Category Archives: Love

Just checkin' in.

Back To School, Music, Spiritual

In which I’m kinda busy!

Last weekend, I had a total blast at Sunbanks (a blues festival near Grand Coulee). Coyote Kings and I played the 2:30 slot on Saturday, and we had an encore and everything! It was freakin’ awesome! The crowd was amazing.

Coyote Kings with Mush Morgan

Then we stayed for another 24 hours and talked to musicians and drank campers’ cocktails and in general had an absolutely fun time! Here’s the photoset.

Tomorrow, I’m flying to Seattle to see Amma. I’ll be home next Tuesday. Om namah Shivaya!

Since there are only two weeks of the term left, I need to be busting ass to make up for the homework I didn’t do last week and won’t do next week. I also need to do laundry and pack. So if you’ll excuse me?

Coyote Kings FTW!

Music

In which it’s gigging season again!

Last weekend, Coyote Kings competed in the Int’l Blues Challenge (held on Clover Island, right before UnTapped kicked off) and we took first place!

2011 Int'l Blues Challenge
Coyote Kings competing at IBC, Clover Island Inn Hotel (Kennewick, WA)

This means we’re going to Snohomish in August to compete against the state’s finalists. And if we win there, we go to Memphis next winter to compete at the national level!

I’ve spent quite a few cycles lately learning the brand-new material and going to band practice and going to UnTapped to schmooze and stressing about the fact that I have no decent gigging clothes because they’re either old or they don’t fit anymore.

Next weekend we’re playing Sunbanks, and I seriously have no idea what to wear. Argh!

Oh, and our new album, Move, will be out in late June!

Observations.

Soapbox

In which there’s just so much stupid shit going on that I can’t keep my mouth shut.

Here’s a list of unrelated items! I am basically bitching, here. YHBW.

1. Republicans Against War? MY ARSE.

Republicans against enforcing the Libyan no-fly zone “because it costs too much” are proof, as if we needed any, that politics are no longer about policy or even a set of beliefs but about absolutely nothing whatsoever. The GOP doesn’t like Obama because he’s a Democrat, and they’re going to block anything he does just to be contrary.

That kind of maturity is really attractive, gentlemen. Not. You rich fucks.

2. Science Fiction Would Have More Women If Not For Patriarchy!

There already are women in sci-fi. There already is science in sci-fi. Yeah, feminism and queer studies are cool, but give it a rest already: not everything is a fucking plot to punish you for having a uterus.

A lot of women don’t like science and just aren’t interested in it, period, and that’s why they drive the market for character-based, sociological science fiction. This is not something men have done! Men are not trying to keep women out of sci-fi, and there’s plenty of hard sci-fi written by women and read by women. Including me. But if I have to read one more hyper-academic, angry, factless article about how science fiction needs more women and more science, and about how those things aren’t there due to some imaginary cultural construct built by the penis people to keep women down, I will seriously go fucking ballistic. Continue reading Observations. →

Okay, listen up, assholes.

Soapbox

In which I smack you around a little.

Here’s the deal. Gaddafi, a crazy person, whose family holds over half of Libya’s entire wealth, has been using a mercenary army to battle unarmed civilians. (A mercenary army made up of non-Libyans hired when Gaddafi lost control of the Libyan army after telling them to shoot their countrymen, their friends and family. These forces are NOT “pro-Gaddafi forces,” as you keep hearing, they are a combination of paid professionals and what’s left of the Libyan national army.)

What’s happening in Libya is that armies of mercenaries hired from sub-Saharan Africa are attacking normal, civilian Libyan citizens. Imagine that. Tanks and soldiers, opening fire into crowds of untrained, unarmed, non-combatant human beings. It would be like the National Guard coming to the elementary school you’re voting in and opening fire, killing everyone in the booths and in line. Do you get it now?

It’s a fucking abomination, a massive violation of human rights. Only a monster would think it’s “none of our business” or that it has “nothing to do with us”: we are the richest, most powerful nation in the world. It’s our duty to help the helpless. If we are capable of standing by while atrocities happen YET AGAIN, we might as well just go ahead and finish dropping dead of heart disease and diabetes en masse, because we deserve it. Continue reading Okay, listen up, assholes. →

Hey! GOP! You're freakin' out. Knock it off.

