For Bobby

and uke enthusiasts

Owl Room Session No.1

Owl Room
Originally uploaded by jeremy pee

One for the beard enthusiasts

Movies and Hangout Time

Hey gang, I just saw a couple movies that you should also see.

Last weekend, we drove up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco. It was sort of like driving in a car commercial. We stopped and stood on a cliff over the ocean while the sun was setting in Big Sur, crazy pretty.


Anywho, in San Fran, we saw Milk. It's the new Gus Van Sant movie with Sean Penn and James Franco about Harvey Milk. It's really well made, a well-told story. Also, informative to all the Prop 8 stuff that happened here as he had a lot to do with Prop 6 back in the day. Gay Rights, get into 'em.

A couple nights ago I watched this documentary called Young at Heart. So good. Really amazing start, then well balances the funniness/wisdom/sadness of senior citizens who sing Sonic Youth, Talking Heads, and James Brown in their choir. Get it at your local video store or online distributor and watch it with friends, family, or pets.


Speaking of pets, we have a cat! His name is Max. I guess you could say he a little POWER HUNGRY. LITERALLY, HUNGRY FOR ELECTRICITY! walka walka:



(Max took the top one himself for his MySpace profile)

Second to lastly, I'll be playing a show in Chapel Hill on the 28th. I'm super pumped. It's just going to be a quiet, acoustic night with cider and hot chocolate, and I'll be playing new stuff from my Hi, Ho, Silver Oh project. This will take place at the Trekky House around 8pm.

Lastly, on the 27th, I'll arrive in Charlotte to an empty house. Please come and fill it if you're in or close to the Charlotte area. I would love to share some times and spirits, reminisce, catch up, play games, shoot the breeze, hug, high five, tell jokes, tell stories, tell time, do math problems, play music, listen to music, dance, and hug again with everyone. I'll bring some Bluetooth Blackberries and frozen yogurt from LA if you bring Bojangles and overalls.

I miss everyone and can't wait to hang. Also, New Years party? Love gang woot.

Cornelius - Fit Song

Probably the best music video i've seen in a long time. Thanks Japan.

Here's to ya'll and your homemade gifts!

Found my coupon for a picnic at Eno River, a gift from Caitlin from last year's Christmas sleep-over. I love you all and your homemade gifts. I hope you appreciate the video...despite my best intentions, my commitment to this kind of thing comes and goes in fits and starts, so I can always use reminding. Maybe you can too. Much love!

For people who love books…

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

If only!

(C'mon, folks, let's get this blog going again!)

Goodbye, old LiveJournal.

By chance I found myself wandering back to my old LiveJournal account. From the summer of 2001 through early 2007, I chronicled my joys, frustrations, and confusions for an audience of whomever happened to drop by. I filed entries from all kinds of moods (chipper, depressed, bitter, ironic, prayerful) and locations (Charlotte, Chapel Hill, New Zealand, Maine, New York). Needless to say, it was a total mess of the intensely personal spilling out into public view.

I was surprised, though, by the sympathetic comments that people left even on some of the weirdest entries. It's hard for me to see how the writing and posting of this stuff could have helped me, beyond giving the illusion of confession without real confession. But the comments—those were just wonderful, and probably redeemed the enterprise on some level.

In the last few months, I had realized I used the LiveJournal to create a false intimacy. By the end, I was just posting quotes without commentary, drawing back as far as I could from the emotional outbursts that had punctuated the journal for most of its existence. And so I finally did what I should have done a while ago: drawn a veil over the best and worst times of my life.

It was something like burying a bunch of old letters in the backyard.

Did anybody else have one of these things, or was it just me?

Animals

Several times this year, I have seen a fox in the parking lot behind my apartment building.

Yesterday afternoon, the hawks that live somewhere on campus were swooping around the quad. The squirrels, for once, were nowhere to be seen.

At night, I saw two raccoons digging around in the leaves behind some cars. They weren't scared of me at all; I was only about ten feet away from them.

Last Friday night, I saw Butterflies. They opened for the Physics of Meaning. I wish the rest of you could have been there.

(Get it? “Butterflies” is an animal and an band!)

