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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Romulus' LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 | |
| 5:25 pm |
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| Sunday, February 1st, 2009 | |
| 4:35 pm |
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| Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | |
| 8:09 pm |
at the gas station I was pumping gas for  nomadraven and while I was standing there, minding my own business, a woman at the pump on the other side said to me, out of nowhere:"Did you hear how Obama was on the Arab News station? ...Al-Jazeera." I was a little caught off guard, but after a beat, I picked it up. "Actually it wasn't Al-Jazeera, it was Al-Arabiya." Now it was *her* that was caught off guard, although my tone wouldn't have indicated any such attempt, since in all fairness, her opening statement *could* have been neutral, after all. Well, that didn't last. "We can't negotiate with terrorists." Okay. I sort of expected this, but before I could get my words together, she proceeded. "And this bailout? It's payback." As she started to go down another line of disrespect for her nation's duly elected president, I responded. "If every person who watches Arab television is a terrorist, then we have a lot bigger problems than the economy." She demurred, copping out with a "Well, it's wait and see, buddy" as I moved over further to my side of the pump island. As she got into her car, she finished with "For national security, now we've got nothing." What gets me about all this is not that she and people like her still think they are Right and still think they are the majority (although nothing else indicates this). Nor is it that people believe that Fox News tripe. No, what gets me is why she chose to bring this up to me, a stranger, with no obvious political indications. And what way did she expect I would respond to her? Do I not look sufficiently hippie/Berkeley-radical anymore? Why did she seem so unprepared to get a minimally clever retort? Why Dittoheads Fail, chapter one. |
| Thursday, January 8th, 2009 | |
| 7:47 am |
{rain,snow}pocalypse 09 First it was the snow, now it's the rain. Every highway out of this area is closed except for Interstate 5 going north from here. Which means the only place to go out of Seattle is Vancouver, Canada, except by plane, assuming flights aren't delayed or canceled due to things like storms or say a flooded or too-slick runway. There's no way around, at least not without going through Canada. Times like now make this feel like a lot less like a major urban area and a lot more like smack in the middle of literally nowhere. I can't imagine being completely unable to get from, for example, Boston to Providence or NYC by roads of any sort, but that is pretty much functionally analogous to what is happening here. And it happened last winter too. Current Mood: wet |
| Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 | |
| 11:37 am |
So I was peeking at my StyleFeeder page today. StyleFeeder is a site that some old friends of mine work for, and it is based on this principle: given the set of things you own or want, you can extrapolate more things you want from the set of all things. (Let's just accept this postulate for now; I've got issues with it, or at least their application of it so far, but TNHNT.) So, you create a "feed" of things you own or want via the site; for example there is a nifty FF plugin that you can use when you are on any common e-commerce site's product page and it will near-automagically import that item into your feed. In addition to this, they have a feature on the website which you can look up your Amazon wish list, and it will be imported into your feed. Well, the page doesn't work. Not in FF or IE, due to JS errors. ( Technical gobbledygookCollapse ) What annoys me about all this is not so much the Web 2.0 supercriticality, or the fact that the page doesn't work, but that I can figure out all that, yet still haven't gotten a new job, in a field where most people in it wouldn't have had any idea where to start on this. |
| Monday, December 29th, 2008 | |
| 8:16 pm |
The snow has melted, everyone. Temp is steady at 40. We had strong winds today, there were evergreen bits everywhere, and a 2 second power blink. We're back to a normal Seattle winter. I drifted up here wayward like a snowflake And as soon as I arrived, I wished that I was home But a good friend said: My man, this is your home now Though it might be stark as a hole in hell, as cold as a frozen gnome* I know you've come a long long way From your sweet warm house in the USA And cold has more than one way to turn you blue But here we relieve the inner chill with a choice word or two It's always Christmas in Siberia Santa practically lives in this town Such a winter wonderland, Siberia And I never have to take all of my lights down *I can never quite make that line out... |
| Sunday, December 21st, 2008 | |
| 8:50 pm |
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| Friday, December 12th, 2008 | |
| 10:07 pm |
At his Seattle screening of My Name is Bruce, Bruce Campbell was randomly asked whether we should bail out the auto companies. After dithering, he says "I'd bail them out, but I'd say 'You're fired, you're fired, you're all fired, we're gonna get some new people in here,' and stop making cars that burn any sort of carbon." He got a big round of applause from this, of course. So I yelled out, in proper Seattle snark, "You're only saying that because you're in Seattle." "What, you think I'm pandering to this crowd? Wanna go out and get vegetarian after this?" he replied. |
| Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 | |
| 9:14 am |
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| Friday, December 5th, 2008 | |
| 9:56 pm |
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| 9:52 pm |
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| 3:17 pm |
Spent half the day yesterday running around North Seattle looking for vegetarian dress shoes. None of the veg-friendly shoe stores had any. So I came back, empty-handed, went to the mall after dinner, and found four different styles of synthetic man-made-material men's dress shoes at Payless for $30. Grr. |
| Thursday, December 4th, 2008 | |
| 10:09 am |
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| Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | |
| 3:30 pm |
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| Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 | |
| 9:37 am |
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| Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 | |
| 8:54 am |
The only Smashing Pumpkins song I actually like. (The video is utterly dumb. This is what happens when you let your pretentious girlfriend direct your video, Billy.) |
| Monday, September 29th, 2008 | |
| 3:20 pm |
Selfish desires are burning like fires among those who hoard the gold As they continue to keep the people asleep and the truth from being told Racism and greed keep the people in need from getting what's rightfully theirs Cheating, stealing and double dealing as they exploit the people's fears Now, Dow Jones owns the people's homes and all the surrounding land Buying and selling their humble dwelling in the name of the Master Plan Cause paper money is like a bee without honey with no stinger to back him up and those who stole the people's gold are definitely corrupt Credit cards, master charge, legacies of wills real estate, stocks and bonds on coupon paper bills Now the U.S. mints on paper prints, millions every day and use the eagle as their symbol cause it's a bird of prey The laurels of peace and the arrows of wars are clutched very tightly in the eagles claws filled with greed and lust, and on the back of the dollar bill, is the words IN GOD WE TRUST But the dollar bill is their only God and they don't even trust each other for a few dollars more they'd start a war to exploit some brother's mother - Last Poets, "E Pluribus Unum" (1973) |
| Saturday, September 13th, 2008 | |
| 8:22 pm |
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| Saturday, August 30th, 2008 | |
| 11:03 pm |
Spontaneous chiptunes at PAX Apparently this guys name is Circles, from Bellingham, check out his myspace and the crew he's in, CrunchyCo. |
| Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 | |
| 2:52 pm |
if these were posters i would buy them. and put them in my non-existent mancave, or something.  Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in Funeral in Berlin (1966)  Bob Gunton as Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption (1994) Yeah, they are both of old-styled men with horn-rimmed glasses holding a gun. I noticed that too. Something about that has an ironic classic kitsch to it. |
