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  • If you use Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7.0, and you want to avoid having your Xanga password stolen, you should immediately disable the "remember passwords for this site" option in these browsers.

    Flaws in the way the new Firefox 2.0 and IE 7browsers' password managers handle saved usernames and passwords can be exploited to send your Xanga username and password combination to an attacker's computer without your knowledge. Called Reverse Cross Site Request (RCSR), this attack might consist of a hidden form on a malicious Xanga user's post quietly requesting your saved username and password either automatically or when you click on an offered link.  Firefox 2.0 is more susceptible to this exploit because  IE7 typically would not automatically fill in rogue forms with saved Xanga username/password information whereas Firefox 2.0 will.

    A very good but somewhat technical explanation of this exploit can be found here.

    If you have Firefox 2.0 with the "Remember Passwords for this Site" option on and want to see a dramatic but safe proof-of-concept of this exploit, visit this demo , create a fake username and password, login, and then proceed to click on the video as instructed ( this video simulates content contributed by a malicious blogger on the same domain as yours - in other words, you visiting a malicious blogger's post and clicking on a video he has posted to steal your username and password.)

    Note: This is not a Xanga flaw, but the result of flaws in the browsers.  And Xanga is no more prone to this attack than any other blog site.  But all blog sites as a genre are extremely susceptible to this attack.

  • No Dreamland now for weeks.

    No running now for weeks.

    Too much time spent in bed, non-dreaming, un-resting, listless, hiding in dark shadows.

    Vomit.  I hadn't seen the creature Vomit for over 30 years. (No exaggeration.)  Now for the last two days my body has been flushing everything from everywhere constantly. 

    Sparkles, lights, flashes - everywhere, not in dreams, but in my everyday vision.   Dementia just beyond...

    I' feel like I've caught the bird flu.  And it's transformed in me to the person-to-person contagion variety. 

    Be sure to use eye drops after reading this.  And wash your hands and clean the keys on the keyboard with alcohol should you leave a comment.

    Oh.  And be safe out there.  Life is so precious.

  • Iraq: Do We Stay? Or Do we Leave?

    How about both?!

    President George Bush is looking for 'fresh ideas' with regards to the Iraq War.  Okay.  Here's one:

    We withdraw troops.

    From Shiite and Sunni-held territory. 

    And redeploy them all to the northern Kurdish region.

    And train and equip the Kurdish forces to become an elite national army.

    And support them in re-embracing Kirkuk as a historical part of Kurdistan.

    And wait for the Shi'as and Sunnis down south to neutralize each other in the ensuing civil war.

    Then send the superior Kurdish Army marching south to restore order, giving them only air support.

    Scaring the crap out of Iran, by the way, by having all our forces aligned along the Iranian border.

    A stategic redployment that will dramatically reduce American casualities to almost nought overnight, while positioning us to deal with Iran in the real showdown ahead to come.



  • From Oct 27th's post...

    [next thought]
    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has delved into the unknown.  Just listen:
         At the Pentagon press conference this afternoon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked what would happen if the Iraqi government failed to meet the “benchmarks.” Rumsfeld first responded that “it is not complicated,” but just seconds later said, “This is complicated stuff. It’s difficult. We’re looking out into the future. No one can predict the future with absolute certainty.” He added, “So you ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it’s complicated, it’s difficult.”
      - thinkprogress.com
         My reaction: "Donald, it's not that complicated or difficult.  I'm looking into the future now and see you gone from prominence shortly.  Final prediction."
    [next thought]
                      

  • It's amazing, baby.

    The love inside.

    You take it with you.

    See ya...

  • Colors of Dreamland: Hot and Not

    Happy Halloween.  Don't worry, be scary.

    Unlike many recent years, I'm unlikely to spend anytime in Dreamland (cemetery) this hallowed eve.  I did, however, find some time to visit yesterday, run x-miles, and wonder at the fall display.

       

  • Something lurks here.  A flaw.  Unseen.  Awaiting discovery.  Who will rip the hole in this fabric of non-eternity?
    [next thought]
    *sex*
    [next thought]
    I just got a voicemail from an unrecognized number and someone whom I don't know telling me that Kim (whom I don't know) has gone back to Arizona.  Good luck, Kim.
    [next thought]
    *sex*

    [next thought]
    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has delved into the unknown.  Just listen:
         At the Pentagon press conference this afternoon, Defense Secretary Donald
    Rumsfeld was asked what would happen if the Iraqi government failed to meet the
    benchmarks.”
    Rumsfeld first responded that “it is not complicated,” but just seconds later
    said, “This is complicated stuff. It’s difficult. We’re looking out into the
    future
    . No one can predict the future with absolute certainty.” He added, “So
    you ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it’s
    complicated, it’s difficult.”
      - thinkprogress.com
         My reaction: "Donald, it's not that complicated or difficult.  I'm looking into the future now and see you gone from prominence shortly.  Final prediction."
    [next thought]
    *sex*
    [next thought]
    Work undone, awaiting future forgetfulness... future fortunes, awaiting spent remembrances...
    [next...

  • I`m looking for what's impossible.  But what's impossible in the morning, may yet be possible by evening, and in the realm of the accomplished before the next day's sunrise.

  • I just finished attending a Web Application Security conference for a mixed gvernment audience.  Actually, I more than just attended.  Due to a late cancellation of a presenter, I was invited to give a 15 minute demonstration of certain web application attack techniques (crudely referrred to, by some, as 'hacking'). 

    And so on Monday, all day Monday, I went back to a slide show I had developed on the topic, scripted my whole delivery, and practiced, practiced, practiced.  My greatest concern was in not exceeding the 15 minutes allotted me.  A huge concern since, as a professor, I could ramble on for hours expanding and digressing about the simplest of topics.

     Tuesday afternoon and my time arrived.  "Just 15 minutes," I silently warned myself,  "and keep to the script."  Then I proceded to explain and give a web demonstration using a phishing email (that I had constructed) to leverage a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack upon a Trusted site by a Malcious site (that I had constructed) inducing the victim (played by myself) to furnish identity information to the attacker's cross-scripted form.  Additionally, I provided a web demonstration of a SQL Injection attack where I established a test account with a user ID and password  in a certain SQL injection-flawed web application and then showed how I could bypass the need for a password by providing a crafted SQL statement to the password field instead.

    The presentation ran 18 minutes.  But that's only because of a technical glitch at the beginning (not my fault, but I fixed it) and because I didn't anticipate that the audience wouldn't be able easily to read the phishing email (small text even on the presentation screen) and so I had to read it to them (not in my script).

