Prefontaine

That's right, I'm like fucking Prefontaine or some shit.

But right now I've got a fucking cold and I feel like crap. I think it's mroe or less my own fault, since I went out to see The Gaping Abyss on Friday and stayed out 'til 4:00 AM. And there was a lot of hooting and hollering on my part while they played a sloppy, punky set. But I could tell by the end of the night that my throat was gonna be fucked up. And it is.

Did a shitty job of it, but finished painting the trim around the window. I may have to get some titanium white (or whatever the ceiling's color is) to do some touch-ups. I also played a bunch of Halo 2, which is really fun. I never got too far in Halo 1, maybe because of some extreme frustration in that initial level where you're trying to dodge the Convenant on that moutainside where you touch down. But it's gonna be different this time. Maybe.

I also cleaned the fuck out of the bathroom, which was getting fairly disgusting, dust-wise. You can't really tell so much, but the dark, dank nooks are significantly less dark and dank. Plus, I found this neat little hand-decorated Mexican-looking matchbox under the radiator. It's got sequins all over it and a picture of a skull ("La Calavera") but no matches. Horror!

Tom lent me Kung Fu Hustle, which is delightful; I picked up Mer's copy of Ulysses and am trying to get into it.

Scary Face-u

So this was on CNN's front page for a while on the day that BTK guy got put away. How fucking creepy is this? This weekend is going pretty good so far, after a pretty stressed-out lousy week. I had my first non-California roll sushi last night at my boss's house and then spent some time at a bar with the friends. Then I had brunch with the friends this morning at this place in Carroll Gardens called Banania, which was, you know, pretty good. On the way home I ran into Sam Frizzank, who told me he'd invited me to a party over at his place a block away from mine (his e-mail had gotten routed to my HotMail junk folder), so I think I'll do that after I get back from yet another work-related BBQ that I'm leaving for in just a second. The best part, though, is that the fucking kitten is finally gone. "Big Kitty" is obviously a lot more relaxed already. We had what Tom calls a nice long "love-up" this morning, with the result that my eyes and nose were streaming all day. That's right. Me and kitty.

I wanted to paint the living room this afternoon -- I even traded in the white semi-gloss I'd bought last week at Pintchik for a white eggshell plus primer at the urging of my co-workers -- but I was so beat after carrying it over from Flatbush and doing the laundry that I think maybe I'll just do it tomorrow.

Sometimes when I'm taking a leak at work and just sort of staring down into the urinal I kind of zone out a little, thinking about some problem I'm working on or whatever, and when I snap back to reality I have this millisecond fear that I've pissing into the wrong thing. Like, pissing into a wastebasket or something.

Update: Now it's Tuesday -- I meant to finish this sooner. Holy shit, though! I just finished my first full run around Prospect Park. 3.7 miles or some shit, and no stopping, not even on that widowmaker of a hill at the end. I just sort of kept on goin', and I was sort of thinking, "well, I'm just gonna keep on goin'." And I did. It didn't even feel like anything, just like a normal run. The thing is, though, the burrito I'd eaten for lunch was sort of, shall we say, propelling me along. So when, in the shower, I reached for my customary washcloth general, John Ass-cloth II (selected, like John Ass-cloth I, from an ignominious cardboard box in the back of the Yale merch place on that main street in New Haven), I knew there'd be some terror in the tumbleweeds. And there was. And I couldn't, shockingly enough, seem to get clean with the washcloth. So eventually I had to just sit down on the toilet and have what my co-workers refer to as an "assplosion," which took some time. But now I'm feeling good, and I'm making some pasta.

At The Enchilada today, I bought a bottle of that really good spicy habanero hot-sauce, El Yucateca, to keep at my desk for when I buy lunch there. That shit is hot, brah.

I ended up going to Sam's party, where this girl filled me in on what happens in season 2 of Carnivale. It's probably not coming out on DVD, right? I don't think so.

So I did paint on Sunday, and it took a real long time -- don't know how Mer managed to do the whole room (plus trim) in a single afternoon. I've still got the trim around the window left to do, which looks to be at least an hour and change if I use the primer. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow. Then Tombone called and he and I and some assorted others went to go see The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which was totally delightful -- sweet-natured, very funny, very accurate -- they certain captured the "virgin" mindset as I recall it having been a 21-year-old virgin. I was really really sore and stiff on Monday and this morning, but the room looks good. I accidentally broke the glass plate on this Picasso print that I kind of liked as I was rehanging it, but, you know, it happens. The problem is, it broke into two big sharp pieces, kind of too big to just throw away.

On Monday I went to go see Jaws at Bryant Park with my friend Karen from work. We picked up a couple of cheap bottles of wine and met her roommate and friends right smack in front of the screen where they'd secured like 10 square feet of precious blanket real estate and provided some crackers and cheeses. It was great; the weather was great, Bryant Park is just great, right in the middle of all those tall buildings. I'd forgotten how gory that movie is -- that kid on the raft basically explodes when "Jaws" gets him.

So it's been good.

The Nine Billion Names Of God

I had the scariest, most vivid dream last night! I dreamed that the world was ending, but it was happening in this gradual, awful way, such that I (and my dream-girlfriend) were stuck in a part of the world that hadn't yet been completely destroyed (I think it was Connecticut) and realized that something was terribly wrong but couldn't find out the details. In the dream I was frantically searching the Internet for information, and all the news sites were either unreachable or had posted "Technical Difficulties" messages. From the little news we'd been able to get, a good portion of the world / universe had dissolved into this white mist, and the dissolution was proceeding towards the Eastern seaboard of the USA. We'd already observed the effects of the "winding down" process where we were, in that "entropy had ceased to function" (this is how I phrased it in the dream, although now that I think of it, it doesn't make much sense). This meant that plants no longer grew, there was no wind, and human beings couldn't make any changes in their lives -- my dream-girlfriend had wanted to take this clerical job at the sheriff's office, but had to turn it down after the "entropy" phenomenon had taken effect. Additionally, my dream-self kept getting these mental flashes of what I identified in the dream as the Hindu god Shiva rising out of the ground and turning all the surrounding organic matter into this sort of particle slurry. Since I happened to be near the Yale campus, I ran over to visit my old Indian CS professor. to ask him what it meant, but he said he wasn't a Hindu and didn't know.

Also, to make matters worse, there was a mosquito in my room in real life, and it would whine in my ear every so often. I ended up sleeping with the sheet over my head, which was okay because it was such a nice night.

On the plus side, I did probably my best run ever around the Park last night, even though I've got this little cough thing.

Year Of Living... Grudely?!

When I was running Friday night around 8:00, I noticed an unusually strong police presence in the park. There was even a helicopter, criss-crossing the northern part of the park near that last killer hill, flying low enough to the ground that its searchlight could actually like... be on you. When I got to the Grand Army Plaza entrance, there were even more cars, including some unmarked black sedans with sirens on the dash that I'm pretty sure were detectives' cars. Anyway, a whole bunch of cops and cop-like people who poking around in some bushes near the head of the big meadow with flashlights and batons. I didn't see a body, but... you know.

