"You could murder every drunken idiot in your town and the world would still be full of them. .... Assholes are a virus. They will always be present and there are times when the virus will run stronger than other times, depending on where you're at. Depending on where you're at assholes will increase in numbers like a virus taking hold. Other times they'll retreat, but they'll just be somewhere else. .... You can't eradicate them, so why even engage in trying to eradicate one or two or three?"

I watched Ian MacKaye lecture about music Tuesday night, and... wow. He has a very low-key stage presence that I was completely unaware of. I mean, Fugazi, Minor Threat, "Straight Edge", yes, but the man's been in and out of bands for over twenty years. His voice is one of experience.
The lecture itself, however, was incredible. Ian MacKaye aside, the entire Ames punk scene was there, more or less, as were many of the regional promoters, label heads, and musicians. One bloke there was from Malaysia, and he and MacKaye reminisced about an incredible gig Fugazi did in a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur.
I'll try to scare up a transcript somehow sometime maybe. In the meaning time, an interview between MacKaye and Sir Boone, the man who not only brought the head of Dischord records to Iowa, but sold him on the lecture format in the first place, is available on the Daily's web space. The quote above is from that piece.

News:

• R-town is on fire. See Joan 5:38.
• A priest from Illinois was busted for manufacture of and intent to distribute gamma hydroxybutyrate. No, I'm not kidding. He really was manufacturing with intent to distribute.
• DVD Mania: Trimark is releasing four eps of The Super Mario Brothers Super Show on DVD for some reason late next month. I'm surprised this is actually being done; I didn't think anyone even remembered this show.
• It's snowing. ((Media source: ISU Webcam.)) Still. What's that? The snow was supposed to stop falling by nine? Oh. That must be an army of tiny gravity fairies outside my window, then.
• I've found the perfect Everything Box. For some time, I've been looking for a computer that could do Everything: a portable, media-friendly rig that could go anywhere, hook up to anything, and do whatever I wanted. So behold the Shuttle SV24--at 10" by 7" by 6", it's an incredible little box, sporting up to a 1GHz Pentium III processor; on-board networking, audio, and 3D video; four USB ports; two FireWire interfaces; and S-Video and composite video output... all for $250. After adding CD-RW/DVD drive, hard drive, peripherals, LCD screen, TV tuner/3D accelerator card, memory, peripherals, and the processor itself, the cost comes to somewhere between $1500 and $2000... but a laptop with these features costs twice as much, and is generally inferior to the SV24's already toned-down specs. Also, laptops generally have bigger footprints than 7" by 6"... heh. I have a new dream machine, and it's almost affordable! Now I just need a job...
• There would be more, but homework summons me. Arr. Until next time...

"If you did a Google search on the word 'scintillating,' you would find this song..." -- geekiest radio plug ever as heard on Minnesota Public Radio last night. It popped out all of a sudden in the middle of a classical music set, and I laughed, and laughed, and then laughed some more. Because the plug was dumb.

Friday afternoon, as I drove through Yankton in search of a high school, I was listening to Fresh Air on the radio. A few things John Powers said in his review of The Mothman Prophecies got me to thinking about the workings of the human mind, and I came to a conclusion that rang true over the course of the weekend:
Few things are more terrifying than realizing that one's mind is slipping into the depths of paranoia. Chief among them, however, is the realization that the fear and the terror were justified, well-developed reactions to extraordinary everyday life.
So it is that I managed to receive two parking tickets from two different universities in two different states in the span of twelve (and a half) hours. I let down my guard because I thought I was the crazy one, not the rest of the world, and it turns out that I was wrong. So lesson learned and all that... I'll pay the tickets, of course, if only in the hopes that one institution will leave me alone and that I might even a karmic debt to the other, a debt that accrues interest even as we speak and demands repayment.

Aside from parking tickets and radio shows, however, there is much else to speak of. The debate team of my alma matter, for instance, is much as it was. The same general roles are still being acted out, only now by different people. Even my role, one I thought was meaningless, is again being played--at present by a dark-humoured, vermilion-haired young girl with the most curiously shaped nose and that wonderful desperation of one who is very much alone, a hopeless solitude I thought was unique to my experience as a Lincoln-Douglas debater in our high-school's small forensics program. I learned much from the past weekend's experience, to be sure. I even learned something in writing about it: Vermillion, a small college town on the very southeastern tip of South Dakota, should more properly be spelled Vermilion. (The current spelling is admittedly acceptable, however; just not proper English.)

All in all, it was a good weekend, full of wonder and ice. Ire? No, ice. Minnesota is freaking cold, eh? Ja. I am very glad I went, despite my failures... and I made a little headway in the university collection of Schell's books.

Before I sign off this time, a couple more dread portents from the internet, namely one of a valiant death and one of... bigamy?

