Earlier, I blogged about how you could get the waving-American-flag screensaver and modify it to be more subversive, substituting adbusters’ Corporate America flag for the official one.

And, after watching that corporate flag wave a few times, I decided to go back to the old stars and stripes, and here’s why:

It’s my country, too.

According to the national narrative, ‘the left’ (typically defined as ‘anyone to the left of Ghengis Khan’) is supposed to hold the flag in disdain. Opinion-shapers told a story where ‘the left’ was supposed to be troubled by the flying of flags after 9/11, where the exuberance of flags in the back of pickup trucks was viewed as a sort of creeping fascism.

But you know what? I trust the flag a whole hell of a lot more than I trust Donald Rumsfeld. I trust blind nationalism more than I trust Dick Cheney. And I trust Kate Smith’s sincerity when she sings ‘God Bless America’ much, much more than I trust George W. Bush.

Earlier today I got up and went through my morning ritual of making coffee.

As I held the grinder in my hands, pressing down on that little button that makes the thing go, I thought to myself, “Is this ground fine enough? Or is it too coarse?” I answered with, “It’ll do fine.”

I put the grounds in the French press, added the boiling water, and so forth.

Fast forward to me sitting here at the computer, taking a sip of coffee, and having something stick to my teeth. I wiped it off with my finger, and looked at it, and there it was: A roach leg. Fully articulated.

So naturally I had to toss it out and make some more coffee.

But the lesson here is: No, I didn’t grind it fine enough.

Oh, and speaking of lighting up the world with LEDs…

I want a bunch of these, cuz they’re just cool.

Not long ago, I wanted to tell everyone everything. I sent out the telegrams to everybody, here on the ‘blog, in email and usenet and over the phone and in conversations in the middle of the night and with total strangers who might not even be able to care less.

I just wanted everyone to know, in the way you know things about someone when someone else tells you about them. Like, you find out that someone’s an alcoholic because a third party tells you so, and you base the validity of the information on your evaluation of the third party. There don’t seem to be any third parties in my life, which worried me, because that means everyone who has an indirect opinion about me can’t possibly really know.

So I told everybody. I laid it all out, like the big fabric disk you put under your Christmas tree, decorated with snowflakes and reindeer. Spread out to display the truth and keep the needles from getting stuck in the carpet.

Only, the fact of the matter is that everyone makes up their own story anyway. No one seems to feel safe in assuming that my narrative of my own life is any more trustworthy than that of a third party. Most frustrating of all, most people aren’t even aware that they are evaluating my narrative in this way; they think they’re being objective.

(One might say that the preceeding attitude is informed by my Aspie tendency to have a horrible aversion to being misunderstood and misrepresented. But that’s just another narrative.)

I haven’t had much to say around here, because I’m burned out on introspection, and I’m burned out on telling people things they’ll misunderstand anyway. I’m burned out on trying to make the connection. I’m burned out on wishing it could be better, easier to quit being so alone.

I think that, ultimately, the problem is that no one has come up with a better narrative. They’ve come up with narratives of denial, where I don’t really have the problems I have, and they’ve come up with narratives of celebration, where I am a beautiful and unique snowflake, and all I have to do is keep banging my head against the problems I have in order to be recognized as beautiful and unique before I.. well.. melt. They’ve come up with narratives where I spend too much time in my head, where I harbor a secret resentment, where I’m a partisan hack, where there’s nothing I can contribute.

If any of these narratives were anything besides formulaic plot lines delivered from Dr. Phil to my ears, it might be interesting. But the sad fact is that very few people have risen beyond that level of triteness, and here I sit waiting for input, because the narrative from where I sit is far too interesting and removed of cliché to really help me. I’m more William Burroughs than Charles Dickens. Hard to read, leaves you feeling creepy, alters your perception of space-time.

I mean really… Don’t they teach people to write any more? Do people feed their minds with anything besides Oprah, Jimmy Kimmel, romance novels and action films nowadays? How hard can it be for people to keep up with an outspoken pan-sexual autistic writer programmer civil libertarian progressive greenie inventor philosopher photographer? And that’s leaving out the really difficult stuff.

I need a narrative for myself. A revision of the code. A new CVS commit. One that isn’t blurted out, but allowed to be seen in patches and keyholes. A narrative that includes the lens to hand the other person so they can look through it to me and see what needs to be seen. The concerns an autistic person might have, I suppose.

It reminds me of a quote from one of my heroes, Kate Bornstein (approximated here): “When people look at me, I have no idea what they’re seeing, but I do know that it’s cute.”

If you have a Mac, and you’re running OS X, you might be interested in this patriotic screen saver called Old Glory. It’s an OpenGL 3D animation of an American flag waving in the breeze.

Once you’ve put it in your ~/Library/ScreenSavers folder, you can control-click on it, and show the package contents. In the Resources folder, you’ll find a file called OldGlory.tiff, which is the flag graphic you see waving in the breeze. You can replace this file with any graphic image you prefer, as long as you rename it ‘OldGlory.tiff.’ I suggest this image, which may need a little cropping in order to appear perfect.

If you want up-to-the-blog-second reports on how Bush’s UK visit is going, from the perspective of an anti-Bush activist, then check this out: http://www.interwebnet.org/.

I’ve been exploring topics through gnutella. That is, I wanted to make mix CDs of songs about life, home, death…

This was inspired by my new theme song, which I heard on KUOW’s ‘Swing Years And Beyond,’ spun by the inimitable Amanda Wilde. (Can it be her real name?)

She played a version of ‘Life Is So Peculiar’ by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. I couldn’t find that recording on gnutella, but I did find a version by Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan, which you can listen to if you click here.

I actually liked the Bing/Andrews version better, because it was more orchestrated. And somehow it’s far more surreal hearing Bing Crosby singing the words: “When I get up in the morning there’s nothing to breathe but air/And when I look in the mirror there’s nothing to comb but hair.”

Interesting project to light up the world with LEDs. Of particular interest is the way LED tech could be built into other materials, such as roofing.

Their innovation flows from this realization:

This major goal is being achieved by the use of a safe, simple, healthy, affordable and reliable form of home lighting using low energy (1-Watt) White Light Emitting Diodes (WLED) Solid State Lighting (SSL). A child can read by the light of a single WLED which consumes less than 1 Watt. Thus, a rural home can be lit to a very useful level of illumination with ONE watt.

Solid -State lighting technology along with our processes can reorient development strategies toward the creation of enterprise, increased employment, enhanced income and gender equity, health and safety, and protection of the physical environment.

Tooth: Still chipped. Appt. tomorrow.

Car: The problem wasn’t the muffler. Today I make appt. with a real mechanic instead of the Midas guy. He guessed it was the fuel injector on cylinder 1, but I can plainly hear it clicking in there. My guess is timing, and/or the fuel injection electronics, but what makes something like that go out of whack all the sudden? Beats me, unless it’s time to replace the timing chain. And I only guess that because it’s a worst-case scenario. Pessimism in the air…

Meanwhile, I’m stir crazy because I can’t drive anywhere. Or at least, shouldn’t.

Hello. I am a nerdy geek. I think you should watch this Most Excellent Star Wars Fanfilm. Be sure and watch the trailers, because they’re really extra bits of movie and not trailers at all.