If you’re curious about the voter fraud being perpetrated on American voters, you could do worse than to listen to Jack Hitt’s story on the latest episode of ‘This American Life.’ It starts at about 21:45.

I decided it was time to go to the mountains for some mental health.

This is the pond at Gold Creek State Park, up in the Snoqualmie Pass of the Cascade mountains. This is an hour by car from where I live.

The weather wasn’t great for picture-taking, but it’s a nice stroll around the pond. There was a tiny bit of snow, and my hands got a little numb holding the camera, but that just adds to the euphoria, right? Right.

I just want to point out one thing about these photos: My favorite thing in the digital darkroom is GIMP’s quick mask that you can paint. Click to the quick mask, paint a gradient, click back to selection, and then adjust curves and levels. It’s like retroactively putting a gradient filter on the lens, either to bring things out or mute them, or tint them subtly.

Or not so subtly.

I’ve been reading up on panoramic photography again, but I’m doing it under OS 9 for various and sundry reasons, so rather than sending an email to myself with the URLs of the things I’m looking at, I thought I’d share them with you all here. I’m so generous.

Cool panos of a flash flood in Death Valley. Presented first because you, my loyal readers, might actually enjoy it.

Philo’s home page. Philo, it turns out, is a guy who automates the QTVR/pano process with Lego Mindstorm robot kits! And who wouldn’t love a panoramic lampshade? My kinda geek.

Monster list of links having to do with panotools/QTVR.

Panotools tutorial for printable panoramas.

PanoTools for absolute beginners, no apologies to David Bowie.

Thrift store: LaCie 24x10x24 external FireWire/USB CD-RW $9.

Works perfectly. Even after you take it apart and put it back together a few times. But most importantly, you can put an internal Zip drive scavenged from an old PC into the enclosure, turn it on, plug it in to your Mac, and it simply works.

So now I can burn all my old Zip disk stuff to CD and be done with it. Woot.

Concerning comedians as truth-tellers in the context of Lakoff and Orwell, this ‘blog from Nov. 2003 is pretty good readin’, relief for an otherwise taxed progressive movement.

I slept for 18 hours, to get my body back on a more normal day/night routine. Sleeping is easier than staying up for me.

I dreamed a lot. I dreamed a whole hell of a lot, but here’s part of it that I think is amusing. Keep in mind that I’m planning a road trip to Texas.

There’s a fad of walking really long distances. It’s like a pilgrimage, but since this is the US we all determine our own pilgrimage, and what degree of difficulty we want.

I set out to walk from Houston to a mysterious national park in the west, somewhere north of Tennessee. This mysterious national park is a recurring destination in a lot of dreams. When I set out to walk, though, the geography is like Washington state, with mountains and narrow farm roads under evergreens.

I’ve only got the clothes I’m wearing and a book. It’s a travel book. I keep meeting fellow pilgrims who are wearing only jogging clothes, and powerwalking their dogs along hundred-mile stretches of empty highway. I want to say hi to the dogs, who are more interested in the world around them than their owners, but this annoys the owners who pull the dogs along.

After about a year of wandering around with only my clothes and a book, and I mean an actual year here, I get to a gas station. I see some friends there. They’re walking, too, and they got there just ahead of me. We exchange pleasantries. They look around nervously… “Are you coming with us?” I decide to, and they hop into a car that has just come out of the car wash. We peel out, leaving tire smoke.

“Is this your car?” I ask. “That depends on what you mean by ‘ownership.’” We’re out of the parking lot by now, and we immediately hit gridlock. We’re in a stolen car, a few yards away from its owner, stuck in traffic. We all look at each other. One of my friends says, “Well, *that* was a fun joyride.” We all get out and resume walking.

We come to an ancient village, one that’s carved into the rocks. We’re in the middle of a jungle, but the red rocks underneath it have been exposed and carved into huge, distorted human faces. A million other tourists are there, too. I’m reading my guidebook, and it’s telling me that these faces are 1,200 years old, and that people still live in them. I read about one of the houses that’s covered with gold leaf, the ultimate in the local keeping-up-with-the-Joneses competition. There’s a picture of it. I take the book down from my face, and I’m standing in front of it. The view is identical to that in the picture. A brown-skinned woman in white clothes is on the path in front of me. She’s carrying a huge basket of laundry on her head. I’m in her way. I step aside and smile, and she smiles, and I decide to toss the book into the river.

Here’s a snippet from Xoverboard.com:

That said, all this news over the last few days about the GOP efforts to suppress the black vote infuriates me, yet at the same time gives light to the desperation they must be feeling right now.

I can concede to right-wingers that many coincidences and accusations could be overstated, and in same cases maybe even untrue. I do not, however, believe they all are. At least some of these stories: the threatening flyers, the registration challenges… some of these are true. And those are enough to prove the pattern. The Republican Party has gone into panic mode.

I’ve seen this sentiment echoed in a lot of places. It’s an essentially hopeful argument, since it assumes that a candidate with a good message and the ability to lead effectively will be seen as deserving of a win. It assumes that the election will be decided on merit, rhetoric (in the good sense), and the will of the people. But that’s not a safe assumption to make.

It’s true that the Bush campaign is easily seen as completely devoid of moral and ideological high ground. Bush’s record is one of tragic ineptitude, despite the very considerable foreign policy experience of his administration. It’s obvious to everyone who’s looked that there is zip zilch nada that Bush can actually run on, which is why all his ads are about how scary the world is, and how Bush is the only one with the Magical +2 Sword Of Defending. Even though the sword is actually cursed, and rolls -10. Yes, I played Dungeons and Dragons as a young person.. gotta prollem with that?

So to the rational mind, this all seems to make sense: We hear stories about Republicans rigging elections, and we assume it’s because the Bushies are worried. A rational, moral person would see such rigging as an act of last-ditch desperation. But we’re not talking about moral people here… The Bushies aren’t worried, and part of what keeps them from being worried is that they’ve rigged the election.

The Republicans can simply steal the election, because they know that any reports of voter fraud will be denounced as ‘Sore-Loserman’-ism from the liberal media. The party faithful have no problem with doublethink, so it’ll be just dandy with them that their party defrauded its way to the top once again. This is simply how it’s going to play out.

My election predictions: Everyone will lose. We won’t have a result before Thanksgiving.

I can only echo the title of this ‘blog: WTF?

Birds Every Child Should Know, illustrated with photos from 1906.

Did you ever hear a rushing, whirring, booming sound as though wind were blowing across the bung-hole of an empty barrel? The nighthawk, who makes it, is such a high flyer, that in the dusk of. the late afternoon or early evening, when he delights to sail abroad to get his dinner, you cannot always see him; but as he coasts down from the sky-not on a sled, but on his half-closed wings-with tremendous speed, the rush of air through his stiff, long wing feathers makes an uncanny, aeolian music that silly, superstitious people have declared is a bad omen.

Did they talk like that in 1906?

In case you were wondering what the inside of an iBook looks like:

I was going to write a long post about this, but it really wouldn’t be that interesting to read.