"thoughts" (and many meems)

Time to go abstract on a mutha.
I picked up the Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth today.
(That link goes to the full text if you're interested.)
Written in 1969. Fuller, its author, was a prophet--of sorts. This can be quite heady stuff, so feel free to ignore it (or just check out the links if you don't like reading).
But, for now, I'll save my own commentary and let your mind commentate at will.
(BTW: Quotes are always out of context.)
So,
Decipher as you see fit...
...existence*

From a philosopher of the mind, R. Buckminster Fuller:

“Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man’s consciously attempting to bring them about. Man is very vain; he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable happenings. But all the larger evolutionary patterning’s seeming favorable or unfavorable to man’s conditioned reflexing are transpiring transcendentally to any of man’s conscious planning or contriving.”

Here's another mindbender:

“A thought is a system, and is inherently conceptual—though often only dimly and confusedly conceptual at the moment of first awareness of the as yet only vaguely describable thinking activity. Because total universe is nonsimultaneous it is not conceptual. Conceptuality is produced by isolation, such as in the instance of one single, static picture held out from a moving-picture film’s continuity, or scenario. Universe is an evolutionary-process scenario without beginning or end, because the shown part is continually transformed chemically into fresh film and reexposed to the ever self-reorganizing process of latest thought realizations which must continually introduce new significance into the freshly written description of the ever-transforming events before splicing the film in again for its next projection phase.”

Post-Bush, soon-Obama-present = "the next projection phase."

And what more, in days of economic "crisis," with the Obamanomics ahead, how might we bring about a new "wealth" which could relieve us of our evolving woes?
(Well(th)...I put crisis in quotes there because I think the economy as being in a state of crisis might be arguable, in the least, depending on how you define wealth...)

Bucky gives us the answer...and no, he is not a computer as you might guess from his writing style, but, instead, a human being (see above)--

again, written in 1969:

“Wealth is anti-entropy at a most exquisite degree of concentration. The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment. Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical. Wealth is the product of the progressive mastery of matter by mind, and is specifically accountable in forward man-days of established metabolic regeneration advantages spelt out in hours of life for specific numbers of individuals released from formerly prescribed entropy-preoccupying tasks for their respectively individual yet inherently co-operative elective investment in further anti-entropic effectiveness.”

YES--invest in the dollar not for the dollar's sake, but for its potential output. Not in entropy, but in order. Buy a baby.

Sorry for my preoccupation with words and links today, but here's a finale:

“To take advantage of the fabulous magnitudes of real wealth waiting to be employed intelligently by humans and un-block automation’s postponement by organized labor we must give each human who is or becomes unemployed a life fellowship in research and development or in just simple thinking. Man must be able to dare to think truthfully and to act accordingly without fear of losing his franchise to live.”

Oh, and for those of you who don't already know...I quit my job about a month ago. Now (unemployed) in the process of daring to think truthfully and act accordingly without fear of losing my franchise to live.

*love

Anathallo loves Sweater Weather

Unfortunately, I did not have the pleasure of knowing Sweater Weather when they opened for Anathallo at Cat's Cradle in 2006. I hear it was an incredible show.

Last night I got to see Anathallo live at the Local 506! After playing their first song, Matt Joynt talked about how great it was to be back in Chapel Hill and reminisced about playing with this really incredible band called Sweater Weather. I was very impressed with their performance and they overcame what I'd describe as a lackluster audeince (thanks to one obnoxious fan's inscesent yelling.) Cheryl and I found ourselves wishing that the members of Sweater Weather would emerge from the crowd and surprise us. Yes! I also got to see the newly weds who drove down to see the show to begin the celebration of Cheryl's birthday. Happy birthday Cheryl!

A Way to Celebrate America

This 3-disc set looks pretty dope: Of Great and Mortal Men

43 songs about 43 presidents!

Have fun!

Studs

The great Chicago storyteller Studs Terkel died on Friday after a nice long life. I think you guys would like him, if you don't know about him already.

Here's the Chicago Tribune's story.

Trips!

Hey everyone, I'm trying to figure out when I should come home around Christmas. I was thinking we could all say where we'll be around that time, maybe get a New Years party together again or something? I want to see everybody in Charlotte and Chapel Hill, so I'll try to come during a window when everybody's back in town.