On Sunday I went to go see Lee Papa's Year of Living Rudely, as part of the NYC Fringe Theater Festival. It was so gross and hot on the way there, but when I got out of the subway station, it was fucking pouring. I was totally soaked by the time I got to Dixon Place -- which turned out not to be air conditioned, which was actually pretty fortunate, considering. So, the show. It was okay. It wasn't great. Prof. Papa is not much of a monologuist, which is ironic considering he's a Drama Professor. He basically oversold every line, and he's got this weird fruity voice that sounds like he's trying to cover up a southern accent or something. On the plus side, some of the new material (the show was 50% stuff from the 'blog), especially the audience participation stuff, was pretty funny, and apparently there were supposed to be blow-up dolls and sex toys on stage with him, but the director said something about them being damaged / stolen, so. You know.

I'm gonna get flak for saying this, I know, but I do feel like I'm getting sick. At least I'm doing better than kitty.

Reading some David Eddings that I borrowed from Razor; I remember all my friends getting real into these books when we were in 8th grade. I'm finally leveling the playing field, by Aldur!

The Meat Circus

It is a fucking house of horrors up in this piece. I swear. Three things:

• My feet are bloody from at least two glass splinters I got this morning walking around the kitchen.
• About 15 minutes after feeding the cats, I noticed the kitten nosing around outside Mimi's designated litter box. I thought maybe he'd trapped a mouse or a bug or something, or that he'd gotten real excited about the smell of her piss, which he is wont to do. No. She'd fucking puked right outside her litter box, like an invalid or old person, and he was fucking eating it. And not just tasting it, he was eating all of it, licking it into the cracks in the hardwood. And there were little crystals of litter in it, and, you know, just... ugh. By the time I got a wad of paper towels to clean it up, he'd basically eaten all of it.

...and this one takes the cake:

• I thought the coffee I'd brewed yesterday tasted a bit funny, but I'm not really a pro with the coffee-maker, and I buy the cheap shit anyway, so I'd just kind of chalked it up to, you know, the hand of an angry God. Well, when I was dumping the filter and grounds out last night I chanced to look into the little filter-holder part of the machine, and what did I see? Glommed into the bottom were a few choice pieces of kibble that'd likely fallen in the day before during the affair of the champagne glass. I'd just put the filter and coffee in on top of them without looking and then brewed a 10-cup pot of Purina. Jesus.

The Strandman

Ugh, so it's Saturday evening and I have absofuckinglutely nothing lined up to do, though not for lack of trying. Chris is sleeping something off, Billy's characteristically unreachable, and I can't get ahold of any of my camp friends, neither. The Abyss and I had made informal plans to have a BBQ today (though it could still happen tomorrow) and I wanted to peep on The Aristocrats with T-Bone. It's not too late... something could still happen! I feel fussy and dehydrated. You guys know what I mean, right? Grrr. Maybe I'll go for a run.

Tom came over, I think it was Tuesday, and we watched Meet The Feebles, which he'd sold to me as "like The Muppet Show, man, but if all the Muppets were taking drugs and having sex and stuff." Well, it is sort of like that, but also really really awful.

Update: Yeah, so Tom came through and I went to go see The Aristocraps with a whole bunch of people at 11:00 on Saturday night. The movie was delightful -- I'd been worried that, having been produced by Penn Jillette, it'd be full of pedantic B.S., and it had a little of that, but for the most part it was a joy. Sarah Silverman is a naughty little minx. I would've stayed out later, but I've got this cough, you see, and...

I bought some new cotton sheets for my bed, since the flannel ones that Mer'd bought in college were just a tad bit too warm for year-round (not to mention pretty filthed, no matter how many times we washed 'em). I'm thinking I might also buy a new blanket to match.

Last night I went over to Bill's place and we all (Chris was there, too) sat around drinking and watching TV. It was nice. When I got home, though, I discovered that the kitties had knocked over a very nice champagn flute that was on one of the higher shelves in the cupboard as part of their never-ending quest for food. There was broken glass everywhere (think I got most of it, though I was still picking the odd shard out of my feet this morning), but they both seemed very contrite, which was kind of weird, so I didn't, you know, punish 'em or anything.

My stuff from Amazon came. The Op Ivy album is a bit tamer than I remember but a bit better, too. The Sandman book I bought was less interesting than I'd hoped but also significantly darker. It was also one of those books that didn't really benefit much from being colored; I wonder if there are some editions that are just black and white.

That Thing In The Wheelchair

On Friday I went to go see The Gaping Abyss over at Arlene's Grocery, a club that had foolishly turned down The Headliners when we sent them a demo tape several years ago on account of us not being popular enough. Sophie P. and her friend Connor were there, and so were a lot of lame friends of some of the non-principals in the band, all dancing pretentiously and obliviously right near the stage. It was a good show, though. The mean old lady taking money for the tickets kept pronouncing the name of the band as The Gaping Abbess, which kept making me think of the alternate name Alec and I had discussed a few weeks earlier. Anyway, after the show, I asked Razor if he wanted to eat some hamburgers in the park on Saturday, and he said they'd been invited up to Rhode Island to play a show for The Strines, who'd lost their original opening act to a break up (The Pink Slips had all given each other the pink slip). Did I want to tag along? You bet.

Got to Sarah J's house (the rectory up at St. Mary's) around 2:30 and we left for Newport in the church van at around 4:00. Sarah's dad is a dead ringer for Father Damien, FYI. On the way we stopped at a Fairway and bought a whole bunch of cold cuts and bread and sandwich-makings and made delicious and filling sandwiches in the van. It took about three and half hours to get up to Newport and another 15 just driving around to find the club, which turned out to literally be in an alley behind a fish restaurant. After dropping the shit off, we walked around Newport for a while looking for a place to eat. It turns out that Newport is a real shitty little town and you can't find goddamn food anywhere! The only stuff we found in our price range was a sushi place that proudly advertised that they'd make you sushi without any raw fish (presumably because "you" think that's icky) and a panini sandwich place that was filled with nauseating smoke.

It was around this time that I found out that the Abyss wasn't gonna go on until 10:30. Bill had originally thought they'd go on at 9:00, and since the band was planning on staying over in a hotel room, I'd planned to go back that evening on an Amtrak train so that I'd be able to feed the cats that night and the next morning, and, you know, have a day to get things done on Sunday. I'd bought the ticket and everything. Ultimately it ended up that the ticket was refundable, and I couldn't get in touch with a car service to take me to Kingston anyway, so, like I said to Bill, I decided to stop being a neurotic creep (for at least a few hours) and just hang out, kitties be damned. So I stuck around, and it was fun, even though practically no one came (despite a puff-piece about The Strines that they'd put in the local paper days before).

Near the beginning of The Strines' set, this guy in a motorized wheelchair came into the club and started 'dancing' by turning his wheelchair around on the dance floor and sort of puttering around in time to the music. I don't know what his particular affliction was, but aside from being wheelchair-bound, he also had these skinny little T-Rex arms that weren't good for too much except clicking little buttons in his chair. I think we were all glad he was enjoying himself, but his appearance was a bit off-putting. Mario correctly observed that it added a Lynchian element to the atmosphere. After The Strines finished up, everyone headed outside for a smoke and the guy in the wheelchair came out and was telling The Strines and the guys in Abyss that he liked the show, and he even ended up offering a cigarette to Billy.

