I need a writing assignment.

It will be funny. There will be three characters. Fill in the blanks:

A _______, a _________, and a __________ walk into a bar.

I might not set the story in a bar, but I need three characters.

Update: Uhm… Maybe I didn’t need a writing assignment. I just can’t get it together, so I get an ‘Incomplete’ on this assignment. All those who offered suggestions feel free to nag me about it.

I’ve been absorbed with the million tiny things that drag one down. I’ve also been absorbed with choosing the next hike… We’ve had rainy and overcast weather lately, so less than ideal. But that’s shifting back around, and I might just have to go hike around in the rain if it doesn’t.

I checked out a book from the library, called ‘Hiking the Mountains To Sound Greenway,’ by Harvey Manning. I got it because he’s a hoot to read, and also because he talks about the history, natural and otherwise, of the places.

The Mountains To Sound Greenway is a big ol’ swath of natural areas along the I-90 corridor between Seattle and Ellensburg, which drapes it all the way across the mountains. There’s a whole parallel universe of hiking trails through the mountains, but the Greenway unites their various owners and protectors into a political bloc.

I’m still entertaining the notion of riding my bike all the way across the Iron Horse/John Wayne rail-to-trail path. Issaquah to Idaho. And maybe back. Ride, Forrest, ride!

mefi linked to this Andrew Sullivan article over at New Republic, that talks about how confused conservatism is at the moment.

Now, I agree with a lot of what he’s saying, but he’s missing the most important, most central, most fundamental thing about what’s going on in conservatism, and in Republicanism today. And that is this: The party isn’t confused, it’s being used.

The situation isn’t that ‘conservatism’ is confused, it’s that there are three elements here: 1) People who have a political philosophy based in conservatism. These are the big thinkers over at places like New Republic. They’re moderate to libertarian, and they, like your run-o-the-mill liberal elite, are distinct in that they’ve actually put time and effort into developing an actual, honest-to-goodness political philosophy. They say free trade over government, individual initiative over regulation, jobs over handouts. 2) Conservative movementarians. I call them ‘movementarians’ because I think it’s funny. Real political philosophers would say they are members of the conservative movement, which is unique from actual conservatism. The movementarians’ beliefs don’t care how big government gets as long as it keeps gay people from marrying, or Terri Shiavo from dying. I won’t go much further on this description, because it’d sound like I was trying to make fun of them, but the sad fact is that the conservative movement is self-parody.

Which brings us to the third element: 3) Slick politicians who know what to say to appease both of the above. They talk a good game about smaller government, and then the conservatives can get on board enough to write articles in the New Republic praising their rhetoric, which impresses the conservative movementarians to no end. The slick politicians can then talk about saving Terri Shiavo to appease the movementarians, and the New Republicans will go along begrudgingly because, well… unilateral power is kinda cool, innit?

Sullivan is basically correct, and his article reminds me of Knute Berger’s latest piece in the Seattle Weekly: Onward Secular Soldiers. Berger criticizes the way both left and right have abandoned secularism (the right more than the left, but the left is trying to get a similar momentum).

But basically: If Sullivan and Berger can be saying essentially the same thing in their different contexts, how wrong can either of them actually be?

Via boingboing, it’s Time Management For Anarchists.

Thanks for all the ‘…walk into a bar’ suggestions. I’m mulling over the possibilities.

What I’ve been doing is sleeping all evening because I went to Old Country Buffet and ate a huge dinner. Got home and felt like taking a nap, which ended up lasting four hours.

I couldn’t figure out which old country the name of the place refers to. Is it an old country? An old buffet? It’s not a country buffet, because it was on highway 99, right through the middle of suburban Seattle. A buffet of old countries? I don’t think I’ll be able to parse the meaning of the name.

But, it must be said that Old Country Buffet is ten times better than Golden Corral. Granted, this isn’t saying much. But it is saying something.

June 1st will be World Photography Day.

Take lots of pitchers!

Also: The Gigapxl Project on CBC radio.

Also II: Some great pictures of migrating birds at Bosque Del Apache, a wildlife reserve on the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

I have a book idea and a screenplay simmering around in my head. The problem is that both are too big. In fact, either of them alone would be too big, so the two of them together is bigger than big. As someone who’s programmed computers, I can appreciate the value of being lazy… A programmer who is lazy will accomplish more with less effort. Unfortunately, writing in English doesn’t work that way. One of the things I’ve always tried to do when writing was to give the reader the opportunity to be lazy, because I like books and movies that let you be lazy while also enabling you to be an active participant. So the situation is backwards.