    Afterwards, at a reception, a tall fellow walked up to me, shook my hand, and told me that my delivery of those particular attack techniques was the sharpest, clearest, and most convincing live demo of such he's ever seen (and he assured me he had seen plenty).   And that's one compliment I'm never going to forget since it came from a leading industry expert, Jeff Williams, the CEO of Aspect Security  (Application Security Specialists) and the chairman of OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project).

  • Of things Xanga...

    Re: Full User Blocking

    A "Full Block Everybody" that a blogger could invoke/uninvoke would be useful for going off-net temporarily rather than shutting the blog down permanently or removing/privatizing all the posts.

    Re: Audio Blogging

    How about providing automatic audio uploads via cell-phones?  I did audio uploads to Xanga years ago.  I used Odeo's automatic audioblog to record to Blogger and then linked from there into Xanga.  Odeo's audio upload is going away.  But Gabcast still provides a free phone-audio option.  Here's an example:

    Chirpy and Chilly

    Re: Featured Content

    Here's a future possibility for a feature:  Allow each user to customize, if desired, what they view as the Featured Content page to include ONLY themselves and their own subscribers.  Thus, if this feature were available and I elected it, when I'd go to my  Featured Content, it would feature only my top 50 subscribers.  This would further the creation of smaller communities - virtual xangasitas - within Xanga.  Or maybe just keep the two Featured Contents that now exist (Premium and Classic) and add a 'My Featured Content' tab as a third option.

  • Back to Love and War, by other means...

    I believe that the Internet and all the services and ventures it sponsors is essentially militaristically-aligned.

    Clausewitz maintained that politics was war by other means.

    I maintain that the Internet embraces an identical myth as that that compulses Modern Warfare.

    How so?

    We are about to lose both of our protracted and dearly-costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

    Why?  Because, as overly proud Moderns, we had no doubt that Apache Helicopters and Bunker Busters and Night Vision Weapons and Total Air Superiority were superior to the paltry spirit of any non-highly technologized guerilla resistance that might ever erupt amongst an indigenous people. 

    And now we are about to witness that superior weaponry (as once before recently for the Russians in Afghanistan, and also in the case of our own curse of Vietnam) is again no match for the superior (although by no means necessarily cohesive) spirit of a motley resistant people.

    The new commander of British military forces has just concluded no less.

    Just so, we, as overly proud Moderns believe that the Internet has provided the technogically-superior template and platform for future social (networked) interactions - defying the fate of physical neighbors huddling together, attempting to supercede the actual pleasure of sensuous tactile contact, casting us non-contextually a-stage so as to be disposed to seek nothing better than the cyber-surrogates of true love.   So, too, does Modern Warfare boast of its provisioned pseudo-surreal assets (both technologically and ideologically supposedly-superior) as guarantees of the vanquishment of world-dispatched recalcitrant souls.

    No Go, it seems, just as before.

    Going to lose those wars.

    Just as "social networks" will someday thump and fail in their promises of "replacement intimacy" for what sharing souls have always and will ever know only commingled with one another in secret gardens and never publicly shared.

    Do you want a misty view of true intimacy most-delicately hinted  on occasion over a "social network" without a need for leveraging imposter cyber-ruses to compensate for the innate structural inadequacies of network-tempered relationships?

    Foomanchu : a love has he celebrated beyond the contort of the Internet's hubris of technological seductions. 

  • Early yesterday morning, my daughter awoke as I was leaving the house for work and called out to me: “Daddy, Daddy, did a plane crash?  Where did the plane crash?”

     

    “What plane, baby?”  I responded.  “There have been no plane crashes, hon.”

     

    “But I just had a dream of the plane crashing.  I saw the face, the body, people screaming.  And whenever I have this dream, there’s always a plane crash.  I had this dream just before 911.  And three times since.  And there’s always a plane crash right afterwards.”

     

    “Well, baby,” I said reassuringly, “there have been no plane crashes today—nothing in the news this morning.  Let’s just wait and see.”

     

    “There’s going to be a plane crash, Dad.  I know it…”

     

     

    Later in the afternoon, I heard the report on the radio of a single-engine plane crashing into a high-rise apartment in NYC.  Shocked, especially so by Jen’s prophetic dream, I called her to share the news.  “Oh my God,” she was freaked out, “Oh my God, why do I always have these dreams come true?”

     

    She wanted more details about the crash, but I had none at the time—just first report sketchy highlights heard on the radio.  “Dad, did the engine fall away?  I saw the just engine coming at me—trying to hit me.   It fell away from the rest of the plane.  I had to run because the engine was going to hit me—I was screaming.”

     

    From later news reports:

     

    “They could see the pilot’s face…”

      -St. Petersburgh Times

      

    “…two people were in one of the apartments when the plane struck, and both ran out into the hallway.”


    “At a late Wednesday news conference, NTSB spokeswoman Debbie Hersman said most of the aircraft was outside the building with only the engine assembly inside.”
     
     -CNN

     

    Yep, my daughter has “the visions”, too.  (Just like her Dad and her Aunt Jude.) 

  • 3 Things Exposed

    Media Matrix is deemed by many as one of the best sources on trends amongst Social Networking Sites.  From the stats in the table provided (by them) below, they just concluded:

    “MySpace.com has the broadest appeal across age ranges, Facebook.com has created a niche among the college crowd, Friendster.com attracts a higher percentage of adults, and Xanga.com is most popular among younger teens."

    The ability to accurately state such comparisons, while interesting to us as simple bloggers, is extremely critical in understanding the multi-billion $ market that each of these networks is striving to capture.  For instance, if being "most popular among younger teens" is especially highly (or lowly) considered, such a finding could imply hundreds of millions of more (less) dollars of comparative worth for that Social Network (Xanga) in terms of valuation.   Advertisers relying upon such findings, too, will design their campaigns to address these differences.  If they base their demographically-catered campaigns upon false premises, they stand to lose millions of $ in returns due to bad targeting.

    Demographic Profile of Visitors to Select Social Networking Sites

    Percent Composition of Total Unique Visitors

    August 2006

    Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations

     Total InternetMySpace.comFacebook.comFriendster.comXanga.com
    Unique Visitors (000)173,40755,77814,7821,0438,066
    Percent (%) Composition of Unique Visitors
    Total Audience100.0100.0100.0100.0100.0
    Persons: 12-179.611.914.010.620.3
    Persons: 18-2411.318.134.015.615.5
    Persons: 25-3414.516.78.628.211.0
    Persons: 35-5438.540.633.535.435.6
    Persons: 55+18.011.07.68.17.3

    Source: comScore Media Metrix

    I have a real problem with stats that don't add up.  And you can probably attribute my heightened sensitivity to the fact that I was a college stats prof for many years.  Above, the 'Total Audience' for each network is 100.0 (%), but the portions attributed to the subsetted demographic groups below each social network column fail to account for the full 100%.  The unaccounted-for %'s are below:

                                  I-net      MySpace   Facebook    Friendster    Xanga

     ?   

