j.k. galbraith died yesterday. while remembering him today, i looked up two blog post of mine on him, and they are here and here.

No Child Left Illegal
Originally uploaded by ams-gwu07.

jim gilchrist, the founder of the minutemen border patrol, says that "it's intimidation when a million people march down main streets in our major cities under the mexican flag."

it's interesting that gilchrist, whose group frequently rallies around cities with large immigrant populations (often times in the southwest region of the u.s.), paints the word "intimidation" pejoratively. if the minutemen are not small scale intimidators, then the president is a monkey.

gilchrist only wishes his group could muster a tenth of the turnout that the may 1st coalition will have. sour grapes it appears to me.

Ott's drive in
Originally uploaded by greefus groinks.

this brings back the old times state of mind!

this is the sign outside at my favortie breakfast joint in my hometown of rantoul, illinois, where i completed my first 12 years of school.

michael pollan, a liberal food scholar, talked with ira flatow's science friday, and compared humans to roaches and rats when it comes to how theses species select their foods to eat.

pollan, the author of a new book, omnivore's dilemma, has the ability to make you rethink almost everything you eat. he thinks the biggest changes to our culture of eating has come in the last 50 years. during that time the food industry became industrialized he says.

corn, pollan says, is in almost everything that we eat and drink. he makes the argument that we're "corn chips with legs," and that it isn't a good thing for our species.

click here to access the archived audio.

click here to view a slideshow or listen to mp3s from my south by southwest 2006 excursion in austin, texas (march 14-18).

outside rebecca's coffee shop

throw another log into the fire

g.w. bush, rumsfeld and cheney have consistenly been saying: as soon as iraq's elected leaders agree on a unity government that the violence as well as the sectarian strife would abate. they've set the milestone and when it's met the prediction will come true. at least that's what they tell us.

this is from today's nytimes: "with each political milestone — the transfer of sovereignty in 2004, two sets of elections in 2005, the referendum on the constitution — the Americans have asserted that the country would stabilize. Instead, the violence has continued unabated, sometimes changing in nature, as it is doing now, but never declining."

just imagine the iraq war was a campfire, and sitting round it is the entire bush administration -- georgeie, rummy, cheney and rice. and the unity government rhetoric that they're spewing to us now is a log. what this administration is doing is throwing log after log into the fire. the fire gets bigger and hotter and the log burns away without a trace. we tend to forget about the individual logs that are thrown in, but we never forget the fire. these guys' concentration is on the logs. they're looking at their collection of logs and not paying attention to the fire.

it's the fire, stupid! (put it out!)

welcome to the world of independent music

michael walker wrote an interesting article on apple computer's garageband, software for creating, recording and mixing music compositions. i use garageband, and as a songwriter/musician who uses it, walker's article was a neat read because he isn't a musician (admittedly) and his garageband insights were interesting.

for walker's song, he used the pre-recorded loops to build it. i don't think that's songwriting, however. i think in order for an original song to be considered a song (in my book), you have to perform musically. if you're building it 100% of loops, i think it's more an apple composition than it is his.

walker also wrote about the phenomenon known as myspace.com, an online social network. i never particularly liked myspace.com because as a web developer/graphic designer the page designs and layouts seem more alike than different. i would like myspace more if you didn't have to host there. the banner ads there make my visits very unpleasant. myspace, regardless of its lack of design asthetic, gave walker the opportunity to share his work with the rest of the world. walker uploaded his song to his myspace site and seemed disappointed when the song doesn't achieve the amount of listens he thought the song deserved. welcome to the world of independent music.

but walker has an ace up his sleeve: nic harcourt of kcrw's morning becomes eclectic. he talks harcourt into listening to his song, but walker seems to be disappointed when harcourt appeared underwhelmed and reacted as if the song was not on its way to becoming a top-seller on apple's itunes music store. in fact harcourt described the piece as "windham hill" sounding, that it possibly could be "film music" and that it sounded as if it was "computer generated." ouch! for any songwriter.