this is getting ridiculous

A suspected pirate ship was sunk on Nov. 18 in the Gulf of Aden by the Indian Navy. The ship now appears to have been a Thai fishing trawler, according to a report.
11/25/2008 NYTimes
I guess the ocean is the last real lawless territory that is regularly traversed by people we (western postindustrial societies) are [...]

craig, lead me not into temptation

I lurk the craigslist free section a lot, I don’t really know why.  everything I’ve gotten off there has been a “but” situation–it works fine, but…
craigslist free lamp: standard floor lamp, with a dimmer dial.  thing is, (other than it’s being ugly as sin) the dimmer doesn’t work quite right–the dial has to be turned [...]

because green has ceased to be a dirty word

just turned off this week’s edition of meet the press, the subject of which was the woes of the american auto industry and whether they should get a bailout, and the options that this nation has for the energy sector—the affable T. Boone Pickens was interviewed about his eponymous plan for american energy independance.
What struck me the most by [...]

if solely defined by drinking the “dark sweet wine,” we’re not so gone

so last night, after returning from a fine senior-citizen’s ball where much port (a brilliant spirit, as fit for consumption now as it was for brautigan and his flea-circus friends in long-ago san francisco) was consumed, and swampdonkeys admired, among other things–after all of that, cycling back to our fine house at 209 mott avenue, [...]

“rust-red scar”

just like all you see of 9/11 in the media is the spectacle of the towers falling, all one sees of hiroshima is the mushroom cloud.  From ground-level the true force of the blast, hidden by the sterile awe of the cloud, is observable on a human scale.  The story behind the pictures is pretty [...]