summer reading

I suppose it includes some spring reading, but here are some of the books recently consumed while I hang out on BART...




Skip is one of the dudes who started Jansport, KVC's employer. In his "hippie guide" he recounts stories of his own bounding into the business world like a labrador retreiver jumps into a lake.
It does have a very nice, conversational tone. Short summary: don't be an asshole to the folks you work with...



Yeah, some PK Dick. Ed, a guy I work with loaned it to me. I needed a book, for the ride home. So, um, Valis is the story of split personalities, religion, technology, drug use and maybe some alien higher meddling with everyone's heads. Short summary: if you look closely, you might find signs of God on television.
So, watch more TV to find God.



Sure, Valis might be dark but I thought a reread of Interzone would cap it off nicely. Mr Burroughs has his own way of stringing words together and it takes some patience. This was my third read of this, I think I get it now.
Short summary: don't shoot your wife, go gay, run to Tangiers, abuse heroin and write childrens stories.


I gnawwed through a couple of Vonnegut books to, but you should already doing the same - what with his passing and such.


Oh, I nearly forgot this one, Kite Runner. I really enjoyed this story of growing up in Kabul, fleeing the Taliban, escaping to the SF and dealing with fucked up family history. Afgan culture is almost entirely absent in my frame of reference, but this book clued me in, a bit.
Short summary: war sucks, persecution sucks and sometimes family sucks.




There is an Afgan food vendor at the market, today. I am off to restock the bollani supplies. The spinach version is damned tastey...

Hey! It's Bill Murrary

Well, the random picture of my cat Bill does not indicate a big wussy turn in the content of Pretty Not Good. I am not going to start posting gushy pics of the cats and telling stories of their cute activities.
It was an experiment in mobile-blogging, the ultra-nerd act of sending content here from my phone.


Now, if I can get that damned google-mobile-maps application going on the Motorola, I will be cool.



Oh, isn't that Bill just the cutest little buddy!

Also...

I have been thinking about this.




I do not know where my high fidelity audio cassette is.
Did you borrow it?

Horse Alarm

I think this is an illustration depicting a horse alarm.


It doesn't have anything to do with any thing.
I just had not posted in a while.

So, in case you were wondering, I am not dead.

In case you were wondering...

In case you had been wondering how many guys you can get on to one motorcycle, and ride said motorcycle around in a tent...




I will probably get jumped by some Mexican biker dudes for pointing out the homo-erotic appearence of some of their moves - so I will dwell on the guy at the end, the back-flipping while putting down the kickstand and parking guy.

I think more people should dismount their motorcycles like that.
That guy is cooler than ice cream cake.

Eric Anderson is Chubby

Word on the street is that my pal, Eric, is chubby.

He moved to Texas, in the past few months.
I guess it suits him.


Dude, cut back on the burritos...
Carne asada, the tongue, all of that.
Drink light beer at the Continental Club.
Maybe get a shave, too..


I mean, really...



I miss you.

The Mighty and the Almighty

I just finished reading Madeline Albright's book The Mighty and the Almighty. A good read, if you give a shit about comtemporary politics and the influence religion plays upon it. So, perhaps, one of the most important books a person might read, at present.

Madam Secretary Albright has an intense understanding of the current situation we occupy in the world scene. The book speaks to our current administration, that of the various countries in the Middle-East, the relevant current Muslin leaders and the whole bit. I would go on, but you should just read it. She has the deal down - to a degree that nearly every American I know seems like a grade school shit.


I had the pleasure of hosting Madeline, along with George Schultz, last night at work. They did a talk for the Asia Foundation with a Q&A bit. Perhaps the most reasoned conversation on our place in the world I have ever heard, from two people who have shaped our most recent place in the world.



By the way, hosting former international policy leaders is far more interesting then helping some douchebag cue up his PowerPoint presentations on selling some crap that nobody needs. Setting a "world stage" is far and away better than the usual day-to-day...

Hey!

Yeah, it has been forever since I posted. That is only because I had things to do, you know, actual life shit. I promise that I will update you on the goings of Scott over the next 24 hours, 'cause after that I will have to go back to doing things...

In the mean time, it is spring cash-drive time at KEXP.org. If I have mentioned KEXP to you - it is because you are cool enough to get it. It is the best radio in the nation, period.
Every cool band I have found in the last year is due to them.
Go listen for 24 hours. Give 'em ten bucks for every song you really dig, go out an buy dig. Dig?

Hokie Nation

The shootings at the Virginia Tech campus were a really bad thing.

I needed to get that out of the way.


Much of the coverage and the concurrent coverage of the rest of the world makes me a bit loopy.
Sure, lots of people were hurt or killed. I am sure they are/were very nice people.

There were the same "experts" that say the same things about the people who shoot people. The exact same rap we heard after Columbine, the various Post Office shootings, the McDonalds that got shot up, the Washington sniper shit.

Sometimes, in spite of expert opinions, people shoot people. There are probably more than 40 violent deaths where you live a year, aren't their? Maybe not. There are here.


There is a lot of that going on in other parts of the world, too. There are those college age kids over in Iraq and Afganistan, the ones who maybe couldn't afford to go to Va-Tech and signed up for the GI bill.

There are about 4000 of them dead. There are quite nearly as many who are double amputees.
I have never seen coverage of their struggle as graphic as what we have seen from Virginia.

I wonder if people think about what we are, as a nation, engaged in. I wonder if we would so casually address the wars we have started - if we saw the kids getting shot up, on the news every night...

Obit. - Kurt Vonnegut

My words are propped up, I will let those of Mr. Vonnegut provide you with things to ponder and remember him by...

"How is this for a definition of high art?... Making the most of the raw materials of futility."

"I like 'Howl' a lot. Who wouldn't? It just doesn't have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg's closest friends, if I'm not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first -- and after that biochemistry. Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that."

"Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club... and kiss my ass!"

"I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

"for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."

"if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake"


sourced from various places

One... by one.

Today is the day.




Sweet poster, huh? You can almost skip the whole movie by following the illustrated narrative.
It does leave you wondering how it is that everybody dies horribly.

That would be how they get you.