off to Utah...

...wish me luck!

more death and other goodness from The Sun

From the December 2007 issue of The Sun magazine...

Burrow into what's interesting - in you, and in everyone else. Every moment on the planet has juice to yield. Anything is interesting if you truly want to know about it. Staying awake to that (is) the key to staying alive. - from The Wizard in the Closet, by Heather Sellers

...my resistance to love. I'd often put distance between myself and others as a way to keep from feeling trapped or getting hurt. I'd delivered wearying criticisms of people I thought were less than perfect, as if I were any better than them. Living like that had been a long, hard battle with many casualties, the most wounded sometimes being me. I think that during all those silent-meditation sessions; in all the time I'd spent listening to the wisdom of renowned teachers, theologians, and sages; in all the millions of words I'd read in profound spiritual tracts, I'd been trying to learn how to love. But no amount of meditation or yoga or studies of scriptures could have given me that. (Insert name here)'s death put me in touch with one of the highest orders of human existence: to love others as though we are dying all the time, because the plain truth of the matter is that we are. - from My Marital Status, by James Kullander

And from the "Sunbeams" section...

Stop reading for a moment, and imagine that you are going to die in one minute. The last things you are going to experience are reading these pages, sitting in this room, thinking and feeling what you are thinking and feeling right now. This is the end of your life... You have no time to write a note or make a phone call. All you can do is experience what is, right now. This is a very simple exercise, but it is quite profound. It brings you into presence very quickly. You stop fighting, you stop needing, you stop being concerned with physical comfort, you stop wanting, you stop achieving, and you stop maintaining. Enlightenment, attainment, realization all become meaningless. You are just present. - Ken McLeod

why god made the internets

I don't remember the last time I laughed this hard. I was in tears...

This is why it pays to check in on Gordo's site every once in a while.

Cindy's favorite instrument

I had forgotten about the "manager" worming her way onstage with a tambourine. Eerily familiar and very funny...

fun for unemployed people

As Wendy said to me the other day, "YouTube is the devil." If you are a geek of any kind, you can lose all sense of time and/or responsibility with your diversion of choice. Since I'm a music geek, that's how I spend my time whenever I choose to cross over to the dark side.

A perfect example is this little gem I came across by accident the other day. One of the most memorable shows I ever saw in my adolescence was Black Sabbath in 1982. In fact, shockingly now that I stop to think about it, it's the only time I ever saw Sabbath live...and it almost doesn't count because it was the Dio/Appice lineup. Anyway, I found this clip - not from the show I saw but a London show from that same tour. The sound is atrocious, but it's so cool for me to witness the visuals in motion from that show and that song. It may look ridiculous now, but trust me...if you were a little metal dude in junior high in the early 80s, it did not get any cooler than this...



All the gushing over that show aside, though, this is still the only Sabbath that counts as far as I'm concerned. Great footage and sound quality, too...



One of the fun things about some of the folks at Unfair Park is that they can be nostalgia geeks just like me. They dug these clips up the other day from an old Genesis show in Dallas that I was definitely not at but would have loved. Actually, I have to admit still liking a great deal of old Genesis stuff...and I think I've figured out why: out of all those bands from 70s-80s prog-rock heyday, Genesis was probably the least pretentious of the bunch. Which is a back-handed compliment, for sure. But they were also the least concerned with showing off flashy, self-indulgent musicianship in favor of focusing on songs. A novel concept in the prog world. But how many other bands from that genre willingly spared their audiences from those ridiculous twenty-minute solos that folks like Carl Palmer, Chris Squire or Rick Wakeman would never dream of? And it's not as if Genesis couldn't have diddled us to death if they'd have wanted to. That's actually the neatest part of these clips...being reminded how truly great they all were as musicians without having to witness them beat us over the heads with solos and stupid shit like that. I had forgotten (or maybe never knew) that the band had ever toured with Steve Hackett playing guitar after Peter Gabriel left. It's also fun to watch to be reminded of what a truly extraordinary drummer Phil Collins was (I personally rank him in the all-time top five or so). And then there's Tony Banks, who I still think is perhaps the most underrated keyboard player from that time. Like the rest of the band, he wasn't flashy and he didn't play for the sake of making himself look good...he played what was needed for the songs. Back when I was first playing guitar, I remember deciding I wanted to play guitar the way Tony Banks played keyboards. It was a style that was concise and melodic...it functioned as a "lead" instrument without being overly obnoxious about it...

But whatever. I'm babbling. Just watch the shit.

And then I stumbled across this...one of my favorite songs from one of my all-time favorite albums (Faith No More's Angel Dust). I had no idea they ever made a video for this song, but it's wonderful...may be the greatest video I've seen years. Fucking hilarious.

fascinating

Frank and Mack (and Mary, when she's around) are completely fascinated with my printer. They simply cannot wrap their heads around what's occurring...funky clicks and noises and then a piece of paper spitting out. Of course, if you asked me to explain the process, I couldn't do much better than the kitters...













Being that Mack is thus far the only kitty who has taken to sitting on my lap (and my arm, shoulder, head, back, etc...but the other two are making progress in that department; I'm guessing Frank will join the lap fun soon, with Mary hopefully not far behind), he's also quite fascinated with my blingage. Dude, it's hangy-down and jingly. Duh.













Myself, I'm just fascinated with this image. Bats are just the coolest critters on Earth. So there.

faces of war

God bless America...













In case the offensiveness of this photo doesn't jump out at you too quickly, this would be a severed human head these brave American soldiers are posing with. While I get the impression that he's perhaps not the most useful tool in the shed, soldier Osborne (grinning idiot on the right) seems particularly pleased with his situation. (Nevermind the fact that the severed head was originally attached to the body of a person considered an ally...at the moment, anyway...oops.) I hope his parents are proud. Osborne's parents, I mean. One would assume the deceased had no parents, friends or family of his own, right? He's not human or anything, he's a fucking head! Let's play soccer with it! It'll be funny, right...?

So how do you suppose Americans would be reacting were the nationalities in this photo reversed? That would be the kind of PR the neocons would absolutely salivate over...