Category: Miscellany

Groan from Uncle TJ. Please don’t kill the messenger! Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him ….what? (Oh,…

Tickets impossible. After spending sixteen frustrating minutes on the phone and on the web a few Sundays back, failing to get Elvis Costello tickets. I asked a friend to deal with getting us all tickets to Beck with Flaming Lips at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. No such luck. He got in after a few…

What was it Augustine said?. Please Lord, slashdot me… but not yet!

I have a temporary need (two, three months) for a PC for a project I’m working on. (There are five Macs in my house and one PC but it’s in the basement and runs Windows 98, ugh.) It’s an old Pentium Pro, so I don’t even know if I should install XP on it (probably…

Keeping in touch with the old gang. If there’s one thing the Internet’s good for, it’s finding your old friend and compadres.

Political Parrhesia: The National Debt Marches Upward. Just passing this Political Parrhesia item along:The federal government’s fiscal year ended on Monday, September 30. So, it is appropriate to take a look at how much the national debt rose in the past year. $100 billion? You wish. $200 billion? Sorry. [Bite Media]

News for Dead Heads. Three new items (two serious announcements and one forwarded piece of satire) up at Uncle John’s Blog. (Archive of today’s latest post at Other Ones to Play Oakland 12/5 and 12/6.)

Taking it on the chin. Kitty Bukkake watches a porn flick while listening to NPR and writes a wickedly accurate, down-to-earth blog entry entitled A Bukkake Home Companion (Contains frank descriptions of pornography, bodily fluids, and Garrison Keiller.) This continues a trend of great writing about a formerly unmentionable body fluid, such as Paul Ford’s…

I overheard myself just now saying “shift-printscreen! shift-printscreen” when actually looking for the Grab application on this Mac. (Shift-printscreen is PC jargon.) Last night while watching Frasier typing up copy for his “Wine Corner” segment on the restaurant reviewer’s show on a strangely small chunky looking off-white laptop, as he leapt from the table to…

Short notice, and Bay Area-specific, but I still thought this worth passing along, from Scott Rosenberg: Readers in the Bay Area are invited to Cody’s Books in Berkeley, where on Thursday evening (Oct. 3) a panel of Salon editors and contributors — inclding David Talbot, Joan Walsh, Jennifer Sweeney and Chris Colin — will talk…

No Nurse is Good Nurse. I’ll send a copy of my Dreamweaver book (or something else if that’s not needed) to the first person who can identify the source of the subject of this entry.

What makes pornography (let’s stick to visual porn for the sake of discussion) work the way it does? That is, how do images of bodies, body parts, or sex arts stimulate sexual arousal in a way that’s useful for masturbation? I would suggest that porn deliberates manipulates (pun intended) inherited, evolved, largely genetic but clearly…

Bush’s real goal in Iraq. In an opinion piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jay Bookman suggests that the Bush administration’s ulterior motive in focusing on Iraq is a relentless expansion of American empire:This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole…

Not as cute as my bunny. B sent me this link to Riparian Rabbit Release for the bunny pix but these guys just aren’t as cute as Hoppy was.

Matrix on TV. When is the sequel to the Matrix coming out? I seem to recall them filming it in Oakland last year. The original was on TV tonight. It was fun seeing it again, though not quite as impressive on our little screen. The Matrix also seems like it was the killer app for…

Inscrotable! The always-hinky MichaelZ sends along this link to the Scrotum Gift Shop down under.

So now people looking for christian nude are finding their way to RFB. Don’t worry. Best item on the first page of results: Should a Christian do a nude scene? I also get a lot of e-mail queries from people wanting to publish religious-themed books because they’ve searched online for a “Christian literary agent” and…

“Blogging will be light”. I’ve started working on a still-under-wraps project this week and for the next month or three I will be a lot busier. I expect therefore to have less time for blogging, here, at RFB, and elsewhere. I imagine I’ll still post nearly daily at least somewhere, but not necessarily here (I’m…

Technology maddening when it’s not liberating. Today Radio, the tool I use to keep Radio Free Blogistan up-to-date is malfunctioning on me, refusing to past the last couple-seven entries. Oddly, you can see them by going to today’s archive page but not on the home page.

First time at PacBell Park. Saw the Giants paste the Padres last night with an old friend who happened to be visiting from San Diego. My first time in the new stadium. Pretty cool. It would be even better for a day game, I’m sure. One odd thing is the rule against going back into…