As some of you know, I broke my back one and a half months ago.  But I have just this weekend  abandoned the euphoric meds supplied to me and I have run (jogged) this afternoon a fair distance for the first time since my injury.  I can now proclaim: it doesn't suck to be me anymore.  I feel now like I can openly lay claim to the world once again instead of taking sheltering precautions against reinjury and shielding myself from the risky energy mix of this world that's always swirling everywhere about.  I'm feeling so good that I wish I was down on the shore of the Gulf Coast in the direct path of Gustav on a Harley hog with two extra cans of gas strapped to packs.  I'd sit there in lawless and guardian angel-less defiance and stare the storm in the face until the rage of the storm matched my sense of utter abandoned independence and then I'd race that bike north/northwest without sleep until the the sun shined otherworldly high overhead and songbirds, untroubled by even a shadow of a cloud, sang their horny mating songs once again.

I repeat: It no longer sucks to be me.

Yep. Sarah Palin ( Republican McCain's vice presidential choice) is really hot. 

She reminds me of my first serious gf in college who was also hot and Republican and running for office.

They have bumper stickers up in Alaska that proclaim "Coldest State, Hottest Governor". Maybe she's responsible for the melting Aor(c)tic icecap?

If the proposed (ideal) ticket were, instead, Obama and Palin, they would have my unqualified support.  Straight up.  Both are young, both appealing, both brilliant.  And would not the two grumpy old men - McCain and Biden - be a a perfectly retirable non-ticket?

Actually, I'd probably vote for Palin and McCain if Palin were the presidential candidate and John were, instead, the t0ken afterthought gimmick.  And I'd even vote for a McCain and Palin ticket if someone would guarantee me that McCain would die less than two years into term and thus promote Sarah to be my Commander-in-Briefs, I mean Chief.  I might even vote for the McCain/Palin purgative if I could take out an insurance policy that would cost me $1000 up front but pay me $3000 if McCain failed to die during his first term.  Do they write such insurance policies?  I'd also vote for McCain Palin if it were clear destiny to me that, while in office, they would both divorce their current spouses and then immediately remarry each other (McCain has practice at this - having remarried to a glam millionaire princess one month after divorcing his previous, crippled wife).  Mr. and Mrs. Ma-and-Pa Presidents.  How cool would that be?  ha!

Barring all the above uneventualites, I'd like to see Obama win the presidency and shockingly divorce his wife, who would then remarry McCain who would have just somewhat unexpectantly have divorced his lesser-aging wife, and,  to top it off, Sarah Palin just leave her husband and shack up with a crooning Barack.  Melting, Love, Pot, baby.  Now ain't that the American dream?

My daughter's wedding last Friday?  It was just fantastic.  I'll let a few shutter booth pic strips convey the love and playfulness of the moment...

        

Jen in white, her husband Chris in tux, and her mom, sisters, and niece (all in coral dresses).

Wedding Day is finally here.  And the bride is so beautiful.

Earlier in the week, it looked like there would be rain all day today here on the North Coast due to the projected path progress of Tropical Storm Fay.  But Fay stalled in Florida.  Damn right I made that happen but I'm not telling how.  Now instead it's going to be sunny and 90 here.  A true summer day in a summer that will never be forgotten.
 
Time to relax.  I'm going to have fun.

Sometimes the best thing to do is just wait.
Sometimes the greatest form of participation in mankind is mere reflection and wonderment.

I have done nothing at all for the last three hours.  Nothing.
And recording these thoughts is but a trifle more than nothing.

Sitting on the porch.  Might as well drink a beer. Wondering if the little pesky bugs buzzing about are going to bite me.  Perfect picture day-80s and sun, slight breeze.  Twenty other houses in sight but nobody's out but me.  Everybody's busy doing something, I surmise.  Except me. 

Ah, the neighbor just pulled in the driveway.  But avoided all encounter with me.  Damn, I'm surely a king that nobody dares disturb.  Or  so it could seem if I let my imagination drive me mad.  If I go in the house and people suddenly emerge I will feel very strange indeed.

Somebody is building a web application dashboard that they claim will psychiatrically shrink your blog:

BEIJING (AP) — "One little girl had the looks. The other had the
voice.... It was the latest example of the lengths the image-obsessed China is taking to create a perfect Summer Games."

Yep,  China put FAKE image over reality once again (see post below) to suck the world in.  Fa(uck)ke (pronounced "fa-uck-kay") them.  I hate fakes.  And, more and more, as the pretended facade of this Beijing Olympics crumbles, I am loathing Big Fa(uck)ke ("fa-uck-kay") China once again.

It's like this: If I had a hot girl making love to me, and I fell short of her expectations, I'd rather hear "Is THAT it ?" rather than "Oh!  That's IT!"  You'd  better stop pretending China and tell us how it is.  Let little girls be little girls.  And let the singer sing.  Otherwise, we'll just fuck you and your narcissistic self-image hard and cold like a prick-addicted, make-up mirroring whore and that will be the once and permanent end of it.

"As the ceremony got under way with a dramatic, drummed countdown, viewers
watching at home and on giant screens inside the Bird's Nest National Stadium
watched as a series of giant footprints outlined in fireworks processed
gloriously above the city from Tiananmen Square.

What they did not realise was that what they were watching was in fact
computer graphics, meticulously created over a period of months and inserted
into the coverage electronically at exactly the right moment."

Read more about the Chinese government's admission that it faked a key part of the Olympic firework's broadcast extravaganza.