Getting in a car, tires on the highway, driving down the road.
Leaving for Y-town and debate judging tomorrow. Whee! I can guarantee there will be no updates for at least three days, however.
I would leave notes, but what is there to say? Weariness overcomes me, so I must depart unheralded.
Which is the way it usually is.

Random media: Anime Christ! (Someone should send that to Evan & Ivy.)

It seems I have fallen behind again. Oh my.
Yesterday afternoon, I witnessed a very beautiful scene while going about my usual business. I wanted to take a picture, but I didn't have my camera with me, so I tried to capture the scene in a few words. Not very well-written words, mind you, and not the thousand words a picture would have superseded, but it's the best I can offer.
There is more, of course--there's always more! But I still lack the skill with words to do the tale further justice. I would write a novel about it, if I could write a novel. Since I cannot, the plight of two other lovers, both very dear to me, will have to wait until a later date to be immortalized in print (or even mortalized in naughts and ones). Why couldn't the internet have waited to take fruit until I was older? I may be able to make a worthwhile contribution to the net in words some day, when I have grown enough to know a few things about life and verse, but now there isn't much I can offer.
The previous paragraph would have ended with a link to Torrez.org, and the brilliant passages once housed there, but Andre Torrez has taken all of his writings down, and the site is almost bare now. Blast it all. At least the secret society still remains...

In other news, while flipping through the LiveJournal interest pages, an array of oddities appeared before me, all related to my home state of South Dakota. Many obeservations to be drawn from the intermingling of an aggregate of 700,000 technophobes with one of the most ubiquitous services on the triple-double-u:

• Joan, Jesse, Matt M, I, and a few others have been a Rapid City consortium of sorts on that site, so I suppose it makes sense that a parallel SooFoo web should exist, complete with stragglers from the debate/emo and orch communities there. SDSU also represents with a large contingent appearing through the eyes of this user. None of this surprised me, but it delights me that others like me from my homeland exist.
• What does surprise me, however, is the Spooncat! conspiracy, and that it comes not out of R-ville, but Sioux Falls. Eee! Eee!
• On the topic of surprises, what is the meaning of the Akron, Ohio connection?
• And of course, Jesus rocks. But you knew that already.

So passes South Dakota into the 21st century.
That's all for tonight, I think. I was going to type all of this up last night, but I'm kind of glad I didn't, because I would have had to come back and change the link to the Almost Square Piece of Cardboard auction that eBay finally delisted today, less than six hours from completion. Luckily, it was mirrored, hence the link. My favorite bid retraction (gone now): "I changed my mind when I realized what I needed was an almost round piece of cardboard."

Well, alright! An update it is!

Iowa State.
Iowa State!
What can I say about Iowa State?
Hmm.
Well, at least there are plenty of resources available to students here. Like the student-run teacher rating website that alerted me to the fact that my calculus professor couldn't speak very good English, the first and second threads on the campus bulletin-board that urged me to change sections, and the mega-wonder-app that made it possible for me to do so. I now have a better professor, a TA that I have worked with before, and a slightly better schedule that has enough free time blocked during the day for me to get a job, finally. The important thing here, though is that the Internet is coming along to the point where the lives of ordinary (not IT professionals, or hard-core geeks, but ordinary) people here and there are being improved by this technology.
...although I'm mostly just mentioning this as a roundabout way of complaining about my (now former) calculus professor. Sure, his English isn't too great, but it's better than my Chinese, and I am willing to work with that. Prof. Hou just isn't a very effective teacher, that's all. Prof. Wu, on the other hand, is very well-published, and seems to be very passionate about his work, so I will give him a try. In the meantime, I shall "keep on bitching!", as the beloved mistress Shar always urged me to.
I hope Shar's doing alright.
But you keep on bitching too, whoever you may be.

Random media of the update: my new keyboard. It's not much to look at (negative points on form factor), but the key pitch is almost as low as on a miniature keyboard, and fingers glide smoothly over them while typing as though it were a big two-by-four. Not as good for command-line hacking as the old Gateway axe, but perfect for long writing sessions.

"The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends."
Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen said that once. Or maybe she wrote it. Hmm. Anyway, sizable post this time, coming in somewhere under 600 words. Sorry about that...