Well, Billy and the wheelchair guy (whose name turned out to be Bob) got to talking, and it turned out that one thing they had in common was that they both wished they'd smoked some weed before the show. Billy said he'd called his guy but that he hadn't been able to score in time before getting in the van, and that he wished he could've rolled a joint or two. "Fuck that," said Bob. "I'd like to smoke a blunt up in that piece."

"I bet you would," said Billy, and began exhorting him to describe further scenarios, much like one would do, say, with a girl who might be persuaded to disrobe with enough coaxing.

"Next time I fly," said Bob, "I should smoke a blunt on the plane -- fill the whole cabin with smoke!"

"Yeah," continued Bill, his imagination firing on all four cylinders, "but only the passengers in first class get to smoke it. Everyone else just gets a contact high!" On that note, they went off to a little cul-de-sac and rolled and smoked a joint. Or maybe Billy just sucked him off. At any rate, after some fretting about where to stay, an Amherst guy who is now a Brown guy offered his house. On the way there, perhaps as a reaction to me and Billy making noise about wanting to get back to NYC, Chris started going off about how he didn't even care, he was goin' to the beach in Providence the next day. I took that as a hint that I wasn't going to get to call the shots, so I'd need to make my own plans. I also hit him a few times, but only because he was screaming the lyrics to Big Shot into my ear.

Yes, yes, you had to be a big shot, didn't you
You had to prove it to the crowd
You had to be a big shot, didn't you
All your friends were so knocked out
You had to have the last word, last night
You're so much fun to be around
You had to have the front page, bold type
You had to be a big shot last night

Mario snored, predictably. I woke up at six (having gone to bed at three) and called a car service to get to the train station, then hopped the 7:20 to Penn Station. And the kitties. were. okay.

Finished Forever, which had a weak middle but an okay last 100 pages; also finished Leisure Suit Larry for the PS2, which was delightful -- raunchy and funny. I popped a few boners, I'm not gonna lie. M-Biddy came through with a couple of books, in addition to the t-shirt: The Pirates and The Mouse and The Collected Letters of George Orwell. Sick.

Kitty Won't Take Her Shot

I'm sitting in the Lay-Z-Boy, which is now in the living room, waiting for her to calm down a bit so I can give her her allergy shot. She's really dead set against it tonight, which is weird, since you'd think this sort of thing would get easier. The thing is, she's also a lot stronger than she used to be, maybe from struggling with the kitten. The last shot she got, she bent the needle on the syringe with all her wriggling and squirming. She's like the fucking hulk or something.

Last Saturday I was feeling pretty down, but then my sister called me to ask me if I wanted to go to Coney Island with her and her friend, and it pretty much turned my day around. I watched them go on the Wonder Wheel (they insisted on riding in one of the sliding cars; you won't catch me in one of those) and then we read our respective books on the beach for a while, trying to get a tan. The girls went down to the water's edge briefly, but according to my sister, the people down there were "so disgusting; they all weigh like 500 lbs!" She told me I should come with her and my parents to this island they go to in Maine every year. I've avoided it for the past however many years (not least of all because there's no electricity and plumbing is scarce), but this time I'm thinking I'd welcome a change of scenery.

Oh, for those of you who live in Manhattan and can thus peep on the ol' MNN, Mike the Bum has a show on that he'd like you all to watch. I can't remember what it's called, but it's got a pretty sweet timeslot (for MNN, relatively speaking), like Fridays at midnight or something. Jump on it.

I bought some stuff for myself on Amazon, using the gift certificate my 'rents gave me. I tried to get each item from a different category of stuff, so here's what I bought:

• A wireless PCI card for the ol' desktop, which is no longer in the study within cabling distance of the router
• Book One of The Sandman
• Op Ivy's Energy
• The Ring

M-Biddy also got me this sweet Air America "Fire Rove" t-shirt. I want to wear it to work tomorrow, but I don't know how well it would go down with the office idiots; yea, them what pulls the cart. Started reading Forever, which is larnin' me things about Irish history if not blowing me away with its prose.

Alright, I'm giving up on the shot. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow if Mer's around to pin kitty down.

It's Wednesday night now. I just got back from this company "outing" where they chartered this yacht and took a 4-hour spin around tip of lower Manhattan. I was kind of dreading it because, you know, four hours on a boat with business jerks and you can't get off, but one of the other developers slipped me some Dramamine and I actually had a really great time. Story of my life, I guess.

Jesus that fucking kitten has got to go.

Worst Place On Urf

Well, I had a pretty great birthday, celebrating my entrance to mid-twenty-dom over the course of three days. Let me fill y'all in.

On Friday I went to go see Razor and Chrissy play this place called Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg. The place is pretty sweet -- all sort of decaying wood and lots of twisty little passages, not unlike the venerable and long-deceased Coney Island High. Unfortunately, I got there a little bit late and thus had to stand in the back of the room (which, as Bill pointed out, looks a fuck of a lot like a converted subway car) with a bunch of sweaty hipster dorkuses. They played a good set, though, and we hung out afterwards in this nice little courtyard out back. Chris and Bill were supposed to come to the Dickies show with me at 12:15, but they punked out, so to speak, so I left with Sarah J. and hooked the L to the 6 to the Continental.

The Dickies were fantastic! By the time I got to the Continental, they were already on stage playing their first song, and the ATM next to the club was out of cash, so I had to make a run around the block to get some cash to get in. The club was packed -- kind of a surprise -- and there was no way I was getting anywhere near the stage, especially carrying my backpack, so I wedged myself in about halfway down, and I think I got a pretty good view of things. Maybe it was just that I'd forgotten to bring my earplugs, but the band sounded tighter and better than I think I've ever seen them. Leonard looked worse than when I saw them at the Ramones thing at Irving Plaza, but he seemed to be a bit more tuned in. The on-stage banter was in top (or worst, depending on one's taste) form. An excerpt, presented here for your enjoyment:

Leonard: You know, Stan here has got to be the best Hispanic guitarist in all of punk rock. No kidding. Hell, he might just be the best bisexual Hispanic guitarist in all of punk rock. No, no, no, Stan's gotta be the best bisexual Hispanic muslim guitarist in all of punk rock.

(You might remember this lead-in from an earlier 'blog entry, but this time it was different:)

Stan: Alright, let me tell you people something. You guys know that band Red Hot Chili Peppers? Well, back in 1981, Leonard sucked that guy Anthony Keatis' dick! Plus, he lives with his momma, and he voted for Bush!

Leonard: I got three things to say to you. One, sounds like someone's got a problem accepting a compliment. Two, [can't remember]. And three -- Bush won, people! (Cackling, he throws up the sig heil amid boos and catcalls.) Alright, this next song is so old... [How old is it?] I said, this song is so old... [How old is it?!] This song is so old, this dirty old liberal Jew (points at Stan) wrote it! (The song is 'Give It Back')

Here's their set list, or at least as close an approximation as I can muster:

• See My Way
• Nights in White Satin
• Tricia Toyota
• Waterslide
• Give It Back
• I've Got a Splitting Hedachi
• Got It At The Store
• Paranoid
• Doggie Doo
• Going Homo
• You Drive Me Ape
• My Pop The Cop
• Curb Job
• Gigantor
• Eve of Destruction
• Banana Splits

Note that some of these songs don't get played live very often -- case in point: I've Got A Splitting Hedachi. So that was neat.

