She was sick of all the lies in the mainstream media…
by James Brush
Author: James Brush
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.
It’s so simple: family, friends, food, football. I love that there’s barely any commercial aspect to it. I love that it’s a secular holiday that people of any faith and any political stripe can appreciate. I love that so many businesses aren’t open on the Friday after Thanksgiving (retail being the exception, but I prefer to avoid that nightmare altogether). Thanksgiving is the one day of the year set aside to just chill. Unless, of course, you’re cooking, but then that’s what the next day is for.
Happy Thanksgiving.
This post is mainly a shout out (link) to those sites I’ve found useful when tinkering with my blog’s code. Lately, I find myself succumbing to a strange addiction: seeking out Blogger hacks just to read them and try them out for fun, sometimes incorporating them and sometimes not, often fixing what ain’t broke. Overall a great way to learn about HTML and CSS, about which I knew nothing prior to starting this blog.
One thing I wanted to find (because Blogger doesn’t yet offer it) is a categories method for archiving posts. I found Blogger Hacks – The Series on Freshblog, which had many a suggestion, and after experimenting with several methods involving services such as del.icio.us and Technorati, I went with the manual method described on theatre of noise primarily because I like the simplicity of it.
The randomly changing images of greyhounds and a cat that appear beneath my profile come from a small alteration and change in the placement of the javascript code provided by immeria. I also used the code in its intact form for the randomized blog description.
The other Blogger drawback is lack of a trackback system. After some tinkering I figured out how to get Haloscan’s trackback feature without the comments since I like Blogger’s comments. Making the trackback link look like part of Blogger involved playing a bit with the CSS tags and learning how that works. It’s probably not that big a deal, but it made me happy to figure out the logic of it on my own.
I’ll be appearing on an upcoming episode of The Armadillo Podcast, which describes itself as a:
Weekly podcast of ostentatious interviews of Austinites famous and infamous, known and unknown, with the sole intent to convince my good friend Galia, an Israeli woman living way out in California, to move and live with us here in the land of the weird and the home of the armadillo.
I am honored to be representing Austinites unknown in Steven Phenix’s valiant effort to convince Galia to move to Austin. It should be posted on Friday so check back there (or here) for more info.
Sometimes you just have to stop running and look around. This morning, jogging under a crisp November sky, I couldn’t help but stare up at the stars shimmering brightly overhead. Jogging in a southwesterly direction, I had ample time to become engrossed with Sirius and Orion, my winter favorites.
This morning, the stars virtually popped out of the clear black in a way that makes me feel humble and lucky and aware all at once. It’s ironic that we so often miss these things that are so immense and jaw-droppingly awesome without really paying attention to what we’re actually looking at.
I remember from university astronomy classes many years ago that in the case of Orion, I was looking at a place where stars are forming. It’s hard for me to imagine anything more profound than that considering that the totality of everything we know and are exists only because one particular star formed.
Wanting a closer look and a chance to really see what I was seeing, I checked out some Hubble images courtesy of NASA’s GRIN Library and found these (which you can click for more learned info from NASA):
Just knowing what’s out there even though it isn’t visible stirs the imagination. It’s as thrilling as looking up in the direction of Cygnus X-1 on a summer evening and knowing there’ s a black hole there even though you can’t see it. Just knowing it’s there, all there, all happening indifferent to our presence, is a pretty amazing – and strangely uplifting – thought.
Phoebe and Daphne…
When I take Phoebe for walks, I notice that she gets freaked out whenever we try to turn around, cross the street, go off the sidewalk into the woods, or do anything other than walk straight ahead.
If we go in a giant circle, finally coming back around to the house, she’s usually fine. If I try to coax her into crossing a street or turning around, it takes a great deal of persuasion. I can’t help but wonder if this is the result of prior training. She was a racer (not exactly retired, more like fired), and I’m beginning to suspect that the idea of turning around or running off the track, in this case the sidewalk, is anathema to her. She just can’t bring herself to do it.