Is it really okay to fake for the sake of an orgasmic fireworks delight?   I think the day will soon arrive when faked videos become so undetectable and un-engineerable in reverse that the presumption will be that all video is suspect and that none will ever more be admissible as proof of anything.  And I think that such a development may be the only thing that will prevent future governments from ubiquitously videoing us in every aspect, facet, and moment of our lives.  After all, when inexpensive, mass-produced nano-aerial vehicles (NAVs) are finally reduced to the size of a mosquito and can record video feeds via onboard video cams, who's going to make the can of RAID to de-bug the airspace in your bedroom?

I have never been quite pathetic.  Confused, lost, tragic, defeated - yes.  But not pathetic.  Even in the grip of defeat,  I have always managed to affirm my will to remain, if only to be challenged by confusion, loss, tragedy, and defeat again.  And it has been my reaffirmation of will that has given me the energy to still be even while being stilled. 

I haven't run for 4 weeks now.  That's probably the longest span that I haven't done so since I first learned to run as a sniffling, trotting ragmuffin.  Correlatively, I have already watched more of the Beijing Olympics on TV than combined of the previous three Olympics.  Credit that to sitting on the sidelines rather than being out and about running like a gumping fool.

My favorite competition in the Olympics so far?  The Canadian women's soccer team pounding out a draw with the Chinese girls.  Hey, it's all been good.  Phelps - swimming.  LaBron -  basketball.  Christine Sinclair - an awesome Canadian soccer athlete (though Kara Lang is cuter).

"A researcher at Ernst and Young has developed a clever hybrid
of a Gif image and a Java Archive that is being  dubbed a GIFAR,  which
could conceivably be uploaded to any site that allows file uploads and
then anyone who "viewed" it and was simultaneously logged in to their
Facebook, Myspace, or Flickr ( or Xanga! - my edit) account could have their credentials
stolen.  Kudos to Nate McFeters
for discovering /demonstrating such a sophisticated attack.  He is
presenting his technique at BlackHat this week (the premier computer security conference, in Las Vegas this week - my edit and emphasis) with the usual
frustrating omission of "key elements".  In other words, just enough is
left out so determined hackers can figure it out but developers at
Facebook and Myspace (and Xanga! - my edit) will struggle until a working exploit is
deployed.   Nate suggests that web application sites should be
filtering uploads to prevent GIFARs from getting deployed, although he
claims this will be extremely hard to do.    I sure hope the content
filtering and Web Application Firewall vendors are working on simple
tools to make this possible." 

"Nate points out that this is not a Facebook-MySpace issue, it is
true of all sites that allow image uploads.  Hmm, that is ALL blogs (Xanga, too?  no.... yes. -my edit). 
We are talking hundreds of millions of sites.   It will be a long time
(as in never) before that many sites are fixed."  

  - NetworkWorld

This should be a Pulse but I have no pulse. (I'm  probably too impatient to wait to feel one heartbeat to the next in gripping my wrist.) 

I broke my back.  Really.  And ruptured a blood vessel that expanded my waist's girth from 36 to 44 (men's macho inches, please.)  Recently.  Three (break) and then one (rupture) week(s) ago, to be precise.  And the blood surging into my lower spine with the rupture spread invasively throughout my abdomen to five tight fingers' distance from the center symmetry of my groin.  Scream Ouch!

But I had an awesome physical therapy session yesterday.

And, today, given the success of that therapy and a certain degree of mindless self-indulgence, I am pain-free.

But will it persist?  Is this truly a matter of healing or just a vomit of self-surrender to a cowardice embrace to a self-forged amoebic pushy-wushy retreat into a shadow of imagined oblivion?

Only your comments will inform for sure.

Xanga blog service info:

Want detailed info on Xanga's traffic, geographics, and demographics trends?  Visit Quantcast and browse around.  Some interesting findings...

1) 8% of visitors are considered "Addicts" and are responsible for 64% of all visits.

2) Teens, Kids, and Asians are highly-concentrated on Xanga.

Now for my rant...

Have you noticed that Xanga has become a blogregationist?   Yep.  Used to be that Xanga Hong Kongers were in the social mix here on www.xanga.com.  But since June 20th or so, they've been broken out into a separate subdomain called hk.xanga.com.  Great timing: right before the Olympics!

If you go to the main Xanga page, you should notice a little tab at the top that says "visit xanga hk".  Now that's where all the people who write with these funny characters (这些都是奇怪的字符) are dispatched to for promotional pruposes.  It sure has cleaned up xanga u.s.a. though, hasn't it?  No need to be offended anymore by cover content with squiggles you can't read anyway and surely are possibly divisive by nature, right?  Because the Hong Kong contingent was growing and becoming more integrated into the Xanga content I was encountering, I had several months back began providing a Chinese translation of my posts for native Chinese speakers.  Well, what a visionary I was not: I never imagined that Xanga would isolate Chinese language bloggers from our melting pot.

And, oh, by the way, are there any bloggers from the U.K., France, Australia, Russia, the Netherlands, and wherever all else that are offended by the fact that Xanga is no longer just worldwide Xanga but now either xanga hk or xanga u.s.a ?  That's right.  The switching tab at the top of the Xanga home page provides only these two options.

It's strange that Xanga didn't at least announce this separation and provide explanation (I did due diligence and checked "Xanga News" - not there.)  At Xanga's startup, it was a great worldwide unifier bringing bloggers from all over the world together.  Now, with moribund massiveness, it has decided to fracture the world into smaller, self-manageable fractions.  What's next?   xanga espanol ?   Yes.  But only if it could attract enough of a critical mass of Spanish bloggers to segregate.  And that's unlikely - observing that Xanga's popularity, measured by visits, in the last year has dropped to less than half.   Is Xanga becoming Babel?

Just remember that the Book of Mormon, a book of scripture used by members of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, features a story about a family who prayed
that their language would not be confounded. Their prayers were answered and
they were led to the Americas.  Thank God for xanga u.s.a !

Do you want to know a secret? 

I'll tell you in a comment...