Wanderers 2009.9.23

We're eleven strong this morning, including Dr. Nick, train-bound, and Barbara, soon to Panama. Dick Pugh, the meteor man, another Cleveland veteran like Barbara, is regaling us with stories.

I ran into Johnny Stallings at Jiffy Lube while servicing EKM. His pen pal friend was getting to try a half-way house for the last six months of his term, provided he found a job within two weeks, and no knocking on doors, gotta line up real interviews. Pretty stringent.

I'm passing around Todd Schorr's Dreamland again, an art book in my collection.

We're reminiscing about some of our super stars: Dr. Stephen W. Hawking yakking about God (Q: "Does God exist" A: (after an interval): "It's not for me to say"), Stephen Jay Gould and the bible thumpers in his audience that night. This guy Atul is doing the Schnitzer this evening (not an ISEPP talk). The tickets show him in health worker clothes.

I've been sending out updates to sponsors, potential investors, regarding our company activities this summer. Testing our safe-house network for future foreign exchange students is best accomplished by locals, or folks from out of state. Some of the language and cultural barriers go away, while host families get habituated to having a guest, maybe starting a garden if planning to feature on cooking shows.

Fine Grind (headed for a name change) is getting those ASCAP letters (and phone calls), same as Duke's Landing (yes, Duke is a Mastiff, same breed as Shomar) same as any public house or brewpub that shares covers and/or original music to which the artist no longer owns the rights.

Open source music, pioneered in Portland among other capitals, develops play lists of sanitized music, with artist-owned copyrights. GNU's GPL etc., serve as model license agreements, when covering derivative works. Of course ASCAP is free to license its own open source distro, as is BMI, much as RedHat sells Linux. The visual arts community also shares paradigms.

Lots of energy talk, more stories about meteors. OK, time to upload to Photostream. I'm still happy with this system76 running Ubuntu Jackalope, a netbook. I pondering whether I should get some accessories, should the winter budget get approved (need to submit to CFO one day soon i.e. send by httpRequest).

I watched the season premier of NCIS, also the launch of NCIS LA (it's common to franchise successful shows, witness CSI). The N stands for Navy. These guys never seem to set foot on a ship, just carry on like normal landlubbers from what I can tell, but then I don't usually go for fantasy worlds of this nature -- too much slimy ooze eye candy (to paraphrase Frank Zappa), horse-pukey stuff. The HDTV looks really sharp (these were broadcasts, neither cable nor dish). This new breed of TV is changing the culture eh?

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