's even better the second time through.

From: angus@generalissimo.com
To: hrc@hillaryclinton.com
Subject:

Senator Clinton,

I fell in love with you when I first saw you in person, speaking at an event in Austin, TX in 1994, long after I first (reluctantly) voted for your husband. I was taken aback by who it seemed you were. Not the woman portrayed in the media, not the woman I thought I knew, through the plastic and glass box in the bar room, in my living room. You were the smartest person I'd met. Right there with Paul Tsongas, or Joe Biden. But better. And, frankly, kinda hot. Granted, I was like 22, and would've fucked furniture, but shit. Yeah. I thought you were pretty hot. And it was easy, what with you smarter than the rest of 'em.

Tonight, you asked me to come to your website and share my thoughts, to help you any way I can.

You are the third boomer candidate. And you have greater knowledge than, not to mention benefit of experience from, your slightly more charismatic, slightly less intelligent husband.

But Sen. Obama has grasped the surge that Bill Bradley and Gov. Dr. got before you. And he executed perfectly. Your flawless understanding of the rules that once held sway have finally been trumped by an understanding of an emergent truth. A mastery of a system that's existed since Nixon v. Kennedy, Daisy, and snowflakes in Muskie's face mean now just less than a resonance in a much more 'truthful' broadcasting of a multitude of voices. Troops in Iraq, countless personal opinions, and still, proudly, 'makaka'.

Fucking shame. You were at worst, a year or two off. But, god willing, it's over. A one-to-many orwellian/randian/machiavellian nightmare has hopefully finally begun to cede to an ultimate many-to-many stasis. Ten-odd thousand years of one-to-one, ripped apart by a few centuries of one-to-many hegemony -- of which you may have been the pinnacle! -- is dying....

We, y'know, all of us what happen to exist, are beginning to communicate again. Unmediated by you fuckers in the plastic and glass box. Or radio. Or someone else's printing press. No offense.

It's a big process. While I still identify as a Frank Zappa conservative, empirically I know these days I'm a Democrat. It's a nice coincidence that Senator Obama is finally pulling this off. But ultimately, I'm pulling for Us on this one. Without party. Without partisan, preconceived belief. This is a race where we can start to move toward rulers that understand it's a group effort. Not one where grabbing a few thousand folks that can put together a heap of money or media influence gets it done. But one where a multitude -- to dream a newly-well-informed majority! -- of voices matter.

I hope there's no hard feelings. I'm still single, and more than willing, y'know, to start putting Bill back in his place. But for now, I'm throwing in big for Senator Obama on this one. And I'd love to think you'd do the same.

Quite fondly,

Angus.

Ya, that's the guy who burned down the burningman. But the real fun was Ralph's Freak Accident CD release gig at the newly reopened Mabuhay Gardens. The venue kicks ass every bit as much as the new album. And if you're in Europe these days, check out The Freak Accident on tour with the mighty No Means No. (thanks again for the pic, Mark Bradley!)

love this animation...

The United States needs a national mausoleum where we can store the formaldehyde-taut corpse of Anna Nicole Smith.

Information wants to be free, but a coke still costs a buck.

Any salacious crime committed in adult diapers automatically triples it's time in the news cycle.

Entering rehab frames your transgressions as outside your control.

Brazil needs a tabloid.

Democracy is the worst, except for the others. However, information ubiquity might mean it's about due...

testing APIdom

There are a lot of Brasilians in town. And that's enough to try and not post anything. Just to spite them. 'Cause they blog like you read about. The brasilians. But they get to hounding...

It hardly relates to the holiday. Prompted only because it's a convenient date to remind me that last year at this time I was at a bar, Amnesia, and saw Toshio Hirano for the first time, as I did again tonight, a year later.

The point is that, in that year, the furniture store next door to Amnesia has closed down after a while selling stuff in the neighborhood.

(And lemme say before I stray too much, if you live in San Francisco and haven't seen Toshio, you are doing yourself a reprehensible injustice.)

What I'm trying to say, the sign in the door, next to Amnesia, says that they're going out of business, but that they're gonna be available at their redesigned website within the year.

Leads me, of course, to the nature of what the hell's going on.

Why would you spend a couple grand a month on a lease to sell stuff to a few thousand rich people with the propensity to buy your taste in swanky furniture who happen to live in the environs of San Francisco when you can toss that shit on eBay and sell to the world?

Commerce made for the concentration of humanity in specific locales. Out here on the internets, we dick severely with that. Sure yer gonna wanna grab smokes and some ramen someplace what's open 24 hours down the block. But I'm getting sick of trying to support my local pawn shops buying up interesting lenses and musical instruments when I know that if I just evolve I can find cheaper on the web.....

Alexa is opening up their index to whomever wants to mess with it. It seems they'll let you create and store programs on their servers to process the (100T! of) data, and query 'em via Amazon's web services platform...

The barrier to entry is a bit higher than that of Goog's or Y!'s API (both programatically, and 'cause there are modest fees), so it's prolly not going to encourage as many casual mashups, but the serious data mining it opens up is pretty staggering... What words contained in Joyce's Ulysses appear on more than 100 webpages? How many times does the word 'syncopated' appear on Portuguese pages with at least two .jpg's? How many vowels are there on the internets?

So while the trainwreck that is the current Bush administration hasn't once moved me to post to this thing in the past couple delightful weeks, all I've been thinking about tonight is what to write about Theo Epstein deciding not to re-up as Red Sox General Manager. To the point that it's been difficult getting work done.

