Who ordered the scrambled brains?

Daylight savings. Ridiculous. Why not just have everyone move to the other hemisphere every six months?

I’m glad I took a timeout over the break to write that last post, titled “Greetings from Jasmine” which appears just below this post. Yep. I wouldn’t go 14 days without writing, causing people to worry about me or berate me for not writing when they see me. Nope. It’s simply impossible to change the timestamp on blog posts. Yep. Don’t bother looking that up on Google. Nope.

So school’s back in. The break was nice. I got a lot done. More general intellectual expansion. Mostly FOSS stuff. I also put myself on two conservative mailing lists, purely for the sake of entertaining the other side. Apparently, the other side cares very much about entertainment in fact. In my confirmation email from Republican Voices, a two-line text advertisement invited me to “Claim your complimentary Game Boy Advance SP“. Yeah, that’s putting your best foot forward. Unless Republican Voices is somehow affiliated with Nintendo. (Oh God, say it ain’t so!) They find it necessary to sell ads in their emails, despite coming across as non-profit by using the .org top-level domain in their domain name republicanvoices.org. Just imagine Amnesty International carrying ads in their newsletter. “Killer deals on enslaving clothes!” (Oh, was the first pun enough?) Does Republican Voices posit (bad word choice? I’m tired.) that it is necessary to sell ads to maintain their mailing list? I run a full-blown website - widely regarded as one of the best in the world - yet I don’t host ads. Not only does that ad mock their credibility, but it makes me ponder putting ads in all of my blog posts. Yeah I think I’ll do that right now. I’ll make it for something I actually believe in though. Not Gameboy Advance SP’s.

There. Looks good. I hope I that ad drives so much traffic to the Free Software Federation (FSF) that they actually rise to the stature they deserve. What am I talking about, you ask? The other day I ordered a grab bag of FSF pins. Not the lapel kind. The big circle ones that you sometimes see promoting particular politicians. E.g. “Vote for Pedro“. Anyway, I would provide a link but they no longer have them available on their site. (Which does indeed shock me.) Anyway, my point isn’t the pins themselves. They were fine. My point is in what the pins were shipped. Three-words: Ziploc Freezer Bag. Yes. I ordered something from the FSF and it came in a Ziploc Freezer Bag, encapsulated in a padded envelope. I mean, maybe it would be understandable if I ordered, oh, say, “2lb. of 1-week old ground meat [frozen]”. Guys, this is the organization that established the legal and philosophical groundwork for the entire Free software movement. Linux, apache, Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, the GIMP, Red Hat. These projects, amongst thousands of others, representing a community of millions of programmers and thousands of companies, and a userbase of tens of millions of people, owe it all to the FSF. And yet the FSF is so strapped for cash that they mail their promotional items in (say it with me) Ziploc Freezer Bags. Ah, yes, the American dream: starting a socialist economic revolution and then getting kicked to the curb while the party rages inside.

Also, I miraculously spawned an interest in Bruce Springsteen. Yes, there, I said it. I like the Boss. At least on paper. You see, on Saturday night, Natalie and I visited Temple Bar where Elysian Fields (AMG) was performing. Now if you know anything about Elysian Fields, you know that the lead singer is Jennifer Charles, whose voice is so utterly hott it could melt the pants off any… well, we’ll just leave it at that. I got turned on to her (no pun intended) when I was exploring the collaborations of Dan the Automator, of Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School, and Deltron 3030 fame. She worked with him on a tongue-in-cheek make-out-album titled Lovage. Anyway, Elysian Fields performed great. Their last song, which our friends EvetIvette and Mike arrived just in time to see, was none other than a cover of the Boss’ Dancin’ in the Dark. The last time I heard that song I was sitting in the backseat of my parents Camry circa 1986 covered in blood, coming home from another buffalo sacrifice ritual. “Bo-o-o-orn in the U-S-A,” we would all sing together. Anyway, apparently he got popular in the mid-70s and his music is all dark and down-trodden - just my style. And six of his first seven albums or so received 5-stars from AMG. Which is impressive regardless of your feelings towards AMG, you jerks. So he sounds good, at least on paper. I’ll check him out and get back to you all right quick. Now hold your breath!

So what’s new with you guys?

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