Comment away!

i'm currently in the car stealing internet, so let's make this quick, huh? 

i miss you. all of you. 

lynchburg is nice. very beautiful. makes for some good bike rides and good hikes. marriage is nice too. and hard sometimes too. but in a good way. 

open invitation for anyone who wants to visit when the extra bed is put together. also, lee and i will be in chapel hill on nov. 5th to see anathallo. see some of you there? maybe? hope so.

more to come later. love love. 

Updatin'

Hey ladies and germs, I'd been meaning to give a good ol' life update so you know where I work, where I live, and where to send presents to me and things like that.

I live on at the 12,053rd residence of Guerin St. (the second apartment) in Studio City, California. At the end of my street is CBS studios, where they shoot CSI:NY (the parts that aren't in New York I guess) and other famous television shows. It's a great location with many neat places to walk to like a 24-hour diner, Trader Joe's, Von's grocery store, a bunch of fashionable clothing stores, and a Farmer's Market that happens on Sunday mornings. Johnny Knoxville shops at the same Trader Joe's as me. When I saw him, I walked up to him and hit myself in the nuts. He was not impressed.

I live with Katie McNeill, Garret Kemble, CC Pearce, and Jonathan Nelson Mackey. We got this dope town house. Here is our landlord (no joke). CC got the master bedroom, and Katie the other real bedroom. Garrett got the converted office, and Jon and I share the dining room. It's pretty funny looking, especially because there's a chandelier meant to hang over the middle of a table in the center of the room. It's at eye-level and Jon and I are both tall, so you can often here a whomping twinkling of glass followed by a quick burst of profanity as we knock our heads against it over and over again. The house has a big living room and a nice patio, so it doesn't feel too cramped. We've had a long list of guests also living with us since we got here, like Tim Phillips, Bobby Sweatt, Mark Mowbray, and numerous others. Feel free to add yourself to this list at any time.

I got a job watching DVDs all day. For example, today, I watched 8 hours of Walker, Texas Ranger. I look for issues like misspellings in the Closed Captions, video defects, and things I think are funny to show my boss and people I work with. Jon and I not only share a room at home, but work in a small space together as well.

I did a short internship as a second assistant editor for a new Haley Joel Osment movie. I think I've told all of you about my ant-faced experience so I'll spare the details. I did watch a rough cut of the movie the other day, after which, one of the other intern viewers asked "Did they use as old man as a stand in for Haley in that one shot? His hand was so hairy."

After seeing what editing a movie is like, I decided it isn't something I want to do professionally. I'd love to do it some more on my own, but the guys I worked with were 15 or 20 years older than me and still organizing footage for someone older than them to edit. I'm okay putting my life into working towards an artistic goal, but not for that job. Now, I'm using my spare time to record new songs and work towards becoming a real live musician.

So, all in all, LA kind of sucks, but there are some great people here, and I'm experiencing some great things. I drove down Laurel Canyon Blvd. the other day to Highway 1 to Malibu. Driving through the canyons is amazingly pretty, especially after being around the concrete grossness of the city. It feels more mountain-towny. Very twisty roads with suprisingly beautiful overlooks of the city. There's a nice cove along the highway where I pulled off to sit on the beach and watch the sunset. Although you couldn't see the sun directly when it went behind some trees, it reflected off the ocean in this way that made it glow orange and pink, which slowly turned to a glimmery white as it was close to a full moon. That filled in my heart a little bit where it's missing the North Carolina fall.

I've got some tunes to better express the experience of being out here. I'm sure there's a way to put them into the blogosphere. They could probably help to fill in the gaps of crappy writing skills and lack of sweet adjectives.

Woot on that friends, I'll leave you with a picture from my birthday party this past Friday. It was an "Express Yourself" theme where everyone was told to wear clothes expressing their inner being. My inner being is available at American Apparel.

This blog is like a selective you tube filter. It's delicious or those other things where you have favorites and you can follow someone's favorites cause you like what they like for themselves...

It's very fun and nice, but I sort of want read about something that's going on with everyone.

What have you been thinking about the most the past few weeks? Anything you can't shake? Anything terribly interesting to you? I'm just curious about what's goes in people's heads, because so much goes through mine. Three days feels like a very long time to me so much happens in my mind.

or you can ignore this and we'll just keep doing what we're already doing.

