Poem: Perspective

Step back
And the whole machine
Wheels by
In a Gaussian Blur.
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Free Hitler Heads, While They Last

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A Long Ten Years Without The Grateful Dead

Jerry Garcia with The Grateful Dead,
Seattle, Friday May 26, 1995.

Click photo to enlarge



In many reviews, people describe 5-26-95 as the last great Dead show, and one of the best of the 90's after the departure of Bruce Hornsby. It's been ten long years since this final Seattle Dead show. After leaving Seattle, they played 25 more times, with their final show on 7-9-95. In this picture from that day, Jerry looks happy, and healthy (angelic almost, with his halo of white hair and beard in the spotlights); he smiled throughout the show. He was in the zone.

Dave Hokit and I went to the Thursday and Friday shows. Thursday, we each brought our oldest children (then ranging from 8 to 10 1/2). Thursday, The Dead played another good set and played one of my favorites, The Wheel, for the last time ever. Friday we hooked up with a show buddy we'd witnessed with some envy the previous night; we merged our commisaries, with us kicking in copious amounts of gin, tonic, bitters and a backpack full of ice we smuggled in. The temperature was in the 80's and I don't think I ever anticipated a show as much in my life. They opened with the sacred trilogy Help-->Slipknot-->Franklin's Tower. Halftime was a frantic, zoo. And it was on to a great second set and encore.

The music lives on. The band still frequently releases selected shows and DVD videos of the band. There are hundreds of stellar shows, and about 2,900 entire shows available for downloading (legitimate and free) on archive.org.

Setlist for 5-26-95: Help On The Way-> Slipknot!-> Franklin's Tower, The Same Thing, Loose Lucy, Eternity*, Don't Ease Me In Scarlet Begonias-> Fire On The Mountain-> Playin' In The Band-> Uncle John's Band-> Drums-> Space-> Easy Answers, Stella Blue-> Good Lovin', Encore: Liberty
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President Ronald Reagan On War And Aliens

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To the students of Fallston High School in Fallston, Maryland, on December 4, 1985, he said:

"I couldn't help but say to him [General Secretary Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species from another planet outside in the universe. We'd forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings on this earth together.

"Well, I don't suppose we can wait for some alien race to come down and threaten us...."

To the 42nd General Assembly of the United Nations, September 21, 1987, he said:

"In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?"

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The Sandra Day O'Connor Bummer

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As LBJ once said "better the S.O.B. we know than the S.O.B. we don't know." Justice O'Connor started out on the hard right, and moderated her position over time. She has been the crucial swing vote many times now.

You can lay big money down on President Bush not naming a centrist to fill her shoes. President Clinton pulled toward the middle on his Supremes choices, but I just don't have the same faith in POTUS.

With his increasingly weak-seeming Majority Leader, Dr. Frist, and his polling numbers in the toilet, he may just have to moderate his course. We'll know soon.
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Sasquatch And Bigfoot Sightings In Washington State

click photograph to enlarge...

I live in Seattle, in the heart of Sasquatch country. King County, of which Seattle is the county seat, had some of the highest numbers of sightings (King County in fact runs right up to the Cascade Mountain foothills, where there must be armies of Bigfoot!). I wrote about camping and fishing in Bigfoot Country in "Fishing With The Old Man" - see the January 2005 All This Is That archives.

Sightings of Bigfoot by county in Washington State:

county-# sightings-last reported sighting
Adams - no data
Asotin - no data
Benton 2 11/16/2004
Chelan 10 5/16/2005
Clallam 9 4/7/2005
Clark 8 10/13/2004
Columbia 4 10/4/2001
Cowlitz 9 5/16/2004
Douglas - no data
Ferry 1 9/10/2004
Franklin - no data
Garfield - no data
Grant - no data
Grays Harbor 20 5/21/2005
Island 1 10/15/2004
Jefferson 12 5/16/2005
King 29 11/21/2004
Kitsap 6 11/16/2004
Kittitas 11 12/21/2004
Klickitat 6 5/12/2005
Lewis 19 5/31/2005
Lincoln 2 10/13/2004
Mason 12 2/18/2005
Okanogan 10 5/16/2005
Pacific 1 1/18/2001
Pend Oreille 5 7/17/2003
Pierce 32 5/31/2005
San Juan - no data
Skagit - 5 5/16/2005
Skamania 47 3/25/2005
Snohomish 28 5/5/2005
Spokane 3 3/20/2005
Stevens 8 10/17/2004
Thurston 11 10/10/2004
Wahkiakum 2 3/23/2005
Walla Walla 14 11/26/2003
Whatcom 14 5/16/2005
Whitman - no data
Yakima 17 10/15/2004

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Painting: Grey Aliens from Zeta Reticuli

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Flesh-eating Aliens Were Chasing Me When I Caused Fatal Car Crash

Scott Krause is accused of crashing into a UPS truck and killing driver Drew Reynolds in 2004.

By Emanuella Grinberg, Court TV

A California man facing life in prison for crashing his car into a UPS truck will not dispute that his actions resulted in the death of the driver when his trial opens Monday in Nevada County Superior Court.

Instead, Scott Krause's defense will argue that the defendant believed he was trying to escape man-eating subterranean beings when he ran into Drew Reynolds' truck on Jan. 6, 2004.

Click on the title of this posting to get to the full story...
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President's Head Explodes During Press Conference

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[All This Is That Wire 6/28/2005 Cleveland, OH]

The President's head spontaneously exploded this afternoon as he formulated an answer to a three-part question from Heywood Jablomy of the Cheyenne Intelligencer. Seconds after the question was posed, the Presidents skull began glowing with a bright pink light and pieces of the skull began to break off and hover in the air.