    8.11.72.32.110.3

    So what makes up these missing segments?  Are they Persons: 1-11 ?  Are they respondents who failed to provide an age - in other words, Persons: age unknown ?  Or is the study flawed because they failed to calculate the stats correctly?

    If they are Persons: age unknown , they should just be omitted as missing data and the subtotals should be recalculated to add up to 100.0 (%) with the header reading: Percent (%) Composition of Unique Visitors reporting their age.  Only then would the age %'s for the social networks be truly cross-comparable.  In other words, only use respondents providing their age to calculate stats based on age.

    If they are Persons: 1-11 , I question how a survey can assess that accurately to begin with since interviewing a 6-year-old is hardly feasible ("Hi little girl, I understand you use the Internet for social networking.  May I ask what site you use and how old you are?").  And since on these sites you can't self-profess to be younger than 13 anyway, it is not a statistic that Media Metrix could passively collect.

    So the stats are flawed.  And, hence, flawed-alike are the conclusions drawn from them.

    Media Metrix: Exposed and Discredited.

    So. (glares at One_Hot_Diva's comment).   If all that's too dry and uninteresting for you, try this:

    vert.fashion.ap.jpg

    Women: most Exposed when most Fertile.

  • In a remote Corner of Dreamland, on unarguably the most pleasant and memorable sunny afternoon of early autumn, a guardian angel witnesses a solo but celebrative picnic of a visitor, while I, the interloper, capture it all for the blog.

    cornerangel


    cornerglass

    Dreamland (Lakeview Cemetery), indeed at times, provides interesting surprises.  And stumbling upon this arrangement was clearly one of them.

  • The fall along the North Coast (Great Lakes), especially early-on and mid-through (like now), is generally a perfectly delightful season comfort-wise, but it is undoubtedly, for me, the most energetically seductive time of year also.  It is always harder for me to run in the early-to-mid fall—to keep my running disciplined and ongoing—than at any other time of the year.  The urge to stop, to forfeit, to submit to some cosmic call to shut-it-all-down tampers with my will most mightily at this time of change.  Yet I know that if I can just push on a little longer, into a later, riper autumn and closer towards grizzly winter, that I’ll be able to skate on through the winter running almost on auto-glide, back into the spring with an emerging gleam in my eye, looking forward and then sailing into a scorching summer once more. 

     

    Incipient 21st century (take-a-snapshot-of-these-global warming) falls, in my experience, are great challenges for an outdoor running-warrior spirit.  To run on intrepidly, even as nature all about signals retreats and imposes terminal constraints upon itself, smacks of kick-ass defiance. 

     

    Even as the leaves now fall,

    I run to catch them before they hit the ground,

    delaying, if but for moments more,

    the inevitability of all-falls-down.

  • Truth is.  And so is silence.  But is the truth ever just mere silence?  And is silence always the truth?

     

    There’s a great rudeness in this civilization of ours.  We either make noise to drown out the truth or we cling to a self-imposed silence to avoid speaking it.   We welcome public scandals because they reassure us that honesty has no incorruptible defenders even at the highest levels.  Yet we carry that ‘certain politeness’ around with us in our personal affairs that requires us not to speak the hard truth to a friend or acquaintance with whom we are having a falling out, but rather to spread ‘the unspoken’ as gossip behind those others’ backs.

     

    Death is.  And so is silence.  Death brings silence.  And, so also, does silence sometimes bring death.

     

    “Of that which we cannot speak, we must consign to silence,” advised the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

     

    Dear Ludwig, there is nothing we cannot speak of, if we put true heart to addressing it.  This does not mean that we should forever babble incessantly without sometimes shutting up and just listening to the world.  Shhh.   Really shhh.  And just listen.  What do you hear?   If all you hear is your own silence, you’re not listening to the cosmos spinning, infolding, unfolding.  It screeches cataclysmic destruction somewhere all the time even as it gently pelts ocean shores elsewhere with the susurrant lap upon lap of sloshing waters .  So listen truly to the world.  The living world might sometimes be little more than a hush but it is never-ever wholly voidly silent.  And when you learn of something that can assist the rest of us in living-surviving, in loving, in appreciating beauty or in observing its passing, then report back.

     

    May your silence always be a sign of your attentiveness to the wondrous flow of life.  Or an indication of a strict observance in avoidance of an imminent danger.  Or a matter of healing when words would tend otherwise to obstruct.  And never a closing of your heart in dreadful anticipation of unlife.  

  • On the way to Dreamland today, I converged onto a road from one merging fork while another car did the same from the other merging fork -  but just in front of me.  (Graphic enough—or do I need to draw it?)

     

    On top of the car ahead of was a cell phone, very clear to see.  And it was probablistically  apparent to me that the car in front had started up somewhere and driven away with someone inside having placed the cell phone on the roof (probably because it was in a hand and they needed both to open a door.)  Trying to save the phone, I started honking my horn repeatedly, waving frantically, and gesticulating madly for the driver ahead to pull over.  But since the advent of drive-by shootings and road-rage, such tactics never seem very successful unless you also happen to have a siren and police flashers available to you.  And I don’t.  Hence, I had to become more creative and actually pull into an oncoming lane (no traffic) and aside the driver and motion to her to drop her window. (no, I did not say ‘drawers’.)  First, she expressed to me a look of terror.  Then a surrendering look of acquiescence.  But when she finally rolled her window down and I told her of the bounty atop the roof and she realized the spirit of my intervention, she smiled ever so broadly and articulated repeated thank-you’s as if I had just stopped her from eating a piece of chicken infected with bird-flu (H5N1).

     

     

    Then, a bit later while I was strolling about a Dreamland closed-down with gates locked for the night, I ran into a guy, along a converging path, who seemed kind of lost and reticent at the sight of me.

     

    “You know this place is closed now?”  I asked him.

     

    “Really?  Wow,” was his reply.

     

    “Yep.  Do you know the way out?”  I asked trying to be helpful.

     

    He pointed in the direction of a distant un-viewable gate and said “Yes, the gate up the hill.”

     

    “Well, that’s closed now and so you, if you’re just on foot, you can hop the fence back there,” I said pointing to where I had just came from.

     

    "Thanks.  Are you a cop? “

     

    “Hell, no,” I said, “Even if I were, there's need to worry about that.”