Pehdtsckjmba

WTF?

Seriously, what the...?
At a dinner sponsored by the Arch-Diocese of New York, to benefit needy children?

I don't even know what to say. Are these funny?

New Way to Eat a Sweet Potato

Yesterday, I had a sweet potato stuffed with black beans, tomatos, sour cream, and cilantro. It was delicious and very filling. Reminded me of the sweet potato burrito at Carrburritos.

That is all.

“There is only one book. And this is the book.”

There are just so many things to be excited about. Not least: MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE drops on October 21st. (There will be continuous pagination.)

John Hodgman's previous book was my sense of humor, but refined and amplified to sublimity.

Here's something that is apparently not a book trailer:



(I basically just copied this from my other blog.)

Culture too?

I found this Michael Pollan op/ed pretty interesting...it's about food, oil, and what the president can/should try to do (or at the least the agricultural/socio-cultural problems that we already face). We can't ignore it anymore.

F*** corporate farming!

An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief

And on a "lighter" note...

Culture...?

Articles I liked:

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

Time to Quit Facebook

I admit I ride a fixed gear, but I ride alone.

“I Believe in You”

This is mainly for Bobby, but anyone else who watched the video he sent around a while back might think it's cool.

So I got really excited when I found out that Lambchop had a new album out this week.

This morning I listened to it. And what was the last song?

You guessed it. A cover of Don Williams's “I Believe in You.”

This makes me happy

Amazing!

The Chairman

10/8/08
Originally uploaded by jeremy pee

So Emily and I have been playing the sentence game, but with different rules. No rules actually. Here is one I made today. The sentence was "Because in China they don't have chairs."

The Great Debaters

Liliana Segura says:

The first problem with this debate was calling it a debate. The second was calling it a "town hall." In the strange, stilted ritual atop the red carpet at Nashville's Belmont University, the studio audience looked less like an inquisitive cross-section of the American public than it did a cast of apolitical drones programmed to deliver canned questions in exchange for canned lines. This was mostly thanks to the rules. The two candidates were literally, according to guidelines agreed upon by the two campaigns, prohibited from addressing each other directly. The result was an hour and a half of parallel speechifying in which disagreements were expressed in terse, passive-aggressive sideswipes by two men who, as McCain might say, clearly "don't like each other very much." In such a format, meaningful discussion -- or even entertaining television -- is fairly impossible.

My First Editorial

Hey friends,

not that this means anything to anyone in particular who reads this blog considering only (two?) of us are still going to UNC, but...I had first letter to the editor published today.

Here it is!

Love,

Annie

Hurricanes

Little Bill O'Reilly



...and Naomi Wolf.

"In the Mind of a Yung Heart"

As I was returning some books to the book room, this two page poem fell out...There's no name on it--although, the phrase "fictional poem" is written in the margins--I have no idea which student wrote it, which book it fell out of, or to whom its ideas belong. But it exists.

"In the Mind of a Yung Heart"

you don't know me
you don't know my status
my triumphs
my struggles
you don't even know my name
and yet
you sit there in all of your glorious
old age
& you judge me.
observing my posture
the clothes i wear
the people i hang out with
and hang on to very piece of
gossip about me that can possibly
be said
for that simple reason
you look so stupid
knowing nothing of my past, my
present, or my future
you couldn't possibly know until
you've walked
one million miles in my tattered
sneakers.
My young eyes have seen
a lot
& my heart feels just as much as
yours
I've had to watch my best
friend fall into a black hole of
peer pressure
that turned her all the way out
trickin' & sippin', gamblin' & sniffin'
I've been 2 more funerals than
I ever wanted to be at
& my heart has known heartache
And they're old friends
You don't know the abuse
Yes, my mother allowed that
monster to put his hands on me
for his personal pleasure & rage.
You don't feel my pain
You really don't
See I have dreams
BIG dreams
I could make the world a
better place
make a great difference in an
important person's life
I could be the next billionaire
But here I stand in raggedy clothes
these hand-me-downs
With a pretty face
& young age
Walkin' down pissy-pew hallways
So I must be something bad to
talk about.
From the depth of my soul
to the tip of my toes
I am me
always will be
And you
Miss Full-of-wisdom
Miss Wise-at-42
You will be you
But you will never understand
My young'n blues.

