I have to write this down before I forget it.

I had a dream about a guy who was in a movie about a guy who played Mickey Mouse in England in the 30s.

The movie centered on the guy inside the mouse suit on promotional tours through England in the 30s.

As a side hobby, Mickey was a bit of a sexual deviant: He got off by kidnapping people, and tying them up in a chair on a railway platform and making them say words in a foreign language. After he had reached his climax, he’d run around in front of the person, who hadn’t been able to see him before. Mickey was fully clothed the whole time, though not in the mouse suit. The only reason he’d run around in front was to say, “See? It’s me!”

So I’m walking through London with the actor who played this Mickey character in a movie. He’s amiable and… I’m kind of attracted to him. I’m showering his performance with praises, saying things like, “It’s so amazing the way you mastered the German and Japanese accents for that role…” He gives an egotistical nod, “Yes, I felt it was quite an accomplishment.”

Then we went into a pet shop full of agitated wild animals.

Hey, look… A daily log of lies told by the Bush administration.

This week Brezsny gives me an assignment to find another of God’s twenty-three kerjillion names. Or two or three. (I linked to Scorpio above, because I read both that one and Sagittarius, since I’m only two days away from the boundary. I find that the Scorpio one usually has more to do with what’s going on with me, so there I am. But I digress.)

God’s already got a lot of names, and that’s part of why he’s confusing. Yes, God is confusing. We get all these people telling them that God told them to do something, God told them to kill abortion doctors, or God told them to invade Iraq (no.. really. Scroll down to the bottom of this). So God’s out there doing a lot of telling and ordering around and stuff. Perhaps. God tells people his name, and they maybe misunderstand and they run around doing stupid stuff because some other guy says God has a different name.

It’s like ‘The Importance Of Being Ernest,’ in a way, come to think of it. But again, I digress.

As Brezsny points out, the word ‘God’ has been overused and abused and stretched beyond recognition. Worn out. It needs replacing.

I forget which sect of Judaism is not allowed to say ‘God.’ They write ‘G-d’ and never speak it. I think this is a g–d idea, but it makes it inconvenient to have a religion where you can’t say the name of the deity you’re trying to worship. “Dear ___. You are so great. We worship you, most holy ____.” It’s like a Monty Python skit or something.

Or maybe they’d wrap it with still more language, as in: “Dear Unameable Deity. We worship you, most holy being of nonspecific nomenclature.” But that just offloads the naming onto some other words, and turns God into a joke. OK, I turned God into a joke just then, but you get my meaning.

I remember reading somewhere that someone said that if it didn’t make you laugh, it wasn’t true. So God isn’t true if God’s not a joke. I’ve also heard of ‘the cosmic joke,’ which might make one laugh, if it turns out to be funny. Maybe God’s new name should just be laughter: “Dear [guffaw]. We worship you, most holy [giggle].”

I’m thinking about a guy I met who also had a complex naming situation. Some called him Fred Jameison, and some called him Beaver Chief. He had couple more handfuls of names that he collected over his life, and he had one after Beaver Chief, before he passed, but I can’t remember it. I can remember him, though, because he would laugh. Among other reasons.

And just saying he would laugh is like saying the roof of the Sistine Chapel is a painting, or that Led Zeppelin was just some drunk guys in a band. BC’s laugh was like a lightning bolt, as awe-inspiring as it was infectious. As full of love and warmth as was humanly possible, but also a little threatening in its spiritual implication.

Really. No kidding. Some people laugh and it’s kinda creepy. BC would laugh and you were kind of creepy, because you held on to any kind of hipster cyncism while BC’s laughter channeled the whole of existence. Laughter as art. Threatening in its spiritual implication.

God lived there. God played in BC’s laughter like a kid on the monkey bars.

Well, I’m not any closer to naming God. Maybe I’ll try again later.

So while I was out eating a bite, I was thinking about a conversation I had today.

