more like INcontinental, amirite!?

I've been blogging 2 or 3 times a day lately, just never here. Mostly because there haven't been that many good stories on the web lately about excrement. Thankfully, this story got my creative juices...flowing. Poops on a plane. So awesome. Call Sam Jackson.

Today a nasty thunderstorm was rolling over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge as I was coming home on the Belt Parkway. It was really awesome. Here's something else awesome I just found while googling to make sure I spelled "Verrazano" correctly:

Its monumental 693 foot high towers are 1 5/8 inches farther apart at their tops than at their bases because the 4,260 foot distance between them made it necessary to compensate for the earth's curvature. Each tower weighs 27,000 tons and is held together with three million rivets and one million bolts. Seasonal contractions and expansions of the steel cables cause the double-decked roadway to be 12 feet lower in the summer than in the winter. (mta.info)

I've been playing some guitar again. The other night I scribbled what may become the first verse of the first song I've written in a long time.

It's funny because writing songs has never been easy for me, but it's also never seemed so daunting. The first time around I guess I didn't expect much of myself, and the end result was something I consider to be a solid okay. If I end up writing more songs and releasing another record, I want it to be at least kinda good. And with that at the front of my mind, I've been some degree of paralyzed.

But seriously though...how about that plane with the poop on it? So awesome!!!

we also ran

In case you didn't click the link in the last post: My reign as the Program Director of PulverRadio officially came to a close last month when the station was shut down. About 50 million different factors played into its downfall, and I like to think most of them weren't directly my fault. So, I'm still working in the same office, but no longer programming a radio station.

I had a bit of a groove going with the blog at PulverRadio, though, and I've decided not to let that die with the rest of the site. So I'm slowly (very...slowly...) moving the archives over to a new place, and I've started writing again after a short exile. If you care what I think about music, you are cordially invited to visit we also ran. In the next few days, I'll hopefully be posting an interview that I'm really excited about...

Ian Bell on faux-hawks

Ian Bell, a friend of mine and the guy who hired me to run PulverRadio almost 3 years ago, has recently returned to the blahgosphere with a vengeance. A lot his content is pretty techy, and maybe not of interest to you, seeing as you're reading my blog, on which a lot of the content is total bullshit. That said, His most recent post really resonated with me.

Every day I drive from Brooklyn to Melville, NY for work. It's right near the Nassau/Suffolk county line, which is to say: my commute is not short. And since there is often traffic, I have a lot of time to get close to cars in front of me and read their vanity plates and bumper stickers. On Long Island, if bumper stickers and fake ribbon magnets paint an accurate picture of the driver, there's a LOT of "Never Forgive, Never Forget" sentiment, which I think begets the political environment we currently find ourselves in: one in which we're encouraged to "Never Ask."

Ian's post takes issue with the "faux-hawks" (I see what you did there) that didn't bother to ask any questions after 9/11, and now shrug off responsibility simply by saying "we were lied to." I agree with him when he says:

A hockey coach of mine once said that the hardest-working player on the ice should always the guy who just screwed up. That rule also applies here. If you succumbed to the rhetoric of the Bush sycophants and joined the march (to send other people) to war only to realize your mistake later, you owe more to your fellow man than to simply claim you were lied to. You need to, at last, take action to stop the injustice in which you were complicit.

But based on the extremely scientific data I've been collecting on my daily commute, I'm more concerned about the seemingly large number of people who still aren't asking any questions.

I've been losing a lot of sleep lately (really) thinking about stuff like this.

...

Oh, and while I'm getting all politicky, I wanted to point you towards MoveOn's just-launched virtual town-hall on climate change. They're inviting whoever you want them to, and asking questions you tell them to ask. At the very least (and I suspect this is the real point) it will send a clear message to presidential hopefuls that there are a lot of people who will be thinking about the climate when they cast their ballots next year.