The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, But It Will Be Blogged
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While previous research has been limited, this appears to be a higher rate than This study found that 71 percent of older adults used some form of alternative The researchers used data from the 2000 The survey asked about the use of six types of alternative medicine: chiropractor, |
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Fortunately, there are still plenty of areas in which
from The Boston Herald original article from Forbes, "The |
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Having been enlightened to the danger of posting these Personally, the Dowbrigade would place the three lampooned from Ted |
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 SYDNEY (Reuters) – A baggage handlerwearing a camel suit taken from a passenger’s luggage has left Qantas Airways red-faced, with Australia’s national carrier investigating a potentially embarrassing security lapse. Passenger David Cox complained after he saw a baggage handler driven across Cox, a marketing manager, had checked the camel suit and a crocodile costume He said he was standing near his boarding gate and at first thought nothing "I obviously was flabbergasted. My jaw dropped to the ground," Cox from Reuters |
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It began as innocent chatter over AOL Instant Messenger, the 14-year-old The alleged payback was brutal, police said, ending with the girl The girl, who spoke on condition that she not be named, shared the story from the Boston Globe |
Blogging from the Astoria Cafe inside the Simon Bolivar International Airport in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Today’s flight is the longest of the return voyage; had to be at the airport; three hours early and don’t get to Miami until 11:25 tonight, 10 hours later. This seems to be due to a short (15 minute) stopover in Quito, the Andean capital of Ecuador.
When they finally call the flight, streaks of Aemrican paranoia started reverberating over the trip even while we were thousands of
miles from American shores. After slip-sliding through the easiest green light trip through the
Lima airport – no lines at immigration, bags off the belt as soon as we got there, no check at all at customs, like a dream off the plane and out the door into teeming Lima in ten minutes -, we discovered why the simplke four hour flight from Guayaquil to Miami was going to
take 7 hours (plus the three hours beforehand now universally required of all international travelors). First the early check-in in GYE. Finally, we were allowed to board the plane, feeling queasy, happy to
see an empty row, stretch out. Back in our drinking days, we would have spent the time in the airport bar, then waiting for the on-board drink service to open up…..
Freezing in our red Red Sox World Champion shirt (why do we never rememberr that airports and airplanes are kept at refrigerator temperatures) until we sat down and could wrap up thin the blacket. We were feeling raw and mean –
a far cry from our normal friendly laidback resting state. In fact, this is the first time on the
whole trip, drunk opr sober, straight or stoned, come to think of it, that we have been in a bad
mood. Vacation over. Side out. Back to the First World, the grim cold expansionist reality of the American empire. On our way back to the Fatherland, we felt as if we were going through some kind of drug withdrawal. This is not a good sign, at least as far as finishing out
our career and our marriage in the merry old town of Boston. We may be heading for another
stretch in self-imposed exile, but its too soon to say. Lots of interesting projects simmering in
the states right now as well.
Luckily we will be able to stay wrapped up in the blanket, in our two seats, during the stopover in
Quito. We thought. But, no, capian’s voice comes over the speakers , “Ladies and Gentlemen, In order to comply
with new United States security regulations, we will be performing a thorough security
check of the cabin during our breif stopover in Quito. All pasasgers traveling to Miamai will
please exit the plane with all of their carry on luggage and proceed to the In Transit waiting areas.
What the fuck? Did they think that a dastardly band of terrorists were going to somehow smuggle a
bomb or boxcutter on board, or get one passeed to them somehow? While we were in the AIR between Guayaquil and Quito. We had just gone through the whole
security drill in Guayaquil, 25 minutes ago, and, to our experienced eye it was indistinuuishable
from the security we go through at that same airport when we flu directly to Miami.
So they took us off the plane, qnd had us make a quick 100 foot circle, in wht process of which we
were handed a wornd blue card labeled “Transit”, forced to empty our pockets and bags and go
through the exray and metal detector drill, have our passports examined, presnet our bording passes
and turn back in the transit cards for later use. We didn’t even get a chance to sit down in the
transit lounge before they were hustling us back through security and onto the plane. We started
looking around for someone to pick a fight with. there was a suspicious-looking nun sitting just
ot our left, and we were thinking about giving her a hard time about the Pope’s taste for Polish
sausage and corporeal punishment, when we were shown back to our seats.
Finally flew into Miami International at 11:30, and got picked up by Chips, International. More tomorrow, back online live from our home port of Watertown Ma.