I was talking to a friend about the state of the music industry, from the perspective of online music sharing. I predicted that more music would be made available for cheap or free on the internet, and that record labels would end up looking like Apple’s iTunes music sales section. iTunes lets you buy songs for $.99 a piece.

Well, as I was munching on my tater tots, I was thinking about how $.99 is pretty much the minimum retail amount you can charge for anything. It’s the minimum currency. And I was also thinking about how the song is the minimum cultural artifact one can trade online. It’s the minimum currency.

So now that a song is equivalent to $.99, you can buy things for a song. Or two or three songs.

Which reminds me of a song by The Tubes, called ‘For A Song.’

I’ve metabolized the worst of the 9/11 anniversary feelings. But the thing is, feelings seem to metabolize in the same way food does. Either you burn it off or it transubstantiates into fat. I’ve worked off some of it, but there’s some other, lingering sorrow that will be stored for later use, no doubt.

I’m going to talk about capitalism, because I like capitalism. I like the idea that people can take capital and transubstantiate it into wealth.

Capital comes from every angle, especially in these post-modern info-economy times. People are capital. Imagination is capital. Language is capital. DNA is capital. Pretty much anything can be capital if you turn it into wealth, because the definition of capitalism says so. I generally don’t like to live my life by rhetorical definition, but in this case, transforming anything into wealth is a useful idea to carry around.

And being an American, it’s pretty tough, culturally, to say you’re a collectivist or a socialist or whatever. Never mind that most of the business that goes on in the US would count as socialism or collectivism; talking about those things in those ways turns people against you. No, if you don’t want people to look at you askance and mutter, ‘there goes that commie,’ while you walk down the street, then you talk about the free market.

And in that regard, I think the free market is super spiff. No, really. The idea of a market that’s at an equilibrium between regulation and expansion is a lovely thing. The only way for a market to be free is, paradoxically, for it to be regulated. Look at the history of the US to find out what happens in times of laissez-faire non-regulation.

That said, there’s a need in this country for markets to evolve a moral sense. Not in the sense that we should regulate morality, but in the sense that the English mean when they say some things are Just Not Done. You don’t market cigarettes to kids, right? You don’t lie outright in ads, do you?

Predatory pricing, collusion, monopoly… These should be relics of the past, relegated to the scrapheap of history, as forms of commerce shown to harm the public good. Any free market libertarian will tell you that businesses should compete, not cheat. That consumers should be informed, not lied to. They’re loathe to let the government enforce such rules, but they’ll agree those are problems that need to be addressed.

And I’m thinking about all this because I demand better from the marketplace. I want better things, cheaper things, things I can use without feeling guilty about all the things people like me feel guilty about. I want the market to respond to me!

It’s 2003. There are supposed to be hovercars and personal jet packs. Why can’t I get a book that isn’t printed on wood pulp, or fast food that doesn’t deplete the ozone layer? Why haven’t we designed a car that doesn’t make pollution? Why have so many bad product designs been allowed to remain?

Ahem. Anyway. Capitalism. Drives culture and politics. Which in turn drive drive each other, because they both know where their bread is buttered.

I was going to go into a whole ‘nother thing here, because that was supposed to be the preamble to the real meat, but all that talk of fat and bread and butter and meat made me realize that I should go eat instead. The world can live without another brilliant insight.

Sitting here feeling kind of devastated. A curious blend of dizzy, headachey, morose, spiteful, and buzzed.

Just watched the late-night re-run of the World Trade Center episode of Ken Burns’ ‘New York’ series. I watched every episode of that series when it was originally aired, and this episode was produced and released as an addendum this year.

Astonishing footage of astonishing things.

I’ve been in a funk all day, the two year anniversary of 9/11. The right-wing talk radio assholes have been prompting their braindead listeners to accuse ‘liberals’ of having forgotten 9/11. I knew that the GOP presidential convention, a wasteful piece of political theater if ever there was, was going to be held in New York in order to use Ground Zero as a backdrop, but today I learned that there will be a cornerstone ceremony at Ground Zero hosted by the GOP, and that construction there is being scheduled to coincide with the convention. Talk about tasteless.

The dramatic loss of life on 9/11 is being used as political currency, instead of moral currency. It’s always been thus among the self-righteous; they presume to speak for the dead, and for what the dead would have wanted. Bill O’Reilly springs to mind.

But. I’m unable to reconcile any of it. I still can’t reconcile the act itself with anything, which doesn’t trouble me because no one should be able to reconcile it. I can’t reconcile how in two years we’ve moved from heartfelt sympathy from around the world to rejecting the UN so as to invade Iraq for no real reason besides bloodlust and a desire to test our capacity to do such things in the world. I can’t reconcile that it took two years to get the official report on 9/11, and that they wanted Henry Fucking Kissinger to write it. I can’t reconcile that so much opportunity has been wasted and squandered, that the country is led by such bellicose fools.

I don’t know if any of you have seen it, but there’s a video out there on the ‘net, showing President Bush’s reaction to the news that the World Trade Center towers had been hit by airplanes. He was at a school, conducting a photo-op. He was reading a picture book with a group of elementary school kids.

An aide tells him what has happened, and he sits there for some time, with a blank look on his face. He recovers enough to go on reading the book with the kids. Soon the photo-op ends, and he can go off somewhere and read a statement.

It’s the image of a man terrified. Petrified. An honest moment. This was our President being honest with us. Honesty isn’t something you say, necessarily, it’s how you conduct yourself. The deer-caught-in-the-headlights look was not unique; many people all around the world had that same experience. They froze, unknowing. What should they do next? What is one supposed to do when one hears of such news? If more people had seen this footage, they might have said, ‘Yeah, I felt the same way.’

All around the world, people were slogging through their grief and lighting candles and laying flowers at the gates to US embassies. And even then, even at the tenderest moment the history of the world has known, the moment in all of history most pregnant with possibility for change and maturity, the language from our leadership said that you’re with us or you are our enemy. That you’ll either do what we say or we’ll kick your ass. That moment of petrified honesty was replaced by a high schooler defending his girlfriend or something.

And I couldn’t reconcile that. I still cant. I’ve tried. I tried believing it wouldn’t ultimately matter. I tried believing that someone smart, someone with a soul would slap some sense into that moral midget. On and on I tried. Still no reconciliation. George W. Bush, President of the United States Of America, had told the world that it was OK to hate us.

And I’m sitting here, at almost four in the morning, having been unable to sleep because this is the anniversary of a horrible event. And all I can think about is how much was wasted. Wasted lives, resources, good will. Wasted leadership. Wasted words. An absolute lack of wisdom. None to be found. Just a big world-wide gang war. No one trying to do anything but hurt back where they’ve been hurt.

It’s all just sickening.

Music: ‘Flibberty Jib‘, by Lord Runningclam, featuring Ken Nordine

This is a sort of remix of a track recorded by Nordine in the late 50s. It sounds like he got Ken in the studio to re-record the spoken parts.

The original story is darker and more cynical. In the end, those who were jealous of the talent of the Flibberty Jib man run him out of town, and all the magic goes with him. Time passes, and another stranger comes to town and casts a spell over everybody with his chanting. And so on, et cetera. That’s the way things have always been in our town. By the way, how are things in your town?

Ain’t nothin’ else to say today.

Why I Love The Internet:

Art Of Resistance’s George W. Bush mosaic. Contains naughty pictures. Parents, ask your kids before clicking.

Why I Hate Windows:

WARNING: SERIOUS GEEK TALK AHEAD.

I have a piddlin’ little Pentium 200, mostly so I can run Slackware Linux and experiment with GNUstep. It also has a Windows98 partition (a separate hard drive, actually). The other day while I was at the computer junk store, I paid $4 for a video card for this little box. A Diamond Multimedia Viper V330, a tiny incremental step up from the S3 Trio64+ motherboard video in the box.

What follows is a play-by-play of my attemps to install this thing.

First: Open case, install card, hook up monitor. Easy.

Start up computer. Tell LILO to boot Windows, thinking there’s more chance of immediate gratification than having to reconfigure XFree86 under Linux.

Wrong. Windows boots to 640×480 and starts up the process of figuring out what to do with the new hardware. A handful of driver files are missing from the Win98 CD, so it never really completely installs.

I go to my Mac to download a card-specific driver. What I encounter is DriverGuide.com, the most horrid tech site ever to exist. They’re the only site I found to have the driver I needed, but they require registration.

Registration involves the following: Giving them your email address and about ten thousand pieces of personal information. Which I faked. Then they ask you if you want to receive newsletters about the following topics… and about three web pages full of little check boxes next to various topics. Then they tell you to check your email which will contain your special personalized user account and password.

I’m here to tell you, folks… The username is ‘drivers’ and the password is ‘all.’ Personalized to the max.

Once you enter this special account information, and then try to download something, the web server will ask you to copy a random number off the screen into a form, which you then submit. They do this so they can keep people from doing automated downloads of their valuable marketing tool.

So having walked their forced-marketing gauntlet and downloaded the driver, copied it to a floppy disk, and opened it up on the PC.

So naturally, having installed it on the PC, it doesn’t work. I end up back in 640×480, unable to switch to other color depths.

Back to the Mac, back to Google, I discover that there’s a flash ROM update available. Perhaps the driver is expecting an up-to-date ROM on the video card, and is bailing when it doesn’t get it..?

I was using the Mac because the network connection wasn’t working on the PC, but I discovered it was a bad cable. So, in 640×480 glory, I run IE and download the ROM upgrade.

This little program is the least user-friendly program ever devised, considering that end-users are supposed to use it to potentially ruin their video card. But. I’m super-user, right? First of all, it has to be run in DOS. Not a DOS shell under Windows, but DOS. So I restart yet again. After much head-scratching, I figure out that the R command line switch means ‘flash the updated ROM into that thing!’ So I do it. It gives me an ambiguous result notification: ‘ROM update ambiguously ambiguous.’

I cross my fingers. I restart the computer. Something new happens… Windows starts, but after a few moments, the screen goes black and I get an error message: ‘Wrong NV chip revision for this Resource Manager.’

Flash ROM upgrade error? ROMs newer than the driver? Fark.

So it’s off to Google again, where I eventually find that there’s an incrementally newer driver out there. Rock on! sez I. I’ll just download it, and install it, and all will be well!

Hold on, though. After getting this NV error, Windows will only let me reboot into ‘Safe Mode,’ wherein I can’t access the network. However, there’s a ‘Safe Mode with Network Access’ option, wherein, again, I can’t access the network.

No biggie, sez me, I’ll just download the thing, put it on a floppy, and sneakerNet it over to the PC (which is actually just a turn-the-chair-Net, but sneakerNet sounds so much cooler). Snag: File is too big for inclusion on a floppy. Solution: Burn a CD! Snag: Mac OS Disk Tools won’t let me burn a DOS disk. Solution: Roxio Toast, CD burning software! Snag: ‘Safe’ mode won’t recognize the CD! It won’t recognize any CD, in fact.

Solution: LINUX!

No, really. Reboot to Linux. Edit /etc/X11/XFree86Config to use the ‘nv’ driver instead of the ‘s3′ driver. ‘startx.’ Download the new driver from the web to the DOS partition.

Reboot. In ‘Safe’ mode. Unpack the driver archive. Run the installer. Error message: “This installer cannot run in Safe mode.”

So. I remove the video driver from windows. I tell it I’m removing the card. I fool it into being less smart. I rip the old driver out like a still-beating heart, drinking the blood oozing from the attached arteries.

Reboot. 640×480. Run the fucking installer. It completes. It tells me to reboot. I reboot.

Error message: “Wrong NV chip revision for this Resource Manager.”

Linux works fine, however.