More crack-downs in Rapid City. Last night there were two or three units in the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant Casa Del Rey. Couldn't see much because of the lights; just some people by their cars being... "talked to". A man with two white dogs stood on the sidewalk and looked on.

After watching I Am The World Trade Center perform in a mostly empty senior citizen's center on Monday, hearing IATWTC new CD reviewed on National Public Radio's All Things Considered was a little surreal. The CD is good enough for it, to be sure. But I chuckled as I thought about how on the same day that the esteemed Amy and Dan were sipping ghetto snow cones and being serenaded by a girl wearing a big Superman cape and a lanky guy with a cheap Yamaha synthesizer, Sarah Bardeen was sitting in an office in San Francisco, picking a certain album out of the latest batch of records from Kindercore.

Might be heading to Colorado this weekend to catch Modest Mouse and a few other bands. Just a little excited. When Meg(h) invited me along, I had to use every ounce of my will to not flip out and start dancing around the hallway. I like that Modest Mouse quite a bit...

Too, too, late. Bed now.

I know I've been saying that the police have been more aggressive lately, but this is ridiculous.
I had driven about two miles north on 8th Street tonight on my nightly journey home when I glanced in my mirror and noticed some red and blue flashing lights. I pulled over as much as I could to make way for the patrol car, which sped past me beating the speed limit by thirty or forty kilometers per hour. I started moving again, and made it about 200 meters before I moved back to the curb to allow another speeding patrol car to pass. After that officer sped by, I pulled back into the right lane and drove briskly to see what was going on. Hit a red light fifty meters on, but watched as the first car turned right on Omaha and the second went straight. A third car turned onto 8th Street from Omaha and followed the second soon after.
Right. To summarize, the police were everywhere. When the light turned green I drove on, but altered my route a bit to follow all of the commotion. Up the road, in the parking lot of our beloved Central High School, were eight or nine patrol cars and one red civilian truck. Three more cars approached soon thereafter. The arrangement of the cars suggested that the red truck had been involved in a chase of some sort, and that the police had set up a rather sizable roadblock on North Street (on the northern side of the CHS lot) to force it off the road. By the time I got there, the driver was standing outside his vehicle, hands on his head as several angry-looking cops pointed weapons at him.

This brings me to my point: it doesn't take twelve police units to stop one truck. The law enforcement community around here has been very a fierce one lately, especially about traffic stops. Crime is down, yet demand is up, and they seem to be taking themselves a little too seriously, especially since Tom Hennies retired as police chief a few years ago and went into politics then. Things were harmonious back then, and very transparent--the police even gave the local news outlets detailed statistics on crime trends by area. It was good. Now... well, between people being pulled over everywhere, squad cars driving through my neighborhood at night with lights turned off, and now such a fierce reaction to what was in all likeliness a simple evasion of arrest, I am growing a bit concerned with my town's public servants.

So that's that rant. Number 34, I think. For tonight, I have really nothing else... well, I guess there's this gem, which will help you price-shop for entertainment through Clear Channel. Lots of bands, all with their prices. I can't believe DJ Spooky goes for only $5k... and Shadow for twice that! I could almost come up with that much.

First and foremost: when I was seven or so, I liked cartoons. And every morning, the USA television network would show good cartoons. Not like that crappy Nickelodeon, which just pumped out game shows back then. No, USA had the proverbial goods. And just before each show, they would play a little short called "In A Minute" spotlighting activism of children around the country. I would try to get up early just to see In A Minute... it never worked, of course, because I've been a chronic oversleeper since perhaps before I was born, but I tried. I remember this so vividly now... it's strange.

Perhaps it's seeing a television laying outside of my front door that brought these memories so vividly to the surface. When I was seven or so, my parents bought a brand new Toshiba nineteen-inch television, and I utilized it in my watching of cartoons. It has rested in the living room ever since... until tonight, when I found the aged Toshiba sitting on the concrete outside the steps leading down from the portal. I thought for a minute that perhaps my parents were finally breaking the bonds of the television, that they were determined to bring my sister up free of its curse!
But there in the living room sat the television from my parents' bedroom. Oh well. I guess the old activists' cry of "Kill Your TV!" is redundant when the TV has lost its will to live.

Anyway, on to more salient events: I Am The World Trade Center is a very good live group. So very, very good. I'm still not sure how they found themselves driving eleven hours to play to a sixteen people in a big, empty retirement center dining hall in South Dakota, but there it was, and there they were. Thirty minutes of solid beats and upbeat fun -- inspired by some newly-tweaked choreographing; I noticed a notebook full of it on a chair -- was ended awkwardly with the words, "Well, thanks for coming out here. We hope it was as weird for you as it was for us."