Soapbox

In which I ramble on about politics and never get to the point.

My country has a seriously fucked up budget. China, Japan, and the UK hold over 2315 billion dollars in US treasury securities. We’re currently $127k in debt per tax payer. And we’re still cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy because it’s supposed to increase tax revenue, even though I can’t figure out how such an approach is supposed to work. (Probably because I’m not an economist and I don’t really care enough to do any deep research.) (What. It’s an opinion piece. Shuddup.)

“As of January 31, 2011, the Total Public Debt Outstanding of the United States of America was $14.13 trillion and was 96.4% of calendar year 2010’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) of $14.7 trillion. Using 2010 figures, the total debt (96.3% of GDP) ranked 12th highest against other nations.”

Congress is trying to balance the budget. Since they’re GOP-heavy, they’re threatening to kill stuff the GOP traditionally doesn’t like, little things like Planned Parenthood and PBS and NPR. I’m upset about these threats because I find these agencies to be both important and useful, and as a citizen I want some of my tax money to go to fund these things.

Continue reading Hey! GOP! You're freakin' out. Knock it off. →

THIS is what net neutrality really means, okay?

Soapbox, ,

In which I explain to you why you must be for net neutrality.

Egypt is missing. The entire country dropped off the Internet today (and the cell network as well), moments after AP video footage of a protester being shot in the head began to emerge. It looks like there’s one network left, Noor, and currently the assumption is that it was allowed to stay connected to the rest of the world only because it carries the country’s stock exchange traffic. That’s one pipe out of 80 massive, country-feeding connections:

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP [border gateway protocol] routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

The Internet was designed to be self-healing. It was built to carry data even after entire cities had been destroyed. If you understood even a little of how core routers work, you’d love the Internet eleven times more than you already do, and you would know how utterly fucked up it is that an ENTIRE COUNTRY has gone dark. 80,000,000 voices have been silenced. Continue reading THIS is what net neutrality really means, okay? →

Where to find a saint.

Love

In which I share the story I was given today.

1.
I went to a volunteer meeting at Helpline this afternoon. After it was over, I rushed across town for my CCNA lab, but class was canceled so I went and got my eyebrows waxed instead. Then I got invited to a jam session, for which I was going to be picked up at four. It was just past two. I decided to stop in at the P&E and say hi to everybody because I haven’t been there in weeks.

I told Susan, the bartender, what I’d learned today, which is that teens are the fastest-growing segment of our homeless population, and that we don’t have a teen shelter. Kids over a certain age aren’t allowed in the women’s shelter, and the men’s shelter and the motels won’t take kids under 18 for liability reasons. When it’s twenty degrees out, it’s important to be inside for the night, but there’s nowhere for them to go. Continue reading Where to find a saint. →

I totally went to Portland over the weekend!

Back To School, Family

In which there’s a little travel, and some work and school.

Toni agreed to drive me to Portland if I paid for gas. Since there was no bus service and the train was full, I was grateful she did so. We rolled out of Walla Walla on Saturday just before noon.

She dropped me off at Leila’s just after dark. (I went to high school with Leila. We lost touch for years, but found each other back when I was married and lived on a farm in Iowa. I’ve seen her a couple times since then.) Continue reading I totally went to Portland over the weekend! →

WikiLeaks

Soapbox, , , ,

In which today’s news storm has got me pretty bothered.

Why is no news source mentioning the most salient fact about WikiLeaks, which is that all the information given to WikiLeaks came from individuals who believed that the information needed to be made public?

None of the information was stolen. WikiLeaks has committed no crime, and neither has Assange.

The idea that government must keep secrets is a wrong one, but it’s so pervasive that questioning it isn’t even part of the current dialog. Military secrets, well, it seems obvious that they need to be protected, but how can any thinking person sanction hiding data on climate change? Continue reading WikiLeaks →