     

    He seemed much relieved and indicated that he was familiar with the fence out.  “But are there a lot a cops around here, here at night?  I like to just walk around here late at night but don’t want to get into trouble.”

     

    “Oh yeah,” I said, “there are a lot of cops here at night.  I bet you’re standing on the grave of one right now.”

     

    Funniest thing is that he took a little nervous hop away from where he was standing, looked down to where he had stood, and then realized my invented observation was no threat at all.

     

    “Take it easy,” I said in parting.  He took my mention of exiting and headed to hop the fence out.  I followed my instinct for truth, justice, and the blogging way and proceeded to the heart of Dreamland, to sit at a picnic table, drink a beer, and compose this.

     

    Cops: They intercept and enforce. God bless the good ones.

    Me: I just interact as I happen upon.  I can't help it that I have that damn 'cop look' sometimes.

  • How big, really, is Xanga?

    So big that it would take you 30 years to leave one comment on every current unique blog (ignoring all the new ones created over those 30 years) if you spent only 30 seconds per blog doing so and never slept.

    So big that, if you update your site today, you are literally just one in a million.

     

    So big that, if you could leave 2 eProps for everybody who updates their site today, your trail of eProps, side-by-side, would stretch for over 100 miles.

     

    So big that about 700,000 current Xangans have or will spend some time in prison during their lifetimes.

     

    So big that about 20 Xangans die (on the average) every day.

     

    Don’t ask: the source and methodology for generating these stats is nfp’d and not available in the public domain.

  • How much is Xanga worth?  As far as I know, Xanga has never sought or accepted venture capital nor has it made a public offer of stock.  So, its actual 'worth' is probably just speculation.  But other social networking sites like Xanga exist and a little more is either known or has been speculated about their worth.  Let's take a look:

    "Facebook, which now has more than 7 million registered users, recently received $25 million in venture funding from Greylock Partners, of San Mateo. The valuation for the private firm was $550 million, a source close to the deal told me. Viacom Inc.offered Facebook $750 million for the entire company earlier this year, according to the source. For Facebook's right to maintain its independence, a half billion dollar valuation is just fine. What does that say about Internet valuations? They remain high."

    - MarketWatch April 19, 2006
     

     
    "In Japan, MySpace would have to take on Mixi, a two-and- a-half-year-old social networking site with more than five million members. Mixi had a spectacular stock market debut this month, with the company's valuation hitting nearly ¥220 billion, or $1.8 billion, on Sept. 15." 

    - International Herald Tribune Business Sep 24, 2006

     

    "Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million. At the time, many laughed. Now RBC Capital markets analyst Jordan Rohan said MySpace might be worth $15 billion in three years.

    There's the $800 million acquisition offer from Yahoo that Facebook reportedly rejected, the $2 billion Facebook wants and the $25 million in venture capital Facebook got from Greylock Partners in April."

    - internetnews.com Sep 29, 2006

     

    When Xanga was recently fined $1 million by the FTC for violations of the Children's Privacy Act, several of you wondered if Xanga could come up with the money or if it was even worth that much.  Well, all I know is that Xanga agreed to the settlement and I doubt it would go bancrupt without a crying-bloody-murder fight.

    So could Xanga be 'worth' $500 million?  $1 billion?  Or more?

    I measure its worth in the friends I've made 'here', the inspiration they have provided, and the lovin' times that they've shared with me. And that's something that can't ever be evaluated by economy.

  • Dreamland journal continued…

    Forty minutes to sunset.  Skies are mixed, some thin strato-cumulus clouds but otherwise jello blue sky.  Temp is in the upper 50s and just ideal for running x-miles—which I did already. 

     

    There were two matters somewhat out of my routine that I got involved in here today.   The first found me taking exception, while running, to a piece of plastic yellow ‘CAUTION’ ribbon tied to the lower limb of an ornamental tree aside the road.  It had been there all summer and finally I decided that it was just stupidly un-scenic.  So I ran up to it and yanked it from the tree.  Yikes—a stirring hornet nest was exposed bouncing up and down with the recoil of the limb!  Luckily, I neither had to yank very hard for very long (thus not a catastrophic disturbance) nor, because I was already running, was I an immobile target.  Nonetheless, it got me talking out loud to that arboreal booby trap . (You may be wondering what I said.  I said, “Can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Man.”)

     

    The other matter happened later during the same x-miles sojourn some miles there further along.  I was running at a moderate pace around a rather blind corner (trees and shrubbery) and about to head up a steep hill when I ‘thought’ I detected the Living.  (You must understand that Dreamland—cemetery—is closed to the Living during the after-hours when I can sometimes be found here.)  Not sure if it was the scent of the Living, the sound of the Living, or just a psychic sense of mine that got me alerted.  In any case, sure enough, there was a young teenage couple strolling down the hill, hand-in-hand, and when they saw me, the girl did not hesitate to petition to me: “Can you please help us get out of here!”  Yes, they were locked in.  Yes, they were lost.  And, yes, I could help them out.  I thought of just providing them directions to the only low fence that provides easy exit, but realized they’d likely just get re-lost following my accurate but necessarily intricate directions (Dreamland’s quite the maze to those not fully familiar with it.)   So instead I began escorting them the ¾ miles along winding paths, over a bridge spanning a stream, and past innumerable but always remarkable tombstones.  The girl admitted to me: “We’ve been lost for so long here—before we found you—that we actually stopped at a few graves and asked for directions.”  I laughed and said “Actually, if you waited until dark and the spirits were assisting, the tombstones might have started glowing one after another to point you the way out.”

     

    The young girl’s mother called the girl’s cell phone as I was escorting them out and the mother was already apparently aware of their turmoil.  The girl informed her Mom that ‘a man’ was helping them out.  Then the relay of questions from Mom to daughter and directed to me began:  “What’s your name?”  “Do you work here?”  “What section are we in?”  Ad absurdum.  Obviously, the Mom had visions of me as some sort of Day Walker or Night Stalker and feared her daughter might prematurely just have found her final resting place.  I answered only one of the questions, What’s your name?, by raising my outer shirt to reveal a tee shirt that only had a question mark on it.  “I don’t know what my name is or who I am,” I replied to the girl.  “I’ve lost my identity here and am searching for it.”  The young man accompanying the girl thought my response was hilarious and insisted on snapping a photo of me as 'a question mark' with his camera phone. 

     

    question

    (actually another pic, same shirt)

    Anyway…

     

    We finally arrived and I showed the two grateful teenagers the low fence, instructed them how to scale it, and then parted, saying: “I wish I could join you and hop the fence, but I can’t.”  “Why not?”, the girl genuinely inquired.  Nodding my head directionally back towards the heart of the cemetery, I said “That’s home, back there.  Not allowed to leave anymore.  After all, I’m only your apparition.”  We all ‘got it’ and laughed.

