Up the Tree

  • Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t because of something you said, or did, I just want the option to get the hell out of here (if the shit goes down). The idea came to me one night as I was talking to one of my old roommates about the election, as they were recounting ballots in Florida, in 2000.

    HER “I swear, if Bush wins, I’m going to leave the county… Move to Canada, or something. If he wins, it’s going to be bad, really bad.”

    I don’t think she knew how bad it was going to get.

    Soon after September 11th I thought to myself; I want to leave New York, get the hell out of here. Run Ben, Run… I didn’t. I stayed in Brooklyn and rebuilt my life with an overwhelming groundwork of fear, brought on, largely, by military helicopters passing overhead.

    The helicopters have stopped flying overhead.

    I am still nervous. More so in the past few weeks, by a president who has backed himself up a tree and must now go to war to save his approval rating and his foreign authority. Our country is in a bad way. Other countries are now revoking their support for a war with Iraq and Bush seems as if he doesn’t give a damn.

    Cowboys shouldn’t have nuclear weapons.

    I have this recurring daymare as I walk up 16th street toward Union Square. There is this brilliant flash of light and the buildings all around me crumble. People scream in horror as the first nuclear bomb is detonated in the Empire State building. Waves of fire, like breaking waves on the beach, incinerate everything and I get washed away in yellow flame. Everything goes black.

    You might say that this is a foolish thought to have. You might say that there are far more things to be afraid of. You might say everything is going to turn out fine… you may be right, but I think things are going to get worse before they get better. I don’t think we have heard the end of Osama, or his followers. Until we start having foreign relations that benefit other countries as it benefits ours, we are going to be hated throughout the world. We get richer as other counties get poorer and it shows.

    So, I’ve decided to get Dual Nationality with England.

    I want to give myself options. I am getting nervous about this administration and what it might do, to me and others I care about. I am just starting to lose faith in my county (is all) and I would rather leave then put up with leadership I don’t believe in. Not to say I won’t fight for what I belive in, but it seems at the moment my county isn’t listening. They are, fingers in ears, refusing to listem to the concerns of the electorate.

    I am tired of being tired.

  • Yesterday and I went to a chinese restaurant, after she got her hair cut and styled like a Charlie’s Angel. We ordered two hot and sour soups and a chicken chow fun, enjoying them both thoroughly. After the meal we got Chinese fortune cookies as is custom in most Chinese restaurants. Mine was delightfully odd for a fortune cookie Don’t expect romantic attachments to be strictly logical or rational!. Wow weird right? Not after I read ‘s…

    Joys are often the shadows, cast by sorrows.

    I think somebody is trying to tell us something.

  • and other meaningless observations.

    Oh Kdunk, how our words resonate in the foothills of my mountain of plumpitude. I feel fat. well, not fat exactly, but I feel if my holiday eating had continued in the direction I had been directing it, I would have resembled a manatee (and a fat manatee at that).

    This holiday season I went nuts, thanks in part to a fantastically cold winter and a snugly coutch, I squandered butter on mashed potatoes, extravagantly partook in alcoholic beverages, I ate chocolate cherry cordials shrugging them off with words like…

    “It’s the holidays. As soon as they are over, I will stop eating this shit.”

    The holidays are over and I am just beginning to stop eating this shit. I ate myself into such a stopper, that last Monday night was the first time I had had fruit in over a month. A FRUIT! I thought you were supposed to die if you didn’t eat your fruits. I knew it was bad, when I bit into the apple and had forgotten how good they were. I had so many candy cherries and gummy peaches, that I had forgotten what the taste of a real apple was.

    I was appalled at my own behavior.

    A grown man eating Snickers bars and parading about with a second helping of Tin Roof Sundae. I should have been ashamed, but I wasn’t [at the time]. Everybody was doing it. A scoop here, a nibble there, and before you knew it everyone was partaking in sinful delights like it was their last days on earth. A group mentality of more.

    You have to look objectively at the whole mess and think, “it’s not so bad”, but then again, didn’t you eat that entire pumpkin pie by yourself?

    For shame!

  • Now, I know this entry wont appeal to many, but I had to write it, so I decided to post it as well.

    Apple computer, a little while back, created a fantastic application for organizing music and creating MP3s called iTunes. iTunes revolutionized how mac users organized and stored their digital music. MP3s became the audio format de jour for computer users. I, myself, started to encode all my CDs to MP3s like a wild-man, hoping one day to have all my music surgically implanted into my brain, so much like fine lady upon a white horse, I will have music wherever I go.

    So, in Apple’s latest revision, iTunes 3, they added support for Audible content. Audible.com is a website that offers audio books, that have traditionally been available on tape and CD, through a very legitimate downloadable MP3 like format.

    Audible charges a monthly fee [$14.95 or $19.95] to access their books [1 book and 1 subscription or 2 books and 1 subscription respectively]. This service, if you are familiar with peer to peer file sharing, is completely unlike Napster and the like, because it is licensed by the audio book companies to deliver their content. You are not breeching copyright laws with their downloads.