Then on Saturday I threw a little barbecue party in the park. I guess I figured it was going to be easier than it ended up being, 'cuz I planned the party for 4:00 but didn't start buying shit for it 'til 3:00, and I also ended up having to shop frantically for a grill, since the gloom-and-doom weather reports didn't seem to keep anybody away, and all the public grills were taken. So I was pretty beat by the time people actually started showing up, but I got a lot of help actually making the food, and people brought drinks, and it was a lot of fun. Ultimately around twelve people showed up, which was more than I expected, and it would have been fourteen had Razor and C-Lo not gotten lost in the wilds of Brooklyn.

On the way home with Tom from the park, this bartender from the 12th St. B & G popped out the door and asked Tom if he'd sell him the whiffleball set he was carrying, which was a little weird. Tom ended up agreeing to rent it to him in return for a round of drinks. We got some G&Ts and then ate some pizza at Smiling, which was real tasty but gave me weird dreams because I hit the sack as soon as I got back from hooking T up with a car service car.

For brunch on Sunday my parents and I went over to the Carroll Gardens apartment of this girl who's the daughter of an old co-worker of my mom's and whom I've known practically forever. Former Headliners may remember her as the hot 'n' sarcastic girl who came to our Continental show in '01. Anyway, she basically made this entire brunch on her own for us and it was delicious -- we ate in the little patio area of her apartment that had a really nice little vegetable garden in one half of it, and talked about a number of fascinating things. Apparently Carroll Gardens is full of dirty racist dagos.

When I got back to home base, Mer'd moved most of her stuff out, which was pretty sad to see. I was planning to rock out with Applebeast / Bloodweiser, but apparently Ted broke some crucial part of his axe, so that's on hold. I moved a bunch of furniture around and converted our old bedroom into my new personal zone with the desk from the study.

I went to Manhattan in the evening and my parents took me out to this great Indian place called Banjara, but my appetite just wasn't there and every muscle in my body was killing me from carrying all the shit to the barbecue, so I didn't eat much (though I've got the leftovers at work today). The 'rents got me a new frying pan, a water pic, and my sister's remaindered copy of Harry Potter and the Artist Formerly Known as Voldermort, which I'm actually kind of looking forward to reading.

The kitten got picked up today by my boss's wife to go get his nards detached. Hopefully he won't be such a dick by the time he gets back.

The Cave of Montesinos

Yeah, so we broke up about a week ago, which was, as she says, scary and sad. I'm still struggling with it a bit -- some days I'm up, some days I'm down -- but like my dad said, you don't get over a three-and-a-half year relationship in a week. Apparently she's moving out on Sunday, which will give me plenty of time to re-organize the house and get used to bachelor life before The Rase moves in in September (she's still in Sierra Leone). Yeah, you heard me -- I'm living with The Rase. Here's a funny thing though: While I was at home on Thursday feeling sorry for myself, I got an IM from someone who'd never IM'd me before. It turned out it was my best friend from pre-school, whom I hadn't talked to in literally, like, I don't know, 10 years? He's living near Tampa and managing a record label. He asked how I was doing, and on a whim I told him the whole thing about breaking up, and he said that he, no joke, had just separated from his wife of 6 years. So we talked about that for a while, which felt good. He even invited me down to FL to go fishing with him on his boss's yacht, which sounded pretty good to me, especially considering I haven't taken any vacation at all this year, except to take Mimi to the allergist. But then the whole hurricane thing happened, and Tom rightly pointed out that the proposal sounded like the premise for a thriller, so I'm gonna think it over a bit more.

In case I neglected to e-mail the invite to any of you, I'm having a little birthday party on Saturday at the grill area in Prospect Park near the entrance at 11th St. near my house -- you are literally all invited.

What else is new?

Been watching some movies. All The President's Men was quite good, though it (or maybe the day-old hamburger from Bonnie's Grill I ate while watching it) gave me weird dreams -- I kept telling myself I needed to some way to evaluate the mutually recursive functions

Woodward(mission) {
  Bernstein(mission);
}

Bernstein(mission) {
  Woodward(mission);
}

Weird, right? I also rented Team America: World Police, which was less "offensive" and less funny than I'd heard, although the filmmakers' actual premise, which I'm pretty sure was that bullshit about dicks and pussies at the end, was just flat-out incorrect. I did laugh at the puppet sex. Tomorrow's my birthday, creepuses. Gonna go to the Dickies show (which is pay-at-the-door, so if any of you want to tag along...), plus the Gaping Abyss show tomorrow night. I might even check out Morning Sedition at Restaurant Florent tomorrow morning, God willing. Tonight maybe me and the recently blog-less Devstar will get our hang out on.

Go Berserk... No Dessert?!

Like Mer, I had a totally killer weekend, though I didn't have to go all the way up to Long Dong Lake or whatever to have it.

Friday afternoon I was feeling pretty down and getting sort of freaked out about it, so when my boss let us off at 4:30, I made an appointment at Ultrasound Studios and drummed for an hour, which made me feel a bit better. I was actually getting pretty good at what I think people call "beat independence," something I've always had a hard time with. I was working some awesome contrapuntal flams into the mix as well. Fuck it, I don't know what the shit it's is all called. Point is, it was a pretty good work out, and I'm still pretty sort of okay at the whole thing. Then I met T-Bone to go see Land of the Dead, which ended up being wholly entertaining, if a bit ham-fisted. Tom Savini's cameo as Hatchet Zombie is alone worth the price of admission. No it's not. Yes it is.

Then on Saturday I went over the friends' place to peep on the housewarming party they were having for their new roommates. The Wy-Man almost kicked the ass of this guy who writes for The Onion A.V. Club for allegedly being rude to his girlfriend, which was... a little awkward. I also talked to these two awful immature girls who had gone to Amherst and knew Razor Lopez down to the littlest detail, including something I didn't know -- that he was in the fraternity Chi Psi!

...Which he fervently denied when I saw him on Sunday at his place over on Water St. He lives right next to this block that houses both a tract-printing press for Watchtower and the DLX Novelty Company. Go figure. And that shit he tells you about the bakery across the street? No lie, dawg. That shit smells choice. I wish I could say that I liked his puppy, but I just... don't. It's got kind of a brutal face like a bear and these very scared eyes whose whites you can always see. The effect is rather unsettling, if you ask me. Chris was there, too. That guy has read Blood Meridian. I could see that one coming, though; that guy's ready everything. So we went up to the roof of the building and were having a pretty good time until all of a sudden this awful woman (who looked like a younger blonde version of the Runaway Bride) shows up and starts trying to strike up a conversation with us. Chris hit the nail on the head when he said afterward that she was ape-shit for volunteering information about herself. Among the non-sequitur gems:

• "I'm so drunk. Can you tell how drunk I am? I'm so sorry." She didn't look or sound drunk at all.
• "Morrissey ruined my life. Morrissey... do you know The Smiths? He ruined my life." Oh, did you know him or something? "No, just a fan."
• "I work with really fucked up people, like meth addicts and stuff? And this woman I'm counseling on the phone, I say to her 'Hey, do you want to talk to my wonderful husband who I just got married to?' And she just hangs up on me!"
• "The projects, man. Those places are dangerous! They'll kill you just for walking in there!" Chris suggests that the projects are not as quite bad as she might think. "I'll drive you right down there and drop you off; we'll see how long you last! I've been living in this city long enough to know how bad it is. Those people will kill you!" How long have you been living here? "About three months now. I keep a carton of eggs and a head of lettuce in the back seat of my car in case anyone tries to mess with me."

