I'd pretend that I was a billboard..I fell in love with a beautiful highway

i just discovered how ultimately perfect the song (Nothing But) Flowers (Talking Heads) is.


it reminds me of this part of slaughterhouse five:
Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

I'm done with you, Consumerist.com

Consumerist.com made the outrageous, false, and inflammatory claim that irregardless is a real word. Dictionary.com also says this:
"Usage Note: Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so."

BOOOOooo, Consumerist.com

Seeing Things

I've seen some good things in the last few days. One was the Eels, who were great live. I was surprised that they were just two guys.

The second was a Smart car, which someone must have brought over here themselves. I think it's only in Europe right now. It was pretty tiny. And cool.

I almost busted up some cars in the downtown rush hour getting a picture to send to P, who is a tree hugger.

Garrison Keillor, Advice Columnist?

Sep 22, 1998 salon.com

Dear Mr. Blue,
I find I have no desire whatsoever to write, either creatively or otherwise. This makes it hard to meet girls in odd clothing or even to be invited out to events where people say unusual things. How does one break the news without offense to intellectual friends that he has not the slightest impulse to assemble words in long, long strings?
Mr. Black

Mr. Black, you are doing the right thing by refusing the call of literature, but why make a big announcement about it? Look authorly and tell those unusual girls that you're at work on a memoir about your troubled youth in the Sufi commune in Santa Fe and it is much too dark and grievous to discuss at a party, and let it go at that. People will respect your privacy and they will also accord you the blatant adulation that is the reward of every writer. To create a fiction about being a writer is an artistic act, and it is the surest way to meet a thrilling woman whose odd clothing suddenly falls from her tanned and sinuous shoulder as she puts her soft cheek against yours and whispers, "You are so beautiful and I am a fool for you. Meet me on the terrace, under the long, long strings of ivy, and tell me unusual things."

healthcare system in rwanda

i wonder what my friend m.s. thinks about this: