Year: 2005

Well, 2 weeks into the new year. I’ve been rather busy with work & stuff to write this. One of the problems with doing it at work…no worries-it’s not like anyone reads this.

So, the past 2 weeks have been: took New Year’s Eve off-I think we cleaned, I don’t remember. Went to a sober party in Mission Viejo-woo hoo. It’s been rainy, really rainy, if you’ve been paying attention to the news. We had some hail. Shopped with Erika, set up an 18G SCSI drive and it promptly died. rrrrr. Played guitar at church for the kids. Work, work, work. Kids, kids, kids. Moved my computer under my desk so it’s easier to load cd’s. Decommissioned my NeXTStation for now-I wasn’t using it for anything but storage and it was a bit of a pain. Starting Pilates on Sat. There’s a gamelan at Pomona college-Pak Wenten runs it. I emailed the ethno chick there to see if I could get in. Hoping… Since I’m not doing kites, Erika might let me do gamelan once a week.

I’m reading more-The Diamond Age, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Good Old-Fashioned Future. I really liked The Diamond Age. All nano-tech and plot. Do Androids… is what Blade Runner came from. It’s different enough that I like it and wasn’t bored b/c I knew the story. A Good Old-Fashioned Future was short stories, pretty good, but I like SF short stories. I’m starting to listen to the music I d/l’d in Dec. The Roots of Gamelan is good-scratchy, but good kebyar recorded at the dawn of kebyar.

How about that Ashlee Simpson? That was the big thing going around, how much she sucked at the Sugar Bowl. Well, I nosed around and finally found a copy of it on BitTorrent. It only took 3 hours to download on dialup. BitTorrent is pretty cool, BTW-once you download something, people start downloading from you. That’s OK if you’re on broadband, but not so good on dialup, so I cut it off. OK, back to Ashlee. First I had only seen the end, where she’s screaming off-key and the song ends and everybody’s booing. So I listen to the whole thing, and she’s not bad at the start, but she’s also not singing with the backing track very well either. By the end she’s all tired out and has no voice left. I wouldn’t have booed her, but it wasn’t very good either. So the blogs and comments are all over the map, and her defenders are pretty much all tweenage girls, who can’t reason for shit, so they can only say something along the lines of “we love you, you rock, no one understands”, which doesn’t help her case much at all. She really needs voice lessons and extended touring to improve-both of which aren’t going to happen. This stuff is all manufactured product anyways-there’s really no sweat and soul and passion in it. What bugs me is that there are so many really, really good people out there making music, in all genres (even the ones I don’t care for ;-), that fluff like this is popular and selling irks me to no end. Hell, even meeee, as an amateur musician with cheap equipment could do better given time to do it. If I had the resources she has, I have no doubt about it.

What other pop culture rants? Maybe I should start talking about that too, along with the politics, computer and religion stuff-something to think about for the new year-bouncing back and forth from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Nope, nothing. Onward, then.

Well, the administration has to admit that there are no WMD’s or chem/bio in Iraq. And Chimpy doesn’t apologize for it. Really. I mean really. No such thing as “the buck stops here” in this administration. He’s blaming bad intel. As if they didn’t ask for bad intel. rrrrr. And then there’s the impending gutting of Social Security, for no good reason other than his Wall Street buddies. And appointing the worst possible people-including a guy who’s on record as calling people “queers” and “radical feminists” doing domestic policy-like he’s going to have every single American in his interest. It’s neverending. What’s next? God help us.

Not picking up much software-the new Adobe Reader. woo hoo. Apple has a new cheap iPod and a cheap iMac in a box. Guess they’re (desperately) trying to expand their market…

A guy at work asked me what religion I was. I get this question from time to time, and for the longest time I had a hard time answering it. I suppose I could say I am a UU, but that’s like saying “I like ice cream”-a fine answer, but not really specific, as UU comes in a lot of different flavors. So I told him I’m a cross between a pagan, a buddhist and a ceremonial magician. Of course the latter generated questions, as not many people have heard of that (the Roman Catholic mass is ceremonial magic, BTW). So I gave him some places to get started-primarily the Golden Dawn. I also looked it up on the web and got back a few online books as well. I’m also thinking of breaking out the Regardie book and starting the GD stuff again (this is the 3rd time). As far as the pagan and Buddhist parts go, I think about the Sabbats when they come around, I respect the God and Goddess and the rulers of the 4 quarters and elements, and I hold to the tenets of the 4 noble truths and the Bodhisattvas, so I guess I’m OK there. It’s so hard to say, though, as I mash up these disparate belief systems, and try to come to terms with the Christian literalists and understand the Moslem fanatics. I don’t know, and say something smart and useful that will help other people grow spiritually?