Quoted by the Silvermen

The bassist for the band the Silvermen contacted me about how I talked about them in my September 2003 update and wants to use what I said as a quote to promote their band and new album at their site. You can preview/buy their new album, Incendiary Luminary, at IncendiaryLuminary.com. As I explained in that update, I thought their opening show for the Reverend Horton Heat rawked. I ended up buying their CD at the end of the night and it made a worthwhile addition to my growing rockabilly collection. It's been my soundtrack to those two weeks I spent in Missouri after coming back from deployment and what I call the "Missouri experience." Their music is something that I found memorable, something that when I hear it I can recall a specific time or place. Not all music is like that. Only the lasting music is like that. There is some music in my collection that is just fodder. Other music defines a portion of my life and when I think of that time I can recall that music and vice versa. I think that's something for a musician to be proud of and the Silvermen fit that bill. Without trying to sound like a grandiose music critic, I love their music. Their live show is teeming with energy. I've never seen an opening band with as much enthusiasm as the Silvermen. When a new band goes on stage, I'm thinking, impress me. Do something that will make me notice. And, they did. Highly recommended.



This is big news for me. For the first time since this site has been up, someone has contacted me about my site that I didn't know personally. Which means I'm at least on the Internet radar somewhere. It also means that someone else is reading this stuff, so I better make it good.

BLOG?

I decided to try out the "blog" idea for quick and easy publishing to the Internet, even after I said I wasn't going to.
For those of you that don't know, a blog or weblog is defined as: [from the Blogger site] a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically—like a what's new page or a journal. The content and purposes of blogs varies greatly—from links and commentary about other web sites, to news about a company/person/idea, to diaries, photos, poetry, mini-essays, project updates, even fiction.

I tried this because it's a little easier than going in and using my website publishing program on my computer at home. I can have information published to the Internet very quickly through Blogger. Not that it took that long using Dreamweaver, but this is quicker. The problem is that I don't know how to use the html codes that go with it, and I really want to change the font and some other stuff, but I'll get to that later. For now, this is the deal.

Salam Pax

Part of the reason that I wanted to start a Blog was to be able to post from remote locations, like work or if I was on vacation, but I don't think that's necessary. I got this idea last night from the story of Salam Pax. Salam Pax is perhaps the most famous Blogger yet to hit the Internet. His blog was watched internationally during the war with Iraq, as he was an "ordinary Iraqi" posting from Baghdad. I'm surprised he did this, because if the regime would have found out, he would have been killed. He still posts on there, and the reason that I'm putting this on my site is because I found his book at Barnes and Noble last night and started reading it. I first read about him from the William Gibson blog while I was in the Persian Gulf during the war, and it interested me immediately, as this was fast becoming an Internet phenomenon. I read the introduction last night, and I'm anxious to get into the rest of it. For now, I'm still reading Kiss Me Judas by Will Christopher Baer, but I will be getting to Salam's book soon enough.

Vanished

From a message board on a website I frequent:
"Am I the only one left here? Jeez, I know it's nearly Xmas but this seems to be the worst year yet for people 'vanishing' from the internet."
I think it's true. Almost all of the non-news websites I visit seem to have shut down for a few weeks. Only about one update a week or less, from what I can tell. I'm no different. Even people that post updates daily have slowed down or even stopped. My message board has been vacant for almost a week now. I just haven't been up to writing anything. I think the majority of it is just too much consumption, period. People drink more, eat more, sit around more, watch movies more, and just in general, don't feel very creative. At least that's what's happened with me. My most creative times are when I'm not thinking about doing other things, like buying Christmas gifts or figuring out a way to send them home. Don't worry, this website isn't the only thing I've neglected. I haven't done my laundry yet, either.

STATISTICS SHOW SHOWERHEADS POPULAR AMONG WOMEN OF ALL AGES

I've noticed lately that when I go to Target, there are an awful lot of women taking a gander at the latest models of shower heads. True story.

Woman Blames Self For Lot in Life

Disassociated Press - 62 year-old Michigan native Pam Westerman announced Friday at a ten year family reunion that she blames herself for her position in life.

"A lot of people want to point fingers and say that it wasn't their fault for where they are in life. I am different in that I accept who I am and what I've accomplished, even though it's not that much in comparison to some people," Pam said eagerly to a surprised group of family members.

