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EatMorGlue

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EatMorGlue last won the day on November 2 2002

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  1. I noticed a lot of other kids reading up on WWII... right now I'm reading: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." If you like reading about WWII, or if you like having your fucking mind blown by, who I consider to be, the best American writer of the 20th century, check this out. This is Pynchon's tour de force, which at its most general is about a man's relationship to the V-2 rocket. When I read books I underline sentences or passages that I like, and I've got entire pages underlined in this book. The man just has a way with words and sentences. Amazing. Plot and story are top notch to boot so far, too. This is not for the faint of heart though: it isn't a real easy read, and it isn't a real short read either, clockin in just under 800 pages. I've been reading it in spurts over the last year. On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald His final book about the (arguably) self-induced cultural amnesia in Germany regarding the Allied heavy-bombing campaigns to reduce to ashes a number of largely civilian, non-military cities during the final years of the war. More German civilians were killed in these campaigns than total US deaths in both theaters of war, yet there is an almost total vacuum in German postwar literature about facing and bluntly describing these atrocities. up to bat next: The Wind-up Bird Chronicl by Haruki Murakami Picked this up on a whim. I think it's peripherally related to the rape of Nanking. Said to be bizarre and disturbing, just how I like my fiction. Fast Food Nation by Schlosser I've been meaning to read it for a while and I've just recently got it. man I wish I had the money for: The Second World War boxed set by Churchill
  2. some people did that during vietnam, like my dad. enlisted in the AF to avoid getting drafted and shot up in the jungle. when it came time to pick jobs they asked him if he wanted to be. he said an MP. they made him a medic. any of ya'll been watching band of brothers on the history channel? yeah. i can only imagine the horror he saw. he still won't talk about any of it, and he's been battling post-traumatic stress syndrome for thirty-odd years now. it's a good idea to keep safe in case of a draft - the logic is there - but in reality it isn't an absolute guarantee to keep you alive or unscarred.
  3. "Cold Turkey" - Kurt Vonnegut Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by In These Times Cold Turkey by Kurt Vonnegut Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace. But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. ------------------------- When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted. Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government. I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it. I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ. The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one. But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this: Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning: As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free. Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all? How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes? Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. … And so on. Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff. For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break! ------------------------- There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are! I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that. Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person? No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said. During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again. Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken. One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us. ------------------------- And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times. The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D. Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade. But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball. Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then: I often think it’s comical How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative. Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut. If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you. If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler? ------------------------- My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint. Other drunks have seen pink elephants. And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals. We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.” How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today. So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief. That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay. Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People. About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem. I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other. But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut. And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels. When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey. Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on. © 2004 In These Times
  4. one of my buddies at work used to be in the army, and he told me i might as well go ahead and enlist now, so i could at least choose your branch of service and job. but what does he know? i doubt the draft would be reinstated, because the draft is designed to share the responsibility of war across economic classes. you think rich folk who spent $80,000 just on their kid's prep school education are gonna let him/her get shipped off to possibly die in some sandy hellhole? or do you think they'll call up their senator/neighbor and tell him this isn't such a good idea. just my opinion.
  5. a.k.a the "everything" article. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040209&s=roy i thought this was an amazing article. if it's been posted before, sorry. it's worth another read if it was.
  6. i've had a little too much tonight to make it through all the posts (i probably made it halfway down the first page), but what i will say is this (and maybe it was said already): a lot of people vote their wallets. i don't know how it is where everybody else is at, but right now, i know more college grads here (regardless of their degree) working manual labor than i do graduates actually using their degree. that's no exaggeration, that's just the truth. i know kids in high school who can't get jobs at the grocery store cause laid off, underemployed grown folks and recent college grads got those jobs so they can make rent and pay bills. meanwhile bush spends $4 billion here for mars, $90 billion there for a war that we can never win. that's aside from the fact that we are using war as a tool to fight terrorism, a completely laughable notion. (as an aside, that article link was sent to me and described as "everything"... definitely worth checking out.) the bush administration has spent hundreds of billions of dollars, but jobs have not really improved at all. do you think unemployed/underemployed america is going to vote for four more years of this? i mean, it's conceivable they will vote along party lines, but i honestly don't think bush has done enough in the creation of jobs to garner a re-election. the administration keeps saying that the economy is improving, and overall, it is. but that doesn't mean jobs are. basically, he is running on a sentimental ticket, and sentiment doesn't pay the bills. a decent job does. my prediction: if jobs don't improve by late summer, bush will lose. with a lot of companies outsourcing jobs to india, the philipines, etc without any government incentive to do otherwise, i think it's unlikely the job market will improve by then. and for the record, i wrote in nader in 2000 even though he wasn't even an eligible write-in candidate in my state. the green party is definitely an extreme left party, and without their backing nader won't "take" as many votes away from the left as in 2000. i still contend he's not taking votes away from anybody. i think a lot of people who voted for nader in 2000 are people like me: if he wasn't running, they probably wouldn't have voted at all. my vote in 2000 was just as good as me staying home... nonexistent-god bless america.
