It’s the second full day of summer and arguably still a match to being the longest day of the year.  This is, of course, the time of Midsummer that Shakespeare immortalized.

There have been wicked storms here on the North Coast for the last three days and nights.  The weather has broken open for the better now, however, and the sun in shine is reaffirming its preeminence.  I thus decided to spend the late afternoon and evening outdoors engaging in some rewarding activities 

Just finished running 7 miles in Dreamland.  I’m sweating like a hound that’s been chasing its tail around and around and around out in the noonday sun.  Haven’t sweated like that since I was in Scottsdale, AZ ten days again.  It feels good to be back to a sense of heat.

I’ve been feeling naughty and not feeling all so nice lately.  Certainly is due to the fact that I’ve been relying on externalities and projections for a sense of fulfillment rather than finding my own decency and worth in my own heart and soul.  Change.  Change does come.  Ever-change, never-end.  Time, as Thomas Merton once suggested, to sink my roots and not shake my branches so much. 

So I prepare to grow deeper, more studious, meditative, and intuitive,  Should the psychic winds of warpdom whip at me I shall not become alarmed.  I prepare to achieve all that I can imagine.  Yet I will guard against letting my imagination run amuck casting havoc recklessly about.   I prepare to come to full but not closing terms with my inescapable mortality.  And thus I will let trees of Dreamland speak to me and whisper how ephemeral indeed I am. 

Xanga Ratings and Xanga Flags are all fine and dandy (well, maybe fine but not dandy, sometimes dandy not quite fine...). 

However, it's obviously easy to defeat the intent of those tags at the top of the page by adopting a custom layout such as this self-proclaimed 12 year old on Featured Content has here.  Do you want to flag her as underage (Proof of Under-13 User flag)?  If you're really determined, you could still send xanga form-mail, I suppose.  But you'd think that Xanga could lock some code down that MUST appear on every page or have the page fail to display at all.

hrmm...EXplicit nudity.  Once again no rating or flagging capability.   This crap is easy to find: just use the Xanga search and some juicy conjoined terms. 

Here's another loophole:  A site self-rated EXplicit which can't be accessed by self-declared minors or anyone else not willing to provide proof of age eligibility.  However, this entry  on the site is viewable by minors since the entry isn't self-rated at all.  So a minor can't get to the portal page (www.xanga.com/x_a_n_t_h) but could, like I did, run across a particular entry that's indexed by and encountered in Xanga's own site search.

Yet another way to defeat the ratings system: Load so much EXplicit porn on your site page that it never does get finished loading and anyone trying to rate the site (i.e, the Wisdom of the Masses) has their browser hang forever.

Another concern is that even though a self-rating of EXplicit such as x_a_n_t_h has blocks frontal unqualified access to the weblog, the photoblog http://photo.xanga.com/x_a_n_t_h remains wide open.  Granted, there are no pics there is this particular instance.  But Xanga is providing a 'Site Rating' of EX that doesn't cover potentially the most graphically EXplicit outlet on the site.  Perhaps that's even why there are no pics there: x_a_n_t_h may realize the coverage is incomplete and is conscientious enough to avoid an indiscretion.