The Ebert Club newsletter, I just realized, usually ships with links to two or more 1940s era films linked on YouTube. I wonder if there’s a feed for the film links. For some reason my YT ID is not my google ID, which seems goofy.
Pushing Twenty
It occurs to me that 2012 is almost surely the twentieth anniversary of my hearing of the miscellany we now call the Internet via an article about Mosaic and the barely nascent web in a (possibly defunct) magazine called Puget Sound Computer User.
Incredibly, I seems I have made my living from the Internet more or less since 1996 or so.
Furnishings
Rearranged the heck out of the TV room furniture, more to come. For some reason we had a bunch of glassware in an inaccessible corner and now all of that is out closer to the dining area.
With luck, I will have resurrected all my old-media devices by the end of the week. We had the turntable and tape deck all set up for the first couple years in this house but we moved a bunch of stuff around about three years ago and they never got hooked up again.
Which reminds me, I have a mysteriously non functional 1080p projector I am due to take an annual crack at again.
A poor way to spend a night
Last night I tormented myself with visions of a plumbing-pipe based flat-panel TV mount. Measuring, counting, keeping a parts manifest. Most of this was in my sleep, except every so often I would convince myself that the device needed a crucial part that I did not know the name or availability of and WHAM my eyes would pop open and I would scrub the Internet fruitlessly for whatever seussian pipe joint I had imagined.
Hunh, I suppose that all can legitimately be considered a pipe dream. Although I am confident to do so constitutes etymology abuse.
Rules to live by
All over everywhere today, but, full of wise thought: Woody Guthrie’s “New Years Rulins”, 1943:
1. WORK MORE AND BETTER
2. WORK BY A SCHEDULE
3. WASH TEETH IF ANY
4. SHAVE
5. TAKE BATH
6. EAT GOOD – FRUIT – VEGETABLES – MILK
7. DRINK VERY SCANT IF ANY
8. WRITE A SONG A DAY
9. WEAR CLEAN CLOTHES – LOOK GOOD
10. SHINE SHOES
11. CHANGE SOCKS
12. CHANGE BED CLOTHES OFTEN
13. READ LOTS GOOD BOOKS
14. LISTEN TO RADIO A LOT
15. LEARN PEOPLE BETTER
16. KEEP RANCHO CLEAN
17. DONT GET LONESOME
18. STAY GLAD
19. KEEP HOPING MACHINE RUNNING
20. DREAM GOOD
21. BANK ALL EXTRA MONEY
22. SAVE DOUGH
23. HAVE COMPANY BUT DONT WASTE TIME
24. SEND MARY AND THE KIDS MONEY
25. PLAY AND SING GOOD
26. DANCE BETTER
27. HELP WIN WAR – BEAT FASCISM
28. LOVE MAMA
29. LOVE PAPA
30. LOVE PETE
31. LOVE EVERYBODY
32. MAKE UP YOUR MIND
33. WAKE UP AND FIGHT
Quetzalcoatl
Crazy elaborate dream in which I inadvertently helped birth, I guess, an aquamarine colored lizard that went through a tadpole phase and then became larger and larger. It was in some sort of public pool, like at the base of a fountain, as a tadpole. I started scratching its head. It began to grow very quickly. It had forelimbs only, no hind legs, and at the root of the forelimbs there were two wings and a snake shaped blunt nosed head.
Once I realized it was a quetzalcoatl I became concerned because it was becoming much larger very quickly and moving around the pool faster and faster. At this point people began to be concerned. It jumped out of the pool and begin to fly around at this point was about five or 6 feet long.
People were running everywhere and it was chasing kids, and eventually started chasing a dog. It looked very much like it intended to eat the dog. I was upset and running after it yelling at it.
To my surprise it stopped and came back to me very much like a dog that has been yelled at. Somehow I figured out that because I’d scratched it in the pool and played with it it imprinted on me as a parent or something.
Eventually I took it home and introduced it to the pets, to Lark and George and Rocket. To my surprise it got along with them and somehow altered his appearance so that was sort of pseudo furry except for the face which was pink and pointy and had snake eyes. It never did get hind legs.
Then there was a really confusing section of dream in which I found myself visiting with Scott Southwick in his gigantic Orientalizing mansion, presumably the fruits of his ice cream empire, before my sister came to pick me up in our run down RV.
On the rocks
From an image that zipped by on fffound
Irresponsible provocations
It’s not mysterious or anything why there is no decent source of legit digital editions for high-counterculture era underground comix. The licensing issues must be quite sufficient to drive any random number of publishing enthusiasts and idealists to suicide every year.
Clearly, what is called for is a complete fraudster, a rip-off artist of epic proportions. One would think that a bankster or Wall Street reaver would have had the gallows humor to at least attempt bringing these crucial documents to the era of pixels and LED induced sleep disruption.
I mean, I do find it ironically amusing that my best bet for reading the Shelton/Mavrides masterworks is to download PDFs from Russia, but having actually consumed beers with one of them, I would honestly prefer to give them money for the privilege.
Lark
Headaches
The past few days have been devoted to trying to figure out why my accounting system is not accurately reflecting a wide variety of costs and expenditures for the year.
Happily, today I was able to lay hands on some numbers that clearly indicate my head figures are correct but the numbers I have been diligently tending for nine months in Quickbooks are completely fucked up. As you might imagine, I find this maddening as hell.
It appears that yes, I have been entering the transactions correctly into the program, but that the program has been, apparently arbitrarily, excluding a VERY LARGE subset of data from certain cost categories. And by arbitrary, what I mean is a giant swath of actual, money-out-the-door expenditures appear to have been treated as income!
I spend something like fifteen hours a week on bookkeeping, because I am trying my damnedest to be a fucking adult. Yet it seems clear that had I simply waited until year end and gathered the data as I have in the past I would have had an accurate accounting system with no cost to me beyond my (surely less than fifteen hours a week) labor. I am mighty pissed. Here, I’ll just light this pile of several thousand dollars on fire and call it a business expense. That’s not too different from my time and cash investment in this bookkeeping stuff this year. Aargh.