Goose the Blog 2.0

Bizarre Dream of the Morning of July 30th, 2006

The Band
An ordinary 4 Piece Indie band metamorphoses into an air guitar act which is then replaced by more and more musicians, eventually turning into a fancy dress carnival parade with people from the past (including my youth pastor and his wife) interspersed with traditionally costumed blonde buxom girls who sing directly to individuals in the audience. The response is great, but afterwards, when the original band comes back and asks if anyone would like to buy a video of the event, no one does. The effect was too interactive for video to capture.

Johnny Rotten
shows up wearing paint splattered torn clothes and hassles shaved headed art school types wearing identical sacks with different designs painted in lime green. I start telling Johnny that he was mentioned in conversation earlier in regards to his Irish parents, but he drifts off to hassle more people.

The Ironic Clothes
appear, identical charcoal gray t-shirts stacked to the ceiling for display, the only difference between them being slightly different embossed designs on the chest. I ask the salesman what statement the shirts are making- Is it that the wearer must be aware of the irony of the designs trying to stamp individuality upon the sameness of the shirts, and also of the marketing savvy? * (I know I’m not explaining this correctly). The salesman admits they’re ironic shirts and may be difficult to sell. I recommend he wear one himself, but he says he’s too big.
Then I realize I’ve lost a few things…Panic sets in…

The Misplaced Library Items (Cause of The Nightmare)
I rush back to the library to see if I left my stuff there: A book on reggae, a pile of my own school journals, and other terribly important things that I can’t remember now. They’re there on a table, but when I try to gather them up, things start disappearing. More panic. I’m going to be late for dinner.

I wake up, shaken but relieved. Must write this down before I forget everything…


* T-shirt ideas that have just occurred to me: Knacker, Knackered, Scanger, Chav, Shallow, So Shallow

Knacker
Scanger
Chav
Chav Pride Article


Fascinating, eh?
Reading this stuff made my understanding of society so much clearer, not having been familiar with a lot of these terms and stereotypes before.
It's funny how my girlfriend abhors racism, but will spit out "knacker" with disgust!

For those of you who didn't know, I moved to Ireland at the end of May. Wanna visit the Emerald Isle? Mi Casa es Tu Casa!

"This song is not a rebel song, this song is 'Sunday Bloody Sunday.'" (yoink! This Modern World)

Once again I am asking for some musical suggestions, with a different twist. A couple of months ago I joined eMusic, a subscription music service. For a flat $10 fee every month, you can download 40 songs. The songs are in mp3 format, have no DRM, and will play on any computer or mp3 player. eMusic has mostly indie bands and back-catalog stuff, along with jazz and classical - they don't have as many songs as iTunes, but I haven't run out of things I want to buy yet either, and for about $3 an album, the price is low enough that I feel like it's OK to experiment with bands I haven't heard much of before.

What I'm asking is for you to go to eMusic.com and see if some of your favorite bands and albums are on eMusic. If they are, suggest them to me and I'll add them to my list and download them when I get a chance.

Also, after looking around, if you feel like you want to join eMusic, don't do it. First, let me know and I will send you an email. If you join on my referral, I get 50 free songs (if you actually buy a one month subscription) and you get 25 free songs. It's a good deal for both of us.

Thanks!

(Right now on my list I have:
Let's Get Out of This Country, Camera Obscura
Honeycomb, Frank Black
Elan Vital, Pretty Girls Make Graves
Surfer Rosa/Come on Pilgrim, The Pixies
How We Operate, Gomez)

Update: If you were getting a sign up screen when you followed the link to eMusic, I think I fixed it so you can just browse/search for songs directly.

More Elias photos up now. There are way too many "balloon" photos, but they tell a story. It's photo journalism.

We didn't get it in a photo, but shortly after the balloon popped, Elias spotted a balloon just like the one he had floating away into the sky. He watched it and pointed at it until it disappeared. We did get a short film of it. Maybe Wendy will upload it later today.

Update: Here's the film (from the comments - thanks, Wendy!).

This is a short radio show about 1811 Eastlake, the housing facility for chronic alcoholics where I have been working once a week.

Yesterday on my local public radio station, Marty Moss-Coane (WHYY's Radio Times) interviewed John Dean, former White House counsel to President Nixon, on authoritarianism and the modern conservative movement (mp3). He has just written a book called Conservatives Without Conscience, and was also the author of Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. The interview is very interesting, if you have the time.

When you've finished with that, you might want to watch Encyclopedia Brittanica's 1946 classroom film "Despotism" (or Google video) and the companion piece "Democracy".

An exercise for the class: How does your community or nation rate on the Goal Variables Respect (shared to restricted) and Power (shared to concentrated)? How does it rate on the Instrumental Variables Economic Distribution (balance to slanted) and Information (uncontrolled with critical evaluation to controlled with automatic acceptance)? What does this tell you about the tendency of your community or nation toward despotism or democracy?

Update: In "Despotism", be sure to listen carefully to the Pledge of Allegiance. A blast from the past!

Update 2: There's also this editorial by John Dean from the Boston Globe. Read it if you don't have time for the 52 minute radio interview. But do check out the "Despotism" film if you can!

...only stupid people asking questions. So here's mine, with a little introduction first:

We are having a heatwave here on the mid-Altlantic coast (I understand it is also hot in some other less important places. Too bad for you). This happens every year, and every year, local governments and local aid organizations give out free fans to the elderly poor so they don't die of heat stroke. They do this because it is cheaper to buy a fan than it is to bury a dead person (or give emergency healthcare to a person who is not quite dead yet). So what happened to the fans they gave away the previous year? When autumn came, did all the elderly poor just throw their free fans away, thinking they probably wouldn't need them again?

Speaking of stupid, President George Bush tried to give an unsolicited shoulder rub to German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G-8 conference in St. Petersburg. Is that more or less stupid than when he appeared with his fly open at the APEC conference in Chile? I'm actually thinking "more stupid" but you could probably go either way.

This article from Harper's explores the dolchstosslegende in the Twentieth century (I wrote a little bit about it a long time ago). The rhetoric coming daily from the Republicans and right wingers concerning our failure in Iraq is a clear echo of the what has already been said in the past, from WWII to Vietnam. People, in general I'd say, have short memories, and too many have pathological personalities. Is the right wing in America really this bad (and by "bad" I mean actively mendacious and power-hungry)?

On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens” through George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals”; from Lee Atwater’s characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream,” the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies—from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to the “war against Christmas” last year.

...

Given this state of permanent culture war, it is not surprising that the Bush White House trotted out the stab-in-the-back myth when its Iraq project began to run out of steam early last summer. It was first given a spin, as usual, by the right’s media shock troops, and directed at both Democratic and renegade Republican lawmakers who had dared to criticize either the strategic conduct of the war or our treatment of detainees. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page opined, “Where the terrorists are gaining ground is in Washington, D.C.” and noted that General John Abizaid, of the U.S. Central Command, had said, “When my soldiers say to me and ask me the question whether or not they’ve got support from the American people or not, that worries me. And they’re starting to do that.”

There's a twist ending, though, so read the whole thing.

At the end of June, my coworker, who has only been with the company for a year, left for India to marry his fiancee and have his honeymoon.

Luckily, India is a big place inhabited by around a billion people, so odds are he isn't one of them.

Nope, we didn't get washed away during the last couple weeks of rain, although we did have one or two pretty awesome thunderstorms. I've just been too lazy to post, bereft of things to say, and busy with some other stuff (like a visit from My-Mother-the-Cyborg and a big, stupid dose of poison ivy).

A few pictures will go up later today. Check back!