Eventually we managed to shake her and her effeminate husband who was a dead ringer for Alan Cumming. Chris threw a chair at me and then pissed on it. Then, as we were leaving, he threw some beer cans off the roof, in spite of Bill begging him not to, and as we were on our way downstairs, this other woman, who must have seen the cans go by her window, came into the stairwell and started giving us what-for. "We're trying to create a living community here," she said. Chris pointed out that the cans had most certainly not hit her porch, but she said he was an asshole. After she went back inside, Billy said, "You don't understand, Chris. I have to deal with that woman every... day."

On Monday, I checked out Kevin Wasserman's BBQ, which is always delightful, though my stomach was kind of upset, and then I headed over to K-Flo's, to check out the fireworks. Unfortunately, I left Kevin's a bit late, so by the time I got to Katherine's everyone was up on the roof and couldn't hear the buzzer. So I went to go find a pay phone so I could call someone's cell and have them let me in, but the nearest pay phone was 3 looong blocks away and fucking broken to boot. The next one I found was in the foyer of this stinky bar and was always broken or turned off; the third one ate all my money and kept asking for 55 cents more. Finally this guy at a deli let me use his phone for free, so I left Tom a message to come down and let me in. By that time, of course, it had all started, so I headed back to Katherine's and watched the fireworks on her stoop. I gotta say, I get less and less impressed with the whole thing every year. I like the fireworks that are bright and have lots of glittery sparks / effluvia / etc., but the most popular ones always seem to be the ones that just go "pop" and spread chintzy-colored dots all over the sky. Uck.

The Boca Burgers I just made were cold inside and floppy, but that doesn't stop the cats from fiendin' for a taste.

I bought this book Forever, upon Emma's official B&N recommendation, to read when I'm done with DQ.

Taking The Bull By The Horns

The kitten is licking the fuck out of his nuts.

So Morning Sedition @ the Tea Lounge was fucking great! I showed up too late to see Jim Earl do any of his bits, but I got to see Kent Jones (who looks nothing like I'd imagined) do his Lawton Smalls report from Planet Bush -- plus, of course, Mark and Marc doing they thing. They also had Chuck D and DMC from Run DMC on as guests. DMC's voice was really weird, though -- it was really high and shaky, like he was going to burst into tears at any second. Maybe he was sick or something; maybe he just always sounds like that. At the end of the broadcast I waited in line to meet the hosts and told Mark Riley, lamely enough, that Morning Sedition was "the best morning show on the radio. Period." Ahem. It's true, though.

During a break about halfway through, as I was coming back from putting my name in a raffle for tickets to see Maron at Bananas, I ran into a friend of mine from Wesleyan, this girl who'd been in No Exit with me. Thing is, I totally didn't remember her name (it's Deanna), but she remembered mine, and I didn't want to ask her because I'm usually pretty good with names and I was just hoping it would come to me. But it didn't, and she sort of slipped in "I'm Deanna, by the way" part way through our conversation. I was like, "I... I know. I mean, thank you." Awk-ward. Anyway, it turns out that she actually works for Air America, which is sweet. I asked her about the financial status of the network, since the neo-con death cult is constantly predicting their demise and none of the on-air people ever really discuss it. Naturally she said they were doing fine, but who knows? You can't trust anyone these days.

Okay, time to pick up my laundry.

Java in a Nutshell

I just found out that the Morning Sedition Tea Lounge broadcast is gonna be at the Tea Lounge at 7th and Union, not the Tea Lounge at 7th and 10th. This is the worst day of my entire goddamn life.

Now it's Thursday.

Yesterday I was feeling kind of down, so I decided to go for a run after work. I was doing pretty well, but after about 2 miles the burrito I'd had for lunch started sloshing around in my stomach so I cut across the park and went home. But I felt a whole hell of a lot better.

I'd bought some mussels at C-Town on my way home, so when I got back from my run I sauteed some garlic and onions and steamed the mussels to put over some pasta. Then Mer and I hunkered down to watch the last 2 episodes of the second season of The Sopranos. The season finale was great -- Tony gets food poisoning from, what else, a bad plate of mussels (though Artie fuckin' Bucco tries to blame it on some chicken vindaloo from a different restaurant), and, in between trips to the bathroom, has a bunch of really weird dreams that kind of guide him through what he has to do to get his ducks in a row. Can't wait to start the third season.

And as luck (or slightly over/undercooked seafood) would have it, Mer and I both had some crazy dreams of our own last night. She can tell you what hers was about; here's what happened to me: Mer was having some irritating friends stay with us while they were in town. They'd brought us a gift of a boxed DVD set of some episodes of a TV show, possibly Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I'm not sure -- I think Bill Nighy was in it) and wanted to watch it with us, but they were still so aggravating that we decided to get out of the house on our own for a while. We wound up on a suburban high school football field -- it was dark out except for the stadium lights lighting up the grass -- and a friend of mine, possibly Chrissy Rodney, was chasing us around in a friendly way carrying a barrel of wine above his head and spraying wine into our mouths and all over our faces as we ran up and down the field. We ended up getting very drunk and the three of us went to the nearby restroom / locker room to clean ourselves up. You know how when you're drunk, sometimes you look in the mirror and you're like, "Echhhh! I look terrible!" Well, in the dream, I literally looked awful -- my eyes were really close together and my nose was all bulbous. For some reason I started spitting in the sink, trying to clear my throat, but I kept bringing up these thick strands of saliva and hair (!) that I had to pull out of my mouth with my fingers. So that was gross. And then I woke up.

As promised, pictures of the kitten:

The kitten looking	A girl and her kitten
Kitties in context

What else was I going to talk about. Oh yeah -- reading Don Quixote. One thing you guys may not know is that the book is basically vomit porn:

Sancho came so near as almost to thrust his eyes into his master's mouth; and that was the very moment when the balsam began to work in Don Quixote's stomach; so that just as Sancho drew close to peer into his mouth the knight threw up what was in him more violently than the shot from a gun and sent it all over the beard of his compassionate squire.

"Holy Mary!" cried Sancho. "What has happened to me? Sure, this poor sinner is mortally wounded, since he is vomiting blood."

But on examining things a little more closely, he realized, from its colour, taste, and smell, that it was not blood but the balsam from the can, which he had seen him drinking; and this so turned his stomach that he threw up his very guts over his master; and the pair of them were then in the same pickle.

Dicks Get Licked

I've already been carping about this to various people, but at around 3:30 today, CNN pulled its top story, that Terry Schiavo was fucking braindead the whole goddamn time, and replaced it with this, which, as far as I can tell, is not news at all. It is a portrait piece; the name of the potrait is "Trash in Hell." Is this some kind of conspiracy or what?

