Electronic Writer

Over 1,000,000 Deconstructed Since 1991

Month: November 2004

  • Round Two

    I went back the next day to the same Coffeeshop, and they offer FREE wireless Internet for their customers.

    This chicken has found a new coop!

    [Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

  • An Evening Out

    I have been told that we create our own reality. And, I am starting to believe it. Although the coffee shop is not new, it is new to me. The scene is really good. Weather Report is playing in the main room. The coffee is strong. The are copies of poetry-related things and glass bricks. It is cool. In fact, the scene is pretty nice.

    The feeling here is academic and open-minded. People are arguing about the value of religion in our world, among people finishing their next paper. It is a great scene

    Independent coffeeshops have an inherent disingenuousness that makes them really attractive. While Starbucks has been stone-washed and sterilized into conformity–the very element that makes them a successful business, indie-coffee houses can display graffiti on the walls as art, publicize local art shows, and play alternative (and even offensive) music.

    I have found Independent coffee houses to be moody–closer to the human spirit than any other establishment. You know when your favorite barrista is working, and the lattes are just better. While the coffee is consistent in the Other, the workers are faceless and nameless and may express themselves in subtle and corporate-approved forms.

    It is sort of the prozac of the industry. The Other gets to be a nice and steady establishment–slightly better than normal. On the other hand, the Independent Coffee shops are like real people. Real moody people. They complain, and kick, and scream, and they are have good days, and bad days. They are, in short human, and it is the inconsistency that makes them interesting.

    [Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

  • Road Map to End the War In Iraq

    How to End the Iraq War
    by Tom Hayden

    http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1124-11.htm

    This is a great article with very specific steps to end our occupation of Iraq. This is worth the read.

  • Ok–I apologize. My ego got off the leash and I had to catch it

    That literature list with all the books on it (a couple of posts ago) was inappropriate. I don’t need to go spouting the number of books that I have read. If you want to talk literature, I’d love to do it. But, I certainly do not need to brag about my good fortune for having read so much literature.

    So, my apologies.

    I was, however, reacting to my current favorite idiot http://tahoediary.blogspot.com/. He has his little blog out there (don’t misinterpret–I am glad that he is writing) and he claims to be part of the Right Wing Conspiracy! So, I read some of his post looking for some evidence to support his claims.

    What I found, however, was a bunch of garbage! I found nothing of substance, an unusually large image of his cat, and this literature list where he claims that having read 33 of the 101 must-read books is an accomplishment!

    I am sorry, Mr. Right Wing Conspirator–if you want to be part of your group,CONSPIRE! Do something with your blog. Make it interesting. Make it caustic. Say something! (You might want to consider what you tell people about your relationship with your cat . . . .) But, just posting mundane links doesn’t make you part of the conspiracy. Instead, it renders you to a much lower position–merely background fuzz or perhaps an info-mercial.

  • Ah, yes. The Sacred Institution of Marriage

    If I hear one more “deeply religious” person tell me that the motivation behind same-sex marriages is the “tax break,” I am going to vomit. The core of that statement has a deeper, more sinister message. It implies that same-sex relationships are founded out of necessity and usership of our system–not out of love. It would be a slippery-slope for me to continue by thinking that perhaps gays and lesbians cannot even experience love because “it goes against nature.” Although, I recognize the logical fallacy of that claim, I bet there are others out there who don’t. Slippery-slope or not, there are those who would not stop there with their fuzzy logic and overgeneralizations . . . .

    I am a straight, single male who has never been married–which, probably disqualifies me from making statements about gays, lesbians, and even married (I think we should call them “natural” –at least that is what THEY would prefer) couples. So, rather than talk about them, I am going to espouse some historical trivia about their precious institution called “marriage.”

    Marriage was Based Upon Practical Reasons

    Way back when, at the time marriages were founded, the ceremony held a dual role in society. There was the traditional role where a couple asks for communal recognition of their previously-existing relationship. The participants already HAD a relationship. They were simply asking for everyone else to recongnize it.

    In addition, marriage had a practical side to it. As the kids got married, it became time for them to move out of their parents’ houses and get a place of their own. So, the entire community would assemble together and give them gifts–all of the things necessary to maintain/run a household. Couple that with a nice dowry, and voila–parents could get the spare room and the office back–all in a good weekend.

    The idea that their relatioship is being “blessed” by God was tacked on somewhere by the men in charge. A religious element probably existed somewhere as part of the process because many early communities were formed around spiritual groups, but the ceremony of marriage itself was really devised for practical reasons.

    Does Anyone Actually Know Someone who Married for Tax Reasons?

    I guess the other big question that I have about the sanctity of marriage relates to a story that has been quoted to me more times than I can count about two little old ladies . . . .

    Invariably, the discussion begins with the concept of same-sex relationships, and the return shot is about the tax breaks. How it is not right to use the God-granted institution of marriage for the associated tax breaks. The next step in the argument is then about two, mythical old ladies who wanted to get married-for the tax breaks. Someone thinks that is fine, and someone else thinks it is terrible. My point is: I think it is a lie!

    I have heard about the mythical grannies, but have never met anyone from that generation that would mix sexual mores and their reputation for a taxbreak! In all probability, they woukd be a likely group of career taxpayers who would pay more taxes to keep their reputation clean. After all, we are talking about the “Leave it to Beaver” generation with their white-washed reality and no camera shots of the bedroom,

    I also have a message for the “au naturale” couples:

    If you are married for the tax breaks, go see a counselor. You are an idiot and a loser, and you need spiritual cleansing/replacement treatment, you need to engage the cerebral portions of your brain (go ahead, plug them in–even for a minute–it wont hurt you), and you must cease and desist projecting your inadequecies onto others.

