http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/07/13/secret-missions-by-republican-operatives-thinning-hair-weird-press-releases-and-an-utter-inability-to-return-phone-calls

Five New York Times reporters piece together the circumstances leading up to Palin's resignation. No huge revelation, just a thousand little ones.

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I don't understand these days where I wake up and feel like nothing is going to happen. I hate those mornings. That's the worst feeling. I don't understand how I can feel that way after living here for 15 months. On those mornings, I dive in and out of sleep, so tired, but unable to wake up. It's a feeling of disconnection from my environment--I don't understand what the point of all this shit my rent supposedly pays for, it doesn't have anything to do with what's important to me, what makes me happy. It doesn't matter.

And then in the afternoon I call up my new friend Edwin, and he comes over at 7:15, we drink the good wine Chris gave me for my birthday, and he takes me out to a swish Peruvian restaurant on the Embarcadero when he finds out my birthday was two weeks ago. This is a man who knows how to live life. The food, view, company, and waitress are all delicious. I am rich. These moments are high, but too fleeting, I don't want them to end; although since I started this (temporary) job, there's been a higher frequency of them then ever before, due to several of the other teachers being pretty awesome. This is just the beginning, I want to think, about time.

How come nothing ever seems to last
Why does everything fade away so fast

I'm afraid too much of my youth is being squandered in distant melancholy. This is ridiculous. I live for the surge of brightness which envelops peaks, weaving in and out of modes, laughter inspired by dialogue too surreal to be anything but secret. I need to leave this place.

I feel in a deep shit every time I have to handle conversation with married men. I can almost decide not to be in a relationship just because I can’t handle the anatomy, that of a dick. I can’t say jealousy as well if I can ditch a man. But all the more, I could see how loosely they hang on to their religion they are with, or if they are religious enough to avoid sins.

You know, it is -really- isn’t as fun as it seems, this world. Happiness does not equate fun. Seriously.


Man: Every action, there’s reaction.
Woman: Huh, which man would tell his secret affairs if not his wife?
Man: Unless he's caught red-handed...I don’t think there are men as clumsy as that.
Woman: Hmm are you encouraging me to play as well?
Man: It's all up to the individual...a 3rd party can't influence your decision...
In an adult's world there's no right or wrong...It's just the way you think about it.
Woman: Not all people think the same.
Man: Hope you have a clear understanding in your decision.

*shit*

I got a long-needed haircut today. $20 down the hatch but the annoyance of longer hair is one issue I won't need to deal with for a couple months.

I realized not too long ago that I'll need to go in Monday afternoon and let the non-profit know that for the most part I'll probably be coming in at 8 am until noon instead of 1 to 5, due to the new job. I'll probably do it Tuesday regardless of whether I'm working or not as I'd like to hit the links that afternoon. I don't know how many days a week I'll work at Supermercado, but I'll probably work afternoons at the non-profit on days I don't have to work Supermercado, just so I can ensure myself good sleep as many days a week as possible.

I also need to try and get a UW Flexpass, as it's becoming apparent that I need to use the bus both ways everyday and I'd rather not ORCA away $20 a week or $72 a month if I can use the system for $40 a month. So I'll need to get someone to sign off on some paperwork tomorrow.

I also need to cancel my Regence insurance, since I'm now on a UW plan that costs 75% less (actually, 85% less since Regence just raised their premiums) and covers more. Even if this position ends in December and I'm left hanging to go crawling back to Regence or Lifewise, I'd rather stick with cost savings in the short term given a chance that another position could arise by then.

Supermercado's not going to pay well, and I'm already facing a short-term loss as I'll need to buy some white shirts and maybe a tie or two. Between this and the non-profit... to break even with what I was making with the trust accountants, I'd have to work 29 hours a week. I'm not expecting that many hours, honestly (probably more like 18-24), and expect to subsist on a reduced income.

Would I ditch Supermercado in an instant if someone came calling with a conflicting position? Only if they wouldn't allow me to work evenings and weekends, and maybe entirely so if the offered position paid well, or was a swing shift position near home. It would depend in part on how the job was going. It's a scenario that could arise at year's end either way, as the non-profit position ends and I go looking for a replacement job... and when the holidays come up and I want to take time off to visit family. If they play hardball, I'll simply quit. The job just doesn't pay well enough or offer enough upside to justify dealing with that. In fact, if there's any jerkery with the schedule, like scheduling me for time I told them I couldn't work, I'd have to quit anyway.

But all those are remote scenarios right now... which nonetheless I need to keep in mind and plan contingencies for accordingly. The job could go amazingly well for retail. And of course, if I don't hear back... complications could leave me back at square one in an instant. I have to keep an open mind.

To be honest, if someone came calling in the next day or two with a better position, I'd let Supermercado go. But right now, with no one biting and prospects for better stuff a bit far off, it's the route I need to take to keep the bills paid. I'm sticking with the non-profit gig but I believe the experience will pay off in the long run should I see the work term to fruition in December.

Off to bed. I didn't accomplish too much this weekend except the Farm Reports, a journey to Smith and this. I did go to the park and swing the clubs a bit. At this point, shanking my way to a 45 on a 9 hole round might be the next best step to getting my golf game together. Enough thinking.

