Zelda's Inferno exercise from September 30th: tell an event backwards. Writing this was a little bit cathartic.

it ended with me walking down the sidewalk in front of her house
back to my car
not sure if I had freed myself or
if I wanted to die right there

before that was my attempt to leave as a friend
or at least not an enemy
to tell her I still cared

before that was her throwing back every gift I'd given her

Whole lot of noise lately about the "Jena 6". Here's something I posted to Slashdot a few days ago:

The nooses were hung on Sept 1. The fight occurred on Dec 4th. That's three months. The events are definitely related.

The events are only related if the guy who got beat down was involved in hanging the nooses, and I'm unaware of any allegations that he did. Collective guilt doesn't wash; something somebody else did three months ago is no excuse for a violent attack on someone today.

None of the statements taken by the DA said that the assault was caused by the nooses. It bears many hallmarks of an after-the-fact justification.

The guys hanging the nooses were assholes, and their behavior should not be tolerated by the school. Three day in-school suspension, with no public statement by the school, may well have been much too light. But trying to get the FBI involved, is amazing overreaction.

A six-on-one aggravated assault goes far beyond mere assholery; it is a serious crime, and if convicted those involved should be dealt with accordingly. It's wrong to portray the assailants in this case as some sort of innocents.

However, the charge of "attempted murder" is clearly trumped up. In Mychal Bell's case, time served plus probation is probably plenty.

Our good friend Brian Jefferson turned me on the TV series Heroes last year, and I was looking forward to last night's season premier.

I was not disappointed. But the part that really made me cheer probably doesn't mean anything to 99.9% of viewers. One of our heroes, Hiro Nakamura, has been thrown back in time to 1600s Japan - and ends up in Otsu, a small city outside Kyoto that I visited this spring. (The famous haiku poet Basho is buried there.)

Sometimes it's the little things that draw you in to a work.

poem based on words and phrase supplied by the workshop participants:

euphoric, a smile that stretches beyond your cheeks, a world full of kung fu masters, antidisestablishmentarianism, vapory, contentment,
sacrificial eyelash, freedom

a world full of taoist masters

everyone you meet is your guide to enlightenment

the tollbooth lady who chats about the weather and asks, "Where did all this wind come from?"

the taxi driver who radiates freedom and contentment

the euphoric beyond-the-face smile of a child picking dandelions



the world tree sprouts from a single eyelash sacrificed by a sage

and I swing through its branches

monkey-mind unlimited

I'll definitely be playing this at the Poems Against War / Poetry In Baltimore event October 19 at Load of Fun Gallerie. Meanwhile, if you play guitar, spread the meme.

I heard a little bit of the buzz going around about Sally Field getting censored by Fox for saying during the Emmys that "If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn't be any goddamn wars in the first place." It bounced around my brain a bit, stuck on to some other stuff, and this is what came out.

Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Soldiers

words by Tom Swiss
      to the tune of "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys", by
      Ed Bruce and Patsy Bruce

guitar chords: D - G - A7 - D

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers
Don't let 'em be fooled by the masters of war
Teach 'em that peace is what to work for
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers
They can die all alone
A long way from from home
Giving their life for a lie

Young boys play war with toy guns and they always pretend
Someday that they'll grow up and be brave and fight like real men
Marching to death at the orders of generals,
      all for the U. S. of A.
But war ain't a game, there's no glory in killing,
      old soldiers fade away

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers

Something I posted on Slashdot, regarding the perceived and actual threat from terrorism:

The biggest single problem in the US today is there are indeed terrorists

No, it's not. Not even close. The threat perceived is way out of proportion to the actual threat.

About 16,000 people are murdered in the U.S. per year; that makes the number of people killed in the U.S. by terrorist attacks over the past decade on the order of one fiftieth the number of people murdered in conventional assaults.

The annual number of deaths from AIDS are roughly comparable to those from murder. AIDS is about 50 times the threat to your life as terrorists.

Both murder and AIDS are of course tiny compared to deaths from cancer or heart disease, which together have killed somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million people in the past ten years. Bacon double cheeseburgers and lack of exercise are far more deadly to Americans than Al Qaeda.

Over a million people died in accidents in the past decade; about 400,000 of those were killed in motor vehicle accidents.

Heck, about as many people drown every year as died in the 9/11 attacks. 3,372 fatal drownings in 2001, versus 2,974 killed in the 9/11 attacks. And yet nobody gets all bent out of shape about how we have to suspend habeus corpus to protect ourselves from the dangers of swimming pools and lakes.

Fear terrorists? Feh. If you want to save lives, put resources into health promotion and medical care, safer roads, and crime prevention.

That doesn't mean "do nothing about terrorists"; but it does mean "do sane things, not crazy-ass useless things".

According to Wired, Homeland Security records obtained by
the Identity Project (under a Privacy Act request) show that screeners
are tracking information including airline passenger's reading choices:

One report about Gilmore notes: "PAX (passenger) has many small flashlights with pot leaves on them. He had a book entitled 'Drugs and Your Rights.'" Gilmore is an advocate for marijuana legalization.

Another inspection entry noted that Gilmore had "attended computer conference in Berlin and then traveled around Europe and Asia to visit friends. 100% baggage exam negative. Resides 554 Clay Street , San Francisco, CA. PAX is self employed 'Entrepreneur' in computer software business."

Hey, TSA, here's something to put in my record: PAX is on record as saying nosy goverment agents can kiss his ass.

Just went to see Telesma over at the ESPN Zone. Sort of a funny combination, psychedelic world music band at a sports bar; joking with one of the guys in the band, I said it was a sort of outreach program. Yes, he said; save the meatheads from themselves...

Interesting week last week. Our server developed disk problems, and we had to switch over to our backup. Fortunately, I'd been working on a "hot spare" setup; unfortunately, the work is not complete. I worked 16 hours last Thursday on the changeover (plus a session at the Well and teaching karate). So much for taking the day off to clean the house and get ready for Saturday's Emperor Norton party.

From The Telegraph:

The passengers on board the Vatican’s first flight to Lourdes may have been pilgrims in search of spiritual healing, but they still had to obey anti-terrorism rules, it has emerged, after several of them had their holy water confiscated....
...
The spring at the sanctuary at Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared in 1858, is famed for its miraculous healing powers, and every day long queues of believers wait to fill up their containers.

Usually I'm pretty proud to be a Marylander. Not today, though, when our state's highest court hands down a irrational and homophobic ruling, overturing a Baltimore Circuit Court that found that the state's law restricting marriage to heterosexual couples was unconstitutional and discriminatory.

Instead, the Court of Appeals found that claimed that the state has a legitimate interest in maintaining heterosexual marriage because it allows procreation and the traditional family structure. How that squares with allowing elderly or infertile people to marry is beyond me. And the "traditional family structure", as we all know, is where a man buys a woman from her family with a dowry. Is that what Maryland law is supposed to encourage?

Shame on the Maryland Court of Appeals.