Wierd Winter

50 degrees and cloudy on the Winter Solstice.  But remember two years ago?

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Time for a revolution

Obama and Geithner: Government, Enron-Style | | Rolling Stone

Happy Thanksgiving, World!

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Damn Right!

Rolling Stone Mobile - Politics - Politics: UC Davis Pepper-Spray Incident Reveals Weakness Up Top

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Different Division, Same Teams

The slow death of American newspapers - continued...

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Great Ride to Work Today on the Bicycle

Left home to Wasena School to vote;  

From there down Brighton to Wasena to 12^th Street to Wasena Park, Smith Park, Carilion Hospital, to Jefferson St., to Williamson Rd to the Credit Union for a deposit.  

From there over Williamson Rd to the Greenway and all the way over to work.

Saturday 7:30am

All's quiet. Looks to be a beautiful day. The week slips away and finally the spaciousness of the weekend arrives. The cat sleeps on the bed. The light slowly rises outside. Tonight, the time changes, so it will be lighter, earlier tomorrow. And we'll have an extra hour of sleep.

Off to help a friend move today. She's a young woman, with two boys, moving out of her home and leaving the boys' father. She's got a lot of challenges ahead and I hope for her the best. She deserves some decent breaks. She's a good egg. After helping with the move, I plan to come home and mulch/chip the leaves in the yard. Today will be the most leaves yet - I've already mulched 11 bags and at 30 gallons a bag, we're up to 330 gallons thus far. Last year it was 885 gallons. With the loss of Sarah's Sweetgum, it should be considerably less this year, but who knows?

The talk of the sports world is the game tonight between LSU and Alabama. I'll be reading, thank you very much.

There are times like this, early morning, silent house, nothing urgent beckoning, that all seems right with the world. I haven't jumped online, haven't got my morning dose of the outside world, don't know who's bombed who, how such and such politician fared at week's end. All the bluster of Wall Street and Washington and the Bible Belt - it all seems far away and innocuous. I am warm. The light is delightful. The leaves on the trees out back are stunning as they thin. The cat sleeps.

I do glance back at Evernote to see what I was reading yesterday at the end of a self-created hectic, rushed day and I come across two things that I remember wanting to read. And both are worth the time:

The first, from The Nation is about urban cycling: http://www.thenation.com/article/163671/rise-urban-biking

The second is from a favorite web stop for me - Disinformation - and it pointed me here: http://tinyurl.com/3gdq8l2

Undoubtedly, I am an anarchist urban cycler! I knew it all along!

What a world!

Just reflecting on what I've learned about in the last 24 hours as I get acclimated to my MacBook Air (MBA) and wander about looking:

1. Amazon Subscribe & Save - ordering non-perishables (primarily) from Amazon to be delivered (free) to my house on a regular basis.



2. Replacing the battery in my Kindle (generation 1).



3. Kindle Owners' Lending Library - borrow one book per calendar month for your Kindle. Selection is limited and the book I borrowed - a 'Vook' - Switch to Mac was pretty lame, but we'll see what next month brings!



4. nvALT - note taking tool for the MBA which is quite nice.



5. Text Expander for the Mac - put together a combination of letters that auto-magically expands into some text. For example, dts (short for 'date timestamp') magically turns into Friday, November 4, 2011 07:30am. Wonderful combination of tools - nvALT and Text Expander and I log all kind of notes with timestamps! (Thanks to Mac Power Users David Spark and nvALT creator Brett Terpstra)



6. Scriveners - learning this wonderful writing tool for the Mac and experimenting



7. ifttt.com - (ifttt stands for If This, Then That) a neat little tool that enables you to define actions to take when you are doing something online - such as - If I post something to Twitter, send the post to my Evernote account. That way, all my posts are stored for me in my Evernote account. Thanks to Brian Kelly over at Bridging the Nerd Gap - http://tinyurl.com/5wl9p9q



8. Jeffery Sachs - heard on the wonderful podcast - Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon - (here) talking about his new book - The Price of Civilization.



9. And finally - Nicholson Baker, also on Radio Open Source, who says that the U.S. has given three things to civilization: Some Like It Hot, the iPod, and The New Yorker. Hear,Hear!!

The Leaves are Thinning

As I look out my window, I notice that the huge oak tree on the next block has dropped most of her leaves - I can see the clouds and sky beyond for the first time since March. The back yard, so dense and overgrown most of the summer, begins to thin out as well, unveiling the fence, the neighbor's garage, the back of his house. The safe, secluded back yard yields to uncover sticks and open air.

On the way to work this morning (bicycle, greenway), a deer. On the way home, a jogger, a woman walking a dog, and a man on a bicycle with a bb gun (I hope). I passed a dead cat on 11th Street, and made sure that, when I got home, I visited with our cat. Traffic was sedate today - maybe the cold keeps traffic down?