I'm back in Ames, which probably doesn't mean much to readers not from this specific region of the United States. Just moving from one slice of nowhere to another slice of nowhere, right? Right. It's a ten hour drive, and not terribly interesting for most of the way. Notes from my most recent visit to the "Star of the West":

1. I forgot to mention Dancer in the Dark in my last post, and I regretted it almost immediately. Dancer in the Dark, often called "the Björk movie" because of its Icelandic lead, is very easily the anti-musical. I won't sit here and criticize musicals, because the term "musical" is very broad, as are the terms "coal miner" and "wallpaper", but it is enough to know that I have held a personal grudge against the medium for many years. That grudge vanished when I watched the DVD release of Dancer in the Dark. You would think that Lars von Trier hated musicals even more than I do from watching the movie, for the central story of the film is that of Selma Jezkova, a woman who creates vivid musicals in her mind from the daily routine of her life to make that everyday experience bearable. Yet these incredibly choreographed song-and-dance numbers, in which the people in Selma's life burst out into nonsensical song and dance with the requisite oversized fake genuine smiles, are always ended with a horrible jolt back into reality, a reality that grows worse with each song until the grim final scene that makes the film earn the moniker anti-musical. It is the perfect antithesis to Woody Allen's upbeat Everyone Says I Love You, which I wish I could find locally on DVD... Anyway, if this is not enough proof of Dancer's mightiness, the music is so good even out of context that mighty spasms of disgust and pleasure racked my body when I found some of the tracks on AudioGalaxy. Yow...
2. Props once again to Jesse, by the way, who pointed Dancer out to me in the midst of a New Year's Eve renting binge and more recently made a valiant journey to Mankato, Minnesota. Good luck, man...
3. I think Christie Sandvik is out of intensive care, meaning everyone from the Rapid City Stevens debate team who was involved in the January 3rd car crash has pulled through. If I'm right. Which I most certainly hope I am.
4. For prairie fans: NWI's Hot Type is running a very rare television interview with Garrison Keillor. The NWI site is very minimal, and offers little information, but there are show times at least available on the show's web page for a day or two more. Looks like it will show again tonight (as in Sunday) one final time.
5. Great googly moogly, Haley's voice sounds twice as skillful every time I hear her. Just... wow.
6. The 'fish has webmail available for use now. Hooray for Dreamhost! So once again, if you are in need of email, just ask for one. Please. It would be a great favor...

I think that's more than enough, eh?

Right. I'm not sure what to make of all of this.
Apple has previewed its new iMac, and it looks like a desk lamp or something. A US$1700 desk lamp, natch, but a desk lamp all the same. I have heard agreement on this much at least, and I am glad.
The Euro coinage, it turns out, is rigged to land on heads more often than not when flipped. This was likely unintentional, but it is very good to know.
Finally,

A BBC story and a MeFi thread accompany this. ...I would make light of these two gentlemen were it not for the fact they exist beneath a threshhold of sheer... pity below which wit loses its humorous appeal. Mocking these two would be akin to laughing at a kitten falling down a well as it idylly chases a butterfly, or scoffing at the current plight of NBA superstar Michael Jordan. It would not be fair.

As for myself, I will return to the soybean-saturated fields of Iowa in three days' time. ...yaay. Iowa. Eh. In the meaning time, a happy (slightly belated) birthday to Jesse Jund, and a big "Get Well Soon" to the folk at Stevens High School of Rapid City. Hooray!

I promised a long, drawn-out rant, didn't I?
Well, it has been tabled indefinitely. Sorry!
However, it can be summed up very briefly: in 2002, I need to love more. This sounds rather sappy without the background story, but the background story is lame, so I will leave it at that. In the meantime, however, sound bites:

First, international economics: Well, the Euro is the official currency of n nations, replacing the Deutschmark, the drachma, the escudo, the French franc, the Belgian franc, the Luxembourg franc, the guilder, the lira, the markka, the peseta, the punt, and the schilling as the official currencies of the various nations of Europe. The Register has a status report on the changeover; most of the old currency should be out of circulation by next Thursday or so.
FYI: The symbol for the Euro is €, and it can be encoded in HTML using the Unicode encoding €. One Euro is currently worth 65 pence, ¥118, US¢89, or CAN$1.14.

Second, on a technical note, AIM is hole-y. Holes in the Windows client are nothing new, of course, but they greatly bolster the case for the much improved Trillian, because the people at Cerulean have been much better at checking the bounds on their buffers than the folks at AOL as of late. So, Trillian. Go now. If you're running a Mac, on the other hand, I hear Fire! is pretty good.

Next, and finally, because I'm short on time, personal junk. I'll use a list format:

1. I go back to college on the 11th, a Friday.
2. A 56k modem does not provide a lot of pipe, especially when shared.
3. I saw Lord of the Rings last night, and if you replaced the various races with people wearing different colored sashes or something, and maybe changed the whole "one ring to rule them all" element a bit, you could call it Braveheart 2, and everyone would love it. I mean this in a good way.
4. Haley plays the Rapid City Borders on Saturday from 8 to 10 pm. Tell your friends; she's keeps getting better.
5. Finally, I still suck, and you're still incredible, as far as I'm concerned. You know who you are.

That is all for now. I hope this uploads okay, because I won't be able to validate it...

UPDATE: Big props to Joan for checking me on Haley's show date. It's really tonight, at the usual time.
If you have well wishes, available prayer time, or some good voodoo magic, please throw your positive chi to a young lady named Christie Sandvik. Also, drive safely.
Many thanks,
The Management.

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