After a hearwarming reunion with Number One Son and a quick consult with Dr. Mercurio, chiropractor to the Sopranos, late of Jamaica Plain, we are headed back to the airport for the three-stage run for home.
Today, back to Guayaquil. Tomorrow, GYE to Miami, and Thursday Ft. Lauderdale back to Boston, hopefully arriving in time for the Thursday Night Bloggers Meeting at the Berkman Center. We have been absent for too long from the important and interesting Blogging 101 project, of which we are the nominal coordinator of Phase I, and look forward to sheparding it to a partial resolution.
Our camera and notebook are full of photos and notes which will constitute fodder for follow-up posting over the coming weeks. We can
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Just when you thought the Federal Election Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a notch and announced yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.
Blogs that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits, according to Chad Jacobs, a San Francisco City Attorney.
This is certainly a bizarre development. Why only local candidates? Does it apply to blogs hosted in Timbucktu as well as SF? Does an inspirational sack of the Kind constitute a “blog related expense”? Are they supplying their own free traffic meters? If you mention the names of all five candidates to a local office, do you have to pay five registration fees? Is this the wave of the future?
Having kids changes everything. While we try to digest the blockbuster news from Dowbrigade, Jr., down here in Lima, Peru, a massive city redolent with memories from our formative years, when we were the age of our son, our thoughts have been turning to Number 2 Son, back in Boston after a year of helping his brother get their Eco-tourism hotel off the ground. More on that soon, including the Grand Opening of the Villa Maria Eco-Hostal Web Site.
But back in Boston, our second son is embarked on one of the crucial rites of passage in our modern transient society; fucking up your first apartment, and the inevitable disasters attendant on learning to live on your own, on a fixed budget, in a society where financial overextension is always as close as the daily mail, telephone cold calls, or in-store shills offering plastic manna from the financial offices.
At 20, armed only with his high school diploma, a spectacular wardrobe contributed by his paternal grandfather, a trial lawyer who restocks his suits with every change in the seasons, and words of encouragement from his father, he began the bitter, soul-sapping process of getting his first “real” job. He was further motivated by “Tough Love” advocate and step-mother Norma Yvonne, who let it be known that should his efforts fail to bear fruit, in terms of a real job and his own apartment, his options were basically, live with his mother in Atlanta (which he hates), go back to South America, or join the Army. In other words, continuing to camp out in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment in Watertown was not an option.
To make a long story short, with considerable help from the Dowbrigade, he managed to get a job and a one-bedroom apartment of his own, which, by splitting the rent with the latest in a long string of neices from Ecuador who have come to visit Aunt Norma and end up staying to work or study, he could just afford on his sparse salary.
Few young couples in the history of the world have been so mismatched and unprepared for the reality of living on their own and creating a viable lifestyle. Their misadventures were immediate and legendary, and the situation, during my current absence in Ecuador and Peru, is appearntly approaching meltdown. One more delightful crisis to be dealt with on our return later this week.
As an example of what we are talking about, let us offer the above photograph, and the story behind it. During the third week of his new life as a phone agent at a downtown talent and modeling agency, once he got over his disbelief that he could actually do a real job and that his being hired was not some kind of cruel joke, he decided to go for a new look.
In an attempt to garner a certain kind of attention, one day after work he dyed his long, curly light brown locks an eerie phosphorescent orange color. All the more surprising since, as opposed to his older brother, who is rapidly covering his entire young body with tatoos and piercing, second son has so far eschewed all body decoration or sylistic embelishments. Working at a modeling agency must have inspired him.
Unfortunately, his boss was not as taken with the new look. In fact, our son was told in no uncertain terms that if he returned to work the next day with orange hair, he should look for another job. As soon as he got out of work that day he went straight home and had Marcella, Norma’s neice, shave his head completely bald. Including his eyebrows (which he had also meticulously dyed orange). Athough unable to get a shot of the breif orange phase, when he visited the following day with his bald pate we snapped the above photo.
The boss was chagrinned, but what could he do? He HAD told my son not to come back with that hair. Since said son is now sort of scary looking, he has been instructed not to come out of the back room when there are clients in the office, until at least his eyebrows grow back.
Were we ever so clueless and starry-eyed? It doesn’t seem so, but perhaps our parents would have a different opinion. Meanwhile, we will try to just guide him through the next few steps in the process of becoming a functional cog in the great American economy without self-destructing or being driven into institutionalization.
