Over this last week, I've been playing around more with my 4 track recorder. I layed down a few drum tracks and played guitar and bass over one of them. It's a bit on the repetitive side, so I started kicking around some ideas for some sort of solos to go over it. I played around with a harmonica that I got in my christmas stocking last year but I'm not sure if it's quite the right key (though jamming along on the harp was a lot of fun). Then I dusted off my mandolin, put some new strings on it (learning in the process that stringing a mandolin is not as easy as stringing a guitar or a bass), got it in tune and tried to play a few things. I haven't picked up my mandolin in a long time and I never really learned to play it in the first place, so now I'm looking for a mandolin teacher in San Francisco who is willing to barter a few lessons for some of my graphic design services. Despite my bad playing, it has a great sound on the tape and I'd really like to pick up enough skills to record some simple tracks with it. If any of my dear readers in the Bay Area see this and know somebody, please contact me.

Here's another brilliant rant about those red state people. Here's just a small snippet... "Okay, you want God? Let's talk about God. Your religion is bogus. Fundamentalism, the facile belief in the unexplained and un-researched, is something you born-agains (couldn't get it right the first time, huh?) share with Al Qaeda, whose ideologues doggedly adhere to religious misinterpretations every bit as silly and dangerous as yours. Just like you, Muslim fundamentalists long to impose an unrealistic and intolerant pseudo-Calvinist morality on the world. In fact, America's religious right has so much in common with the Shiah, it's a wonder you guys don't invite them to join the Rotary. Born-againsters look for the face of Christ in the wallpaper; fundamentalist Muslims hallucinate the voice of the 12th Imam; but aside from that (and extremely divergent attitudes toward pork), you both hate the same stuff--homosexuality, pacifism, Jews, education, uppity women, enlightenment, short skirts, gangsta rap, tattoos, infidels. ... (They also share your love of super-lethal weaponry.)"

Wow, Target really does sell everything!

News too good to be true: Canadian authorities have arrested US President George W. Bush and charged him with offences under Canada's War Crimes Act.

Teenage girl allegedly plans her mom's murder and blogs about it on her live journal. "Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered. I won't have computer acess until the weekend or so because the police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails, I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back." There are currently 4351 comments on that post.

Neil Young and Michael Moore, together at last! Mike cut a new video for Keep on Rockin' in the Free World with lots of F9/11 footage.

How does corporate media cover Buy Nothing Day? Badly, of course.

Some folks in Louisiana helped to enforce Buy Nothing Day at their local mall today. Tyler Durden claims responsibility.

Wondering what else we have to fear under Bush Term 2: The Fascist Boogaloo? How about trying to get weaken the only halfway decent federal appeals court in the country! In other news, calling a "conservative group working to get Bush's judicial nominations through the Senate" the "Coalition for a Fair Judiciary" is just the sort of false advertising that the 9th Circuit should rule against.

HOLY CRAP! Now your cell phone can do something even more annoying than ring during dinner or a movie. What will they think of next?

Waste hours of time with this. It's a flash kung fu remixer. What's that, you ask? Just klick the link and have some fun.

Well, the San Francisco hotel workers strike and lockout is temporarily over due to a 60 day cooling off period just in time for the holidays. One of my operatives in the field has acquired this touching thank you letter from the management of one of the hotels to the temporary scab labor force.

Finally, the truth is revealed about Ilsa She Wolf of the SS Ann Coulter (via Freakgirl)

Yet another documentary on Bush, the neoconservative movement, and how they played 9/11 like the burning of the Reichstag - Hijacking Catastrophe :: 911, Fear & the Selling of American Empire - watch it here.

This makes me so proud of my home state! Looks like the Bush Twins were refused service at a NYC restaurant for the next four years to the applause of every diner inside.

Here's a little something that I whipped up for one of my freelance clients. He has his own IT consulting business and wanted a cartoon of somebody being overwhelmed with computer problems. This one was rejected because it was a bit too serious and he wanted something more cartoonish (which I'll post on my portfolio page once we have a final draft). I'd still like to use this for something, I'm just not sure what.

The Chileans take us Americans to school on the way to protest George W. Bush.

For all of your weekend mashup parties, check out the Kleptones' A Night at the Hip Hopera. It's a full 23 track mashup album of various hip hop and Queen's A Night at the Opera album. Magnifico!

The Washington Post drops Ted Rall's political cartoons because he stated the obvious about our electorate and their mental challenges.