Okay, I started this entry last week and just didn't get around to finishing it. That's just how it goes sometimes. But there's some really big news about things, and I'm a little surprised that Meriwether hasn't posted yet: We got a kitten! I'll post some pictures as soon as we have them, but the story is thus. The wife of one of my bosses has gotten herself into the business of "fostering" cats, which means taking them off the hands of non-"No Kill" shelters until they can be officially adopted by other people. So she fostered this mother cat that came with three kittens, and the kittens were beginning to drive my boss crazy. We were at a brunch party at one of the sysadmins' house and I think I'm overhearing her ask if anyone can cat-sit for her, so I remind her that I live across the street from them, which is true. Turns out she was actually asking people about adopting the kittens, so I'd just volunteered us. But it's actually okay -- we went over to meet the one she'd said she had in mind for us, and then last Tuesday she just dropped him off.

He's what's called a "classic tabby," which means he's got very well-defined black stripes that kind of make him look like a tiger. Mer's christened him "Mikey," which is a sound-alike for "M.K.," which, according to her, is short for his real name, which is "Male Kitten." Weird. Anyway, he's been sequestered in the study for the past week because he's got a mild eye infection and because Mimi really doesn't like him much at all. We're going to let him out tonight, though, and that's just going to have to be that. (In part because when he's alone in the study, he cries non-stop, which is something that I didn't think would bother me, but I find it pretty upsetting. It's been fucking up my sleep and making me all wound up.)

Other stuff, other stuff... I read Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, which is pretty good -- a lot better than Gun, With Occasional Music. I read practically the whole thing in a single afternoon; I went up to the roof of our building, something I just realized we can do, and drank a gin and tonic in the hot sun while reading. It was really fun -- there was a nice breeze and I could see the trees blowing around in the park -- but I'd made the G&T way to strong and after about 30 minutes I nearly puked. But, you know.

I'm finally buckling down and trying to give Don Quixote a serious read; it's a fat one, that book.

Oh yeah, here's a fun thing: Morning Sedition on Air America has been doing their show from different places around NYC -- last month they did it from City Bakery, which is the place the staff buys food in the morning, I guess, and a few weeks ago, they did it at Snotty Dick Inc., The Strand bookstore. This Friday, though, they're doing the show from the Tea Lounge, which is literally like 2 block from my house. I could totally just wake up at 5:30 and go over there and hang out until 9:00 and yea, be earyl, even, for work. It's going to be awesome.

I just found out that not only are my old favorite bunch of ironic Republicans coming to play their first show in NYC in about 2 years, but they'll be playing at The Continental on my fucking birthday! How sick is that. Tickets aren't on sale yet, but who wants to go?

Kid, there are two kinds of bears in this world -- bears that dance, and bears that do not dance.

Remember... What the Doorman Said

Saw Chris tonight, which was fun. We went to the friends' place, where I thought they were having a barbecue, but I guess I'd been too waffly with Liz on the phone, so they didn't think we were coming and they ate all the food. So we got some Calexico instead, and it was great. My stomach was bothering me a bit so I didn't eat it all at the time, but I pounded it down as soon as I got home. It was good to see Chris; sounds like he's going out west to do his Master's at UCLA, which is sort of too bad for me, and probably Razor Lopez, too.

I finally got my hands on a copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Mer and I both plowed through it in a couple of days. It's good, you know, but a little, I don't know, breezy. Now I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which is pretty goddamn scary. Finished Jade Empire; very satisfactory, except for one of those darn "choices" you make very near the end of the game basically swings your alignment completely in one direction, obliterating the results of all the choices you'd made earlier in the game. For me, the net result was that I turned into a pretty decent guy... and that's not so bad, I guess.

My new primary care physician sent me to a cardiologist and wants me to get an ultrasound, because I have, respectively, a heart murmur and a big fat varicose vein on one of my nuts. She said I really needed to start wearing something besides boxer shorts when I went running, so I bought a couple pairs of boxer briefs, which are not, you know, super-comfortable for me, but they stop the ol' oysters from hurting when I go 'round the park. So.

I think I may have found a place to donate my meagre comic book collection -- the Special Collections department of the VCU library system is apparently willing to receive any and all items I can send them. Even the Spawn / Underdog Christmas Special. I didn't think anyone wanted that one.

I Am Fucking Awesome

Well, hello there! I'm in a pretty great mood this morning, and I'll tell you why: First off, last night I got off the train at around 7:45 and it was still pretty light out, so I resolved to go for a run. I hadn't run last weekend -- I literally plain forgot to do it -- and I'd been feeling sheepish about that. Plus, I was feeling pretty full of energy despite having been stuck at my desk for the past 10 hours. So not only did I go for a run, but it was my best run ever! I only had to stop once, for only a few minutes, because my chest was getting pretty tight. But I ran up that last fucking hill like nobody's business. 3.4 miles, baby!

Also, just now, I finally got the CSS automatic table layout algorithm working in this rendering library I'm writing. Long story short, I'd gotten my renderer working passably a few months ago (jesus, 6 months ago?!), but there were some layout indiosyncrasies (like two elements only being able to get a few units away from each other before getting squished) that made me realize that I'd have to rewrite the whole thing to do layout according to the CSS algorithms. And that. took. a. long. time. The spec is worded in a pretty vague way, and a lot of times I had to spend a few days figuring out what it meant or even subject myself to the ridicule of people on IRC to get some help grokking it. At any rate, I fixed a trivial SIGSEGV just now and ran my test program, and what should I see but my three little test buttons layed out horizontally next to each other. Totally unexpected. I said, "Fuck yeah!" out loud as I used the TAB key to cycle the focus through each one, even though there's no one here to hear me except Kitty, and she's sick.

I got some books out of the Epiphany branch of the NYPL last week: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is really quite good, though it's got a completely different tone and focus from Blade Runner. The Darkest Part of the Woods I picked up on a whim while I was looking for a different book -- it's not bad; "pleasantly dull," might be the best way to describe it. Right now I'm reading The Road to San Giovanni by Italo Calvino.

Got into Jade Empire a whole bunch more. I still have the same complaint with it, though, which I also had with the Bioware Star Wars games, which is that the "choices" you get to make aren't terribly nuanced. That is, I don't really feel like I'm deciding between Way of the Closed Fist and Way of the Open Palm (or Dark vs. Light Side, as the case may be) as between rude and polite. I may subscribe to a Randian worldview (in the game, in the game), but I know how to say please, people.

UPDATE: It's Sunday now. As it happened, I had a kick-ass day at work on Friday, too, but I woke up at 2:00 AM Saturday with the shits and all this thick, unhorkable mucus in my chest. The worst part was, I was having a computer dream before I woke up and spent like 15 minutes half asleep trying to clear my throat by loading an Assembly in a custom AppDomain. Jesus. Tom dragged me out for a run, which did not go quite as well as the one on Thursday. Then I went to Ted's birthday party; I was the only attendee who didn't barf, apparently. This morning, Mer and I went to Cafe Steinhof; a fly died in my coffee, but the spaetzle was good. The humidity is making me irritable.

It's Literally Just Like 'The Shining'

So on Thursday night my friend Seung had a painting in this art show and stopped by the opening after work -- it was at one of her friends' apartments on Broadway, right above Yellow Rat Bastard (how's that for location?). She basically had the best thing in the show (and the only painting -- on canvas at least). The rest of the stuff was pretty... bad. It was mostly so-called "mixed media" pieces, including, but not limited to, a plywood crate attached to a set of a drapes and hanging from the ceiling. You know, like, stupid stuff.

