Eine Neuen Linken.

Long overdue, this... we're adding to our blog-roll Dohiyi Mir, the blog (and podcast!) of an old college acquaintance, with whom I sparred on the pre-Internet notesboards system, hosted on the old UNIX VAX, which you accessed with green VT100-style terminals. Ah, those were the days...

This makes a total of three (3) bloggers in my link bar who also attended my micro-ivy.

If anyone is searching the archives...

I have changed the link for the first podcast so it's at least findable (I think). It won't work from a podcatching app, though. Still on the look-out for a permanent yet cheap solution.

Edit: Nope, didn't work. Damn it.

It's official.

Podcasting is now part and parcel of iTunes. And me without my knickers on.

Rooster Spice, the Podcast--Episode 3

Coming LIVE to a portable audio player near you (well, maybe your audio player isn't actually living):

Rooster Spice, the Podcast clocking in today at just over 17 (!) entrancing minutes and just under nine inexpensive megabytes. Show notes:

• Feeding kids like Hobbits
• Two recent Supreme Court decisions
• Two recent Squelch auditions
• Bootleg of the Week: Revolution by the Beatles
• No leftovers, the fridge is busted.

As always, send your audio and/or text comments to roosterspice AT gmail DOT com. Please?

Incidentally, the first RSTP episode is currently off-line. My ISP has a storage limit, although I did expect to get at least THREE shows up before I had to delete one. If anyone would like to donate some storage, on a temporary basis, until I consult the Mistress of Funds and price out a solution, please let me know. I really would like all the episodes to be on-line when I enter this thing into the various directories.

A New Look.

I'm not in love with this new template, but at least it's not broken. (Yes, throwing myself upon the goodwill of my readers was as effective as throwing myself upon a sword. Could be because no one actually reads this darn thing.)

Apropos of nothing, let me give a plug to the increasingly inaccurately named Holidays 2004 weblog. The former Medley/Cozy has been on fire recently, particularly when describing the anti-speech amendment (which could, incidentally, snag our current president).

The ultimate do-it-yourself music video.

This is making the rounds of the intarwebs, so do yourself a favor and check it out. (Link via Pandagon).

Okay...

Back to the old template for the time being. Despite Godfrey's suggestion, I can't find any reference to <div style> in the template (though it does show up in the source), which makes me think that Blogger is putting it there and breaking things. I don't know enough about CSS or HTML to figure out why the call is breaking things, or how I can fix it. I throw myself upon the knowledge and good will of my readers...

Darn you, Google!

I have now replaced the template with a plain-vanilla version. But it's still fouled up. Which makes me wonder: is it Blogger's fault?

Erm...

Is anyone else seeing a big blank space where the posts ought to be?

Rooster Spice, the Podcast--Episode 2

So! here we are, it's a Friday, and you're looking for something to listen to, right? Wait no longer.

Rooster Spice, the Podcast

Show notes:

• Comments and commentary
• World's largest ice pop
• Thoughts on first-person shooters
• The Supreme Court's view of private property
• A message from Satan
• Leftovers

And, yeah, I know the filename says it's released tomorrow, not today. Sorry about that.

Remember, you can send comments, audio or otherwise, to roosterspice AT gmail DOT com.

Rooster Spice, the Podcast--Episode 1

Yes, that's right; instead of reading esoteric, rambling, self-piteous blog entries, you can now listen to esoteric, rambling, self-piteous blog entries!

Get the podcast here (64kbps mp3, VBR, 5.7MB, 12:00). Or, if you prefer, you can subscribe to the podcast--copy this link into your favorite podcatching client.

I welcome your thoughts in the comment boxes, or at my new email address: roosterspice AT gmail [dot] com. If you like, send audio files (ogg, AAC, or mp3) and I'll play them in the 'cast!

And tell me if you want me to stop...

Show notes: First episode ever! Features Father's Day; thoughts on returning to theatre; reading from Twelfth Night; leftovers.