Pam's sister was quick to point out that she's a great person and doesn't understand what brought on this attitude. "The last time I seen her she was doing fine. I don't know if it's the onset of age, but one should never take responsibility for one's own actions, no matter what the cause. Always find a way around it. I did. Now I don't feel bad anymore. It's someone else's fault, not mine."

A short interview with her concluded that she's just a woman who has accepted who she is for better or worse. "A lot of people want to be victims of society and blame others for how they turned out. I think that's bullshit. A lot of people can't handle life on life's terms. If you can't handle the game, get out." Frank, but true.

Snow Days

My sister told me how on Tuesday they are supposed to be getting snow, hopefully causing them to miss school. It reminded me of how much I miss snow days. I miss getting up early in the morning, pulling the covers back to a frigid room, hustling over to the window and finding a white world outside. A sigh of relief, then woo-hoo! A snow day! Then the mad dash to the radio or TV to find out if school is out. School is out! Now you can rest easy knowing you don't have to study schoolbooks or deal with the teachers for the rest of the day. No time to go back to sleep now! Time to put on the hot cocoa, pop in a movie, or curl up and read a book. You can make a snowman, bake cookies, or just throw snowballs at your siblings. Whatever happened to that?
It was one of the true pleasures of being a kid. As an adult, the closest thing I've had had to a snow day is the San Diego fires. We were off work for two days, but it's hardly close to the snow days of being a kid. Snow is so much more beautiful than fire. But there is something very special about an unexpected day away from daily responsiblities that isn't taken for medical reasons. I even used to like to get sick as long as I could get the day off school.
Speaking of the winter time, the holiday season isn't what it used to be. When I was a kid, the holidays were a big deal. Now all you notice is how much the family has estranged from it's original makeup. How different it is from what it used to be. Sometimes that's hard to cope with. Over the years since moving away from my family, I used to hate the holiday season with fervor. The more people talked about how stressful the holiday season is, the more it seems. It is stressful. That gray sky that just won't go away! The mandatory need to buy Christmas gifts. The shopping frenzies. But it doesn't have to be stressful.
Now I take a much more appreciative viewpoint, realizing how much I've gained over the years. I don't participate in the traditional story of Christmas, that being the Christian version, but I do love the holiday season. This year my girlfriend bought me a small tree and some decorations, and it meant a lot to me. She always talked about getting a Charlie Brown Christmas tree (a Chawie Bwown Cwistmas Twee!), but most of the trees we found were too nice for that. Here's the one she got me:



I'm only kidding. That's the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. Here's the one she really got me:

Information Overload

Here's something about information overload from the website Principia Cybernetica Web:
"The acceleration of change is accompanied by an increase in the information needed to keep up with all these developments. This too leads to psychological, physical and social problems. A world-wide survey (Reuters, 1996) found that two thirds of managers suffer from increased tension and one third from ill-health because of information overload. The psychologist David Lewis, who analysed the findings of this survey, proposed the term "Information Fatigue Syndrome" to describe the resulting symptoms. Other effects of too much information include anxiety, poor decision-making, difficulties in memorizing and remembering, and reduced attention span (Reuters, 1996; Shenk, 1997). These effects merely add to the stress caused by the need to constantly adapt to a changing situation.
Part of the problem is caused by the fact that technological advances have made the retrieval, production and distribution of information so much easier than in earlier periods. This has reduced the natural selection processes which would otherwise have kept all but the most important information from being published. The result is an explosion in often irrelevant, unclear and inaccurate data fragments, making it ever more difficult to see the forest through the trees. This overabundance of low quality information, which Shenk (1997) has called "data smog", is comparable in its emergence and effects to the pollution of rivers and seas caused by an excess of fertilizers, or to the health problems caused by a diet too rich in calories. The underlying mechanism may be called "overshooting": because progress has inertia, the movement in a given direction tends to continue even after the need has been satisfied. Whereas information used to be scarce, and having more of it was considered a good thing, it seems that we now have reached the point of saturation, and need to limit our use of it."
As the world suffers from more and more information, it becomes harder to process and keep up with it. Humans only have enough time in the day to digest all the information. I found myself reading news sites every few hours, trying to keep up with what's going on in the world. After a while it becomes too much. I found myself thinking about social concerns (see the December 2nd and 3rd entries) that a year ago, I would have ignored. I wouldn't even have to ignore them, I was just oblivious to them. I used to never watch the news or keep up with anything. Life was a lot simpler.
The proliferation of easy publication (blogs, websites, etc), the filtering process has been cut down. Anyone can have a voice. That's why you get low-quality information that people deem as acceptable. Technology helps us, but it also hinders us.
I recommend going back to the simple life. Cut down on the news. Grab a book and some coffee, put on Mozart, and read a little. Take a walk. Go get a back massage. Do something that will take your mind away from the data smog. That's what I'm going to go do right now.

