As far as I can tell, this woman has two special skills: being shrill and pushing out kids. The former has gained her a good career in politics. The latter, well, one of them is named "Piper," another fucks jocks bareback (perhaps another round of abstinence training is in order there), and that's all I have to say about that.

I actually had hoped as recently as this morning that this was going to be a relatively high-minded campaign with the Republicans matching what the Democrats offered last week and speaking of their stance on various issues. But instead, they trotted out the usual suspects for an endless litany of "I know you are but what am I" bullshit. We can expect the usual swift-boating and "he fathered a black baby" nonsense it seems, rather than an actual debate on the issues of our time.

But that aside, boy do I dislike that woman. I'm not sure how her ability to get the rest of the country to foot the bill so people in Alaska can have the lowest per-capita tax rate in the country applies to a national office, and that's not for me to say anyhow. What I do know is that the Republicans seem to prefer if I vote personality rather than issues, unless those issues are "God, God, Guns, God, God, Guns, 911" and "God." Did you notice that Giuliani ended his speech with the "shining City upon a hill" line. Ever hear that before? You might have if you spent any quality time in a fundamentalist christian school like I did. I find it slightly ironic that the author of that line would have had Giuliani hung for even one of the many sins he's committed according to the Catholic rite, never mind the fact that he would have been hung just for being Catholic. I'm sure that's what the founding fathers hoped to avoid when they put "under god" in the Pledge of Allegiance. (As per Ms. Palin.)

Man, I'm fuming.

micromov004 - Assemblage #1 from Chris Randall on Vimeo.

Here's a new micronaut track I did; I went and kited some footage from the Prelinger archive and made new music for it.

In other news, I'm fairly done with the Micronaut EP; there is also a nearly completed Bounte EP, so we'll probably shove 'em out the door at the same time. Maybe they'll both win gold medals. Expect those in a couple weeks.

I wonder if meth is any good for my allergies.

Also, don't forget Atomica Project tonight. Details here.

If you live in a suburb in a place that grass doesn't naturally grow (SoCal, Phoenix, etc), and you have to seed your lawn every spring and water it all summer, the picture above is the part of the equation you're missing out on, but provides us with endless fun every year. Linn County, OR (where I live, not coincidentally) is where the vast majority of the grass seed used on lawns all over the US comes from. The way they grow grass seed is thus:

Step 1: plant a field with grass.

Step 2: let it go to seed.

Step 3: harvest the seeds, leaving all the rest of the shit on the ground.

Step 4: burn that shit.

Step 5: rinse and repeat.

We're in Step 4 of the yearly process right now, and, I'll hasten to add, I live in a canyon. The wide mouth of this canyon, to the west of us, opens on to the Willamette Valley. Particularly, the part where all the grass seed is grown. The end of this canyon is up the road a couple miles to the east of us. A basic knowledge of weather patterns in the U.S. would tell you that prevailing winds push all the smoke from all these hundreds of fires in to this canyon, where it stays.

Long story short: you seed your "lawn" in the spring, and in the fall, old people in Mill City get emphysema. Thanks. The word for the day is "hardscape."

If you think about that, you'll realize that's why we don't see any pictures of soldiers that have been killed, even though there would logically be quite a few. The Times finally said "fuck it," and put up a photo essay showing some powerful images from this current war. Note that these are pictures you're not used to seeing from this conflict, and are as disturbing as any from Viet Nam, and perhaps somewhat more so for the fact that the people in the picture are your peers instead of two or three generations ago. In many cases, these people are younger than you.

People in the 60s and 70s saw these sorts of images in their newspapers and on television every day, which goes a long way towards explaining the heavy fatigue that war caused in the public consciousness. In the five years of this war, despite the fact that I read several major news sites every day and watch television news almost every day, it occurs to me that I know more about Anna Nicole Smith's various liaisons than I do about the human cost of this war. I don't recall ever seeing any pictures from this particular conflict that were this graphic prior to this morning; in all honest, I'm sure they're out there, and I never really looked, but even so.

While I'll leave general "support" for the war or the argument thereof to others (I'm not so stupid as to think it's as simple as being about oil, or that it can be ended next week, or won if we only had the willpower) I think it's important to know what you're paying for, and in some cases what you voted for. You, as an American taxpayer, probably spent more money on the war this year than you did doing most anything that you enjoy for yourself like going to the movies, eating out, having a drink at a bar, etc. Looking at the percentage of the Pentagon budget that goes directly to Iraq, and the percentage of my taxes that go to the Pentagon, I personally directly spent more on this war than I did on rent, electricity, broadband, phone, and natural gas combined in 2007. And the third picture in that photo essay is what it bought me.

If you need a cell phone that costs $299, chances are good that you have Shit To Do.

Conversely, in order to obtain that phone, you can't have any Shit To Do, because you need to wait in fucking line for an hour. A WEEK after it was released. Are you kidding me?

I'm normally pretty sensitive to the type of person that would wait in line the day of release for new technology. I'm not that sort of person myself, but I know a lot of people that are, and I understand them to a certain extent. But check it out:

If you're still waiting in line a week later, you're just a fucking loser. Plain and simple. Go get a job.