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Aug. 3rd, 2003 09:12 amWatching 'This Week with George Stephanopoulos' here. I had kind of given up on this show but I saw that today they were going to have on not only John Ashcroft but also Muammar Qadhafi. I had to see Qadhafi, so here we are. They showed a clip of Bush responding to a question about gay marriage saying he had lawyers researching how to 'codify' marriage as only between men and women. Jerk. Steven Den Beste just wrote about why a Constitutional amendment against gay marriage is a bad idea, if you didn't know.
My friend Mike P. is supposed to be somewhere between Denver, Colorado and an unknown destination in Alaska right now, riding a motorcycle (not sure what kind of motorcycle anymore). He wants to look for land to purchase for an arcology. I think he's also stopping off in Vancouver in Canada to see what housing costs are like there, and what kind of job he might get. Before he hit the road he sent me a box of reading material. The box arrived last week, and included a copy of Adbusters magazine, Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta by Gore Vidal, and Bold New World by William Knoke.
I am about a third of the way through Jarhead and I'll read or at least skim the Vidal screeds. Adbusters... I liked the way it looked quite a bit, and the little 'blurby' text-against-image style fits my ruined attention span well. I am somehow wary of this magazine though but... we'll see. Once I had opened the box Mike sent and had all these items arranged in front of me, and had thumbed through them, I found myself wondering if Mike now was into some of the more conspiracy-oriented explanations not only of the Iraq war but of 9-11. I'm gonna email Mike and ask him to lay it out for me, see if he thinks the U.S. was behind 9-11, what have you. I need to be able to talk to people about these kind of things without losing my temper.
I noticed that both Time ('Where the Good Jobs Are Going') and Newsweek ('Men at Overwork') have articles on the outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas, or jobs otherwise being eliminated from the market here. Hrm. See I know coworker Mike has his faith in the free market, but I in my simple way have wondered for years and years what happens in a society like ours with increasing automation. We aren't all going to be handed free housekeeping and lawn-mowing robots then led to a hammock and instructed to take it easy from now on - that's just not how this society works. I saw that 'fear of a robot planet' essay by the How Things Work guy that made the rounds recently (which coworker Mike thought was ridiculous, and so far as I know all history is on his side) but it brought up the same concerns I guess. Computers changing everything, global outsourcing of manufacturing and now service jobs... it gives me pause but I must have faith too. Tied to the tracks, counting on the Unseen Hand to rescue me.
I am most of the way through Blankets now and it is pretty amazing. I love it. It's the kind of comic book book where even I don't race from word balloon to word balloon on the first read, but keep stopping to admire the illustration. I kind of can't believe one person produced nearly 600 pages this perfect.
I miss Chicago lately, much more than I ever thought I would. And for more than just my Olive Branch.
My friend Mike P. is supposed to be somewhere between Denver, Colorado and an unknown destination in Alaska right now, riding a motorcycle (not sure what kind of motorcycle anymore). He wants to look for land to purchase for an arcology. I think he's also stopping off in Vancouver in Canada to see what housing costs are like there, and what kind of job he might get. Before he hit the road he sent me a box of reading material. The box arrived last week, and included a copy of Adbusters magazine, Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta by Gore Vidal, and Bold New World by William Knoke.
I am about a third of the way through Jarhead and I'll read or at least skim the Vidal screeds. Adbusters... I liked the way it looked quite a bit, and the little 'blurby' text-against-image style fits my ruined attention span well. I am somehow wary of this magazine though but... we'll see. Once I had opened the box Mike sent and had all these items arranged in front of me, and had thumbed through them, I found myself wondering if Mike now was into some of the more conspiracy-oriented explanations not only of the Iraq war but of 9-11. I'm gonna email Mike and ask him to lay it out for me, see if he thinks the U.S. was behind 9-11, what have you. I need to be able to talk to people about these kind of things without losing my temper.
I noticed that both Time ('Where the Good Jobs Are Going') and Newsweek ('Men at Overwork') have articles on the outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas, or jobs otherwise being eliminated from the market here. Hrm. See I know coworker Mike has his faith in the free market, but I in my simple way have wondered for years and years what happens in a society like ours with increasing automation. We aren't all going to be handed free housekeeping and lawn-mowing robots then led to a hammock and instructed to take it easy from now on - that's just not how this society works. I saw that 'fear of a robot planet' essay by the How Things Work guy that made the rounds recently (which coworker Mike thought was ridiculous, and so far as I know all history is on his side) but it brought up the same concerns I guess. Computers changing everything, global outsourcing of manufacturing and now service jobs... it gives me pause but I must have faith too. Tied to the tracks, counting on the Unseen Hand to rescue me.
I am most of the way through Blankets now and it is pretty amazing. I love it. It's the kind of comic book book where even I don't race from word balloon to word balloon on the first read, but keep stopping to admire the illustration. I kind of can't believe one person produced nearly 600 pages this perfect.
I miss Chicago lately, much more than I ever thought I would. And for more than just my Olive Branch.