Anyway, by the time I'd left the show it had gotten pretty dark, which was sort of disorienting, since it was totally light when I'd gotten there. I thought I should head for either the Delancey St. or East Broadway F stops, so I headed off Eastward and walked for like 6 blocks before I realized I had know idea where either of those stops was in relation to where I was. That, plus the fact that I kept thinking that Mer would be waiting for me and I hadn't called her to let her know where I was, and hadn't yet realized how sick I was with this shitty cold I've got now, led me to basically freak the fuck out. Pretty embarrassing, considering I'm supposed to have grown up in this city. Well, Jake, it was Chinatown.

I eventually made it to East Broadway, which, no kidding, is pretty East, and thus home to B'klyn. But I was still all wound up by the time I got back to the apartment, so I thought I'd do a few chores to calm myself down. The overhead light in the kitchen had been getting a lot dimmer, so I decided to remove the fixture and replace the bulb. One thing we'd always noticed about the fixture, which was one of those simple, screw-on glass dish dealies, was that it had a big splotch on the interior of one side, which we'd always assumed was paint. Well, when I finally got it down, I noticed that not only was it full of bug carcasses, a bunch of which had rained down on me as I was unscrewing it, but that splotch was actually a wasp's nest! Holy shit! Mind you, it was clearly devoid of actual wasps, but it definitely had a little hole in it for a wasp or wasp-like critter. So that didn't calm me down at all.

21 Days Later

Well, I haven't posted in this thing for a while. Sorry! I just haven't felt like it. Nothing's really happened. My fingernail is probably going to fall off; this realization is something that would have totally freaked me out when I was a kid, but now... not so much. It doesn't really hurt that much, it just feels sort of, you know, exposed. Which isn't even as bad as it sounds. My stomach's been shitty for the past week or so, too. Yesterday I decided to top my breakfast off with several handfuls of these japaleno potato chips that Mer brought home and the rest of the day I felt so crappy I couldn't eat anything.

Sometimes when I'm between books, I browse reviews on Amazon until I find something that sounds interesting, then I try to get it out of the library. I found this book called I Am Legend like this last week, but it totally sucked. The premise is awesome, though -- it's set in a future (1976 -- it was written in 1954) where a plague has turned the entire world except this one guy into vampires. Now I'm reading The Dante Club about a spate of Se7en-style murders in 1865 Boston -- also a rockin' premise with a lackluster execution.

I bought Jade Empire for Mer the day it came out. She had me go look for it in Manhattan since it was sold out at the GameStop on 7th Ave. It took me a while, but I found a copy at the GameStop on 8th St. & Broadway (Razor Lopez may remember it as a Software Etc.), and let me tell you -- that place is chock-a-block with dorks. As I was waiting in line, this creepy guy standing behind me turned to me unprovoked and said, in a halting, nasal voice, "I hear that game is like Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords except that there are more choices and the choices have deeper consequences." Neat. The only copy on the shelf was wedged into that display they have that shows you the current top 5 games, and I wasn't sure if it was for sale, so I asked the cashier when I got to the front of the line. He said, "Sure, but I don't know if we sell to Romulans." I was kind of nonplussed until I looked down and realized I was wearing my Star Trek shirt with the Romulan insignia on it. So we all had a good laugh, and one of the salespeople started going off about this guy he knew that bottles his own Klingon Blood Wine. The cashier was even nice enough to let me have the last copy of the Limited Edition version of the game, which was in the case behind the register. "Same price, but you get an extra playable character and an extra fighting style. It's basically a no-brainer." Indeed.

John Paul II's Greatest Hits

Good riddance to that disgraceful fascist.

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed to those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not.”

"The Church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, if every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful. This teaching is to be held as definitive and irreformable. Contraception is gravely opposed to marital chastity; it is contrary to the good of the transmission of life (the procreative aspect of matrimony) and to the reciprocal self-giving of the spouses (the unitive aspect of matrimony); it harms true love and denies the sovereign role of God in the transmission of life."

"The fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, received neither the mission proper to the Apostles nor the ministerial priesthood clearly shows that the non-admission of women to priestly ordination cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against them. Rather, it is to be seen as the faithful observance of a plan to be ascribed to the wisdom of the Lord of the universe.... In order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."

That Revolting Zombie In The Vatican

Seriously, I could not be "praying" harder for that disgusting old hate-monger to kick the incontinent-urine-filled bucket. What I don't get is the legions of monstrous ignoramuses swaying and gibbering like retards and wishing for him to hold on for, what, a few more days? Guys, your whole bullshit delusion is predicated on your infatuation with death; you should all be cheering for it harder than I am.

This week's been pretty fulfilling, Thanatos-wise, what with that Terri buying it and Jerry Falwell looking pretty close to it himself. (As far as prayers go, Marc Maron had the best one for Falwell: That he be pounded into the earth like a nail by a falling chunk of frozen blue airplane urine and have it slowly melt into his mouth as he lies dying.) Unfortunately, the week's fatalities also include comic prodigy Mitch Hedberg. I shit you not, guys -- he's fuckin' dead. MTV said heart attack, but, no offense, I feel like his heart was probably attacked by a bottle of pills and a couple of six packs.

I was goind to post the following on my Advogato diary, but I don't know how well it would go over there.

So, on the 26th, as I mentioned, I took the Chinatown Bus to Boston to attend the Free Software Foundation's annual Associate Member's meeting -- the price of membership buys you a day of lectures from the FSF's board. (For those of you who don't feel like to trying to grok their mission statement, you may think of the FSF as a kind of ACLU for software.) The first bus arrives in Boston at 11:00ish, so I missed the first couple of speakers, but here's what happened after I got there:

Henri Poole gave a short talk about the usefulness of community-building web tools for grassroots political campaigns, particularly as observed during the 2004 Howard Dean campaign. Interestingly enough, he recommended Drupal, the base system for CivicSpace; I'd evaluated it while trying to set up undecidable.net and found it to be the most polished but also, in some ways, the least featureful. Henri was careful to emphasize that the FSF is nonpartisan, but most of the questions from the audience were geared towards our currently uncomfortable political position; weirdly enough, several people asked about the "Dean scream."

Gerald Sussman was the next up; his talk was about the history of Engineering. The majority of it was devoted to historical data about the people behind various engineering innovations, as an illustration of the way in which scientists and engineers facilitate eachothers' work -- doing new science requires the invention of new tools, and the resulting discoveries themselves lead to further applications. Towards the end he introduced the problem of process patents, which interrupt this cycle by preventing research from feeding back into the scientific community. The audience didn't have many questions, except for a Russian-sounding guy in the first row who kept insisting that he could prove that all patents, not just process patents, were harmful -- Sussman disagreed, citing some of Edison's patents that led to the electrification of New York City, and required protection so that funding could be secured. (Not an subject I know that much about, admittedly...)

Then there was lunch -- I talked to a few people I was sharing a table with, including a guy who used to work on iPhoto at Apple (he's a GNOME hacker now).