Daddydaddydaddy.

I'll have some more to say about Father's Day, but for now, let me just share this comment from a thread over at Pandagon:

My father committed suicide when I was two, unfortnately I found him dead.

My mother, an immigrant, raised my sister, my brother and I alone (with the help of the community we lived in and Social Security) until I was six, when she married an abusive asshole who liked to beat her and us.

Tonight my son, ten, asked if he could take me to McDonalds for dinner on Father's Day. He had thirteen dollars he'd somehow saved from his birthday two weeks ago...

Tonight I had the best meal I've ever had and I'm a vegan.

I'm going to cry for years thinking about the joy in my son's eyes when I said I would love McDonalds, and when he paid for his Dad's supper. My supper.

Nothing means more to me than the love that little boy has for HIS Dad. Father's Day?

It's a wonderful thing.
(Posted by sixteenwords.)

The blog post itself is also well worth reading, if a little less uplifting.

Newses.

Whew! Things are getting out of hand here chez Rooster Spice, what with all our millions of readers clamoring for easy ways to get Rooster Spice to their mobile phones, PDAs, neural implants, and the like. So we have implemented an RSS feed, which our Tech Guys tell us will bring us up to date, or at least to 2003 or so. To subscribe, just copy the link at the orange XML chicklet to the right there, and you too can get up-to-the-minute updates on the level of Squelch's self-pity! (Shrewd readers will find a clue to Rooster Spice's future direction embedded in the XML...)

The usual.

I'd love to be able to get worked up about politics and eroding privacy and creeping fascism. But how can I get worked up about troubles in our country's public life if I can't even handle my own private life?

This morning was another day of losing my temper and taking it out on my kids. E fell and scraped her knee a little bit. She's extremely pain-averse since she chewed her toenails down to the root a couple weeks ago. Now even the tiniest injury makes her wail and cry. She is only two and a half, after all.

But I couldn't distract her or make her laugh to defuse the situation, no. I just plowed on ahead (we were walking D to his summer camp and on a deadline). So naturally she got more upset the more we walked. I wound up carrying her all the way home after dropping D off, getting more and more angry the whole time.

There's a little more to it than that of course, but what's the difference? The point is, all I could do was get angry. I couldn't stop and calm myself down. Actually, I did try to; but after getting calm, E refused to move, and I got angry again. When we got home, I put her in her room for her own safety. I was drenched with sweat and shaking with rage.

K says I should take an anger management class, and maybe I should. But like a typical male I feel I should be able to fix this problem on my own.

Posts like this are why I keep this blog pseudonymous, so there's no danger my family will Google me and get themselves worried for my (and my kids') safety. Unfortunately, much of my family and a few friends already bookmarked this stupid blog back before it went pseudonymous, and they're my only readers.

So--why am I pressing the "Publish" button?

Rumors shall swirl no longer.

So it's true, although there's very little info about it on the Apple site: Macs are moving to Intel, and Mac OS X already works on a Pentium 4. God damn. Cognitive dissonance abounds. They couldn't even move to AMD chips?

As long as Mac OS X still works, I don't really care. But gee whiz...

Deep thoughts.

How long, do you suppose, before the wingnuts start "rehabilitating" Mark Felt from a man who helped bring down a criminal enterprise in the White House, into a evil traitor who ruined a presidency to which he should have been loyal?

I mean, besides Pat Buchanan, who has already called Felt a traitor.

Let's not forget this: the Nixon White House was bad. They attempted to subvert the American political process through illegal means. Then they attempted to cover it up. In my arrogant opinion, no one should have felt loyalty to Nixon and his cronies.

We cannot let Watergate go down the memory hole. It was a significant event, and not just because it happened during the baby boomers' coming of age. And we cannot let others gloss over Nixon's crimes, just because he was a conservative and conservatives are ascendant.

(Well, he wasn't a conservative in today's terms, of course. Did you know that a centerpiece of his second term was supposed to be nationalized health care?)