  7. i got this the other day too and it was awesome... i collected on my very first class action lawsuit! i thought i'd never see any money from it, it had been so long. and in a way, it's like i didn't. in one hand, out the other. to the credit card co. that shit is such a racket. "welcome to the real world, SUCKER!" - mission hill
  8. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...tech_music_dc_9 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A recording-industry trade group said on Wednesday it plans to sue hundreds of individuals who illegally distribute copyrighted songs over the Internet, expanding its anti-piracy fight into millions of homes. The Recording Industry Association of America said it hopes to curb illegal song downloading by tracking down the heaviest users of popular "peer to peer" services like Kazaa and suing them for thousands of dollars in damages. "We're going to begin taking names and preparing lawsuits against peer-to-peer network users who are illegally making available a substantial number of music files to millions of other computer users," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a conference call. The RIAA believes the popular peer-to-peer services, which allow users to copy music, movies and other files from each others' hard drives, are partly responsible for a decline in CD sales, and has aggressively sought to shut them down. But until now the industry has shied away from directly suing users, opting instead to send them online warnings and clutter up the networks with dummy files. Some advocates have argued the networks provide a harmless way for music fans to discover new artists, but Sherman and other music-industry figures likened them to shoplifters who steal groceries and other tangible goods. A recent court ruling makes it easier to track down copyright violators through their Internet providers, and Sherman said investigators would begin to track down hundreds of users who make their digital-music collections available for copying. Lawsuits asking for statutory damages of $150,000 per count will likely be filed in six to eight weeks, he said. The industry will not initially target those who do not allow others to copy their music collections, he said. Music fans who wish to avoid legal action should change the settings on their peer-to-peer software to block access to their hard drives, or uninstall the software completely, he said. The RIAA has managed to shut down Napster Inc., the first peer-to-peer service, and several successors. But the trade group suffered a setback last month when a judge ruled that two other networks, Grokster and Morpheus, should not be shut down because they do not control what is traded on their systems. "The RIAA, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to not only alienate their own customers but attempt to drive them into bankruptcy through litigation. So therefore they probably won't be able to afford to buy any music even if they want to," said Grokster President Wayne Rosso, who added he does not support copyright infringement. Four college students agreed last month to pay between $12,000 and $17,500 each after the RIAA sued them for allegedly operating illegal song-swapping networks on campus. RIAA members include AOL Time Warner Inc (NYSE:AOL). Vivendi Universal (NYSE:V), Sony Corp (6758.T)., Bertelsmann AG (BERT.UL), and EMI Group Plc (EMI.L). _______________________________________________________ The RIAA's take on it: http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/062503.asp WASHINGTON (June 25, 2003) -- Starting tomorrow, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) will begin gathering evidence and preparing lawsuits against individual computer users who are illegally offering to "share" substantial amounts of copyrighted music over peer-to-peer networks. In making the announcement, the music industry cited its multi-year effort to educate the public about the illegality of unauthorized downloading, and underscored the fact that major music companies have made vast catalogues of music available to dozens of services to help create legitimate, high quality and inexpensive alternatives to online piracy. "The law is clear and the message to those who are distributing substantial quantities of music online should be equally clear --- this activity is illegal, you are not anonymous when you do it, and engaging in it can have real consequences," said RIAA president Cary Sherman. "We'd much rather spend time making music then dealing with legal issues in courtrooms. But we cannot stand by while piracy takes a devastating toll on artists, musicians, songwriters, retailers and everyone in the music industry." The RIAA expects to use the data it collects as the basis for filing what could ultimately be thousands of lawsuits charging individual peer-to-peer music distributors with copyright infringement. The first round of suits could take place as early as mid-August. Over the past year, the industry has responded to consumer demand by making its music available to a wide range of authorized online subscription, streaming and download services that make it easier than ever for fans to get music legally and inexpensively on the Internet. Moreover, these services offer music reliably, in the highest sound quality, and without the risks of exposure to viruses or other undesirable material. Federal law and the federal courts have been quite clear on what is not legal. It is illegal to make available for download copyrighted works without permission of the copyright owner. Court decisions have affirmed this as well. In the recent Grokster decision, for example, the court confirmed that the users of that system were guilty of copyright infringement. And in last year's