More shocking revelations on the Dowbrigade Boys coming soon…..
A Dutch war memorial that goes up and down, and spurts flames may be scrapped after complaints it looks like a giant penis. The Liberation Monument is a giant copper obelisk that rises and falls depending on the level of sunlight, and spurts flames out of the top during important festivals. It is due to go on show in the village of Wageningen where the German capitulation was signed at the end of the Second World War 60 years ago. In full sunlight, the erection reaches a height of ten metres, shrinking back to just six metres when the light dims. It was due to be exposed to the public at an official ceremony in May but now village councillors say it should either be scrapped or radically redesigned. A spokesman said: “Any association with a phallus is undesirable, whether justified or unjustified, and is to be avoided at all costs.” from Ananova |
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Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers has stirred controversy on and off the Ivy League campus with his recent comments suggesting that women may not have the same ”intrinsic aptitude” as men when it comes to math and science. Three books reviewed by freelance writer and former educator John Budris tackle the topic of gender differences, what research says and what it means for parents and teachers as they work with children. from the Boston Globe |
From time to time, the ebb and flow of the news tides wash up a certain kind of detrius which we pick up and file away because they remind us of Richard Farnsworth (not his real name), a kid from our freshman dorm in Harvard Yard, yo these thirty long years ago. Tidbits like the death which tragically cut short the Papacy of John Paul I, and now, 26 years later, the “merciful” heart attack which spared the most recent Pope a prolonged and undignified period of incapacitation before expiring. Young Farnsworth was full of vim and bizarre ideas. His field was electromagnitism, and was always ranted on about phased projection of electromagnetic fields and whatnot. Quite frankly, the young Dowbrigade understood nary a word, which was not suprising, seeing as our field at the point was psychology, which we dropped as soon as we figured out that everyone in the Psych department was clinically psycho and mostly just trying to figure out why. The next year we changed to Anthro, which we found much more sane and outward looking. But we digress. By November, it had become appearant what Farnsworth’s true obsession was. He was fascinated by the idea of a Heart Attack Machine. Appearantly, seeing as the heart is a bio-mechanic pump regulated by electical impulses, a powerful enough electromagnetic field can interfere with the impulses and basically stop it like pulling a plug. According to Farnsworth, this had already been proven (he didn’t get into what kind of experiments had “proven” it), but the only “problem” was that the machinery required to project an electromagnetic field of sufficient intensity filled half a room, and require a power connection many times what was available from a normal household socket. Plus, the effective range of the thing was only about 2 or 3 meters. You would have to get the victim to walk directly in front of a huge, immobile maching to actually kill anybody. However, again according to Farnsworth, he had devised a way to phase the electromagnetic field, in such a way that it required much less power to generate, and could be projected at least twice as far. Combined with recent advances in miniaturization, he said, it was at that time feasible to create a version of the HAM that would fit into a large suitcase. If someone would only give him an adequately equiped lab and an unlimited budget, he could do it. We thought him utterly mad, although undoubtedly a genius. And that was 30 years ago, by now, the damn thing probably fits into a breifcase, or even a laptop. So whenever a farflung foreign leader, or a significant role player in any of the arenas of human endeavor we track, convieniently dies of a heart attack, we remember old Farnsworth. Whatever happened to old Farnsworth? We never found out. In early December of that same year, he just disappeared from campus. One day, his suitemates came back from class, and all his stuff was gone. They, and some of us who had gotten to know him (he had no real “friends”) went to talk to officials up to Dean of Students Archie Epps, but they refused to tell us anything. It was as if he had never existed. But we suspected we was in a well-funded laboratory somewhere, working on his obsession. Whoever came up with the Polish Pope idea pulled off the most brilliant stroke of geo-political manipulation in history. The intense Catholicism of Eastern Europe in general, and Poland in specific was the Archilles heel of the mighty Marxist empire. It was the sore, which once inflamed, errupted into the cancer that killed the beast of Communism. Of course, they had to get rid of that short-shelf-life “mistake” Pope to get their man in, but it was worth it. Now, the greatest Pope of many lifetimes has been shuffled ceremoniously but expeditiously off the stage by another heart attack. Ane we are reminded yet again of Richard Farnsworth (not his real name) and his Heart Attack Machine. |
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Nearly three out of every four adults over age 50 use some
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Is it possible for a monument to be TOO phallic? Isn’t that the whole point of the Big Dick Monument Movement?