Probably the reason I made it out of the Eighties alive.

I summer where I winter at. No one is allowed there.



Thanks, Bob. Thanks for everything.

I think I know what Freud would say

Cigar. Teddy bear. Gun. A harem of women. Yeah, I think I know.



That's the completely conspiracy-theory obsessed Bob Welch, by the way. If I didn't remember this song from my childhood in the '70's, I'd swear this video and the website were part of one of Michael Rosenbaum's famous pranks.

Look out, Ted Nugent. There's a new sheriff in town.

Richard Henry Lee...

...Virginian statesman and delegate to the Continental Congress of 1776, is best known for the motion that led to the Declaration of Independence. He made the motion on June 7, 1776, and the deliberations stretched on into weeks. Finally growing impatient, Lee again arose in the assembly in early July and declared:

"Mr. President, we have discussed this issue for days. It is the only course for us to follow. Why then, Sir, do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise, not to devastate and to conquer, but to reestablish the reign of peace and law. The eyes of Europe [and the world] are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast, in the felicity of the citizen, to the ever-increasing tyranny."

Happy birthday, America. Don't forget where you came from.

Recon, starring Peter Gabriel

Just discovered this short student film (!) starring Peter Gabriel and Charles Durning. I wish I could find it in higher quality, but you'll get the idea from this, regardless. Clocking in at just under ten minutes, it is a neat little piece of cyberpunk noir. Enjoy -

Victory is mine

For the past year or so, Kira and I have been increasingly conscientious about composting our food scraps. This has been, on the whole, a positive experience, and it has been pleasing to see the subsequent reduction in our weekly flow of garbage that gets hauled away from the curb.

I say "on the whole," however, because composting is not, at the end of the day, a bed of roses. The song of the lonely composter is, at best, bittersweet -- a mixed melody of virtue and sorrow.

I sing, dear reader, of fruit flies.

It started with the advent of warmer weather a few weeks back. We have been keeping a small, charcoal-filtered scrap bin inside near the kitchen trash cans. When preparing food or slicing up fruit to put on our cereal for breakfast, the location of the pail made it easy to get rid of the bio-waste as it was being generated. Throughout the cold months pf winter, this arrangement worked just fine. Come the summer, though, things started to change.

Without being too graphic, it got to the point where every virtuous lift of the lid on the small bio container brought its own "reward" of a small cloud of very active -- and hungry -- pests. It didn't take long for the strawberry tops and banana peels, doing their fetid business in the small green pail, to become a breeding ground for these harmless, but quite annoying, swarms.

What to do? What to do? Both Kira and I have been trying to avoid harsh chemicals lately. Allergies, general health, and a host of other concerns leave us leery of fumigating rooms or zapping the little bozos directly. We both, my wife and I, have been on a "home remedies" kick of late, and I was curious if there was a more "old world" solution to the problem then resorting to the wares of DuPont and Dow Chemical.

Turns out there is. After a little thinking, and some digging on the internet, I came up with this: take a shallow dish, fill it with a dash of port wine, stretch some cling wrap over the top, and poke a small hole in the middle with the blades of a scissors.

Some of you who know me, reading this, may recall that I have a particular fascination with the theme of monkey traps. Being a theologian, I think a lot about the workings of systems, and I am particularly interested by systems that are powered to deliver results on the basis of "lowest-common-denominator" operations. That is to say, I like systems that are so elegantly simple that they continue to work even when they are in what is known in the biz as a "failure condition."

For a system to work, even while its failing, requires the sober understanding on the part of the designer of some factor, outside the system, which can be depended upon to deliver a satisfactory result, regardless of the condition of the system. In the case of the monkey trap, that consistent factor is the short-term thinking of the monkey. Because the monkey cannot let go of the immediate desire to have the fruit or the nuts in the bottom of the trap, it gets caught -- and held -- by its own fist, refusing to let go of the treasure in the trap.

This fruit fly catcher functions using the same principle: the files are smart enough (and driven enough by the scent of the sweet, sweet wine) to get in through the hole, but they have no capacity whatsoever to get back out again.

The first morning, after laying the trap, there were ten flies floating in my little scarlet sea. Two days later, there are thirty, and I no longer spot pests on the wing here in the house.

Given all the catastrophic failure we have seen recently, I am encouraged by this. With a little thought and planning, systems can be designed to incorporate failure into their flow, so that even when they aren't directly "working," they can still work. Part of this, I think, involves a willingness to let go of active control, and to allow passive factors to operate.