     

    But I did go back.  And now, having sat and written this, the sun has already set.  And since all of Earth is home to me, home also this will always be.

  • “If I were an Al Qaeda asset, you’d all be screwed.”

     -my opening statement at a convocation of future suicide-bomber fundamentalist Islamic Boy Scouts.

     

    I’m looking for self-enhancement and self-improvement opportunities.  Only qualified multiple other personalities need self-apply.

     

    For most people, beyond a certain point in life, incredulity sets in (like death’s rigor mortis) regarding many previously kindly-considered things.  Like the virtue of innocence, the ultimate prevalence of goodness,  and the possibilities for true love.  That point is the exact point where most people finally and tragically fail forever more to fully trust themselves.

     

     I refuse to subscribe to the current regime’s descriptor (echoed by the preponderance of the news’ re-echoing) of “The War on Terror”.  Why?   Because, from a state-power perspective, that’s tantamount to always backing the status quo, which by definition, has the most to fear from terror.  Terror is often just a guerrilla tactic.  Sometimes it is a guerrilla strategy.  Sometimes it is a despotic-state strategy such as Ivan the Terrible and Saddam Hussein unleashed upon their own citizenry.  In any case, a War on a Tactic or a War on a Strategy  makes no sense whatsoever.  If someday a radical, militant fundamentalist Islamic tyranny seizes hold of America, you can be damn sure that I’d be quite engaged as a guerrilla in demonstrating at great cost to them what real  terror is.   So let’s stop resorting to this sloganistic misnomer of "The War on Terror".   Call it what it is:  The Virtual Evisceration of Radical Militant Islamic Nihilism (The Vermin).

  • (This account is from last evening.  Already a new sun has risen - time to shine on and leave these words here.  Behind... )

     

    Who sent the news crew?  No running x-miles in Dreamland today.

     

    Just got to my favorite Dreamland haunt to jog about this evening and found a film crew lingering even though it’s after hours and the cemetery gates are locked for the night.  While I really don’t believe they were there to cover my special ops regimen (running, popping a beer, and blogging—in that order), I decided to change up, wander off elsewhere, and quietly engage in the latter two-thirds of the fore-mentioned guerrilla training. 

     

    And as I now sit on the base of the obelisk of John D. Rockefeller, I must remark about my running:  I’m tired.  I think I’ll go home now.

     

    Yeah.  Right.  Over John D’s grave.   But, I’ll be back tomorrow.  Either going to run twice as far as my discipline stipulates—or just as far, but as fast as I possibly can.

     

    Oh hell.  A little red fox, unsuspecting of my presence, just ran past me ten feet away, then saw me and jumped frightened  into the woods.  Now three squirrels in the immediate environ are all chirping their “don’t fuck with me” chirp.  Things seem a bit odd and a’kilter all around.  Too much activity for a non-thinking man such as myself to process.  I non-think it’s time to slip unnoticed back into the world of the living…  Yes, your world.  And mine.

  • My undercurrent: Still running x-miles in Dreamland (cemetery).

     

    Observation of one man to another about women:  “You can’t figure them out.  Don’t even try.  If you shit all over them, they treat you like you’re a brand new puppy dog.  If you treat them good right from the start, they wonder what’s  wrong with you.”

     

    (Okay. So I am one of the guys involved in the previous mention. I’m just not designating my role.  But it makes you wonder what was mentioned just prior to that generalization to warrant it, doesn’t it now?)

     

    I thought with the arrival of fall weather and dwindling sunlight on the North Coast that I’d be spending more time indoors.  So much for ‘indoors thinking’.  I’m actually more engaged in the arrival of the new season and its manifestations outdoors than I was with this past summer in its most glorious stride.  I may just be transitioning spiritually from a summer-lover and sun-worshiper to an autumn activist spurred on by the quickening of all that’s in the air.  So as you near- and fellow-latituders cuddle in your houses in the hastening twilight of an imminent vanish-into-fall night seeking comfort from northerly winds pimping an ungodly upstart chill, just imagine that I’m somewhere ‘out there’ seeking new-found thrills.

  • Very boylike this morning:  leaping up flights of stairs—three stairs at a time, hopping off and up onto street curbs, dashing across traffic-filled avenues, finding a huge slab of concrete in the middle of a city sidewalk and lifting it over my head and tossing it aside, petting flowers that with autumn’s coolness soon shall die, pounding on hollow street light poles to make them sound like bells, stepping briskly lightly knowingly and feeling the power of my advance, smiling at all the girls I pass while avoiding falling into their trance.

     

    Update:  Seems like the Xanga clock is slow 6 minutes.  As I updated the time on this post, I checked the US Naval Observatory Master Clock Time and noticed the deviation.  This is not a good thing for Xanga since it could taint any cyber-forensic investigation and give cause to a court to throw 'evidence' out.  Xanga: sync your time - NTP
    ....update to this update:  The time has been corrected and now appears accurate.


    Other update: A Kansas City teenager accused of attacking a classmate and then bragging about it on a Web site was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison.  Yes, the Web site was Xanga.

  • Into Fall

    Shall I write of soft soothing sentiments  or fomenting vitriol?

    Both inundate me in the every-now mobius-ly and simultaneously.

     

    It almost seems like a fair feminine spirit upon a sunny path is calling out to me to come play and romp about in happy-go-lucky dalliance.  While at the same time, along the shadowy back track, a dark-armored machismo spirit warns me, of not only dangers ahead, but dangers at hand, and begs for my warrior wariness.

     

    As if an omniscient observer perfectly balanced, I attempt to trace the mobius flow wondering wherefrom and whereto?  From what beginning and unto what end?

     

    escher

     

    But my anima and animus both grow impatient and  are equally unassuaged by my non-deliberative non-committal non-decision.

     

    Oh damn the both of them.  I shall simply revel in the transition of seasons underway.   Grabbing moments sunning warmly while I still can.  And running amidst the gusts of cool winds about to rip leaves from limbs.

  • The stranger approached the master seeking enlightenment on how to avoid the trap of Illusion totally and forever.

     

    The master, in response, challenged the stranger: “Let’s keep it real.  What’s been the play of Illusion in your life?  What does Illusion mean to you?”

     

    The stranger did not hesitate to volunteer:

    “To speak to a trusted intimate of Illusion—

    of all the previous lovers and intimacies that served no ultimate

    end but to disillusion—

    to speak so and have the loving courage

    to believe that this trusted one

    would never join their company—

    to have this trusted one pledge most adamantly,

    in brilliant contrast, to stand apart from all who failed before—

    and then to awaken one day with the full realization

    that this  one, too, had passed fully over into the company

    of that  oblivion—

    that is cold-ass Illusion.”