So we walk along the sidewalk track each day, so slowly that passersby must think she’s the slowest greyhound in the world, which may be why she didn’t last in the racing world.
Ever since I first read about Sonic Youth’s album Sister back in 1987, I’ve loved this band despite never having heard them. Granted, I never could find Sister at any of the record stores (either of them) in Newport, RI, but I knew they were my favorite band.
I finally heard them a year later when their follow-up, Daydream Nation, arrived. I had moved to Austin by then and was able to locate what would become my favorite album ever. Period.
I’ve tried to explain to many people for many years why I love this noisy, spacey album so much, why it’s my desert island disc. But then love of a particular work of art is a lot like loving a person: you just can’t always explain it.
I suppose when I heard it, it was so at odds with everything else that was floating around out there, so unexpected, and so stimulating that I couldn’t stop listening to it. Literally. I think I listened to “Teenage Riot” five times before letting the tape (yes, a tape) advance to “Silver Rocket,” which was the track that sealed the deal. I still love the way the song descends into that insane pit of boiling feedback and white noise to finally be rescued by a drum roll that rises out of nowhere, growing louder and louder, organizing the chaos back into music and then, suddenly, the band is back, tight as ever, from wherever they had gone. Amazing.
I never tire of listening to the intro and outro to “‘Cross the Breeze” and Kim Gordon’s lyric:
I took a look into the hate,
It made me feel very up to date
Or Lee in “Hey Joni”:
She’s a beautiful metal jukebox,
A sailboat explosion,
The snap of electric whipcrack
So cool. So hip. So unlike anything I’d ever heard before. This is one of the few, if not the only, bands from my high school years that I still follow, and Daydream Nation is why. In 1989, it seemed like everything that was worth knowing about popular music had been distilled, destroyed, and rebuilt in this album that still sounds like a punk rock Dark Side of the Moon.
Sparking this post, I ran across two exciting treats in store (or should I say in stores soon):
- Continuum will be publishing a 33 1/3 Series book about Daydream Nation
- Billboard has this (discovered by way of Kofi’s hat) which mentions that the band is looking into doing an expanded release of Daydream Nation as they did with Goo and Dirty. It also mentions several other releases to look forward to in the meantime.
I finally found Sister in 1994 when it was re-released on CD by Geffen. It was as good as I knew it would be and inspired an interest (obsession and grad school project) in Philip K. Dick’s writing, but alas, that is a post for another day.
The following are links to some interesting Harry Potter related commentary and analysis:
- This is a pretty thorough and convincing analysis of Snape’s background and why he is, despite murdering Dumbledore, still working for Dumbledore’s cause.
- “Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy” is the abstract (I can’t seem to access the whole article, but the abstract is still worth a read) to a law review article about the Ministry of Magic.
- ASL Library contains a series of links (including the one listed above) to more law-oriented articles about the world of Harry Potter.
Anyways, I still have Potter on the brain and will until I see Goblet of Fire.
As an antidote, I think I’ll be reading a nice short work of nonfiction next: River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins.
There’s nothing like seeing familiar sights anew to make a person appreciate what he takes for granted. Just one tiny shift in point-of-view makes the familiar seem so unexpectedly exciting. I love those moments when, as David Byrne once put it, you suddenly notice the color of white paper, and I was treated to one yesterday.
Being a North Austinite, I rarely find myself needing to go from East-bound 71/Ben White/290/Whatever-the-hell-they-call-it-now to I-35 North, so I’d never driven the new (to me anyway) overpass that connects the two highways. Nevertheless, yesterday, I was ascending the overpass thinking, Man, I am up here!, and as the roadway bent northward, a stunning view of the city that I’d never before seen rolled into view. The overpass is high enough that you can look down on St. Edward’s University, which is usually hidden, and clearly see the main building dominating the foreground, and in the background, the downtown skyline rises up from the trees in a way that the buildings all seem to huddle together making them seem somehow taller and the city denser than it appears from some of its other views.
The crisp wintry air that (finally!) arrived the other day just made it appear all the more inviting.
White paper never looked so white.