Catch you tomorrow.

Hmm for me if it is called a Public Holiday within a circular, it should worth every step you walk in a mile, but when a nation enjoys their pubes much more than their embodiment, you then will question what about mine.

Eighty Years of Book Cover Design by Faber & Faber -- as previewed in a multimedia feature in The Guardian -- jogged a few memories for me. Faber is probably the publisher I've owned the most books by, after Penguin and Picador. Seeing the covers laid out in this way made me think of Emily Jacir's artwork Material for a Film, which displays the books owned by a Palestinian poet assassinated by the Israeli secret services.

The two Lawrence Durrell covers visible in the glimpse below of Jacir's piece were designed by Berthold Wolpe, a long-time Faber designer. We had them on our family bookshelves in the 1960s, so when my mother and I met and drank a pastis with Lawrence Durrell in Avignon in 1985 it felt like meeting an old family friend. (My mother embarrassed me by saying "My son Nicholas writes too!" Which totally wasn't true.)



Of the Faber covers, I found the ones designed by the books' own authors the most interesting. T.S. Eliot's design for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats looks like a zine -- surprisingly light and scrappy, twee and pungent.

David Jones' Anathemata almost reminds me of a Peter Saville Factory Records design. Letting this poet-painter design his own jackets was totally the right thing to do -- as with the great Alasdair Gray, the effect is to create the impression that the artist has a personal stylistic universe which can be extended into any medium. That can be a welcoming and charismatic thing; the feeling that an artist's vision is immersive and comprehensive, different from everything you know.

Looking at the cover for Crow by Ted Hughes reminded me of how this book of visceral reports "from the life and songs of the crow" influenced my debut record The Man on Your Street ("songs from the career of the Dictator Hall", whose thoughts are described in The Courier as "hovering on like rooks as he wings his way below").

The generic postmodern Pentagram design that wrapped all Faber poetry titles from the early 80s onwards made me start thinking of Thomi Wroblewski, the designer I befriended and worked with from 1987 on. Thomi -- employed by Mike Alway to do the least el set of el single sleeves ever -- was known for his Talking Heads and Siouxie and the Banshees sleeves, as well as William Burroughs jackets for Picador:



When we started collaborating, Thomi had a big studio above the office of maverick Scottish publisher John Calder, in Green's Court, just off Brewer Street in Soho. I ended up spending a lot of time there, meeting Calder and some of his unlikely hangers-on (the Jewish doctor from Eastenders!). Thomi shared my taste for refined erotica (he designed an edition of Apollinaire's 1907 smut classic Les Onze Mille Verges, which publisher Peter Owen had to paraphrase, so subversive was it still considered to be in 1980s Britain), and liked to photograph you naked, writhing like a dancer. So it was up in that Soho studio that I posed, naked and masked, with various pretty girls for the Murderers, The Hope of Women sleeve. Thomi even dressed me up as dandy barfly Julian Maclaren-Ross, and put me on the cover of Memoirs of the Forties, his book about Fitzrovia. I'm seen from behind, toasting Soho.

What I notice about Thomi Wroblewski's 1980s book jacket work now is that while it often transgresses against the standards of good taste, it has an interesting maverick diversity -- exactly the sort of quirky zing that Wolpe-period Faber books had, but Pentagram-period Faber had lost by the time they standardised their poetry line with the tight-assed, Laura-Ashley-like "pomo ampersand classic" design.

This period of 1980s late pomo design is now coming back with a rush; the stretched typefaces on Thomi's 1988 Quick End anthology, for instance (The Quick End was a collection of short stories by Michael Bracewell, Don Watson and Mark Edwards, a writing group formed under the tutelage of Kathy Acker -- I faithfully attended all their readings) look rather like what Mike Meiré is doing now at 032c magazine. There's an awkward, ugly energy here which suddenly looks interesting again.

via eyeteeth

Tonight's Farm Report is complete. There will be a bit of pressure to produce key content, as the Major League All Star Break will shut down day to day operations until Thursday, leaving a void and meaning the only baseball to cover will come from the minors. Since I produce a high volume of content, all I'll do is keep doing what I'm doing and things should work out.

Here's a fun observation for the evening: This and this are written with an obvious bias, making Wikipedia an unreliable resource for accurate information on these two items.

I think the closest we can get to a real story on the history of Jimbo Wales and Wikipedia is to piece together information from various sources, including that from rogue sites like this.

Objectivity on the internet is nearly impossible to come by. Everything you read is written with the motivation of some sort of bias or self-interest. Given the interests and politicking behind the scenes with Wikipedia, even their attempts at serving as an objective resource tend to fall short. As a resource, they typically suit your needs, but there's a side to every story that you'll probably never see.

Do your research and don't blindly trust what you find, even statistics.

http://www.redfin.com/WA/Kirkland/10454-Forbes-Creek-Dr-98033/home/461510

poor greedy people. if they'd priced at like 600k it would already be sold.

my real dream house is next door, but those people aren't selling anytime soon.

One knows something's up when the Daily Koz and the Ron Paul groups agree... Thanks to Inibo for posting this from the Real News network, left leaning but they do get some things right!

people used to be a lot more violent!