Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/04/08/biz-vs-gov/
Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the contrast between business and government:
“In government, everyone thinks that in business you say jump and everybody jumps. That’s not the way a good company is run. Good companies are run by leaders who delegate and build consensus. In business, people think that everybody in government is lazy and incompetent. That’s also not true.”
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/20/america-still-relevant/
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I wont say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
Having a poem in your head is like having a song in your head, only quieter and easier to identify. This morning I had Ginsberg’s “America” in my head, so I went to read it again. I like this poem so much that I have a copy right here, on the web. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/04/like-programming-a-vcr/
I am trying to install some software that isn’t working. So, I’m trading messages with the company’s technical support, who suggested I add an argument to a wrapper script, which I tried, but nada, so they clarified:
Hmmm, when you add the -nosetjmp make sure you go through custom install using ___setup and select 2 for run setup utilites then select 2 again Perform ___ configuration then select each step except number 3…this will override your changes that you made to the script. Once that is all done you can add -nosetjmp to the ___v9.cfg file and let’s see what happens.
All this while walking back and forth to the machine room to swap through a series of three CDROMs. Ah, the glorious work of being a SysAdmin!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/03/howto-drill-hole-soft-plastic/
<yohan> For future reference:
<yohan> the right tool for the job, when the job is drilling a hole in soft plastic, is a Forstner bit.
<yohan> Someone with a blog should put that up, because Google sure didn’t give me that answer.
Thanks Dave, thanks Andrew.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/26/enemy-combatant/
This past week I read an article in the New Yorker magazine about the policy of my government to secretly kidnap terrorism suspects, without any due process, and to hand them over to foreign governments to be “rendered,” which is a euphemism for “tortured.” There are many in law enforcement who have grave doubts about the efficacy of torture. If you torture a man, he will pretty much tell you anything you want to hear. And, you can not use testimony from, or evidence that leads back to torture in a legal trial. Anyway, the article, found in the Feb 14 & 21, 2005 issue, is very long, very engaging, and left me feeling very disgusted and frustrated and just plain old upset. What follows is the last section of the article, that briefly puts a human story to the situation. It is with a heavy heart that I type this out, but the story bears being re-told. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/22/fear-and-loathing-mountain-view/
(In tribute to and with apologies to the late Hunter Thompson . . .)
We were just outside San Jose when the technology lifestyle began to kick in. Diploma in hand, I was offered a job in Mountain View, as chief IT monkey for an Internet startup. I was sufficiently underqualified that the job presented a compelling challenge, and a great salary, for a cocky young English major from Illinois, so how could I ever refuse? Fellow alumni and I were recruited by the tens of thousands, and found ourselves settling in the Silicon Valley in quick, overpopulated waves in a mad dash for riches; In my mind, we were the ’99ers, the prospectors from out East who had followed the gold rush to California as the original ’49ers had done a century and a half before. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/13/thomas-jefferson-religious-freedom/
Almighty God hath created the mind free . . . All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens . . . are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion . . . No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.
Inscription on the Jefferson Memorial
Taken from A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, 1777.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/19/timothy-levitch-waking-life/
Timothy “Speed” Levitch is a professional Cruiser in the midst of a torrid love affair with New York City. His work as a tour guide has been documented in a documentary titled “The Cruise”.
On this bridge, Lorca warns: life is not a dream.
Beware, and beware, and beware!And so many think because then happened, now isn’t.
But didn’t I mention, the on-going WOW is happening, right now!
We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance, where even our inabilities are having a roast! We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel starring clowns!
This entire thing we’re involved with called the world, is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be.
Life is a matter of a miracle, that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each others’ presence.
The world is an exam, to see if we can rise into the direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it, matter is here as a test for our curiosity, doubt is here as an exam for our vitality.
Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write a hundred stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling in to a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized at last, something was happening to him.
An assumption develops that you can not understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely, which is to say
I do not exactly disagree. I would say, that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me. And I can learn to love, and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of Self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca, in that same poem, said that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And, as one realizes, that one is a dream-figure in another person’s dream: that is self-awareness!
Emphasis added by dannyman, per the rhetorical philosophy articulated in “Speedology: Speed on New York on Speed”
See also: Jimmy’s Chicken Shack
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/04/10/chain-saw-theft-ends-rampaging-deer-terror/
OSLO, Norway (AP) — After terrorizing a small Norwegian town for weeks, a buck deer went too far: he stole a chain saw from Olav Haereid’s front yard.
The large stag had knocked over garbage cans at a child care center, threatened cars and had begun to frighten residents of Aardalstangen, the Aardal og Laerdal Avis newspaper reported Wednesday. The town is 220 miles north of Oslo, the capital.
Last weekend, the renegade herbivore spotted a chain saw in Haereid’s yard, picked up the saw with its antlers and ran off with it.
The saw was so heavy that the deer only managed to carry it a few yards, but the theft was enough for local officials to impose the ultimate penalty. The buck was shot.
“Sad, but we had no choice. People were becoming frightened of the big animal,” forester Vidar Moen told the newspaper.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/10/21/fisting/
I persisted, though. I told him how we had peeked through the French doors into the famous restaurant. I asked him what was on the other side of that wall now.
His reply, which he himself considered a bland statement of fact, fell so harshly on my ears that he might as well have slapped me hard in the face. He said this:
“Fist-fucking films.”
It woke me up a little, that I should be so surprised and appalled. He was sorry, as he would tell me later, to have brought a sweet little old man such ghastly news about what was going on right next door. He might have been my father, and I his little child. He even said to me, “Never mind.”
“Tell me,” I said.
So he explained slowly and patiently, and most reluctantly, that there was a motion-picture theater where the restaurant used to be. It specialized in films of male homosexual acts of love, and that their climaxes commonly consisted of one actor’s thrusting his fist up the fundament of another actor.
I was speechless. Never had I dreamed that the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America and the enchanting technology of a motion-picture camera would be combined to form such an atrocity.
“Sorry,” he said.
“I doubt very much if you’re to blame,” I said. “Good night.” I went in search of my room.
Kurt Vonnegut
Jailbird
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