Passive factors are not nearly as glamourous, of course. It would probably be a lot more macho and satisfying to grab that can of D-Con and zap each individual winged beastie in turn. But there's a lot of ways that that macho crap can fail, and pretty quickly. Can't be everywhere at once, in the first place. Second, the little pests might outbreed me, and develop a resistance to the chemicals. And finally there is the worry that I and my loved ones might not be as resistant to the chemicals as the bugs are (an ultimate sort of system failure, this).

What I love about the port-wine trap, in contrast, is that none of these factors drives the success of the system. All that matters is that fruit flies keep having a mad lust for fruit juice -- and I think its fair to say that nature is on my side with that one.

Take my advice, O reader: build to fail.

Gives new meaning to the phrase, "celery stalk"

When I lived in Atlanta, years ago, the bathroom in my small apartment had a window. The tub was an old clawfoot tub, and it was set out from the wall, so the landlord had installed a wraparound shower curtain that ran all the way around the tub, obscuring the window.

One day, while cleaning, I pulled back the curtain to find that an ivy vine from the outside wall had worked its way through the window sash, and was extending several inches into the room. As it extended, it was not attaching to anything. Instead, it was just suspended in air, as if it were reaching toward the shower, to grab.

Say what you will about Al-Qaeda. For my money, that mute tendril of intrusion was as terrifying as any Hitchcock film. You northerners might not understand, but down here, we've got kudzu, and kudzu will freakin' eat your car.

At last, I have found someone who shares my fears. Watch, and be edified, citizens.

(It seems to have an ad attached to it - apologies!!)

The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie

Today, in the parking lot of the post office, I observed a family (with a small dachshund, no less), driving a Volvo with truck nuts.

And I thought, already in my horror:
What if this is not irony?

An historical Rhyme

I made this up in the shower this morning. Sing to the tune of "London Bridges Falling Down":


In a duel you lost your nose
lost your nose
lost your nose
Now it's made of brass and gold
Tycho Brahe!


Don't blame me. Blame Wikipedia.

The 23rd Grand Illusion

Once, many years ago, I lived in my mix tapes. For me, they were an art form; a style of communication better than a written letter (back when we used to write letters). What was wonderful about the medium to little teenage me was the ability (the hope, at least) of conveying not just semantic meaning, but emotion. Like all teenagers, I was inarticulate about feelings when it came to using mere words, but I found I could achieve something like communication through a collage of sounds. I wooed with mix tapes. I worked out anger with mix tapes. I found the possibilities that arise out of juxtaposition and combination. A few cubic inches of plastic and iron filings were my palette. Into this space, which was not a real space but rather a space of the mind and the ears, I painted and collected and assembled sound.

What I found then, and find often now, was that this language of assembly and sound was not (as Wittgenstein cautioned against) any sort of "private language." The assemblages on my mixes spoke to me, certainly, but the only reason I really found them useful was because I believed they would speak to others, as well. To the high school crush to whom I could not bear to reveal my feelings, I could give a mix tape. The mix was crafted and constructed to convey without literal conversance. The mix spoke a secret language of Gnostic inference and ghostly symbols, but it was never meant to be indecipherable. The whole point was for the assemblage to be deciphered.

Years later, I find that I am still bound to those crushes who have remained in my life, no longer or never as lovers, but as friends, by these secret languages. An old acquaintance (for whom I never made a tape, though I am certain she was offered many by others) once said that she did not trust the medium of the mix tape: "They are always political; they always mean to say more than they are." Precisely.

Assemblage is powerful. Assemblage accomplishes, and its accomplishment is always and often unintentionally greater than the elements assembled. How is this so? The answer is not in the elements, or even in the assembly. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are interpreters and meaning-hounds. In psychology, the word apophenia is used to describe an overly heightened state of pattern recognition, where the sufferer seems to be seeing connections in every unrelated thing. If we take a step back from the precipice of pathology, however, we find that each of us benefits (it would be hard to say "suffers") from this condition. Without a certain level of the apophenic, a good game of chess would be impossible, negotiating city streets would be a nightmare, and we would never be able to locate a loved one's face in a crowd. We differentiate and combine, and in that process we associate and imagine that which is not there, but should be. We connect the dots, we fill in the colors among the spaces and the lines, we find new things. For the majority of humanity, this is simply what we do. Hence the articulate inarticulate joys of the mix tape, given and received.