Freakgirl just posted some of her strange search strings leading to her blog, and of course she had some interesting ones. I get some strange ones too, though nothing so strange to report back on. Just the usual ones for Metallica lyrics, Rick Santorum, various things and people "gone bad," and other humdrum things that I've mentioned offhand or just happen to have in the title of my blog. But today, I found one that needed to be posted. I'm number 5 and 6. Check out number 8 too while you're at it. Anybody who comes to this site searching for that, did you really need to ask? Think about it. Do you really need some website to tell you that the answer is "however you want to?"

Those poor sexually repressed and overdramatic conservatives. They have nothing better to do than get all bent out of shape over a film about Alfred Kinsey. "'Alfred Kinsey is responsible in part for my generation being forced to deal face-to-face with the devastating consequences of sexually transmitted diseases, pornography and abortion,' said Brandi Swindell, head of a college-oriented group called Generation Life that plans to picket theaters showing the film." Don't these "right to lifers" have a big bloody war in Iraq that they should be supporting instead of wasting their time protesting a movie? Get your priorities straight, people! But wait, there's more... "'Instead of being lionized, Kinsey's proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist,' said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women of America's Culture & Family Institute." I would think that Mengele would be a whole lot scarier than any mad scientist that Hollywood could come up with, let alone the man who blew the door of off researching and documenting human sexuality.

Republicans pass a rule that bans members indicted by state grand juries to remain in a leadership post. Now they want to change that rule just to benefit Tom DeLay. Hypocrisy, thy name is GOP.

An Ohio CBS affiliate is bearing their buttocks (and more) to Michael Powell and the FCC. Part sweeps stunt, part protest, and part installation art, an anchorwoman modeled in a Spencer Tunick piece and they're showing it without any blurring.

And it looks like Bush has already chosen Colin Powell's replacement. I always thought having at least a minimal personality would be a requirement for the job of Secretary of State. Making that ice queen our country's highest level diplomat speaks volumes about the sort of foreign policy we can expect to see from Bush Term II: The Fascist Boogaloo.

People, there are better and more effective ways of protesting the Bush administration than setting yourself on fire in front of the White House.

They've finally found the perfect actor for the title role of Dubya: The Movie, and it's not Timothy Bottoms.

Today, Colin Powell gains back a tiny part of the dignity he lost by working for the Bush administration. A tell-all book would be about the only thing that would really take the tarnish off of his once respectable reputation.

And today's case of reactionary rightwingers freaking out over free speech is brought to us by Colorado. "Parents and students say they are outraged and offended by a proposed band name and song scheduled for a high school talent show in Boulder this evening, but members of the band, named Coalition of the Willing, said the whole thing is being blown out of proportion. The students told ABC News affiliate KMGH-TV in Denver they are performing Bob Dylan's song "Masters of War" during the Boulder High School Talent Exposé because they are Dylan fans. They said they want to express their views and show off their musical abilities. But some students and adults who heard the band rehearse called a radio talk show Thursday morning, saying the song the band sang ended with a call for President Bush to die." I think that the band should get on stage, tell the audience that they've caved to the pressure of the right wingers and will be playing a different song instead, and then turn their amps up to eleven and go right into War Pigs.

Holy shit! Is this really happening in the USA? "LOS ANGELES, November 9, 2004 - At 7:50 PM two armored tanks showed up at an anti-war protest in front of the federal building in Westwood. The tanks circled the block twice, the second time parking themselves in the street and directly in front of the area where most of the protesters were gathered." (via Jesus' General)

Sometimes life just isn't fair. A perfect example is that today Old Dirty Bastard dropped dead in a recording studio while Dick Cheney was rushed to the hospital for a shortness of breath but came out of it just fine.