Sesame Street Censored

Lame, but on subject : )

Can you figure out the gag? Also, can you guess who is playing Alan Ginsberg?

Hitched!

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows...

...check out the documentary if you've never seen it.

So…

…wedding pictures, anyone?

The economy part 2.

In my last post about 11 days ago, I complained about how people paid little attention to the looming economic collapse - and now of course things have changed quite a bit in that regard.  As expected, everyone is following essentially the same line, that these massive bail outs are a necessary evil to save the economy, jobs, etc.  Of course you all must know by now that I completely disagree with this idea.  The bail outs postpone a short term recession, sure, but at the expense of ensuring a long term depression.  Their solution is simply to create more false credit, which is how we got into this mess in the first place.  I reccommend that all of you do a little research on the Federal Reserve System - the source of the dollar, its inflation, bank loans, government debt, and credit oversupply since 1913.  The book "The Creature from Jekyll Island" is a good place to start.  Here is a short snippet from a lecture by its author (from the mid 90s) on the subject of how bail-outs are the product of the Federal Reserve System:

Finally, did they pass along their inevitable loses to the taxpayer in the name of protecting the people? This is what I call "Operation Bail-Out." Every time one of the big banks gets into trouble, not the small banks remember, they're the competition, the big banks get into trouble and they are bailed out at taxpayers' expense. Always in the name of protecting the people. If a large corporation is in trouble because it can't make its interest payments to the bank anymore, they go to Congress and say "we can't let this corporation fold; look at the thousands of jobs that would be lost; look how the people would suffer." When a third world country can no longer make its interest payments to a large bank in New York, what happens? The bank goes to Congress and says "you know, you'd better do something about this because if we have to write that loan off of our books we may be bankrupt, we could fold. And look at all of the depositors, good Americans, who have their accounts with us who would lose their deposit. Maybe the FDIC won't be able to cover; we could have a crisis on our hands. If our bank falls maybe the other banks will fall too and we'll have a national recession. Look how the people will suffer." So Congress dutifully steps forward, remember it's a partner in this, and votes the funds to guarantee the loans or in some way to pass the payments on directly or indirectly in some very ingenious methods to the taxpayer. That money is raised primarily through the Federal Reserve System and we pay it through the Mandrake Mechanism.

So the Federal Reserve System has done pretty well on that. In case you have missed a few of the more memorable games, I'd like to review them for you. Penn Central Railroad was bailed out in 1970. That was a good year because Lockheed Corporation was bailed out the same year. Commonwealth Bank of Detroit was bailed in 1972; New York City in 1975; Chrysler in 1978; First Pennsylvania Bank in 1980; Continental Illinois, the largest of the banks so far, in 1982. And look at all of these third world countries which cannot pay their interest payments. They are paying their interest payments and you're doing it for them because the Federal Reserve System creates the money that we send to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and then they give it to those countries so that they can pay the interest to the banks. Maybe you've missed that little trail but that's how it works.

Congressmen and Senators don't talk about this as a source of the problem because if the Federal Reserve went away, Congress would no longer be able to print money to pay for things when it runs out of tax money (which it does every year), inflating the currency and increasing national debt.  They would rather people continue to suffer economically than to remove a key source of their power and wealth.  Also, they're poopoo heads.

More Candyblogging

Bad news, folks.

When the economic crunch hits, hard choices must be made. And if you're a manufacturer, this usually means a choice between raising prices or reducing quality. I am sad to say that Hershey's appears to be choosing to forgo quality.

“Products such as Whatchamacallit, Milk Duds, Mr. Goodbar and Krackel no longer have milk chocolate coatings, and Hershey’s Kissables are now labeled ‘chocolate candy’ instead of ‘milk chocolate.’

“What’s going on here? On Friday, TODAY consumer correspondent Janice Lieberman reported that Hershey’s has switched to less expensive ingredients in several of its products. In particular, cocoa butter — the ingredient famous for giving chocolate its creamy, melt-in-your-mouth texture — has been replaced with vegetable oil.

“The removal of cocoa butter violates the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s definition of milk chocolate, so subtle changes have appeared on the labels of the Hershey’s products with altered recipes. Products once labeled ‘milk chocolate’ now say ‘chocolate candy,’ ‘made with chocolate’ or ‘chocolatey.’”

