entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

Sometimes, sleepy suburbia gets just a tad too exciting, and one must slip the surly bonds of home for less familiar surroundings, accompanied by one's best girl Friday (but that should go without saying), in order to again achieve a baseline level of boredom.  Three weeks ago, 2wanda and i headed to DC, under the pretext of some job-related conference which she was to attend with some of her coworkers.  The horrors of air travel aside, it was an enjoyable few days in our nation's capital, which i had not visited in over two decades.  Visiting the National Air & Space Museum rekindled all of the "i wanna be an astronaut when i grow up" urges i had as a boy, and we walked our legs off; outside the museum, a guy with the stereotypical Vietnam vet look played guitar under a pavilion in front of banners decrying the Chinese Communist Party's repression of Falun Dafa, and as we left the building, he was ranting about the evils of secularism and Marxism to someone who was obviously provoking him.  The next day, we walked what legs we had regenerated overnight right off again at the National Museum of the American Indian, which featured an excellent cafeteria with all manner of cuisine from native cultures all over the Americas.  After that we headed to the National World War II Memorial because Kim wanted to look up her grandfather.  Then we took a taxi back to the hotel because we were totally pooped.  I flew home the next day and spent two very lonely days until Kimmy came home.

Last weekend, we hit Sonoma Valley for our birthdays.  We stayed at the Birmingham Bed & Breakfast, which was conveniently located a short walk away from several wineries, which meant that we didn't drive at all during our stay; they were very good hosts and easily accomodated both Kim's gluten-free diet and my incessant list of food aversions.  We hit Meadowcroft (good wine, poor service), Chateau St. Jean (good [albeit overpriced] wines but a lack of warmth from the people), Kaz (wacky characters galore, from the winemaker to his daughter to the wines themselves), Landmark (good but nothing remarkable), and Kunde.  Kunde was definitely the best overall experience; a wide array of wine at a fair price, gorgeous grounds, cave and field tours, and nice folks.  Plus, their estate is where a great deal of Bottle Shock was filmed; we drove past the boxing ring that was specifically built for the movie.  The view from their mountaintop tasting patio is stunning and i highly recommend it.

David Halberstam died on April 23 this year, but he left this magnificent excoriation of the Bush Administration behind.

kosmonaut_blog wants to see other people's handwriting.  Instead of writing her a nice note back, i decided to use this opportunity as an exercise in sedition, because i'm an unpatriotic jerk who hates his country, like Thomas Jefferson.  Please excuse the spots; the scanner was dirty.

I was cleaning out my home directory yesterday and i found this fossilized rant in a file dated 2000/01/17.  I get the feeling that i left it lying around because it was unfinished.  It's a bit emo.  Anyway, here you go.

I write this sober of any foreign drug, drunk only on my anger, my bitterness, my despair.  The steaming heap of shit that our world has become reduces us to bacteria and parasites that feed on it.

Here in this country of freedom, this land of opportunity, we choose to elect our leaders from among a pool of select candidates, not unlike choosing a chicken at the market for our dinner: Does it look fresh?  Is it on special?  Has there been any recent report of a poisonous outbreak of disease that was blamed on this brand of fowl?  We don't KNOW these people, yet we want them to affect our way of life in ways we cannot control beyond the vote.

Hell, we don't even know our neighbors!  Those goddamned antisocial backstabbing little slugs that live next to you, yes, them.  They are the humans with the closest vicinity, yet with whom you have no affinity.  What, make friends with THEM?  Their rotten brats drive you insane, their snooty attitude spawns violent thoughts in you, and their dog ripped up your amaryllises again.

The tribe is dead.  Once people lived together, breathed the same air, took a dump in the same pit, and, horror of horrors, cared about one another and worked together for the good of the tribe.  Or did they?  Is my romantic mind filling itself with happy delusions, to either torment me with hope or pickle me with cynicism?  Can either survive alone, or is their symbiosis unbreakable?

Is democracy truly the biggest joke foisted on us by the ancient Greeks?  In this country, where only white landowners could once vote, candidacy has always been slanted towards the rich or powerful.  Yet you can't escape a basic tenet of democracy: Give a luser a vote and he'll elect a luser.  Clinton was elected after he actually managed to nurse some fledgling hope in the hearts of many to overturn the Bush-Quayle mandate.  What has he given us since?  Monica Lewinsky, "don't ask, don't tell", and Hillary for Senate in NY.  Bush offered us a lip-reading exercise and a continuation of the Reagan mindfuck.  He gave us the Compleat Works of Quayle Malaprops, "this will not be another Vietnam", more Iran-Contra ghosts (hey, he followed through on the Reagan mindfuck continuation!), and his sperm in the form of Gee-Dubya.

Am i glad that Reagan's mind is deteriorating into mush? (Is anyone certain that he wasn't already sick when he was elected president?) I've never been big on Schadenfreude, but i have to admit that there is a certain perverse joy.  It is rather empty, of course; at best, it could be considered karmic retribution or poetic justice.  But that isn't going to fix what he broke.  He fed the notion that America is invulnerable, accountable to no one else in this world.  He fed the War on Drugs with high-and-mighty Nancy.  He presided over the biggest expense on Defense this country has never needed.  He tried to sell us the belief that giving the privileged more leeway would somehow benefit the downtrodden.

• Warren Ellis brings us a disturbing answer to a troubling question.
• iayork could've been the coolest Dad ever.
• E. Howard Hunt died three months ago, and talked about LBJ's involvement in the assassination of JFK.
• "I have a great idea.  Let's rebuild the Internet from scratch!"
• Baseball might be getting rid of its longest-used performance enhancer, but in the meantime, the one undetectable performance enhancer might not be all that enhancing.
• Fox News never fails to disappoint: "Could [Seung-Hui] Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?"
• The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has decided that the bit in the Second Amendment about "a well-regulated militia" was just fluff.  This is a complicated one, because i don't disagree with the decision, but i'm not crazy about the way they got there.  I wonder about how laws like Minnesota's Personal Protection Act can help Americans be responsible gun owners, and what the effect of these laws are (and, Seth, if you happen to be reading this, you're still a douche).
• This one's a real corker: Jundallah, a wholly owned subsidiary of Al-Qaeda, has been receiving carefully funnelled financial support from the United States and is fighting the Iranian government.  Follow all the links.  You know what?  Nothing surprises me anymore.  All of my predictions have come true.  At least we have the liberal media hammering the ... oh, wait, a Blue Angel crashed.  Sorry, where were we?

The unstoppable expansion of Starbucks has been a problem for longer than you think.

Was the Boston Tea Party an act of terrorism?

Turns out Strom Thurmond was a huge fan of Thomas Jefferson.

I have no joke here, i just like saying:

Almost 12 years later... and eerily familiar.

Anthony de Boer quoted:

One proposal which Churchill put forward was for autonomy for the Kurds in northern Iraq. He favoured this because he feared an Iraqi ruler who would 'ignore Kurdish sentiment and oppress the Kurdish minority', but his advisers dismissed these fears, believing that Britain would always be able to exert a moderating influence in Baghdad.

-- Martin Gilbert, _Churchill:_A_Life_, p.434. Passage describes events in March 1921.