mushinnoshin

I just made my first financial contribution EVER to a major party candidate. Yeah, it creeped me out a little. But Bill Richardson is the first major party candidate I ever thought was actually right for the job. I use the phrase “right for the job” quite precisely. It doesn’t mean I think he’s my ideological soulmate. It means I think he has the right combination of experience, leadership, and “good enough” positions on every major issue to actually do the job we’re hiring someone to do: get this car out of the ditch and back on the road. And most importantly…

Did you hear Jay Leno this week, talking about Wednesday’s Presidential debate?

“Hillary and Barack and John Edwards, they said setting a timetable for a complete withdrawal is irresponsible. And pulling out troops basically depends on the situation on the ground. Otherwise known as ‘the Bush plan.’ Hello?”

Jay got it exactly right.

Vote for them, and you get more of the same. Vote for Bill Richardson, and you get a commitment to pull our troops out of Iraq and END THIS WAR.

You can make it happen. Help Governor Richardson win!

Tomorrow night the fundraising quarter ends. Your support NOW will make a crucial difference to our grassroots campaign.

Even $50 can make a difference. And I’m asking you to please give now. If you do, our most dedicated supporters will double the value of your contribution — making twice the difference in our totals.

I love finding out a day before launching a major program that Microsoft’s insistance on asshatery and inability to follow simple specifications is going to break the whole damn paradigm.

It has been remarked that according to the HTML specification, the form data set should additionally contain the field foo with the value bar, according to general principles of including all “successful controls”. This is somewhat debatable [debatable if you're an asshat, I'm sure] and depends on the interpretation of wordings in the specification [apparently, it's a meaning of 'is' thing]. Anyway, IE 6, for one, does not work by this interpretation…. IE fails to pass value while Mozilla and Netsacpe works.

Yet not so strange, if you understand his point of view. In Iran, you see, homosexuals are thought of as women trapped in male bodies. That’s why they offer free operations for those who want to change their sex

Interesting. While Iran remains clearly more homophobic than America — by orders of magnitude — it sounds like they just might be ahead of the curve on transgenderism. Not that it makes their homophobia right, but it does smear the ink of the caricature our handlers want us to accept, showing us once again there are no “good guys” and “bad guys” — no matter how much the wannabe cowboys in charge would like us to believe it — there are only people, all a mélange of qualities good and bad.

Meanwhile it also makes plain the problem with our culture’s nasty and growing habit of making snap judgments based on little more than a thin combination of soundbites and propaganda. There’s almost always more to the story.

Update: what timing. Thanks to Webb, Feingold, Sanders, and a few others at least for remaining voices of sanity.

Update 2: Anthony Gregory with another interesting factoid:

Incarcerations per 100,000 population (sample):

1014____Texas (in 1999) (governor George W. Bush)
1013____Louisiana (2001)
715_____United States of America (2001)
584_____Russian Federation
554_____Belarus
487_____Cuba
416_____Ukraine
402_____South Africa
388_____Singapore
267_____Namibia
253_____Tunisia
248_____Taiwan
210_____Poland
204_____Chile
194_____Iran

A few people have posted about the fascinating film still playing at the Belcourt called The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which I saw Friday night. I don’t have a lot to say about it but did want to make one observation.

Unfortunately I ‘m not entirely sure I have the right words to capture what I want to say. I’ll try, but bear with me.

I think what makes the film so compelling is this — on one level, it takes a story about a topic so trivial as to be absurd but uses a human interest element to make it fascinating, but moreso, the film knows that it’s doing this and does it right in front of us, and this very dichotomy in fact is the story, and it’s captured right there in black and white.

In the deliberate humor found in the angle of the light shown on Billy Mitchell’s arrogance, we see that the film recognizes the overblown pomposity in believing that these games somehow “matter”. Billy Mitchell takes himself way too seriously in precisely the way that you think the film might take itself and its topic too seriously, but doesn’t. But then we meet Steve Weibe, and in the earnest heart of someone who doesn’t take it too seriously except insofar as being a way to challenge himself and find a sense of pride and self worth — we discover exactly why it all should be taken seriously, at least as seriously as anything and everything else with which we thinking animals occupy ourselves — because people care about it, and because everyone wants to be the best at something they enjoy.

Sure, Donkey Kong is just a game. So is life.

Next time I go see a production that kicks as much ass as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I’ll try not to wait until the final performance, which renders unhelpful to you my reporting of its awesomeness. Aww, well hell it’s not like you ever take my advice anyway.

Still, since I recently went through and loaded up my calendar with the new seasons of a few of the local orgs, here’s a brief on what I think will be some highlights.

