RadioFreePirate

Lady Summer turned me onto [Matisyahu], who is lifting up my spirits.  He’s caused a lot of excitement in several musical corners – some are uncomfortable with his perceived cooptation of reggae, others with his vague, feel-good message that never gets too specific about his Hasidism.

And yet here I am, head bobbing, noodle-dancing, singing “you have been a refuge for me” while my husband sighs embarrassedly.  Isn’t the great journey of music about borrowing, embellishing, and returning to the whole some idea or emotion? What I respond to is his love for the song, and it’s fricking infectious.

Freud Head Pops. You know, to suck on.

On that beach, young children were making things that kind of looked like castles by pushing together tiny grains of silicon dioxide. Annoying parents stood by to tell the children what castles did, and did not, look like. The end product was often intricate with buttresses, ornamental shells, and sharp defined corners.

For a moment the children could step back and say “this is a castle,” and very few people would argue with them, but being on the edge of an ocean, beaches also sometimes have waves.

These waves often started somewhere far away, and are the result of many incremental forces. As they approach the shore they have a certain inevitability to them. Waves don’t really give a crap what a castle is supposed to look like, and they don’t really give a crap about the children that made those castles.

In fact, waves aren’t really capable of giving a crap at all. When they’re done, the waves leave behind a clump that’s soft and rounded that doesn’t really look like a castle anymore. It looks like something, but we don’t really have a word for it.

On Ocean Beach some people get tired of building sand castles and choose to interact with the waves directly.

Some people just hang out and bob up and down. Other people float on things that are filled with air, but everyone knows it’s the surfers that really know what’s goin’ on.

…

Other people swim out, and they bob up and down. Sometimes, when people get to the top of a wave, they say “I made this wave, this wave is because of me, and because I’m wearing yellow swimming trunks,” and then lots of other people put on yellow swimming trunks and the swim out, but by the time they get there that guys at the bottom and some guy in red trunks is yelling the same thing.

Other people sit on inflated rafts, so even when they’re at the bottom their little heads peek out over the top of the waves, but, eventually, a lot of those guys tip over or they run out of people that are willing to blow.

It’s the surfers that are the most fun to watch.

They know they didn’t start the waves, but they do study them. While they’re surfing, they don’t congratulate each other for pushing the water closer to the shore. They understand that the wave has a certain inevitability to it, that it doesn’t give a crap about them… it just moves.

So, they play on it and explore its natural contours and do tricks. And, by doing that, they give the wave meaning, human meaning.

— Ze Frank, the Show, Feb. 5, 2007.

Napoleon once said Such work as mine is not done twice in a century. I saved the Revolution as it lay dying, I have cleansed it of its crimes and have held it up to the people shining with fame. Personally, I like the surfers’ revolution better than Napoleon’s. You?

Sea Shepherd ship now running as a Pirate : Melbourne Indymedia: “‘It was not the British Navy that ended piracy in the Caribbean, it was Captain Henry Morgan who did that and he was a pirate’, Said Captain Watson, ‘I am proud to add my name to the long list of honourable and noble pirates like Sir Francis Drake, John Paul Jones and Jean LaFitte. To that end we have our own version of the Pretty Red or Joli Rouge and it is the crossed shepherd’s staff and Neptune’s trident under a human skull engraved with the yin and yang of a dolphin and a whale. If they want us to be pirates than we will be damn pirates but we will not abandon the whales to the agony and misery of the harpoons without a fight. We are pirates of compassion in pursuit of pirates of profit.’ “

Reuters had an interesting article yesterday about a guy who fuels his house (with hot tub) and car with solar power and fuel cells: Solar power eliminates utility bills in U.S. home. Apparently it’s currently about $4000 a year to do something like this, which is still more than it costs for oil dependency. But as oil prices rise and alternative energy source prices drop, the article says this should be economically viable in the next five or ten years.

And Damn Interesting had a, well, damn interesting article about a tree that stayed alive for hundreds of years, the only living thing in the middle of the Sahara Desert, only to be hit by a truck. That even a drunk driver managed to accidentally run into the only tree in a 400 kilometer radius is amazing.

ZineMachine: A vending machine for zines, books, and minicomics.

Tragedy of the anticommons – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “WKRP in Cincinnati was one of the most popular syndicated sitcoms of all time, and many television shows from that era have been successfully released on DVD. However, it is unlikely that a DVD release of WKRP will be available in the near future. When it was a television program, an agreement was in place between television producers and music licensing organizations such as ASCAP and BMI wherein a standard licensing fee was paid for each song that was played on a television show. As such, the producers could determine how much money would be paid for their use of music clips and budget accordingly. However, there is no similar standard agreement for use of music on DVD’s (which ASCAP and BMI do not control), and the producers are now faced with the prospect of negotiating individually with several dozen composers.”

This was the saddest thing that I’ve heard in a long time.

RyBorg writes from the rainy NorthWest: “I had a new experience tonight. I’m usually not one for web-browing,of the variety where I start in one place and through following a
series of interesting links find myself elsewhere. It started with youtube, with provides an easy way to jump from random topic to random topic. It ended up leading me here:

http://www.votergasm.com/Pledge.php

Funny, sexy and political, although perhapse catching my interest only b/c a friend convinced me to go encourage voters before this last election.”

“Although Leach knows it’s a tough year for Republicans, he has refused to go negative. When state GOP officials sent out that attack mailer, Leach asked them to stay out of the race. When they did it again, he warned Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman that he would refuse to caucus with his party when the new Congress convened in January if the negative tactics recurred. Mehlman promised to put a stop to it.

Then Leach called Loebsack and apologized.”

 If only more Democrats could be like Jim.

: “British rock legend David Bowie’s career will take a dive next year — as he joins the cast of the popular underwater cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants for a guest appearance. Bowie said on his Web site blog that he would be the voice of a character called Lord Royal Highness on the Nickelodeon network’s hit children’s cartoon series next year.”