About a month ago, Anne and I were hitting a few garage sales in my neighborhood and I picked up a Tascam Portastudio 424 4 track recorder for $5 at this DJ's house. It sat in the closet since the day I got it, but today I dusted it off and played around with it a little bit. I plugged a really old rectangular room mic (it came with my dad's old reel to reel deck) into one track and put it near the hole of my acoustic/electric bass and plugged directly into another track and messed around with some possible melodies and chords, then rewound and played some more rhythmic stuff on top of it. It was pretty fun. I haven't picked up an instrument in months, so it was refreshing, and since I knew exactly what I was playing, it was pretty easy to jam with myself. The main extent of my experience recording has been live, mostly recordings of gigs I've played, and the occasional live-in-home-studio recordings. I have played around a little bit with computer multitracking, but I've never had a good interface between my sound card and headphones/mics/instruments. So I'm pretty excited to try doing some stuff on this 4 track. Some of my favorite bands have put out really great albums using equally low fi equipment. And I still love the analog sound (though since there's no way that I can put it on vinyl, it will inevitably wind up in a digital format). I might try to lay down some drum tracks on the computer, or I might just get some pots, pans, spoons, glasses and power tools, stick some mics around, and lay down the percussion that way. More than likely, there will be some combination of the two. I'm not entirely sure what kind of songs I want to record, other than that they will probably be more on the instrumental end (I'm neither a great singer or lyricist, but I might do some vocal noises), and they will be really weird. Much of the sound is going to depend on what kinds of effects and instruments I'll be able to borrow from friends. What I have to work with are an electric bass, an acoustic/electric bass, and acoustic/electric guitar, a bass EQ pedal, my grandfather's mandolin, a cheap harmonica, a nose flute, and the contents of my kitchen. I'd really love to have an electric guitar, a nice multi-effects processor an old analog envelope filter, a bass synth pedal, a taborine, and a megaphone.

Today's links on the wackiest of the wacky right wingers both come from Wonkette (who really needs to email me for her screener copy of Washington Interns Gone Bad). First up, we've got those lovely rays of sunshine over at Free Republic discussing the size of Cheney's Dick. But of course they're good and upstanding heterosexual christian conservatives there! Secondly, there's a right wing response to sorryeverybody.com, and it's as ugly, juvenile, and rednecky as you would expect something like that to be. Hey rightwingnuts, show us all your guns! Besides the obvious differences between the two sites, the most striking is the difference in numbers of photos. SorryEverybody has many many more.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to announce my new winter T-shirts line. As both a reaction to the election and world events, and in reference to the greatest sequel name in cinematic history, I give you... This exciting new line of clothing features the official mascot of Bush's war, Hoodie, the Tortured Iraqi! Check out the assortment of shirts, along with all of the classic BushCheneyCorp goodies at my cafepress store. You can even get Hoodie on a hoodie. Order now in time for the innauguration protests.

Holy crap! One mention on linkfilter.net and traffic the the Washington Interns Gone Bad movie website exploded! Anybody else who wants to mention it on their heavilly trafficked blog (Ana Marie Cox, I'm looking at you when I say that), please feel free.

Remember the convention kicker, Scott Robinson? Well it looks like he's dusted off his brown shirt, shined up his jackboots, and headed to the polls on election day to intimidate voters.

STOP THE PRESSES! Keanu Reeves smokes pot.

Finally, scientists bloggers have discovered a way to make cheap booze taste better! You don't even need a chemistry set, just a Brita water filter pitcher.

The good news is that Ashcroft is out as attorney general and the rotunda of the justice department might be safe for semi-nude statues again. The bad news is that in Bush Administration II: The Fascist Boogaloo, his replacement could be a lot worse. Worse. Than. Ashcroft. How scary is that?

So today I got an email out of the blue from the son of an artist named Robert Shetterly who has painted a really beautiful series of portraits called Americans Who Tell the Truth. It's a very large and diverse group of inspirational Americans, painted in gorgeously detailed acrylics and accompanied by quotes from each subject. This series is such a positive response to such a dark period of history we are living through, and this sort of positivity is so badly needed right now. My favorites are Cesar Chavez, Woody Guthrie, and Emma Goldman.

Do you think California should secede from the United States? Check out the official website of the Committee to Explore California Secession.

Moby blogs about Christian values. I would link to it, but he doesn't have any sort of permalink system and each post pops up in a new window whether you right click or left click. Christian Values 11/5/2004 - New York City ok, i know we're in our time of repose and healing and whatnot, but i was watching the reverend jerry falwell on tv today and he was talking about 'christian values' and i was outraged. his 'christian values' are: 1-anti-gay 2-anti-women 3-strong national defense 4-pro-death penalty i've said it before, and i'll say it again, how in the world can the christian right call themselves christian? where in the teachings of christ does christ talk about: 1-homosexuality 2-abortion 3-patriotism ? the election was decided by the christian right, but how in the world are these people actually christians? i'm sorry, i don't mean to judge, but i've read the gospels quite a few times, and it seems pretty clear that 'christian values' are: 1-humility 2-non-judgementalism 3-caring for the poor 4-compassion 5-love 6-serving god don't get me wrong, i'm not presenting myself as a virtuous, upstanding christian. i'm just saying that it outrages and baffles me that so many millions of americans call