     

    The master paused considering the eloquence of the stranger’s response.  Actually, an onlooker, had one been present, might have observed that the master’s last sip on a can of beer coincided precisely with the last words of the stranger.  No matter.

     

     Before rummaging around for another beer, the Master spoke:

    Please , tell me you didn’t see it coming..."

     

    Then, digging deeply into the profoundity of his enlightened non-self, he declared:

    "Wake up.  Wake up.  Your Illusion is just a bad dream-plot for an unremarkable afternoon TV soap opera.   If you must dream, dream a little dream about dreaming about…”

     

    The master never finished verbalizing his thought.  Instead, an onlooker, had one been present, might have been invited by the master, at that precise adverbial loss, to share the next "beers-of-great-destiny" along with him ...and the stranger.

  • I've never ever authored an email-no comment post before.

    So maybe it's about time.  What to say?  What to say?  Okay:

    If you suddenly feel I'm 'far away', all I want you to honestly ask (and answer) yourself is: "Who moved?"

    Oh, to hell with this post.  You can't (won't) comment anyway!

    If you care not to comment , continue to the post below, published one minute prior, and choose not to comment (thus reaffirming your self-found hidden freedom).  Rather than, here, being restricted from doing so.

    It's all good.  There's only one Golden Eternity.

  • The Summer of My Devirtualization

    Virtual people live in virtual worlds which depend upon one’s acceptance of them as a good enough mimics of reality to serve as a surrogate for the real thing.

     

    Life without virtualization is sparser, perhaps even spartan, yet more sober and closer to the heart.

     

    Very few people truly know themselves very well, let alone wholly.   Fewer still are those who can know another truly in a significant way.  Much of what is believed about others by the vast majority of semi-knowing selves is a projected virtual encapsulation of those others’ personalities—colored by culture, colored by habits, colored by consensualized expectations. 

     

    Do the math: a semi-knowing self (½) can ‘know’ another semi-knowing self (½)  only to the amount of two bits (  or one quarter,  that is, ½  * ½ = ¼).   Knowing, in terms of relationships, is multiplicative, not additive.  You cannot put two half-knows together and sum up the relationship as an enlightened one.  Only two self-enlightened individuals (1 * 1 ) can find wholeness (=1) in mutuality.

     

    So if you find yourself living in a world where you pretty much feel you know all your friends and lovers, or even ex-friends and ex-lovers really, really well, either you are (were) all enlightened (all 1’s—and there’s still hope for Utopia) …or you have filled in the actualized ¼ or ½ of your knowledge-in-relationship with the ¾ or ½ of an unctualized virtualized relationship.

     

    I started out the summer believing that all my friends, my acquaintances-becoming-friends, and even I, myself, were near-1’s in terms of self-actualization and honesty in matters of self-revealment.  I was clearly wrong about myself.  I  was only just a half-know believing in the addition rule. 

     

    But I’ve changed over the past 3 months.  This has been the summer of my devirtualization.  I’m no longer just a half-know believing himself/herself whole.  I’ve acknowledged and confronted my self-ignorance and fractionally progressed somewhat more toward unity.   Fractionally.  But I’ve also come to understand that the principle of multiplicativity factors a multiplicity of two selves into a numinously psychic bond with one another.

     

    Paradigmatically, You (1) times I (1) equals US (1).

     (thus ever approximating the soulmate ideal of an irreducible United Selves).

  • And I think the world is a strangely beautiful place to have allowed us to meet and become friends as we have.  But it's also a strangely cruel place to keep us apart as it does.  Ah—this world is the perfection of a public laundry conundrum (lost socks and all) and we are just wet rag dolls tossed into its assorted dryers to thump away our wetness.  But how I'd love someday, if just once, to thump playfully in the same dryer with you.

  • But it's the Looseness that counts...

    Well...

    CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- An al-Qaeda-linked extremist group warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that he and the West were "doomed," as protesters returned to the streets across the Muslim world to demand more of an apology from the pontiff for his remarks about Islam and violence...

    The pope on Sunday said he was "deeply sorry" about the angry reaction to his speech last week in which he cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of Islam's Prophet Muhammad as "evil and inhuman" and referred to spreading Islam "by the sword."

      -chron.com

    Let's see, I've been "notfor" Prophet here since the year 2000.  I've had the "The Looseness of Doom" banner up there for just as long.  "The United States of America" has always been emblazoned in my background.  And that's not a metallic popsicle stick that I'm brandishing in my ever-so old original profile pic.  So...al-Qaeda is telling us something I didn't already  know?!

  • At 09:02 today, world-famous sailor and cartoon superstar Popeye was rushed to Sweet Haven Bay General Hospital but was pronounced dead on arraival. Peepeye, 76, Popeye's only surviving nephew and family spokesman, said tainted spinach was likely to blame. "This is his finich", said Peepeye.

  • The Dream

    Peek-aboo, Oh I want to sing…No, I want to write…though I want to chat. Can’t do all—without inspiration, can’t do any. Circles. I’ve been turning in endless circles on myself, chasing my own tail. And sometimes catching it. Then berating it for be such a loser. Imagine my tail allowing itself to get caught—even by me. So I admonish myself to just stop chasing and stop losing out to myself. I drove to work today just living for the music. Literally, music was in my ears and on my mind, and I thought even worth dying for, defending if the need arose against a future nightmarish cultureless music-less oppressive status quo. Certainly I was high but I didn’t know why. Then I thought of you. You, too, I thought would live and die for the music. You, truer in this than I. For the music that you had given me was right, stealing my heart away from the commonplace and trite, easing me melodically through many nights. And the music of the morning was sweeter yet. And this was all I energized all day: ~~~Shaggy - Angel~~~ Girl, you're my angel, you're my darling angel Closer than my peeps you are to me, baby Shorty, you're my angel, you're my darling angel Girl, you're my friend when I'm in need... ~~~~~~ I love the music. Love, love, love, the music. And when before I die I go senseless, on that great day, it’s all I wanna hear.

  • Chris and Xanga are announcing Xanga Audio beta...  hrmmm....

    March 1, 2003 - my first audioblog on Xanga.... And I then wondered:   "Will aud(io)blog(ing) ever be a part of Xanga? "

    I now wonder if Xanga (like Audioblogger/Blogger) plans to enable phone audio postings (as contrasted to just manual audio uploads) by calling a Xanga number, recording a post, and then having your blog updated with an audblog icon and a link to your recorded audio?

