Ilya Yablochnikov

In tribal societies chiefs and other "big men" would hold feasts, give gifts and destroy material possessions. The more lavish the expense, the richer and more powerful the chief was implied to be and the stronger his claim to power. It strikes me that political campaigns, especially in a democracy, are not so different. What is the point of fundraising? One would think that in an age when ideas can be easily disseminated at low cost and assuming the ideal of a citizen making his political choice based on an affinity with a candidate's policy, no such efforts would need to be undertaken.

I was browsing the new arrivals at the library and ran across a book by Adam Carolla. He is the tv host you may remember from "Loveline" and "The Man Show". I don't remember the title but the cover has a photo of him in a leather jacket and hat riding a kid's bicycle. The jacket summarizes it as Carolla taking on everything wrong in society. A society where men can't be men, people don't know their place and a bunch of other stuff that entitled, middle-aged white men complain about. It's the kind of thing that is inconsequential, old as the world and makes liberals annoyed.

Some things I came across on the internet yesterday:

I am always on the lookout for places to play table tennis and I saw the Laughing Pint mentioned as a bar that features a ping pong table in a Guardian travel feature in Baltimore. That's right, I had to read a British paper (ok, website) to find out about a place in Baltimore. So a few days later I went to check it out. The bar is located in Highlandtown which already makes me like it. Highlandtown is not yet a trendy neighborhood and I like its diversity. If that makes me a hipster, so be it.

"Right to exist" must be one of my least favorite phrases. And you know know exactly what I mean. There's only one context in which it appears "Israel's right to exist", most often phrased as a question. The reason I hate this phrase is that it doesn't make any sense to me and everyone acts like they know what it means. I think its primary function is as a code word. If you question it, you are automatically out of the club.

DJ Kel came over my house and we played some records. I was recording this on a new laptop and it sounds like shit, almost like it came through the microphone. I am not sure but it may just be that the Analog-Digital Converter on that soundcard is bad. Since it sounds terrible anyway I compressed it in a space and bandwidth saving 96kbps. It's like 1998 up in here.

I recently remembered about an online magazine from Los Angeles called Ostrich Ink. It mostly contained short autobiographical stories from young writers. The site turned out to be no longer existing. The magazine stopped publication in 2005 and the website was removed in 2007. Thankfully pretty much the whole site is backed up by the Wayback Machine. There are 29 issues going back to January 2003. I don't know if any writers have graduated to some place else.

Craig Sopo recorded a couple short clips of live performances at the most recent More Or Less night at the Hexagon.

2N3904
Ryan Vanderbeck

2N3904 can be seen performing around town. Ryan Vanderbeck was visiting from Philadelphia. He is affiliated with Rizumu who have been bringing some good music to our northerly neighbor.

I am going to be moving site content to Drupal. Let's see how that works out.

I've been reading a lot of books this year. I am going to briefly review them.