3:59 PM Welcome Ethan Thomas Huffman!!

Ethan and I share the same middle name! Congratulations Huffmans!!

From Chris' email:

All,

We're proud to announce the birth of our son, Ethan Thomas Huffman.

He was born on his father's birthday, America's Memorial Day, May 30th 2005 at St. Vincent's Womens Hospital at 12:01 p.m. He weighed 8 lbs and was 20 inches tall.

Mother and child are well and Ellie and I are doing what we can to help out.

Please follow the link below to a gallery of pictures from the past 24 hours: link

Email wishes are welcomed and please feel free to call in the next week or so to congratulate Mom and new big sister Ellie.

Also, feel free to pass the news on to others you know whom I've missed, along with our apologies.

Love,
Chris, Sarah, Ellie & Ethan

Woot!

6:28 AM More guilty pleasures.

Hello there, the angel from my nightmare
the shadow in the background of the morgue
the unsuspecting victim of darkness in the valley
we can live like Jack and Sally if we want
where you can always find me
we'll have Halloween on Christmas
and in the night we'll wish this never ends
we'll wish this never ends

Where are you and I'm so sorry
I cannot sleep, I cannot dream tonight
I need somebody and always
this sick strange darkness
comes creeping on so haunting every time
and as I stared I counted
webs from all the spiders
catching things and eating their insides
like indecision to call you
and hear your voice of treason
will you come home and stop this pain tonight
stop this pain tonight

Don't waste your time on me you're already
the voice inside my head (I miss you, miss you)

When a song gets stuck in my mind, I end up listening to it over and over. Right now "Lawyers in Love" and "I Miss You" (the Blink 182 tune I quote above) are in heavy rotation in tanque hq. Also in heavy rotation: Cash and Carter singing "Jackson."

I'm also hearing "Kid Asphalt" in my head. "High school parking lot...." Like buttah. Tommy's drum fill leading into the 1/2 time part of the song is pure arena rock gold.

Know what I like about "Lawyers in Love?" I'm a simple guy. The simple pleasures. Sentences without verbs. So here it is. I like the pattern. Lawyers in Love might as well be math rock, it's such a formula. The first two verses are what they are, but then the third verse kicks in with, not a key change, but it sounds like it. "Last night I watched the news from Washington." Sweet. The rhythm of the verse is 4/4, straight ahead, but for the kicker he throws in a 3/4 pattern. If you tap your foot to that line, "Last night I watched the news from Washington," it's nearly on-beat, pow pow pow. But then comes the line "and I hear the USSR will be open soon," and you get those gorgeous triplets, "U - S - S" (1-2-3) "R - will - be" (1-2-3) "open soon."

Yeah.

Welcome to my world. As further proof of my doofushood, I offer this insight: lately when I see an attractive woman and find myself noticing that she's attractive, my mind says "hey chocolate momma, with a stomach like a Hershey's snare drum." Gold star for you if you recognize the quote.

This looks to be a rainy Memorial Day. Here's to a time without war.

11:40 PM For some reason I felt the urge last weekend to rewatch some low budget internet television hacker shows, so I downloaded episodes of Packetsniffers and The Broken -- between the two I prefer The Broken's higher production values, but both are fun shows. I'd assumed that both had been short-lived fun that were over, but apparently The Broken is coming back. Yay! If you've never seen The Broken you should check it out (think well-executed cable-access program by two computer enthusiasts). Episode two is pretty much a wash, but one and three are great stuff, fun and well paced.

It turns out that one of the Broken pair, Kevin Rose, has been doing other stuff (like ScreenSavers) since then. Who knew? Anyhoo, here's some links: HackerMedia.net first clued me into the new show (they also mentioned this interesting-looking documentary about BBS's), and later I found this Slashdot post about it. The new show's page is here: Systm.org. I've downloaded the episode but probably won't get to watch it tonight (you know, cause my rock-star schedule is so busy). update: just watched it and enjoyed it. They build a little device to help them find unencrypted wireless cameras (like those used for security cams and home webcams) and pick up the signals. Cam-sniffing? Regardless, good stuff.