I'm Bored

"You know how I know it's the end of the world, Lenny?"
"No, tell me."
"Because everything's already been done, you know? Every kind of music's been tried, every government's been tried, you know? Every fuckin' hairstyle, fuckin' bubblegum flavors, you know. Breakfast cereals, every type of fuckin'. You know what I mean? What are we gonna do, man? How are we going to make another thousand years for Christ sake? I'm tellin' you man, it's over. We used it all up." -from the movie Strange Days (1995)

Strange Days has always been one of my favorite cyberpunk flicks. I've always liked this quote because it illustrates how bland everything is getting in one way, and in another, it's getting worse. Every day the media serves up another healthy dish of paranoia as we hear of grisly deaths done in a new way. One recently happened in Germany where a man allegedly put up ads on the Internet for a well-built male so that he could perform a consensual, ritualistic cannibal killing, and he did it and taped it. I won't go into the details, but it's sickening. This reminds me of how far we've come as humans. Nothing is shocking anymore, so people go further and further to get attention. Think of the sniper killings. That had a whole metropolitan area who wouldn't leave their house for fear of getting sniped. It's depressing and there isn't anything you can do about it. Similar things are happening in Ohio. Killers aren't just satisfied with basic killing. Now a killer has to compete with past killers. Don't expect the news to get any happier. I used to ignore the news, but it's hard not to anymore. Bad shit happens to otherwise decent humans daily. I don't know if the world is getting worse or it's just more televised. 500+ channels brought to you through a little wire coming through the wall, all in high-definition technicolor.
We've made a lot of advances in technology, but we're starting to see a lot of things rehashed. Movies are getting boring. I classify movies into one of 4 categories:
1. They just flat out suck, original story or not.
2. The movie is a remake/add-on/similar to another movie already made.
3. The movie is decent, but is so overdone that by the time you're done watching it you're bored of it and watching it again would be a waste. No balance.
4. The movie is original, balanced, not too overdone, and is considered to be a good movie.
I used to remember a time when at least 2 out of 3 movies that I watched were worth my time. Now it's probably 1 out of 4 or worse.
Music sucks. I haven't listened to a CD by a band that came out after 2000.
Do I even have to talk about TV? The only time I watch TV is if I know something is going to come on that I will like, usually interviews.
I'm so bored of culture these days that the only thing I do is read books and browse the Internet. Maybe I'm just jaded from information overload.

Classmates.com

Sometime in late October I joined Classmates.com on a pure whim, hoping to find some lost friends. I set it up, accidentally clicking the 2 year option instead of the 1  year option. They charged me $60 vice $40, but they refunded me the money after I figured out the error. As far as the actual service goes, it's a great idea, but I think it's something that seems better on paper, but the reality of it is that in a couple of email exchanges you can sum up the past few years of your life and then the emails slowly dwindle. I contacted 8 people: 4 of them responded, 1 of them didn't, and the other 3 didn't get the email that I contacted them, most likely from not updating it to their current email or just not checking it. My advice is that unless you are going to try to contact at least 10 or more people, don't bother. The other problem with it is, out of the 8 people I contacted, only 2 of them emailed me more than once. Theoretically I contacted 8 people, but it was up to them to return the email. You see the problem here. Some people don't want to be bothered by people from High School. Others don't keep up with email. And the ones that you do contact and talk to, it's very easy to fall out of contact with since so much has changed, and it's hard to keep up with daily emails. I have a hard enough time keeping up with my family, let alone people I haven't talked to in years. Some other options they offer are military, workplace, and college databases, so you can keep up with that. It's great if you have a good number of people you haven't seen in years, but don't expect everyone to get back to you. Weigh out whether the chances of you getting in touch with a few people, exchanging a couple emails, then losing contact is worth $40 a year.