Found it here, full story here, more information here, and more information than you require here.

This is also posted on my other blog.

The Great Schlep

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Downward Spiro

This makes me sad:

This is the 1969 Spirograph set I was able to buy for cheap off of ebay. It was produced by a toy company named Kenner. It's an extensive kit which includes many different shapes, pins to tack the pieces down onto a supplied rectangle of cardboard (so your drawing doesn't slip), and four ball point pens of different colors. I've been having a lot of fun playing around with this and it's already come in handy on a project or two.


Here's a sample of the instruction booklet that came in the box. It contains simple explanatory illustrations and some Spirograph drawings so complex they make me jealous. (More photos of the booklet pages can be seen on my flickr.) It's both lovely and intelligent.


This is the Deluxe Spirograph I bought last month at Target. It was because this set was so much junkier than the version I had as a kid that I even thought to pursue a Spirograph kit on ebay.


The instructions that come with this kit are so childish that it made me feel silly for wanting to play with a spirograph again. The shapes themselves aren't displayed as attractive abstract designs - instead it is explained that they should be made into something you can identify and recognize (a crab!) These instructions talk down to children and limit the creative possibilities.

Such a disappointment, especially given how far the toy's overall design has fallen.

The little people of tomorrow deserve better!

Yo dudes, CC showed me this sweet thing called TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). If you go to the About TED section, you can learn about TED, and subscribe to the podcast. They have some amazing lectures that will inform your life and make it awesomer. This has been seconded by everyone I know who has seen any TED lectures. Just spreading the love.

Jon, Mark, and I are playing a show later tonight, I'm pumped! You should come if you're in the mood for nice music and have money for the plane ride +$5. Actually, if you come, I'll give you $5 for the show.

Love.

Existentialism!

Did you know that Jean-Paul Sartre is blogging now?

Sample post:

An angry crow mocked me this morning. I could barely finish my croissant, and left the cafe in despair.

The crow descended on the croissant, squawking fiercely. Perhaps this was its plan.

Perhaps there is no plan.

It's even gr8er than yr h1gh sch00l livejournal!

I got this from a site called Iqra'i.

ok. now i have a picture. this is "graeme, not the cracker."
whoa, whoa, whoa? we're talking about babies?!

my brother just had his first baby, and my first nephew. Graeme Timothy Ely. He's little. I just realized i don't have a picture on hand. But he's the best little guy around.

THIRD POST FOR THE DAY!

and speaking of the Tomorrow People.

I believe Randy said somewhere here that "Children are the Future."

Are they?

hmm

so they say you're never supposed to talk about politics or religion in mixed company, but these just make me laugh...sorry for the Barack stars in the group

not saying anything in particular here...politics aside, this just makes me laugh

By the way...that Red White and Blue Obama poster was made by Shepherd Fairey of "Obey Giant" fame.  You might want to check his work out-- www.obeygiant.com  -- It's pretty good stuff, but pretty anti-American too for the most part...strange that a presidential candidate would hop on the bandwagon.  Wooo!  Less than two months before a New World Order when China buys our country out of debt!  JK (I mean, JFK).

Bobby's Baby

Well, not a baby human, and he might be a dingo, I'm not sure yet. But, if he is, he'll definitely eat baby humans--or maybe lick them at least.

For those of you who haven't seen him yet, here's Miles...

Not a post about babies.

I hate to interrupt the babyblogging (yes, they are cute), but I just saw a girl in Davis Library wearing a tri-cornered hat. Hmm.

When is the last time you saw anyone (excluding those explicitly reënacting history) wearing such a thing?

I win.

The door has been opened for older babies. I give you, my neighbor, Gabe (doing his best Johnny Cash pose).

Baby Off

The little boy is nephew Joseph, and the little girl is my niece Bridget.

I'm only posting because you folks started this.

Zingo!

I saw The Bronzed Chorus last week at Tir Na Nog. They were awesome as always.

I went to the bathroom and saw this poster.


So if you can't really see, basically, if you're too crunked to drive and you need a designated driver, you call this number; then a guy comes on a tiny moped, he folds the moped into a suitcase. He drives you to your home in your car, and then he goes back to his home in his little suitcase moped. Brilliant.