On arriving home, I find a mailing (yet another) from some guy named Nutter. An utterly contemptible piece of mail, denigrating the sitting senator from our district to the Virginia Senate. I despise the mailer, the person who mailed it and the Virginia system of elections that staggers state and local elections so that we get to vote practically every year. We have to put up with such filth and falsehood more than we should. Yet, try to change that.

So, maybe to work tomorrow on the bicycle again. So invigorating and such a good sense of accomplishment once you get there (or back).

Autumn Light

I had an opportunity to be out of the office around midday yesterday, the first day of November. As I drove down Brandon Avenue, from Towers Shopping Center heading toward Grandin Avenue, several things hit me. First, the warm fall day. It was a delightful 60 degrees and zero humidity. Second, the light was exquisite. The lack of humidity, the cloudless sky, and the angle of the sun made the light seem crystal and riveting. Third, the colors of the leaves were full out. Even as the leaves on the trees are thinning now, moving into November, the colors are explosive reds and oranges and yellows. As I passed Brambleton Avenue, the confluence of light, temperature, and color proved nostalgic - for college, for high school, for those days when nothing much mattered other than the next date, test, or game.

Driving home from work yesterday was another study in atmospheric collage. The cloudless sky of lunch had given way to wisps out of the west - low swooping ribbons of clouds hunkering down on the ridges to the south and west. As the sun dropped lower, below the mountains, the wisps of vapor exploded in oranges, pinks, and deepening reds. The faint ocher of the autumn leaves on the hills descended into darkness as the light show above grew, glowed, and finally glimmered out.

Beautiful Morning on Lick Run Greenway

I'm lucky enough to be able to ride a bicycle to work and this morning was one of the best ever to ride. How very lucky indeed!

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Fool me once..

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Sarah's Sweetgum Gone

Alas, it had to come down, but we miss it and mourn it.

Off to Hit the Streets!

My Saturday routine - out the door with my walking shoes on, trash bag and picker-upper in hand. Off to tame the wild streets of Greater Raleigh Court, picking up trash and heading for Cups for my rendez-vous avec ma femme! Pour cafe et conversation avec notre amis!

Au revoir!

Friday Playing with the MacBook Air

Trying to get the hang of this wonderful new toy and tool. Lots of confusing and bizarre things to learn - how to play a video; how to use the mouse; how to use the trackpad;

Happy hour about to begin - a wee bit late, but better late than tomorrow.

Spectacularly beautiful day! And more beautiful weather expected Saturday and Sunday.

Leaves too.

just another day

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Here's What OWS is about...

This statement is ours, and for anyone who will get behind it. Representing ourselves (not the movement as a whole), we bring this call for revolution.

We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed. However, this freedom has been largely taken from the people, and slowly made to trickle down, whenever we get angry.

Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system. A system based on the existence of have and have nots, where inequality is inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar.

We agree that we need to see election reform. However, the election reform proposed ignores the causes which allowed such a system to happen. Some will readily blame the federal reserve, but the political system has been beholden to political machinations of the wealthy well before its founding.

We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.

We need to retake the freedom that has been stolen from the people, altogether.

1. 
   

   If you agree that freedom is the right to communicate, to live, to be, to go, to love, to do what you will without the impositions of others, then you might be one of us.

   
   



2. 
   

   If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brows, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.

   
   



3. 
   

   If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.

   
   



4. 
   

   If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.

   
   



5. 
   

   If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to remain in power, then you might be one of us.


   
   
   

   And so we call on people to act.

   
   

1. 
   

   We call for protests to remain active in the cities. Those already there, to grow, to organize, to raise consciousnesses, for those cities where there are no protests, for protests to organize and disrupt the system.

   
   



2. 
   

   We call for workers to not only strike, but seize their workplaces collectively, and to organize them democratically. We call for students and teachers to act together, to teach democracy, not merely the teachers to the students, but the students to the teachers. To seize the classrooms and free minds together.

   
   



3. 
   

   We call for the unemployed to volunteer, to learn, to teach, to use what skills they have to support themselves as part of the revolting people as a community.

   
   



4. 
   

   We call for the organization of people's assemblies in every city, every public square, every township.

   
   



5. 
   

   We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.

   
   

We call for a revolution of the mind as well as the body politic.

Here's to Matt Taibbi

Taibbi - the best financial observer and writer for my money, and at Rolling Stone no less - has a great piece on bank bailouts on October 5.

"If the Obama administration was serious about helping actual human beings through this settlement, then it would be fighting for homeowners to get the same bailout the banks would get. If the banks are getting a trillion or more dollars of legal immunity, why shouldn’t homeowners get that much debt forgiveness? Or, half that much? A quarter?"

Check out the entire story at Taibblog: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/attorneys-general-settlement-the-next-big-bank-bailout-20111005

Occupy Wall Street

Let's hear it for the movement. Maybe things will get better. Maybe not. Who knows. Why not give it a try.

The Piazza San Marco in Venice (Canaletto) : Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza : Art Project, powered by Google

The Piazza San Marco in Venice (Canaletto) : Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza : Art Project, powered by Google