In other news, our house has unfortunately become a stray cat magnet. Yesterday a bone-skinny little kitty was crying at the front door, looking for love. She looked like a thin bobcat with big paws and a long tail. She was more agressive tonight when I got home from work, and I decided that rather than shoo her away I'd go ahead and take her to the animal shelter. It's a bummer, but I guess there's the chance that she'll find a home. Turns out her paws looked big because she has six toes on each of her front paws.

sigh.

I liked the last star wars movie, but found it to be a missed opportunity for greatness. This fawning review is so far off-base that it could be a parody.

Robot cats are cuddly and creepy

11:33 AM From stuck in my head to stuck in your head:

I can't keep with whats be going down
I think my heart must just be slowing down
Among the human beings
In their designer jeans
Am I the only one who hears the screams
And the strangled crys of Lawyers In Love

God sends his spaceships to America, The Beautiful
They land at 6 o'clock and there we are, The Dutiful
Eating from TV trays, Tuned into Happy Days
Waiting for World War 3 while Jesus slaves
To the mating calls of Lawyers In Love

. . . . .

Last night I watched the news from Washington (The Capitol)
The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will
Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon
And I hear the USSR will be open soon
As vacation land for Lawyers In Love
Lawyers In Love
. . .
Lawyers In Love

11:26 PM I've had this for a while, wasn't sure if I wanted to link it, but what the heck. I'm not a vegitarian, but at the very least I feel less and less able to justify eating meat when I can't verify it's origin: http://tanque.org/shelf/peta. To coin a phrase, this is some repugnant shit.

9:21 AM Just finished reading Jennifer Government [author's site] this morning. Fun, pop-corn read about a near future where the US "government" is simply a small player in a world of corporate rivalries. Everyone adopts the last name of their employer, so the protags have names like Hack Nike and Buy Mitsui. Jennifer has a past, but for now she's a Government agent, trying to figure out why kids were murdered at the rollout of Nike's spectacular new running shoe. Good stuff, quick read (barely a physical character description in the entire book), made me want to track down another by this author.

Forgot to mention in my previous post two movies recently seen:

Dick - cute, mildly funny movie about two 15-year-old girls (don't let the bikinis on the cover fool you, these are little kids) who get mixed up in Watergate. Will Farrell plays Woodward, which almost makes it worth the price of admission. I won't go so far as to recommend this per se, but it made me chuckle. and....

Super Size Me - yes, I'm the last person to finally catch this (I picked up a copy used, so if you haven't seen it you can borrow my copy). It was just okay, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The best segments didn't revolve around the protag getting ill (which was interesting, but not engaging to moi), especially the one on corporations in schools & Sodexo's food service. Shari was particularly moved by one of the special features in which McDonald's food is kept under glass to watch it decay. Most of it gets gross like you'd expect, but the french fries NEVER CHANGE. It was pretty weird. We're talking like 10 weeks later and they hadn't so much as gotten fuzzy or changed color AT ALL. So striking that it justifies the use of ALL CAPS.

Jimmy needs to get a cape and mask to go along with his new alter ego, The Night Stalker!

Hope, I read that article Pep posted awhile back and thought, "I'm one of those non-MLS folks who's taking their jobs!" My position originally required a library degree, but they gave up on finding someone with the other quals who wouldn't end up leaving after a year. Now they'll never get rid of me!!! (BwaHaHaHaHa!!) But yeah, I wouldn't want to be looking for a librarian job right now, at least from what I hear.

via Undernews, Buy Citgo! Viva Venezuela!

6:02 AM i obviously haven't posted much lately, sorry about that; felt the urge but haven't followed up with it. and i blame that mostly on my brain ceasing to work, as i originalled typed "fallowed" in the previous sentence and took way too long to figure out why it didn't look right.