Witnesses reported a deep ringing sound, followed by a loud bang and an overpowering smell of ozone. The whereabouts and medical condition of the President are not known at this time.

Pending further developments, the Vice-President invoked the 25th amendment to The Constitution and was sworn into office at 4:30 EDT today.
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Crosswalk Button Hacks: Cross Anytime!

Have you ever watched someone manically push the crosswalk buttons? Did you think they were fools? I did. But, as it turns out. . . they were on the right path!

A group of pedestrian hackers called Cross Anytime announced their discovery of several back doors or "cheats" using crosswalk buttons at many intersections. The 3658-item list has been released on their website http://www.crosswalkbuttonhacks.com/.

While some of the codes have been obtained through intelligence gathering and analysis of illegally obtained push-button systems, most were uncovered through the brute-force approach. "It's wasn't as easy as it sounds," Walker said. "Contrary to what the kiddies may think, going crazy with clicks doesn't help much. You need to understand the inner workings of the systems - not to mention differences in the push-intervals. For instance, the McKenzie mkI model is based on dual 1.2 second cycles (meaning that long clicks and pauses last 1.2 seconds) while the mkII model uses a 1.5 second cycle (pauses are 1.5 seconds long). And the models look almost identical to the casual pedestrian!"

The most popular hack, which works on most models, is the "Instant Walk." Three short clicks, followed by two long, one short, two long, and three short; turn any crosswalk signal from "don't walk" to "walk" with a matching change in the traffic signals.

It's Times Like This I Want To Revoke The First Amendment

* click image to enlarge *

Listening on the radio to the BTK strangler testify, in sociopathic, unemotional detail about each of his ten murders, or "projects," as he calls them. . .that's when you start to wonder about our right to hear this. Get this guy out of the papers and into the hoosegow!

While we're on the first amendment (sort of), would we have been permitted to see Janet Jackson's nipple if Justin Timberlake had, say, cut it off instead of flashed it?
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Drawing: Fun With Scratchboard, 2

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The Posies Release New CD!

The Posies

[from: billboard.com] Seattle-based power pop veterans The Posies will break a seven-year new album drought [jack note: in the meantime, they have released a two live disks, a box set, solo albums, an E.P., and another mini-E.P.] with "Every Kind of Light," due Tuesday (June 28) via Rykodisc. The 12-track record would appear to have been a long time in the making. But according to co-frontman Jon Auer, its actual recording was a lightning-quick process capping a half-decade of the band's adventures in limbo."We'd actually officially broken up after 'Success' in 1998 and called it a day," Auer tells Billboard.com. "We actually decided it was over before making that record. Then we toured it and said good night." Read the rest here.
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Update On The Former Presidents Club: POTUS Bush & Clinton Hang Out In Kennebunkport

POTUS Pals - click to enlarge

The friendship between President Clinton and President Bush (the elder) continues. Early on, it felt like a marriage of convenience, but it really appears the two Presidents have come to genuinely like each other. The club just isn't that big anymore--President Ford is now in his nineties, and for all the great things President Carter has done, he probably is not anyone's first pick to bring to a party... /jack

AP - Tue Jun 28,10:55 AM ET
Former presidents Bill Clinton, left, and George H.W. Bush smile for wellwishers before starting a round of golf at the Cape Arundel Golf Club in Kennebunkport, Maine, Tuesday, June 28, 2005. Clinton was in the state Monday autographing his book, 'My Life' . Clinton was invited to Kennebunkport by his former political rival. The two got to know each other and became friends while touring countries affected by the tsunami. (AP Photo/Pat Wellenbach)

Eat Your Own Dogfood

Actor Lorne Greene used to flack the dogfood Alpo on TV, saying "it's so good I feed it to my own dogs." It gained currency during the dot-com craze, and the phrase is still used most commonly in technology companies. I believe it is one of the central tenets of quality assurance (as opposed to QA's subdiscipline, testing).

"Eating your own dog food" means that you use the software you create, or play the games you make. In other businesses, you might actually eat the food you serve, watch the TV shows you make, or use the product you manufacture. This can be taken to extremes, of course, as in the Not Invented Here syndrome, where you not only eat your own dogfood, but you also won't touch anyone else's [1].

Ben Hamper, writing about life as a shoprat at General Motors in his book Rivethead, tells how anyone foolish enough to drive a foreign car into the employee parking lot would find their car keyed, tagged with spray paint, mirrors ripped off, and possibly rammed by a one-ton pickup. That is an extreme punishment for not eating your own dogfood.

Why should you eat your own dogfood? You actually get to know the product you are making. By knowing it, you may get some ideas about how to increase its goodness. In the case of games and software, problems, bugs and deficencies become apparent often only after extended use by a variety of people. Eating your own dogfood shows you believe in your own product. If you work at a brewery, a game company, or bakery, it probably works pretty well for you, if you manufacture cod liver oil, syrup of ipecac, chastity belts, or experimental aircraft. . .not so much.

[1] "Not Invented Here," describes a company that will use nothing developed by "outsiders." In many cases companies don't know a solution already exists. But even more often, the organization believes they can produce a superior product. Apple Computer, from System 1 through OS9 did not include many U.I. innovations (from, say, Windows) because they were not accounted for in Apple's human interface guidelines (a great document, by the way).

Apple rejected any change they did not invent...which, of course, ignores the fact that Apple cribbed most of this stuff from innovations at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the first place. In the open source world, at any time, there are several groups working on different projects that all do the same thing.

Large corporations like Microsoft reject all use of open source software...because they feel the source sharing requirements are too onerous. Therefore they must come up with all these tools in house, no matter how much it costs and no matter how poorly the tool emulates what is already available for free.
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