Aimster decision, the judge wrote that the idea that "ongoing, massive, and unauthorized distribution and copying of copyrighted works somehow constitutes 'personal use' is specious and unsupported." "Once we begin our evidence-gathering process, any individual computer user who continues to offer music illegally to millions of others will run the very real risk of facing legal action in the form of civil lawsuits that will cost violators thousands of dollars and potentially subject them to criminal prosecution," said Sherman. To gather evidence against P2P users who make illegal downloading possible, the RIAA will be using software that scans the public directories available to any user of a peer-to-peer network. These directories, which allow users to find the material they are looking for, list all the files that other users of the network are currently offering to distribute. When the software finds a user who is offering to distribute copyrighted music files, it downloads some of the infringing files, along with the date and time it accessed the files. Additional information that is publicly available from these systems allows the RIAA to then identify their Internet Service Provider (ISP). The RIAA can then serve a subpoena on the ISP requesting the name and address of the individual whose account was being used to distribute copyrighted music. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), ISPs must provide copyright holders with such information when there is reason to believe copyrights are being infringed. Almost all ISPs disclose this obligation in the User's Terms of Service. Music industry leaders, along with an unprecedented coalition of other groups like the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), the Country Music Association, the Gospel Music Association, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), American Federation of Musicians, songwriters, recording artists, retailers, and record companies have been educating music fans that the epidemic of illegal file sharing not only robs songwriters and recording artists of their livelihoods, it also undermines the future of music itself by depriving the industry of the resources it needs to find and develop new talent. In addition, it threatens the jobs of tens of thousands of less celebrated people in the music industry, from engineers and technicians to warehouse workers and record store clerks. This message has been conveyed to the public in a series of print and broadcast ads featuring top recording artists. And, in the past two months, millions of Instant Messages were sent directly to infringers on the Kazaa and Grokster peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. ____________________________________ and that's followed by a mess of propoganda from artists whining about not getting their money. and they even say that every time a file is shared, a new artist won't get heard. what a load of bull. how bout this guys: if your music sucks, maybe you shouldn't be getting paid. and if you are a company in an oligopoly who artificially inflates product prices, maybe it's the public's right to try to undermine you if they have the means to do so. i dunno... just food for thought while i sit in my bunker and wait for the sky to fall. :rolleyes:
  9. so i fuckin did it... getting my B.S. in mathematics in about three hours now, honors and the whole nine. "i didn't know what i was going to do when i graduated. but i knew i was going to drink." - my favorite professor pretty much sums up my situation right there. and congrats to anybody else graduating this semester. to getting in and out in four years, like pulling band-aids: cheers.
  10. yo man.. drop me an email with your addy so i can (eventually) get that radiohead to you. i didn't log into hotmail and they deleted my inbox.. lost your email and your address. gluetown@hotmail.com
  11. been meaning to read notes from underground for a while. currently reading: notes to myself - hugh prather this book is ridiculous. i just want to beat prather about the face and head with it. imagine deep thoughts that aren't funny, but sound more like stoner babble that you think is deep when you're high, but is just idiotic when you aren't. a friend of mine told me it was so bad that it was funny. i'm not laughing yet. if on a winter's night a traveler - italo calvino awesome. i love this book so far. i love it. awesome. the complete short stories of ernest hemingway i mean, come on... hemingway. it's a pretty good read. recently read: pale fire - vladimir nabokov a lot funnier than i thought it was going to be. fascinating novel. if you haven't read it, i guarantee that you've never read another novel like it. the same goes for the calvino novel i mentioned. i'm starting nabokov's lolita soon. ignorance - milan kundera i thought this book was awesome. first kundera i've read. the romantic and the bitter cynic in me were both satisfied with it when i was done. the book of laughter and forgetting is up to bat soon. ULB is gonna have to wait till the summer though. death sentence - maurice blanchot very strange. i guess this would go in the french existential type of style? like camus... but i found this way stranger. (no pun intended, honestly.) plot? heh.. not necessarily. it took a bit of explanation and a second reading for me to understand what was going on, but it was pretty cool once i understood.
  12. i just got back from sunny florida and the gator bowl and i gotta brag on state... nc state smote notre dame. so fuck rudy.
  13. the last two albums DID rock. if they went over your head, well, then i'm sorry for you cause you are really missing out on some incredible music. but the fault lies on your end.
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