    Unrelated self-note (to remind me where I 'was' today  - as I view my archives years from now): blogging from Chicago, here just for the morning, early afternoon.  Back in Cleveland this evening. Go Buckeyes.

  • True memories of another are more than just addressable recalls of encounters in the past.

    They are psychic post-dispositions to guide one henceforth in understanding one’s world.  One must take responsibility for one’s world.  Take complete responsibility for everything in one’s world, including those memories.  And learn.  Or disappear forever into a night of unknowing.

  • But...I really like it really hot. I really do.

    What we know today:

    1)  "For most of the past 800,000 years, carbon dioxide levels had remained at between 180 and 300 parts per million (ppm) of air. Now they are at 380ppm.... In the past, it had taken 1,000 years for carbon dioxide to rise by 30ppm during natural warming periods. According to the new measurements, the same level of increase has occurred in just the last 17 years....It's an experiment we don't know the result of."

    2) A process of worldwide global warming change has now begun, and projections of its course range from benign over the coming century to catastrophic in the next ten years.

    What we strongly have reason to believe:

    The principal cause of this warming is very probably the carbon dioxide generated by burning the fossil fuels on which the world depends for most of its energy.

    What we don't know:

    How significant an impact global warming will have on life, including human life, resulting from changes in precipitation, sea level, strength of storms, and transmission of diseases.

    So. Things are getting warmer. (I  really like it.)  Industrialization is probably to blame.  But will warmer mean your country becomes a desert...or a rain forest?  A more wasted land or a greener, more agriculturally productive land?  (Some Chinese scientists believe China will get greener and significantly more productive agriculturally while the US will experience major drought.)  Will your coastal cities get submerged?  Will extreme weather become even more extreme and common?  Will world immigration pressure go manic as populations in growingly destitute areas flee towards the growing greener pastures?  Will tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever range farther?  Migrating birds are likely to migrate much farther than before carrying diseases like H5N1 (bird flu) along with them.

    "Oh mommy, look at that big strange bird in the sky.  I've never seen a bird like that before!"

  • Just for fun?

    Google Image Labeler launched today. It’s a game, based on Luis von Ahn’s ESP Game, that puts two random users together and asks them to label/tag an image. The idea is that if two people come up with the same label, it is probably a good one and will make Google’s image search better.

       -TechCrunch

    What a clever game.  It provides fun for the participants (yes, I tried it and found it interesting, amusing, and engaging) while it improves Google's search and thus potentially makes Google more $$$.  Hence, if you hate Google, don't play.  Or play 'bad' and hope you match up well with some other deranged Google-hater.

  • If I hadn’t loved you, I’d now conclude that knowing you was a waste of time.

     

    Not that a waste of time is always a bad thing.  Crosswords are a waste of time.  Blogging is, too, pretty much.  And washing and waxing a car is as much a waste of time as anything I can imagine.

     

    So, it follows, that only knowing you would have been like washing and waxing my car.  Only knowing you would have been like blogging.  In fact, it was through blogging that I got to know you.  See there.

     

    Except for the loving part, all will fade. 
    That love, however, will remain ours-untouched-
    even after all of time has wasted away.

  • As a young adolescent, I was quite an introvert.  As an introvert, I was a loner, spent much time at home reading books, exploring the workings of the mind.  By brute force of such habit, I became something of a genius.  Or at least peculiar enough to be worthy, by some frank folk, of such a consideration.  Well, that peculiar sense of self has been too long neglected.  Changes ahead.

     

    It is true that I have led many of you here through the gates and onto the grounds of Dreamland.  I have led you where I have gone: to hallowed grounds, to an expanse of sacred doom, to the land of the dead.  I connected up philosophically with Death at  a very young age—at 2, I think, I had my first premonition that nothing in life lasts.  Still a child, there were subsequent deaths in the family—of course sad but not shocking, heartbreaking but not insurmountable for the surviving.  Death visited again most tragically when, as a freshman in college , I was driving my mother to work (so that I could then take the car to school) and another driver ran a red light, crashed into us, and killed her.  Not instantly, but painfully.  Yet ultimately she died with dignity in the company of the children she loved.  After her death, something in me changed.  I became more fearless, sometimes reckless.  I firmly believed I’d not myself live until the age of 30.  Yet I resolved never to surrender to Death—it would have to come and drag me battling to my grave.  Death did come to claim me a few years later.  But it was a mistake.  A Death angel, literally, hovered over me and queried me wordlessly (hence, mentally or psychically—or more aptly described: directly ) as to whether I was the Pope: Are you the Pope?  I was shocked by the mere vision of that above-my-bed swirling Angel.  Yet more shocked by the realization that it had mistaken me somehow for the Pope and needed my affirmation to continue its mission.  In response, I directly indicated no, I am not the Pope.  It departed and I fell back to sleep.  I awoke to discover that the Pope had in the meanwhile died.  After that fiasco of near mistaken identity, Death and its angels seemed to avoid annoying me like I was the plague.   Many years of mindful adventures followed, with fine uninterrupted health, and a sense of life embracing an endless path to eternity.  The confluence of those three factors washed away my adolescent impression that I was destined to be good—in the sense that only the good die young.

     

    There is an intention of space as a proxy for time between this sentence and the last.  Much has transpired in that space.  Most darkly, somewhere in that space just before the beginning of this sentence—Death decided it had neglected me long enough. Perhaps it finally got over its embarrassment in nearly mistaking me for the Pope. (More likely:  I had screwed up once too often in flirting with danger <<details here omitted>> and drew its unkind attention back upon myself.)  Increasingly so for the past month, but most acutely over just this past week, Death has been hacking at me.  Yes, hacking.  Like a hacker does a web server.  The good news is that it hasn’t (yet) found me vulnerable.  The other news is that my psyche is getting battered by a seemingly endless barrage of reminders of hammered mortality. 

     

    Changes ahead.  Death has reminded me that it’s time for me to stop neglecting myself.

  • After an unprecedentedly expansive, far-reaching total summer self-survey, I've come to the conclusion: better sober-dry than fucked-up high.

  • knowing that i’ll never know is knowing all i need to know.


     


    you came


    you saw


    you absconded


    with my heart no longer intact


    i have come to rely on instinct, wit, and intuition alone


    to complete the dirty work of reconstituting a living


    trusting that the shadow of a cloud


    is not the cloud itself


    while realizing that a cloud hasn’t much intrinsic value


    even at that.



  • Why '8'?  It's already on 'the Chart' (Oxygen).  I would have designated HU as '0' - to represent the numinous ethereality of heart-soul.  But I bet Dow was anticipatingly sensitive to a criticism that designating HU as '0' would indicate that they considered HU to be 'nothing', 'worthless', 'zilch'.   Hence, in the interest of good PR, they have here propagated a snippet of bad science.  Just as in the interest of profit, they have in the past, prostituted good science.  Still, a rather captivating and atypical ninety seconds of elementalism here.