I’ve been writing a little (for absurd values of ‘little’) computer program to wipe free disk space on hard drives. All it does is make a bunch of files and re-writes data across them a few times, according to some rules. No sweat. I did this because there are no freeware or open source programs to do this on Mac OS 9. None that I could find, anyway.

See, I’m getting rid of my old Macs. I have a bunch. Too many. WAY too many. If you want a Mac Portable (the original pre-Powerbook luggable) or an SE/30 or LC III or an 8100/80 with a G4 upgrade card in it, now’s the time to mention it. But these things have hard drives in them, and the hard drives have old data on them, and I’m not sure what the old data is, so I need to wipe them. And there’s no solution that’s free.

One of the reasons I was thinking about Oban for my last entry is that the dates are firmed up for the yearly party in Colorado.

Some friends of mine from online throw a party every year, for a long weekend of frivolity and relative inebriation. It’s a bunch of people who know each other really well but only ever see each other at this party once a year. It’s a crowd who remember the internet from before the web, when there were only like a dozen usenet newsgroups, so part of the fun is getting to hear the oral history of the internet. Dorks, geeks, and nerds, each and every one. Myself included. Perhaps especially.

The scotch connection is that the first time I went to this party, the hosts had been married only a few months previous, and had come back from their honeymoon in Scotland. They had brought back a few hard-to-find single malts, as well, and thus it was my introduction to that side of the alcoholic beverage spectrum. This is why there’s a strong link in my mind between scotch whisky and the Denver sprawl suburbs of Lafayette, Colorado.

Lafayette is pretty close to Boulder, a town I often fantasize about living in. Get a cheap apartment and go hiking all the time… Of course, I could do that here, but I have a leftover romantic notion from when I lived in Texas that Boulder is some kind of wonderful place, wonderful enough to endure the population density and high cost of living. Back when I lived in Texas, escape was more important than thinking these things through.

So I’m going to be headed for central Colorado at the end of June, barring the unforseen. That set of folks is important to me… The fact that we’re a house-full of nerdy people all being nerdy is liberating, in more than a few ways.

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In my imagination right now I’m in a converted warehouse. I’m in a sort of loft thing that’s been built over the main floor.

Down on the main floor is a stereo and it’s got Damien Rice and Richard Thompson on shuffle play. And it’s really, really loud, but the big space and the high quality of this stereo means that loudness doesn’t hurt, it’s just a pleasant happy feeling in your gut.

And I’m up in my little loft with the remote controls, and I’m writing. I’m typing away at a laptop which exists solely for the purpose of writing. Real writing. Writing that doesn’t just play footsies with the audience, but writing that’s a deep, full-body down and dirty nasty. Without condoms.

A shot of single malt. A moment. A sip of water collected from glacial run-off at the top of Mount Baker. Why Mount Baker? Why the hell *not* Mount Baker?

Then it’s back to the kind of writing that makes the bed squeak and groan in sympathetic vibration. Not just a mindfuck like Philip K. Dick (who, incidentally, wrote himself into many of his works, with the name Horselover Fats, a de-Latinification of his name), and not just a body fuck like, well, whoever. But the kind of thing where just reading the first letter of the first word is expression of interest, come on, making out, torrid affair, being chased by someone’s spouse, furtive running through the night, marriage, divorce, resentment, nostalgia, pregnancy, birth, and baby’s first word all at the same time.

Which saves on typing, I suppose. But in my imagination, I’m writing that, and I’m tossing back the Scotch, and I’m listening to dueling Irish traditional crossover songwriters, and I’m living in a big, dingy, ancient, dark warehouse. Let’s say in London just to stay on the emerald Isles. And I’m doing that, forever and ever.

If anyone wants to make this dream take shape, you can start by sending me some Oban. Lagavulin is good, too, but the Oban… Man… It’s a four letter word.

I’ll work out the warehouse and the writing part myself.

‘Sideways:’ Played exactly right. Perfect pacing. No false anything. Paul Giamatti is my new hero. Hint of raspberry and shoe leather.

Another trip to Juanita Bay Park:

It’s not like there are a lot of red winged blackbirds there…

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… The might mallard of chromatic abberation!

OpenRAW, web site devoted to the issue of open source/open standard RAW file formats for digital photography.

Recently, Nikon announced that its new RAW file format (NEF) would contain encrypted white balance data. This meant developers had to get a license in order to get ahold of white balance information in NEF files… Why did they do this? Good question. It’s largely irrelevant information, since the white balance can be guessed or set externally to the file itself, so it’s more a legal roadblock than a technical one. Nikon seems to want to exert licensing controls over its users’ digital workflow, and/or extort licensing fees from, say, Adobe.

It’s a stupid move for Nikon, but it puts the need for an open standard RAW format into sharp relief.