Oh baby...

And it comes full circle.

one more baby

I thought I'd one-up your baby, Katie.  This is (a crappy cell phone photo of) my baby niece Lane, playing with a small stuffed elephant that Caitlin and I bought for her.  The baby-off is on!

Daily dose of cute

I could not resist posting this baby. So stinkin' cute.

Welcome Magoo

Fanfare! Maggie has arrived!

taste the rainbow

This summer, a friend of mine introduced me to snowballs, a cold treat that originates from Louisiana and is similar to a snow cone except that the ice is finer making its texture more airy, like snow. Pelican's Snowballs has a few stands in the triangle area and they boast that their snowballs are the genuine article.

Pelican's menu is extensive and it's remarkable how much they can get ice to taste like other things (birthday cake was delicious). You can take your chances on a flavor like dill pickle or on one whose name leaves its taste a mystery, like fuzzy monkey or wild thang. Yeah.

But, what really got me curious was the kids menu.

Science Projects

This picture is good. Here is the link to see it better:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zom-bot/2806692734/in/photostream/

Here's a silly picture to balance out my last post!

It's Aditya "Romeo" Dev, the world's smallest body builder. Look how tiny he is!  Here's more.

Depressingly long post about the economy

(The tone of this blog so far has been generally silly, or occasionally reflective.  I hope I'm not upsetting that trend by posting a little doom.  As a friend to all of you, I feel compelled to share my growing concern for our collective future.)

Throughout my life as an adult, I've been a rather loud pessimist when it came to all things economic.  This is the major contributing factor for those late night Ron Paul speeches that cost so many hours of your time.  In the past year, I've had countless I-told-you-so moments with the world.  I didn't actually say "I told you so" to anyone,  (though you could argue I'm saying it now) but instead just mumbled it in the general direction of cnn.com on my screen.  There's been a handful of mini-market crashes, huge spikes in oil prices and inflation, massive financial institutions falling left and right (Fannie Mae, Freddic Mac, IndyMac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch, and now AIG), and it all continues to be patched up with unsound policies, and generally ignored by most people not in that business.  The problem is that misfortune on Wallstreet of this magnitude (and it's going to get worse as I'm about to show you), gets down to all of us in the end.  The Great Depression started with a few months of steady market decline and several financial instutitions closing, it took a year or two before that translated into massive unemployment and unaffordable food and medicine.  I think there's a chance we're heading in a similar direction now.

Just last year, the five largest investment banks were Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Bros., and Bear Stearns.  If you've been reading closely, three of those five institutions have collapsed.  Here's how Merrill Lynch has looked the past year before dying this week:

Now look at the stock price of the two remaining financial giants for the past year:

Now look at the stock price of Bank of America and Wachovia for the past year:

(See that uptick in July?  Read this article.)  Can you imagine what would happen if either of these banks went under?  Think about trying to get your money back through the FDIC, which has already burned through a quarter of its insurance fund just to bail out IndyMac depositers.

If you're wondering why this has all happened, it's a combination of many factors.  First start with the premise that we're a nation that is ridiculously in debt, both at a government level, and at the level of the individual.  Second, add in inflationary policy, which discourages savings as the interest rate on savings is so small compared to the value your money loses each year, and the potential value of investing.  Now add Democrat supported market intervention that keeps the cost of borrowing of money artificially cheap, creating artificial incentive to hand out stupid mortgages.  Sprinkle on Republican conceived financial abuses that allowed for swapping to go unregulated (which means financial institutions can sell off mortgages/loans to other institutions as securities/investments without any sort of regulation or oversight - Warren Buffet called this financial WMDs).  Throw in corporate greed and mismanagement, runaway government spending, and a glutenous population, and you have yourself our current situation.

Obama and McCain will both propose to prop up institutons and individuals in an attempt to keep things going as people are accustomed, but these politically motivated strategies will only buy us a little more time before the government is completely broke and we have to do one of the following:  shutdown many functions of government (think entitlement programs, portions of defense, etc.), print huge amounts of money creating an inflation crisis on a level somewhere between post world-war Germany and 1980s Japan, or just let things naturally correct themselves (a bit like the Great Depression, without government handouts).  In any case, I'm pretty convinced we're going to see massive changes in our lives in the next 5-10 years.  We've had lots of economic close calls in our lifetimes -  the savings and loan crisis of the early 90s, the dot-com bubble burst/9-11 combo which nearly brought us down, and now we're here enduring the fruits of the patch-jobs fixing those crises.

