Yearly Archives: 2005

Friday Ark

This entry was posted in Friday Ark on by

Cats, Dogs, Spiders and ? every Friday.
I’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals as I see them (photoshops at my discretion and humans only in supporting roles).
Alert: Friday updates will be minimal until afternoon…I will be on the road without a sat link. Click through the comments and trackbacks below to check out the boarders.
Leave a comment or trackback to this post or email me and I’ll add yours to the list. Check back regularly for updates throughout the day on Fridays and somewhat less frequently over the weekend.
Dog folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Dogs hosted by Mickey’s Musings.
Cat folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Cats which goes up every Sunday and will be hosted this week by Enrevanche.
And, check out Laurence’s fine graphical analysis of Friday Ark boardings.
Archive editions of the Friday Ark.
Cats

InvertebratesDogsBirdsOther VertebratesDidn’t Make ItAt the Zoo

Exceptions (inclusion not guaranteed)


Why Blog When….

This entry was posted in Music on by

…you can dance your ass off to extraordinarily fine music:
RRE_31722.jpg
Put Railroad Earth on your must see many times list. Neither the commercial CDs or the downloaded live shows that I’ve listened to so far do justice to the live performance.
Some might call them blue grass oriented and I suppose they are but that label is overly constrictive. These guys play music! They are all fine individual players and when wrapped together something much larger than the sum of the parts rears up, grabs ahold of you, and takes you right to the core of what you need…you choose it.
We humans may be a bit underconfigured for this music. You really need 6 sets of arms and legs to dance with these guys. Especially when they are jamming!
Oh, you must be movin’ ahead all the time. Even when they plumb sad themes or the underbelly of life the music does not let you dwell there. Especially during the first set there was a constant feeling that the big bang was about to occur, that all the forces of creation were gathering and driving forward to a great flowering.
I don’t yet know Railroad Earth’s music well enough to provide a full set list but here are a few (order not exact): Set 1: Storms: Set 2: Railroad Earth, Smilin’ Like a Budda, Long Way to Go; Encore: Catfish John (beautifully done!). There was much, much more: the first set lasted over an hour and the second set started at 10:13 and ended at 11:30 (including encore).1
This was an all ages show and ranged from sub-teens to geriatric. Everyone was friendly, open to conversation and eager to talk about the band.
There were maybe 200 people in a relatively small venue which, thankfully, was non-smoking (the smokers could go outside or into the attached bar). If you wanted you could be stage front – 2 feet from the band. I found the sound to be a bit muddy that close and spent most of my time about 16-18 feet back in the center where the sound was pretty crisp.
There were 3 audiences taping rigs and they may have provided patches for more decks so I suspect this show should circulate soon.
A special treat was getting into the venue early, a good 90 minutes before show time, and being treated to the sound check while eating dinner.
1 Here is the full set list (thanks Scott!):
Railroad Earth
4/6/2005
Bishop’s Pub
Vashon Island, WA
I: Storms, Old Dangerfield, Bird in a House, Stillwater Getaway,
Railroad Earth, Place Where Songs Begin, Head
II: Cold Water, Mourning Flies, Moonshiner, Like a Buddha>El
Cumbanchero, Magic Foot>Luxury Liner, Sing for Me, Seven Story
Mountain, Long Way to Go>Fiddlee
E: Catfish John
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Below the fold, in reverse order, is the menu for the rest of the weekend. Blogging will be very, very light!

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Keeping Our Business Secret

This entry was posted in Federal Government Information Law Libertarianism on by

How not to be accountable: don’t tell anyone what you are really doing (PDF).

In 2004 the federal set a new record for keeping secrets. Last year, the federal government employees chose to classify information a record 15.6 million times, according to new government figures released this week. The figure is 10 percent higher than the total in the previous year. And when given a choice, government employees last year chose to keep their new secrets longer than in years past: Two thirds (66 percent) of the time government employees chose to keep those new secrets for more than a decade. At the same time, the flow of old secrets to the public dropped to its lowest point in nearly a decade to 28 million pages.

In fairness to the bushies increases in classification started trending upward again around the beginning of clinton’s second administration. The clinton folks were, though, declassifying more documents than they were classifying while the bushies have brought declassification to a near standstill.
Makes me wonder just what they are hiding and why they don’t want us, their employers, to know.