Category: Uncategorized

• Eurobike Awards 2007 – Top Picks (TreeHugger)
  Hmm, I’d be more enthused if it used more accessible/less energy intensive materials. I think the belt drive is long-overdue . . . .
  (tags: cycling environment energy markets)
• People For the American Way – Buying a Movement
  This is old — from 1996 — but I wonder how dated it is? I suspect all that has changed is the dollar amounts.
  (tags: politics values culture)

but a good day sailing, well that’s another thing entirely.

I took a sailing checkout at the Center for Wooden Boats today on a Blanchard Jr Knockabout. I wish I could link to a picture, but there are all of two I can find, neither of them worth sharing. Looks like I better take some of my own.

The checkout was supposed to be a lesson/refresher and it was supposed to be yesterday. So we were a little crossed up. But when the instructor learned that I had done a lot of sailing in my yout’ he turned it into a checkout, gave me the boat and some brief course instructions — “head for the red buoy, round that and come back to the dock, see if there’s enough wind to bring her in under sail.”

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The wind was negligible, given the considerable wind shadow, but once I got out a bit, things picked and I remembered why I liked sailing so much and why I had missed it.

I would have passed the checkout, perhaps, but for my unfamiliarity with the jib: I have never sailed with one, so it took a bit of extra mental muscle to get used to it. So we have a follow-up for next weekend and I look to be ready to checkout the smaller gems of CWB’s livery fleet.

it’s really pretty surprising that I can’t find any pictures of these boats. They really are treasures, especially given Seattle’s maritime heritage. Even some crummy digital snapshots would be useful . . .

ev’rybody had kung pao chicken . . .

you know, you can keep that going

and it was finger-lickin’
ev’rybody had indigestion
and no one answered the question.

Now playing: Knuckle Down from the album “English Settlement” by XTC

I found the complete version of this today.

“Stardust, Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie Book 1 of 4” (Neal Gaiman)

I loved the book, want to see the movie, and had no idea the illustrated version was so wonderful.

Now playing: Thanks For Christmas by Three Wise Men (XTC) [yeah, it’s early, but so what?]

Glenn Greenwald – Political Blogs and Opinions – Salon:

The Fred Kagans and his dad [Donald] and his brother [Robert] and his wife [Kimberly] and his best friend Bill Kristol sit back casually demanding more wars, demanding that our troops be denied any relief, demanding that the President call for other families to volunteer to fight in their wars — all “as an intellectual or emotional exercise,” as [Senator Jim] Webb put it.
That’s all revolting enough. But to then watch Fred Kagan sit around opposing Senator Webb’s attempts to relieve some of the strain on our troops — all because it would require too much paperwork to figure out and because they haven’t yet won Fred Kagan’s war and thus deserve no breaks — is almost too much to bear. But it is worth forcing oneself to observe it, as unpleasant as it might be, because within this ugly dynamic lies much of the explanation for what has happened to our country since the 9/11 attack, and the personality type that continues to drive it today.

I didn’t realize one could have the organ that causes one to feel shame removed. Evidently, you can. How else do these heartless, spineless, gutless bastards get through a day?

Continue reading “who are these people?”

Shut It Down October 17, 2007:

It starts down here with us, not some monied org with a sidebar agenda. We don’t need to go anywhere. We don’t need to spend anything. Just stay home. We believe that October 17th would be a great day. The 25th Anniversary of The Solidarity Movement protests and strikes that shut down Poland, and brought down Communist/Soviet rule. We all need a day off… why not take it off together?

Out here in the Soviet of Washington, it will be interesting to see what traction this gets. The risk for members of my old union, the SEIU, will be pretty high: the UW, bastion of liberalism, may not look kindly on a one-day worker outage.

Jane Smiley on the modern Republican party and it’s evolution:

[W]hen you reject common humanity, value profits above people, practice sectarian religion, feel contempt for the choices of others, exalt wealth, conflate consumersim with citizenship, join exclusive clubs, daily practice unkindness rather than kindness, and develop theories, such as those of free market capitalism, that allow you to congratulate yourself morally for selfishness and short-sightedness, then being a gang member is in your future.

The Paleolithic Diet “is the diet that man evolved on,…:

The Paleolithic Diet “is the diet that man evolved on, the diet that is coded for in our genes”. The diet consists of avoiding grains, beans, dairy, sugar, etc.; eating meat/chicken/fish, eggs, fruit, veggies, nuts, etc.; and increasing your intake of root veggies and organ meats like liver.

(link)

Put simply, that diet is what you would expect from animals whose existence is consumed with simple survival — food-gathering, procreation, and shelter. No herding, no agriculture, just an existence tied to the success of today’s hunting and gathering.

If we believe, as I do, that man is capable of making choices beyond the most basic ones — and given that I am writing this and someone else is reading it, with the technological underpinnings that requires, what else can be true? — perhaps we are post-evolution. Evolution moves too slowly for us to see it, in most cases, and the changes are subtle. And where evolutionary changes are a response to environmental pressures or the like, humans are more likely to stall evolution by adjusting the environment to suit their present needs.

topical comment from Tbogg’s commentariat:

Darwin wasn’t wrong, in controlling our environment we have allowed these people to survive. Even so, they’re struggling. Have you noticed the rates at which these people breed in an effort to guarantee their survival?
CJ | Homepage | 09.14.07 – 10:39 am | #

That Bush Speech:

Here’s the irony in this, and you’ll forgive me if I speak entirely bluntly here: I suspect the vast majority of Americans don’t care about Iraq in the slightest, except to the extent that it has Americans in it. If Bush were to say “screw it,” and brought every single American serviceperson home tomorrow, his ratings would shoot right through the roof, Americans would rejoice, and by and large any concern about Iraq would fall entirely off their radar. Mind you, Iraq would be an unspeakable mess: The Sunnis and the Shiites would fall on each other, Turkey would possibly invade Northern Iraq, where all the Kurds are, and Iran would be happily munching popcorn and wandering in from time to time to make mischief. But those would all be someone else’s problems, now, wouldn’t they? The “Pottery Barn” theory of war is all very nice, but the fact is most Americans would be happy to leave cleaning up the mess to someone else. Sure, everyone else in the world would hate us for it. But they hate us already, thanks to the last six years, and at least this way we’d not be spending billions and having our sons and daughters die for the privilege of being despised.