Newsy stuff to get out of the way:

• I've been reading and listening to stories/commentary about the memo from Downing Street. My take on it? I guess it's interesting as an exercise in where we are these days. The "big story" of the memo is that the Bush admin knew from the start they wanted to invade Iraq and manipulated intelligence to justify the war. Well, yes, of course they did. Is this really still up for debate? Can resonable people still contest this? I get the impression the media doesn't quite know what to do with this story -- on the one hand it should be old news: "Bush administration still guilty of lying to justify invasion of Iraq" but on the other hand, since that story hasn't seemed to have taken hold with 50% of US voters (give or take), the story is presented as a question: "does this mean the President may have mislead the US people?" Additional article (with plenty of more links within) here: [link]
• I can understand why something like flag-burning infuriates people, even as I feel that folks sometimes confuse the symbol for what it symbolizes. So while there's a part of me that doesn't see why flushing a Koran down a toliet would infuriate anyone more than other forms of psychological torture, I think I can at least see why such things might. As often is the case, I found Juan Cole's perspective on the affair enlightening. [link] It sure sounds to me like the Bush admin is avoiding addressing the Gitmo situation, chosing instead to focus on un-named source of the story.
• TPM has a good little nugget about Indiana's Rep. Chris "The Count" Chocola -- and how the Indiana Republican Party is working to ensure a "balanced" debate about Social Security (by threatening a church with the loss of their tax-free status if they don't have pro-privatization folks come speak at an SS informational meeting they held). I'd never heard of the fella myself, at least not until recently when his name came up on a humorous MediaMatters story about the amusingly moronic Michael Medved's interview with Rock the Vote's Hans Riemer. It's worth a listen [link] in that "who listens to this moron?" vein.

Recently watched movies worth mentioning:

• Network. Good stuff, interesting because it is both timely and dated simultaneously (sometimes in the same scene, even). Faye Dunaway is the programming exec who wants to turn a last-place network into a ratings star by turning their news department into a circus. Good anti-corporate stuff, good news-as-entertainment stuff, weird 70s women-are-evil vibe (in the way Dunaway is both lusted after and demonized) -- Holden's character pursues Dunaway even though he's married with children, but somehow she's the viper in the end.
• I picked that up after watching The Bridge on the River Kwai. William Holden's part seemed entirely extraneous in Kwai, so I was surprised to learn that he made so much money from that movie (something in the millions, but he worked it out so that he basically got $50 grand/year for the rest of his life). In any event, I like this movie as much as I did the first time I watched it. Apparently the mind-numbingly aggravating British officer played by Obi-Wan was based on a real-life Brit officer who was, in contrast, quite a skilled leader who managed to get better conditions for his men while they were prisoners; there's a book based on him mentioned in the user comments on imdb, but it's apparently out of print. On second viewing, the British officer's blind devotion to building a good bridge seems even less convincing and more stupid. So why did I still enjoy it? Who knows?
• I don't remember where I first heard about Primer, but I liked it a bunch; I'd almost go so far as to say it's the best sci-fi I've seen in a long time, but then we'd be getting into what constitutes sci-fi, and I don't have the energy for that just now, so let me just say that it's a cool low-budget movie that did well at Sundance and had me scratching my head and wanting to rewatch it. Short plot summary: garage would-be entepreneurs stumble upon a technology which seems to allow time travel, and problems soon arise as they explore what they've uncovered (more than that would be more spoiler than I'd want to give). After mulitiple viewings and director's commentary I still have questions, and I'm not quite convinced they got everything "right" in terms of explaining the plot, but I haven't had this experience with a movie-as-puzzle since Memento. Now I need you to watch it so I can bounce some questions around. Director's commentary was interesting just in terms of hearing about how they made the movie, too.

I haven't given up on posting more about Catcher in the Rye, I just haven't made the time to put my thoughts down in a more concrete form.

Todd's been talking about getting back to Indiana sometime this fall, and Heidi mentioned a similar idea on her page recently. August, perhaps? I'll probably be out of town for at least one long weekend in August, but I'd hate to miss the chance to see everyone together in one place.

12:19 AM

• Bethany and Aunt Phyllis in Jakarta: [link]
• I recently finished Catcher in the Rye, need to follow up on Book Tanque.
• Thank a teacher.