And so it was. The cover band, Cleavage, didn't show, forcing the other "cover band"--two kids with a Yamaha synthesizer and a microphone--to waste two hours by going through all of the rhythm presets on the box, one by one. They seemed to take it rather well, though, given the circumstances.

Bottom lines: I Am The World Trade Center has upgraded their equipment since cutting their last recording and improved rather well. My speech in class was apparently a failure, as none of them showed up. And now I go back to work for the tourists in the Ice Cream Mines of Keystone.

VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: My SPOON is TOO BIG!

...by "after work" I of course mean "after work four days from now." Ha ha ha.

Anyway, I failed a test, and learned that studying right before an exam is perhaps not so important as getting more than zero hours of sleep the night before the testing period. This theory was proven on my next exam, so Everything Is Fine now.

In other news, Andre Torrez is still a genius. He's like a modern renaissance man, except that he lives in a time that not even vaguely resembles a renaissance.

Local arts scene: I have a persuasive speech to give Monday morning. I had planned on doing it on American nuclear policy and how it's going to get us all killed. On Friday, however, I heard a bit of news that inspired me to change the topic. So instead I think I will get up and persuade everyone in the room to go see I Am The World Trade Center play. I mean, look at their damned touring schedule--they're hitting R.C. in between stints in Chicago and Seattle. IATWTC is going from Chicago to Seattle and making one stop -- in western South Dakota! This is an opportunity to catch some infectuously happy electropop music that those of us in Rapid City should not deign to miss. No, sir.

This is all for now.

It's been six days, and I thought I should write something. Joan has her LJ to jot thoughts in when she doesn't update her own page, but I just have a few notebooks that sit in my room. Perhaps I will try to keep the momentum going.

I was at the School of Mines Monday morning, walking from my English class to my car, when the gentleman in front of me suddenly stopped, turned around, and said hi. I said hello, and he explained he was driving through the area and had decided to stop and check out this little local college. He asked me whether I was studying animal science or forestry, and I smiled and said that no, I was just here for the summer, trying to get ahead on my Physics/Mechanical Engineering degree. He had gone to a state college in his home state of Massachusetts to study animal husbandry, he replied, and used what he learned in his life as a farmer. We talked a little more, reached the parking lot, and began to part when he stopped and turned to me.

"I'm going to tell you about my son," he began. "He studied nuclear engineering in college, and perhaps you may have heard of him. He was a pilot..." The man's speech slowed.

"Last September he was flying from Boston to Los Angeles, when at (9:26?) a.m. his plane was hijacked. His was the first plane to impact the World Trade Center; we lost him that day."

"I'm so sorry..."

"Yes, we miss him very much," he started, shakily, and stopped. "Well, goodbye."

As I stood, shocked by his words, the plain-looking gentleman walked across the parking lot to a waiting van--a hulking silver Honda Odyssey with local plates, driven by a older woman, with two others in the back seat. The man stepped inside, closed the door, and together he and his family drove away. Still I stood there, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Why would he tell me this, even if his words were true? Were his words true?

It still makes no sense to me. I thought about checking Lexis-Nexis to verify his story, but never went through with it. What difference would it make if he was telling the truth or not? In his mind, his son died a tragic death; perhaps this is enough to know.

Big differential equations test tomorrow. I bombed the last one; I will explain further after work, maybe.

Well, the great Monitor Drought of 2002 is over. Has been over since last Friday, actually, but I haven't been successful thus far in completing an update without a grotesque computer crash. It's too bad, really. The attempt on the fifth would have been most interesting, what with the men with guns and all. Oh well.

Hey, there goes another crash. Goodbye, Mozilla! My computer has trouble scrolling. I don't know why.

For the most part, though, everything is fine. I'm still working in Keystone with the ladies from Lithuania, going to class with the non-trad. students at Mines, and... not sleeping, I suppose. Lots of time with the Dreamcast, I'm embarrassed to admit, and some time spent reading. Just finished the interesting bits of a free sociology textbook I found laying around Mines, and have ordered The Emperor of Ocean Park, which I have heard good things about. On top of that, a group presentation is coming up for Technical Communications; I talked the group into going for overpopulation as a topic, so I expect to spend a lot of time in the near future browsing the websites and literature of Zero Population Growth (they changed their name, but I still prefer the old one) and the UN Population Fund.
Or at the very least, I expect to spend a lot of time restarting my browsers. There it goes again...

I dont know; I give. Hopefully I will remember to switch everything over to Movable Type sometime soon so that I am able to more easily update...