  • FALSE DAWN: A few nights ago, photographer Rob Ratkowski stood atop the summit of the Haleakala volcano in Maui under a velvety, star-strewn sky. Daybreak was was only moments away when a pale glow lanced up from the eastern horizon--but it wasn't the sunrise, it was the Zodiacal Light:


    Above: Zodiacal light silhouettes an observatory dome atop Maui's Haleakala volcano; a 3-minute exposure on 800-speed film by photographer Rob Ratkowski.

    Zodiacal light is sunlight reflected from countless tiny grains of space dust orbiting the sun. These grains are sprinkled among the orbits of the planets, making a vast dusty pancake as big as the Solar System itself. For people in the Northern Hemisphere, the next two months are a great time to see Zodiacal light because the dust band is oriented nearly vertical at sunrise. Says, Ratkowski, "I was amazed how bright it really is, washing out the stars within its glow." 
     - spaceweather


    A 'vast dusty pancake'.  We live and love amidst a vast dusty pancake sprinkled about.  ha!

  • Are you killing me?


    Are you killing me?


    My conclusion: Yep, you're killing me.


    * dives from status of 'pontificate-on-high' to lowly 'man with no-name who's got plenty of nothing'


    And it ain't the first time I've been underground either.

  • Did you hear?  They demoted Pluto to a “dwarf planet” today.  It’s not one of the planets in our solar system anymore.  I don’t think this was a deliberate insult to Pluto per se as much as a delicate reaching out to dwarves, a much-neglected segment of our society.  Following suit, look for them to demote Mercury to a “midget planet” next.  By the way, are munchkins from Venus or Mars?


     


    I’m traveling to Ottawa, Canada next week to obtain some work-related training at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) College.  Can anyone tell me if those boys like to party or not?


     


    Does it really cost $96 a day to feed oneself in Ottawa?  Because that’s what the State Department affords travelers like myself.  And they stipulate that if you spend more than 3 times that limit that you will then have to justify your expenses.  If it is really that expensive to eat in Ottawa, then I expect I’ll see a lot of poor thin Canadians strutting around.  Lord have mercy.


     


    Still running (I am).  Is it any surprise?   I suspect I still have enough in me to complete my second virtual lap around the circumference of Earth before I revert ever more to walking.  Ha.  One of my personal challenge fantasy-visions is to run a marathon at the age of 100.  In Antarctica.  After (projecting future global warming) some of that ice has melted and there’s exposed virgin terra firma to dance upon on again.


     


    "He who does not trust enough will not be trusted."

  • For Love...

    My speculation, pure on-the-sidelines speculation, about the JonBenet Ramsey murder case and John Mark Karr's confession:


    1) He isn't guilty.
    2) He isn't insane or even a total kook.
    3) He isn't confessing just as an act of self-promoting publicity, otherwise know as seeking "15 minutes of fame".


    Rather:


    1) He calculatingly postured to get arrested and is confessing because, in some strange way, he really does 'love JonBenet' and
    2) He fully realizes that, even though he's found not guilty of her murder (as he expects), he will have suceeded, in the media, of turning a 'cold case' into a 'hot case' again, and
    3) After his acquittal (if he's even charged), the media will continue to ask: "Well, then, who really did it?", keeping the case 'hot' and forcing authorities, in response, to revamp their investigation. And thus John Mark will have achieved his goal of total media manipulation, self-seen as an act of his 'love', in the pursuit of the true murderer of his pedophilic fascination, and thus
    4) He sees himself as sacrificing his reputation, and perhaps even submitting himself to incarceration (for related charges of false report) and liability for the court costs, 'for her'.


    Makes you stop and wonder what some people consider as their 'love' and what they will do for that 'love'. 

  • I'm tempted to reveal the 10 most deepest, darkest secrets of my soul and the 10 most hurting vulnerabilities of my heart and the 10 most defunct, defective dysfunctions of my mind.  Here.  But only for 10 minutes exposure top.  Then swoosh 'em away.  One a day.  Over the next 30 days.  At totally unanticipatable times of the day.  In a manner that will not be viewable through email subscription (just a technical detail I will not bother you with) lest someone think they can catch up via subscription without paying attention.  A form of Russian blog roulette, if you will.  And if you read, you watch me shoot myself in the head.  Otherwise, I flush my deepest dreads into cyber-oblivion and thus catharize my hurts forever more.  Yes, I'm tempted.  Bang.  I live.

  • I have come to believe that sanity consists of little else than being able to assure yourself, most of the time and with a high degree of self-found probability, that the rest of the world collectively is crazier than you.


    If, however, you are thoroughly convinced of such with no need for self-assurance whatsoever, then you are definitely not sane.

  • Xanga has a new 'CSO'... and I thought they only hired kids.


    NEW YORK, Aug. 1 /U.S. Newswire/ -- As part of its comprehensive approach to online safety, Xanga has hired experienced cybercrime prosecutor, Stephen Kline, to lead the company's safety and compliance initiatives as Chief Safety Officer. Since 2000, Kline has worked in the New York Attorney General's office as an Assistant Attorney General in its Internet Bureau, where he has investigated and prosecuted numerous high- profile Internet-based fraud and compliance violations in both state and federal courts.


    During Kline's six years with the Attorney General's office he:


    -- Prosecuted the first enforcement action of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act


    -- Jointly prosecuted with the FTC a group of more than 60 adult Web sites for hundreds of millions of dollars in credit card fraud –- the largest case of its kind ever


    -- Prosecuted several spam operations, including some of the world's most notorious spammers


    -- Served as an expert lecturer for law enforcement and attorneys on compliance with Internet-related laws


    "Xanga is an industry leader because of its innovative approach and strong commitment to safety," Kline said. "I'm looking forward to working with both the Xanga team and law enforcement in order to continue to offer Xanga users a safe place to express themselves."


    Reporting directly to Xanga CEO John Hiler, Kline will serve as Xanga's chief liaison to law enforcement officials, regulators, policy-makers and industry groups. Additionally, Kline will be responsible for defining Xanga's abuse policies and procedures, and also ensuring that Xanga is in full compliance with state and federal law.


    "What makes this so exciting is that Stephen is a real innovator," said Hiler. "His work with the New York Attorney General's office was on the cutting edge of Internet law. We're hugely excited to have an innovator like Stephen focused 100 percent on the safety of our users."


    Kline will begin work at Xanga on August 16, 2006.


       - U.S. Newswire

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