Prediction Outcome

Alright, so it wasn't that hard to predict, but I was close. The article I read said, "The official cause of death listed on Jones' death certificate is an irregular heartbeat because of a stress reaction from the violent physical struggle." They didn't say that it was from a heart attack, but I'd say that's pretty close. Here's my two cents: people are bitching that the cops shouldn't have used excessive force to subdue him. Well, as many  others and I have already pointed out, had he not put himself in the situation to be beaten down by cops, he wouldn't have been. Do I agree with police brutality? No. Do I think there are corrupt cops? Yes. And you'd be a dangerous fool to think otherwise. But this was neither.
Today at work I was semi-laughingly (I can't tell if the guy was joking or not) called a "white racist" for my views on this matter. I stand by my views regardless. I'm tired of two things. One, for people getting outraged at police for doing their job in a manner that they were taught. Two, for these minority watchdog groups that are whining every time "the honkey is keepin' the brotha' down." This brotha' kept himself down. Sorry, I don't buy that he was a productive, healthy member of society and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't see how it is that ordinary citizens can bitch about something like this. It's like you have a crackhead who gets done robbing a few houses, then gets caught and has to be taken down with police batons, then cries over police brutality. Cops are called to do a grisly job that normal citizens won't do, then they bitch about it. Granted, Nathaniel Jones was not armed. [I read that] in the police academy you are taught that if a perpetrator gets your gun, there is an 80% chance they will use it against you. From what I read, he almost had the one cop in a headlock and said, "My mother taught me this." Now how far is that scenario from him getting the gun and using it? He was trying to get the one cop's baton as it was. Then I read where someone said, how far do they think this unhealthy guy is going to run? Doesn't matter. If you charge a cop, that's reason enough for them to put you to the ground.
Another thing I found funny is how much the media pounced on this story when it first came out and now it's on it's way out of the newsrooms. I thought it was going to blow up into something big, but luckily it hasn't. The media doesn't tell the whole story anyway. They do whatever it is they can to make the story sound as bizarre as possible, without overstepping their boundaries. Meaning, they leave out certain information to where they aren't lying, but they aren't telling the whole story.  Like how they didn't show the beginning of the tape where Jones had attacked the cops and called them racial slurs.
I think the only reason we haven't seen rioting is because maybe the community doesn't totally agree with the argument that he was a poor, helpless individual that police murdered without reason. If they do riot, let 'em bitch all they want. Doesn't change a thing.

Fat Man Has A Heart Attack

I originally wrote a rather large diatribe about this supposed police brutality case in Cincinnati, OH. On a discussion board from a news site from Cincinnati, a black police officer from Columbus, OH said this:
"Wow. How many of you folks have actually seen the entire video? I read these posts and its very apparent that many of you don't have a connection with reality. I'm a Black police officer in Columbus Ohio, and if I had been dealing with your Cincinnati citizen, I would have reacted in a similar fashion. It's just extremely likely that I would have stopped him earlier because I will not tolerate his kind of resistance. It interferes with my primary goal of going home to my family. I invite you critics to move to my city. This is some of the most unbelievable crap I've ever heard.
As police officers, we are sworn to protect the general public. That means that when any situation gets out of control, we're the folks who are called to bring order back to the area. If an individual, regardless of color or sex, presents a threat to the public at large... I am obligated to deal wtih it so YOU don't have to.
The male suspect involved in this situation was an obvious threat. He was a threat to the public - who called the police - and presented a threat to the police once they arrived. Anyone who believes excessive force was used should move to some areas of the southern United States, where things can get interesting (even for us cops) very quickly.
You folks who are complaining about this incident need to wake up. If you were directly in the line of this guy's rage, you would not be here to complain about anything... but if I killed him in your defense, his family would still be here with a multimilliondollar lawsuit against myself, my family, and my department.
When that suit comes MY way... I'll pass it on to YOUR family for being idiots."

Because I thought there were too many angles and too much stuff to comment on about the case, I ditched the idea. Instead, I'll just strip it down to the prediction: the guy died of a heart attack after police subdued him due to drugs and the commotion with the cops. It's obvious that most people that are crying wolf about the race issue or police brutality haven't been put in charge of defending anything with a weapon. First of all, a baton doesn't do that much damage, especially when they hit him in the torso. He was FAT. Enough said. I'm just tired of people whining about police brutality. You want to stop police brutality? Be nice to cops. I have yet to hear of an incident of a cop beating down a polite citizen. When that day comes, I'll cry that they are beating up people without reason. If you are high on PCP/cocaine, 400 pounds, and trying to tackle cops, they have every right to subdue you and you deserve everything you get.

Choose Your Destination

If you want to know how your city ranks for for national crime statistics, find out through the Top 25 Safest (and Dangerous) Cities. Unfortunately, my hometown area, St. Louis, ranks as #2. I've been keeping up with the local news site KSDK in St. Louis, and it's not a good place to live.