    I signed up to investigate for myself Audible’s service, here is what I found:

    • The sound quality is good, not great. They encode their content at 32kbs which is suitable for voice only and bottomed out when listening to Garison Keiller’s News from Lake Wobegon, when the audience laughed or clapped it sounded like I was listening to the radio through a fish bowl.
    • They have a lot of content. I was delighted to see that they had such a wide variety and selection. I was particularly impressed with their unabridged section.
    • Very easy to use. On Mac OS X (Jaguar) I didn’t have to install a thing, it worked flawlessly — which brings up a very good point.
    • This is no MP3. Don’t think, that just because this looks and feels like an MP3 it is one, it certainly isn’t. Your fist tip off should be the .aa file extension. Your second tip off should be the prompt in iTunes for a username and password. This baby isn’t your old play me whenever, wherever you want and burn me onto whatever you want format, oh no, i’s the download me, play me whenever, but only be able to bun me on to a CD once format. That’s right. Only once and only as an audio CD, no MP3 CDs here, as I said earlier, this is no MP3 and it wont play, unless your MP3 CD player supports the Audible format, which at the time of this article none of them do, for distribution reasons.

    If you are an avid iPod user, you will not notice any of these restrictions, you can put them on and take them off your iPod as many times as you like and the iPod remembers where you are in each individual track, so even if you start listening to another story, it can come back to the exact spot you left off. I don’t know, however, what happens if you stick another iPod onto your computer, the audio file may not copy.

    This is what disturbs me about the Audible format, the audio files don’t feel like they are mine. If I went out to Barnes & Nobles and bought Catch Me if You Can on audio book CD [$44.95] it would be better quality, I could back it up onto another cd, make MP3s of it, load it onto my iPod, whatever, it’s my audio.

    With the Audible format, Catch Me if You Can [$29.95] is approximately a 25 minute downlad on a DSL connection, if you have a modem, don’t even think about it. The 117Mb file is a heafty little bastard, but does contain over 8 hours of audio. The plus is, you get to hear your book almost imediately and it’s not taxed (sorry NJ residents). If you are a Member, you are saving almost $30 off the Barnes and Nobles price, which is nice. Unfortunately, Audible’s advice to “Download this program to your computer and then burn it to a CD or transfer it to your iPod.” doesn’t work, because it’s over 8 hours and won’t fit onto a CD, nor can I cut it up, because iTunes won’t let you. No CD for this track, oh well, there goes that flexibility.

    The service does have it’s benifits over the audio book CD, but it also has some major disadvantages. I think the most pronounced flaw is the only allowing you to burn 1 audio cd of the content you legaly purchased from a liscenced merchant. If the audio track is not that big, that is.

    Sure, there are ways of getting around this format’s copy protection, that any hard-core computer user can figure out in no time, but we shouldn’t have to. If we buy content online, we expect to retain the flexibility that we are accustomed to. In the long run these proprietary features of the Audible format hurt its acceptance in the marketplace and frightens away would be consumers.

    I may stay with Audible.com, I may not, but I thought it important to share my experience and inform yall with the help of my meddling.

  • This is sort of me talking out-loud here people, so feel free to interject.

    I have been web logging for more than a month and a half and I’m just wondering, what happens now? Where does this baby of mine go from here? I’m not going to get paid for taking my clothing off, that is strictly reserved for teenage girls.

    What is my angle?

    Im not expecting any great deal of praise for my efforts, but I can’t stand still for long, I have to move forward and make this thing a special place like I said I was going to in my ‘early days’. I want to have a blog that inspires, that informs, that reaches out to people and makes them feel connected.

    I have broken down and bought that How to blog for the posers book by Rebecca Blood. I feel like an ass for doing it, but it might actually be a good read, so why not burn the $12. (Note to self: write book on blogging and get on the band wagon) (Note to self: Title the book Note to Self and pat self on back for ingenuity)

    Unrelated topic.

    My father is British. He has, as it were, English teeth. His teeth are a celebration of a history of bad personal hygiene and faulty genes. It’s not his fault, his country was unaware of such advances as fluoride, or toothbrushes with bristles. Be that as it may, I have inherited those total bastard genes and those total bastard genes have given me teeth so weak that every time I went to the dentist they found a cavity. No, I’m serious, every single time. So, until I was 18 I had to take fluoride at the dentist to, in theory, strengthen my hereditary tooth weakness.

    It wasn’t the fluoride that rubbed me the wrong way, I could appreciate the dentist wanting to foster the strength of my teeth through all means available, but it was the flavor that eventually got to me. My dentist only had one flavor. That one flavor, much like the one ring, was evil. That one flavor was Pina colada. I would like to meet the man behind that fluoride flavor and tell him the stress and sorrow that that horrific little taste did to me. Not that, if given the choice, I would have wanted another flavor to become so disgusted by the thought of it still puts shivers down my spine. Pina colada is a disgusting flavor on it’s own, but put that flavor in a small child’s mouth, a child I might mention who had never had a pina colada before, and you are creating an adult who would bite his own arm off than even fain interest in that alcoholic drink.

    I am damaged goods people. Damaged goods.

    Site for the weekend:
    The New York Public Library’s Image Gate. This site is by far one of the most amazing accomplishments on the internet. See for yourself. My favorites Union Square, Mohonk, and Telephone.

    The Thinking Machine