After lunch, Eben Moglen gave a great speech about the legal and financial status of the FSF over the course of the past year. He made a number of interesting revelations, which I here re-reveal, in no particular order:

• The FSF was subpoenaed multiple times for various documents related to the SCO v. IBM trial; some of these subpoenas they took great care to respond to, others they simply ignored
• They've (the FSF) managed to acquire a few million dollars in the bank in gifts from some rather weathy corporate donors
• The latest threatening rumblings, as far as Free Software goes, have been related to patents, and, like the SCO debacle, are traceable back to Microsoft, though perhaps more directly this time than before -- he's been hearing reports of what he called "muggings" on the part of Microsoft, which go as follows: A CEO of a Fortune 500 company receives an invitation to dinner with Steve Ballmer or Craig Mundie; when he shows up, the CEO finds out that, in fact, he's having a meeting with a bevy of Microsoft lawyers who inform him that if his company goes with Free Software, they're opening themselves up to a range of patent-related lawsuits; the lawyers claim to have a detailed analysis of the legal liabilities faced by this CEO's company, but in order to see it, he's gotta sign an NDA -- and in some cases, this NDA says he can't discuss their findings with a lawyer -- any lawyer -- a stipulation that Moglen was pretty sure is illegal.
• Using some the money they've amassed this year, the FSF is opening a legal wing called the Software Freedom Law Center that's going to expand the Foundation's role in representing the developers of Free Software developers in cases dealing with things like GPL violations and patent infringement. He wants to recruit 15 young technically sophisticated law school graduates. The FSF is already assisting projects such as WINE, Plone, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Samba.

He also had some prognostications for what he'd be talking about at next year's meeting:

• He predicted that patent aggression from Microsoft would be the most significant concern for Free Software; a patent showdown of some sort, probably over XML document format interoperability (i.e., MS Office vs. OpenOffice.org), wouldn't be a matter of if but rather a matter of when.
• Fortunately, "when" would probably not be until 2008, owing to the precarious status of Windows Longhorn and vendor demand for "server" versions of their "desktop" offerings. By that time, Moglen said, the FSF would be well prepared to handle whatever Microsoft throws on the table.
• In the meantime, he said, they'd be working on the new version of the GPL, among other things.

Overall, his speech was very upbeat. The FSF was in great shape, he said, despite what it's been through over the past few years. His closing line drew lots of clapping and desk-pounding: "We have earned some political capital, and we intend to spend it."

One of the reasons I went to the meeting in the first place was to hear RMS, and he was next to take the podium. I was a bit surprised by his speech (not least of all by his voice -- it's actually kind of nasal, not at all like Goliath from Davey and Goliath like I imagined) -- the topic had been given beforehand as an explanation of the need for a Free BIOS, but he ended up just rattling off a list of bullet points:

• A Free BIOS is necessary to avoid the entanglements introduced by Treacherous Computing initiatives (Treacherous Computing is Stallman's name for Trusted Computing; he had to explain this to the Russian guy in the first row who couldn't believe an industry group would label their products 'Treacherous').
• Because of the refusal of most major GNU/Linux distributions to cease including non-Free Software, the FSF has heretofore been unable to endorse any particular distribution. Stallman announced that Ututo GNU/Linux, an all-Free Software distribution, would be the officially recommended FSF GNU/Linux distribution.
• The following improvements were on the table (but not set in stone) for the GPL v3.0:
  • Improved compatibility with other Free Software licenses
  • Better support for linking Free Software libraries with non-Free Software
  • A "retaliation clause" to punish licensees who participate in aggressive patent prosecution (this one seems kind of ill-advised to me)

After each sentence he had to clear his throat -- I feel like he might have been a bit under the weather. When he was finished, he opened the floor to questions. The vast majority were asinine what-if challenges to the language of the GPL (e.g., what if I license my program to someone under a non-Free license until they donate X dollars, at which point I release it to them under the GPL -- is that okay?), which Stallman rightly said he wasn't willing to discuss. Novalis, who, I think, is the FSF webmaster, piped up from the first row and fielded some of them whenever RMS started really laying into someone. Perhaps sensing that the discussion was straying a bit too much Henri Poole raised his hand in the back of the room and asked Stallman what his vision for the next 20 years was, seeing as how it was more or less the FSF's 20th anniversary. Stallman said he didn't have a "vision."

"Well, then, what do you see happening in the next 20 years?"
"Fascism."
"Fascism? That's your vision for the next 20 years?"

RMS had put his feet up on the desk so that he was reclining odelisque-like. He said that the U.S. government was basically obliterating everything that was good about life, period. "Doesn't the pendulum swing both ways?" someone asked. RMS didn't think it had ever swung this far right for so long before. At this point, the moderators thought it prudent to get the next speaker on stage.

It was Larry Lessig, who you may remember from his appearance on The West Wing, or his book Free Culture, or for just being an all-around genius. His talk was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation in which the slide transitions were fairly exactly synchronized with his spoken words -- neat! What he talked about was kind of a re-tread of the things he wrote about in Free Culture, basically that people who produce creative works are always building on what's come before them (a process he refers to as "remixing"), whether or not it's obvious from looking at their final product, and that we, as a society, are in a uniquely restrictive climate when it comes to the rights of creative producers to do this as a result of overly restrictive copyright laws (which stem, in part, he thinks, from the inability of lawmakers to address the fact that digital use of copyrighted materials unavoidably creates copies). He talked a bit about his Creative Commons project, which provides and promotes the use of custom and varyingly "free" licenses for creative work, to allow creators to permit selected "remixing" of their work without giving up other rights. He'd made a rather cryptic remark at the beginning of his speech about how he might have to run for the exit after the audience heard the claims he was going to make, which turned out to be:

• The Free Software movement should get more involved in the production of Free creative software products, to facilitate the creation of culture in the developing and third world
• We should promote the concepts of freedom to creative content producers all over the world, even if the creators are unwilling / unable to produce their work on Free Software platforms.

It was a very good speech, even if I'd already heard most of it before. When Lessig finished talking, Stallman stood up in the back and said, "The Free Software Foundation will never support the use of any non-Free Software platform."

Thus began a half-hour long argument between the two of them in which the audience and Eben Moglen eventually had to intervene. Lessig argued that you could certainly urge creative producers in parallel to support both Free licensing and Free Software, but it would be a mistake to write anybody off (and potentially lose out on the production of creative work) simply because they wanted to make their art in Macromedia Flash. Stallman said that freedom was more important that creativity and that there was no excuse, period, for endorsing non-Free Software in any context, even by looking the other way while promoting creative freedom. Their argument got fairly heated -- at one point, Stallman asked Lessig why he'd think it was a good idea to give a speech like this, and Lessig replied, "I'm going to a board meeting tomorrow and you said that the price of going to the board meeting was coming here and giving a talk." Rowr. So eventually Moglen stood up and said that he thought the intersection of creative freedom and Free Software was going to be a huge issue and that it might be a good idea for the FSF to devote a great deal more effort towards producing Free versions of popular pieces of creative software, like Flash. After some more back and forth between RMS and Lessig, the audience started to disperse and gather around each dude.

I packed up my stuff and hopped back on the bus. It was very cold when I got back to NYC; an aggressive bum at the East Broadway subway station asked if he could have the contents of my Au Bon Pain bag, and I gave it to him, but you know what? I wasn't done yet.