Reading the mostly apocalyptic ravings on SOSH tonight, I'm struck by how much of the opining savages Sox CEO Larry Lucchino, while absolving Theo the Boy Wonder of any blame.

I met Lucchino during the '03 season at a Yale Law School alumni dinner. He spoke his mind freely, was very engaging and open, and struck me as a totally decent guy.

I met Theo during the '04 season in the visiting dugout at the Oakland Coliseum. My buddy Kevin got us press passes to the Sox-A's game, and we were on the field during batting practice when Kevin walked up to Theo and said something to the effect of "Hey Theo, I just wanted to thank you. You gave me my first break when you were in the media relations department with the Padres and got me my first press pass to a baseball game, and I've been putting out this magazine ever since. So, thanks a lot..." To which Theo responded, "Yeah, great." Needless to say, I was a little blown away by what a prick he seemed like. Even noted douchebag Dan Shaugnessy made more time for me in the line for the press buffet, and I didn't even really want to talk to him.

While obviously this isn't the definitive character analysis of the parties involved, it does run counter to the assessment of most of the commentary out there, and it's the only first-hand knowledge I have. So there's that.

But if I were to speculate wildly, as is the fashion these days, on why Theo decided to spit, I'd say that he prolly felt that while he remained in town, he'd always be at least a little in the shadow of his mentor, Larry Lucchino (who was the one who'd given Theo that job in media relations when he was CEO of the Pads), and ultimately that he'd accomplished the pinnacle of what he could do with the 2004 World Champion Red Sox. I think Theo, with help of a 3/~5 contract, may have convinced himself to get over these two main things (and the fishbowl that the job is in Boston) when Dr. Charles Steinberg's press release came out in Shaugnessy's column last Sunday, and he changed his mind.

I don't think there are necessarily any bad guys here, just a bunch of self-interested egos. But I do feel that Lucchino is taking way more heat than he probably deserves. The biggest thing that pisses me off, tho, is that if Lucchino is so responsible for tying Theo's hands as GM, why doesn't he get more of the credit for the moves the Sox did/didn't make that resulted in three straight trips to the playoffs and a Championship?

(edit: Having just listened to Theo's press conference, the other thing that seems like it might have been an issue is whether '06 is going to be a rebuilding year for the Sox, which I think it should be. I wonder if Theo and the trio had differing opinions on that, and that contributed to his departure....)

Just took the wraps off Rollyo today. I'm looking forward to the post-partum depression if it means some sleep... Unfortunately, with the Sox tenuously hanging on to their playoff spot (let alone the division lead), and the Yanks at the Fens this weekend, I don't know how much of that I'm gonna see....

Until 7th Generation and Green Forest can start making a half-decent product, I'm back to Mr. Whipple's finest for the foreseeable future.

...perhaps the middle of a development crunch was a bad time to try and start blogging.

While I've long had reservations of actually blogging (versus the conversation and link pointing between me and Habib this was previously), I think I'm going to start. No better time than when yer knee-deep in dev mode and long for the free time to actually extract your fingertips from the keyboard just long enough to grab a beer...

Alright. So I grabbed a beer tonight. Two, at the 2am Club down the hill from my pal Jeffrey's place where I'm housesitting. They have an 'Attack from Mars' pinball there, and I'm top score after one game. This reflects mostly the fact that the denizens of Mill Valley clearly don't play pinball. That's how come they can afford to live in Mill Valley.... Though it was a pretty solid game...

I wanted to link to this blog which I wound up reading far too long tonight. And to these photos.

What do they have in common, other'n the temporal semblance of my discovering them in the past 24 or so? I think they're exactly how humanity recovers from the obscene amount of capital given to the juggernaught of the current entertainment-marketing-complex (just looked, I'm the fifth person to come up with that term, according to google). These two sites are as compelling as anything I've seen on the teevee in years (with the exception of last year's ALCS and possibly The Wire), and it's very much just folks. People sharing their existence. That's what's important here.

We're stuck here. Existing. While, yes, I can become wrapt with imagery of Beyoncé for as long as the the next guy, what means something to me is how the rest of us are pulling it off. And that's even more exciting than Dave Robert's steal....

Judith Miller gets a tip from one of her unnamed, (and often seemingly unquestioned) sources (coincidentally, she was pals with Chalabi) saying that Yellowcake Wilson's wife is a spook and got him the Niger gig thru nepotism.

Judy tells Bob Novak, and since she doesn't have a hook, she's cool with Bob using the tip in his column... (Maybe it was even Chalabi that told her, lending credence that it was common knowledge, tho that opens up all sorts of other juiciness that's prolly best left untouched... But I like it.)

Bob likely calls someone to confirm, but never comes into contact with the source who leaked the info. The someone, I'm sure very plausibly, also confirms that it's common knowledge she's a spook.

Then when the feds come a-calling on Novak, knowing he doesn't have an actual source to protect, he cuts a deal promising full cooperation in exchange for presumably much less than a blindfold and cigarette. Then simply points his finger. And I would hope, laughs maniacally. 'Cause it's funny.

(Or maybe he just went before the grand jury, and, again, without a source, and without a shield law in the country (much less a federal one) protecting another journo who wasn't even speaking in confidence, he simply told his story and didn't get indicted... Though I like the laughing maniacally part better...)

Check out this story on Miller from 2/12/04 in Slate, where she is slammed by numerous sources for being a mouthpiece for the administration.

And this quote from Howard Kurtz, WaPo 05/26/03:
"An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper's top reporter on bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles [New York Times coverage of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein] has been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is close to top Pentagon officials."
(found at http://www.usiraqprocon.org/BiosInd/JMiller.htm)