• People’s Branch Theater, responsible for the aforementioned Hedwig, have three shows left in their season. I love this troupe and look forward to all three.
• October 5-13, ACT1 is doing “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” at the Darkhorse. ACT1 will also have three more this season, though I haven’t heard of the other three.
• It looks like the TN Rep is going to have a fantastic season, which will include:
  • Edward Albee’s The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? (you may know Albee from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
  • Steve Martin’s The Underpants. I love me some Steve Martin, and I saw this one performed at the Darkhorse a while back, which had me in stitches. So I’m very much looking forward to seeing the Rep’s take on it.
  • Oh, and they’re kicking things off in October with The Crucible.
• I don’t typically pay much mind to the Broadway musicals, but this year TPAC’s got Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in January, Monty Python’s Spamalot coming up in February, and 12 Angry Men in May.
• Speaking of music, Vanderbilt’s Great Performances series has a couple of good ones lined up. Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu-Man returns to Nashville in February, and the Kronos Quartet is coming in March.
• And speaking of chamber music at Blair, Alias has another great season lined up, which kicks off Oct 4 with some tasty Shostakovich.
• Of course, Shostakovich in February and March are just two of the Nashville Symphony performances I’m looking forward to this season. Coming up just next week will be a great one for noobs, with our renowned “music advisor” Leonard Slatkin stepping in to give us Beethoven’s Fifth.
• My many Irish friends might be find their curiosity piqued by a couple of Celtic special events on that list, including a performance by the Chieftans. Of course Irish music without a pub and a Guinness may be like… well, bluegrass without a honky-tonk and a Pabst, but still…
• Lastly we can’t forget the Nashville Opera, who’s entire season also looks enticing, although the one I’m anticipating most is Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. (What can I say, it’s a Sideshow Bob thing)

So, yeah, it’s going to be a good season. I’m either going to have to get a raise, or start making some hard choices… Well in any case at least with all this advance notice, maybe we can avoid all the usual bickering and fighting over who gets to go with me to these things :)

Pro:

1. It would be good for me
2. Having been very busy and having kept late nights, I overslept every day this week and only did about half of my usual daily practice
3. I skipped last week due to the Buddhist festival
4. I will feel justified to reward myself with my usual post-yoga Chinese takeout for lunch

Con:

1. Yesterday’s Peace Walk left me with a mild sunburn on my head, which won’t do well for headstands
2. I did already get in a third night of exercise for the week with a karate Fight Night last night
3. I’m still in mourning that my amazing and beautiful teacher is out for a few weeks getting married, to someone who, sadly, isn’t me (I kid! I kid! … well, mostly ; )
4. Too much coffee this morning has my stomach a bit queasy
5. I think spending the next few hours sitting on my ass, perhaps catching up on my Netflix, will be more likely to put me in a place to get some more painting done this afternoon
6. In the time it took me to write out this post, I missed the window to get there on time, and class is actually starting at this very moment.

I think that last one’s the winner.

So last night, on the way home from seeing The King of Kong, one of the radio stations plays Pinball Wizard. Heh.

I should be doing something productive I suppose. I really should be putting coat #1 of the rag-on glazing on wall #2 in the parlor. But hell, it’s 9:00, I just had my weekly batch of tasty spicy vegetable whole wheat spaghetti, this time with a nice glass of pinot noir, and I think I’d rather just nurse an after dinner screwdriver while I catch up here on some overdue rambling. Seeing as I haven’t written anything in, what, two-thirds of a month or so?

Well I’ve been buried at work, been on a major project that’s kept me working nights and even a bit on Saturdays. But it’s almost over, I’m in the final stretch, and hopefully things will get back to something resembling normal soon.

This weekend has been a good break. The symphony kicked off it’s new season and I had my Friday night ticket as usual. I’m in the same second-to-cheapest-seats section this year, but I got them to move me into the center section, which was nice. I suppose I’ll just gradually improve my ticket every year until I’m a blue hair with a private loge box. Ah, who am I kidding, I still won’t have any hair : )

It was a good show. Our “guest” conductor for the evening was one Giancarlo Guerrero, who you may have heard has actually been hired to take the job full time starting next next season. I’m happy enough about it — I can’t say I know enough about contemporary conductors to have a super strong opinion, but I do know that his work last year with the NSO on Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and Sibelius’ Symphony #6 was probably in my top five for the season, and I wasn’t the only one who thought it was excellent.

Come Saturday it was time to get my dharma on. It couldn’t have been a better day for the Nashville Buddhist Festival. I didn’t get to stay long, but the opening meditation aimed at cultivating peace made for a great way to start the day. And on the subjects of Buddhism and Peace, let me take the opportunity to plug the Buddhist Peace Fellowship event we’ve got planned for Friday.

Anyway, I had to leave the festival early to get some office time in. But after that it was back to the dharma, this time with Krishna, as I headed out to kirtans at 12 South Yoga with my friends in Samavayah, who I’m happy to say have finally found their way onto YouTube:

Onward to today, I continued the theme with a regular Sunday morning at the Yeshe Tsogyal house. Wouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy except that — well for one thing, I’d gotten out of the habit the last few months, so it’s nice to start getting back to it, and for the other thing — AWESOME meditation this morning. Sometimes when you really get there, you feel something shift inside your head. I mean you really feel it, like some sort of neurological equivalent of cracking your knuckles. The only other time I’ve felt anything like it was back when I was doing insane amounts of LSD. And so I sort of wonder if this morning I popped something *back* into place that’s been out of whack all this time.

It would be nice.

Between that and the MCB post about Google’s 10 year anniversary, I had an inkling that I might share with you the story about how I put myself on Goodyear’s payroll when I was around 10 years old or so. And how I once figured out that the fallout from that event shaped everything in my life that would happen going forward. But now it’s getting late, the screwdriver is kicking in, and I think I’m just going to have to let that one slip by for now. Release my attachment to the need to tell the story, as it were.