There's a solid chance things could right themselves.  But there's a small, but signfiicant chance that this instability will spiral into something that will change the way we live.  We may, at some point in our 20s or 30s, have to deal with extreme shortages in employment, food, or energy, and I think what we're seeing now is momentum in that direction.  I encourage all of you to prepare yourselves for this time by getting yourself out of debt as soon as possible, and preparing yourself for possible lifestyle changes up ahead.  (Also, if you happen to have mutual funds or a 401k or something, I'd get out of it as soon as possible)  No need to panic this moment though.  We probably have a couple of years before this all hits us in a tangible way.

Random ways to make money...

So I have my first paying acting job coming up on Thursday. Well, it's sort of acting. Method acting. I won't have to act annoyed, frustrated, or scared while ants literally crawl all over my face. I won't have to act like I shaved my beard; it will have been shaved. I will, however, have to act like I'm Haley Joel Osment.

In case you haven't put it together, I'm going to be HJO's stand-in this Thursday as it's not in his contract to have ants crawl all over his face. Why would I shave my beard and let ants free on the sensitive skin beneath? 'Cause I get $75 bit*hes! Please excuse my asterisked language. The acting lifestyle has really hardened me.

Woot.

Groups of Birds

a bouquet of pheasants
a charm of finches
a wake of vultures
a confusion of guinea fowl
a murder of crows
an unkindness of ravens
a parliament of owls
a convocation of eagles

My Very First Post!

Hey friends,

I've been scoping out this blog, and seeing what everyone's posting trying to get a feel and sense of things, and I like it.

I'll try to do my best to do a balance between my serious and silly side. I've been mostly serious these past few weeks, and it's hard to be so serious all the time. Sometimes it feels like this terrible trap.

Anywho, school is tough, I'm ready to be done with senior year, it's not at all the senior year I was expecting or hoping for. A lot of it is about trying to make some new friends and make new connections to people because most the people I have been really connected to are gone now.

Intuitively senior year should be time with the friends you've built up over the past three years and just letting good times roll and getting your work done, so you can pass and leave.

I like people though, I like knowing people and I like different peoples ways of seeing things, so I can't just focus on my school work and a couple clubs, I love people.

I am learning local flora right now, there is one plant i particularly like called hearts-a-bustin-with love.

Sometimes I Wish...

...that a feeling of social obligation didn't prevent me from telling people when I think they do something amazing.

So I was in the Carrboro Harris Teeter, picking out some Romaine lettuce, and I saw this girl buying some other sort of vegetable down towards the bakery. I was in that grocery store mood: running through my head, trying to compile a mental list of things to buy, and then to keep it in mind while still looking for unexpected bargains. I suppose this is why people make "grocery lists" to begin with, but if I do that then I'll miss the mood, which is half the reason for going to the grocery store anyway. (The other half, of course, is beer.)

Anyway, the girl turned her cart around, pushed off, and rolled on the cart for about fifteen feet. JUST LIKE I ALWAYS WANTED TO DO WHEN I WAS A KID (but my mom wouldn't let me). And then when she was done, she kept on walking and shopping like a normal adult, as if rolling around on a grocery cart were just the same as walking. And I wanted to say to her: "That was amazing. You just reminded me to never grow up all the way. Thank you for that."

But, of course, I feel like I'm not supposed to say things like that to strangers. So I tucked away the memory, and now I have put it on this blog. So maybe that's something.

Weird

That's crazy Bobby, because I was just looking through my dad's old yearbook, and I found this one from '73.

















Randy, way to go. You always shave it right.

Love.

For Em

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0tWHdZLp8E

Trim'd

This seems like as good a spot as any to make general beard updates, right?

Before : sepia :: after : color.

What Happens When You're Really Bored...

Okay, Sorry for the two posts in one day, but facebook and this yearbook site combined for some easy time-wasting...

I'm not sure who wins...Cheryl or Smith's hair?

Or, Randy as a New Kid On the Block?