    [Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

  • This literature list is floating around!

    This list of essential books is floating around in the blogosphere, and I thought I would keep it going. I have bolded the books that I have read.

    1. Beowulf
    2. Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
    3. Agee, James – A Death in the Family
    4. Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
    5. Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
    6. Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
    7. Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
    8. Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
    9. Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
    10. Camus, Albert – The Stranger
    11. Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
    12. Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
    13. Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
    14. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
    15. Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
    16. Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
    17. Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
    18. Dante – Inferno
    19. de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
    20. Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
    21. Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
    22. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
    23. Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
    24. Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
    25. Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
    26. Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
    27. Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
    28. Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
    29. Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
    30. Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
    31. Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
    32. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
    33. Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
    34. Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
    35. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
    36. Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
    37. Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
    38. Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
    39. Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
    40. Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
    41. Homer – The Iliad
    42. Homer – The Odyssey
    43. Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    44. Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
    45. Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
    46. Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
    47. James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
    48. James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
    49. Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    50. Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
    51. Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
    52. Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
    53. Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
    54. London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
    55. Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
    56. Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
    57. Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
    58. Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
    59. Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
    60. Morrison, Toni – Beloved
    61. O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
    62. O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
    63. Orwell, George – Animal Farm
    64. Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
    65. Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
    66. Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
    67. Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
    68. Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
    69. Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
    70. Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
    71. Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
    72. Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
    73. Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
    74. Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
    75. Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
    76. Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
    77. Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
    78. Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
    79. Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
    80. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    81. Sophocles – Antigone
    82. Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
    83. Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
    84. Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
    85. Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
    86. Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
    87. Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
    88. Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
    89. Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
    90. Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
    91. Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    92. Voltaire – Candide
    93. Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
    94. Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
    95. Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
    96. Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
    97. Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
    98. Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
    99. Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
    100. Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
    101. Wright, Richard – Native Son

  • Government Accountability Office is going to Investigate!

    This is reprinted from Common Dreams

    http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1123-13.htm

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

    NOVEMBER 23, 2004

    4:11 PM

    		 CONTACT: Congressman Jerrold Nadler

    New York: 212-367-7350

    D C: 202-225-5635

    Government Accountability Office to Conduct Investigation of 2004 Election Irregularities

    WASHINGTON — November 23 — Reps. John Conyers, Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler, Robert Scott, and Rush Holt announced today that, in response to their November 5 and 8 letters to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the GAO has decided to move forward with an investigation of election irregularities in the 2004 election. The five Members issued the following statement:

    “We are pleased that the GAO has reviewed the concerns expressed in our letters and has found them of sufficient merit to warrant further investigation. On its own authority, the GAO will examine the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and counting of provisional ballots. We are hopeful that GAO’s non-partisan and expert analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered in the 2004 election. As part of this inquiry, we will provide copies of specific incident reports received in our offices, including more than 57,000 such complaints provided to the House Judiciary Committee.

    “The core principle of any democracy is the consent of the governed. All Americans, no matter how they voted, need to have confidence that when they cast their ballot, their voice is heard.”

    The Members listed above were joined in requesting the non-partisan GAO investigation by Reps. Melvin Watt, John Olver, Bob Filner, Gregory Meeks, Barbara Lee, Tammy Baldwin, Louise Slaughter and George Miller.


  • And Another tale of voter tampering . . . .

    Stealing votes in Columbus

    by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.

    November 23, 2004

    http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/914

  • Let’s Get it On!

    The court battles have begun in Ohio! The election is going to get messy. There are plenty of angry people who experienced abuse directly.

    Read all about it . . . .

    http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/886

  • Who said I was paranoid? Why would they say that?

    Paranoia runs deep. Or, is it high? Well, I don’t know, really. I have never considered myself to be paranoid before, but I kinda feel that way now. I guess.

    Actually, what worries me is that it might not be paranoia. In fact, I spend a great deal of time worrying that this or that were connected in some devious way. There are conspiracy theories running rampant right now, and conspiracy movies are being produced en masse, and what is even worse, is that some of them might be true.

    I have always had somewhat of a fancy for conspiracies, in general–it is a natural by-product of an inquisitive mind. You learn to ask questions. You learn to find patterns. And, you look for more questions to ask. The interrelated-ness of life and living is more than just System’s theory. The patterns that tie life together so succinctly is not just Gestalt Theory. Einstein saw existence as a fabric, and that fabric is tied together like many pieces of string from the same ball of yarn.

    But, what do we DO about these conspiratorial theories? I think that a better question might be to ask how do we investigate them? Having a specific process to collect information is a way out. It is active. And, it is helpful. If you are willing to share your information, then your efforts will help more people than you might now.

    EMTs have this neat little trick that they do when they show up to the scene of any accident. After they make sure that the scene is safe, they immediately check the victim for some basic information (I am overexaggerating, of course–it is more complex than that, but hear me out). They take pulse, bloodpressure, and collect some basic information if the victim is conscious. The call this “establishing the base-line vitals.”

    Baseline vitals are important. And, that is where we are in America–right now. We need to establish the Baseline vitals of the country. We need to check what we know, establish a snapshot image of the situation of things as they are at this very moment. And we need to track the progress–improvement, or otherwise.

    How we accomplish this tracking is really where we need to begin.

    [Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]