An addendum to my post from a couple days ago: One of the songs sung 'round the campfire was a really amusing anarchist love song. I recorded a bit of it and now you can listen to it.

This is scary and annoying. This company has a service called The Viral Chart where marketing and advertising videos distributed on the internet for "viral marketing" purposes have a little "sprite" embedded in them that "phones home" over the network, even if you're just watching the file locally on your computer, and tells them whenever you play the file. (So they can track how well the campaign is working, see?)

Ok, so, from now on whenever you watch something on your computer, ipod, whatever, discconnect it from the internet, or else open up the file with quicktime pro or whatever and strip out the little virus.

Or just learn to stop worrying and love the bomb, I guess.

(thanx josé)

I'm a day behind, but I still consider what I'm talking about to be last night. Sunday night. Anyway, I went with some others out to the desert, to the foothills of the Rincon Mountains east of town, for a little memorial vigil for Bill, who took his own life a couple weeks ago in a Flagstaff jail after being arrested by federal agents in Prescott, allegedly for arson in Washington State, about 8 years ago. Anyway, it was a nice time, sitting under the stars while people shared stories of Bill, and sung songs.

When we all decided it was time to go, we walked back to the road where we'd parked, about a mile through the hilly desert, over rocks and through washes. I thought it would be dangerous in the dark, but it was really plenty light out with the half-moon blazing down at us, and it was like I was gliding through an alien dream world. Especially because Christian was playing guitar the entire way a few feet back down the trail behind me. night hike with soundtrack. It was really a new and marvelous experience, even though the original occasion for it was so sad.

(designed by Hern

So after I get back from Michigan to Tucson I have to basically run right over to Dry River and set up for a film screening. After the screening a musician who goes by the name Totally Michael plays, and he's totally hilarious. Sort of like a disco/funk/hipster PeeWee Herman.

Anyway, after that I head home, enjoying biking through the warm night air, glad I'm back in Tucson. Up by 5th Ave and 4th Street I see a cop car go by shining its spotlight all over. Even though I don't really know what I'm doing (I keep meaning to learn more about copwatching) I decide to stop and see what they're up to. They stop at a house and shine the light on it for a long time, then a cop gets out and knocks. No answer. He goes back to car. I start biking on, turn onto University Street like I normally would. I notice a "ghetto bird" - as I've heard it called here, a cop helicopter commonly used to harass parties and surveil people in the lower income and student areas of town - flying by. Suddenly 2 cop cars are behind me flashing their lights, so I pull over. Cop gets out, says they're looking for somebody that "looks sort of like" me, but he obviously doesn't really think I'm who they want. he asks for my name and birthdate and scribbles it on a piece of paper. He says in sort of weary tone, "somebody was at some house, I guess ----ing his girlfriend." The word I thought he said was "plugging", but then I wasn't sure - maybe it was "mugging" or "bugging"? Whatever it was, he was cynical and flippant about it. He's just going through the motions. It's like they can't just admit that they pulled over someone not remotely who they're looking for, so they have to pretend I might be useful to whatever they're doing. He says, okay, that's all he needs have a good night. whatever.

I have about 12 more hours in cold, wet, grey, Michigan and then I head back to Tucson. While you wait eagerly for more news from Project Steev, listen to

this radio show about Bolivia, Evo Morales, and the new leftist wave in Latin America, and also read the interesting comments thread for the show. Here's what one thoughtful listener/reader said:

Angela Merkel grew up under socialism in East Germany, but she embraces the more capitalist ways of West Germany (especially as she is pushing for more dramatic labor policy changes than the Social Democrats are to help improve her country's economy). On the other hand, Gerhard Schroeder grew up in poverty in capitalist West Germany, and he has chosen to embrace socialism. Each wants what they did not have growing up. Why is this? Unfortunately, I would argue that Latin Americans have not had the opportunity to fully experience capitalism like Schroeder did. This does not give them the proper perspective to truly understand capitalism. Thus, their push for socialism is done half-blind, at least.

The position of this writer of the above is unclear, to me, at least, but it does bring up something I think about a lot, and that is that people are so, SO often really a product of their upbringing and childhood background, and people very often react to what they experienced as children, for the rest of their lives. You see it all the time, not just in someone's politics, of course.

I don't have the energy lately to post an entry for every little thing I want to mention here. I'm just going to write a little list of unrelated recent things:

• I heard/watched a great speech available on Freespeech TV by Tim Wise about white privilege. He's a really great speaker in addition to having some very important things to say. Recommended. I thank Onto for linking to it in his great blog post about the racial aspects of the NYC transit strike.
• I've been spending a lot of time working on the indymedia computer lab and the sound system at the Dry River space. We've received a couple loads of computers and peripherals that were mostly crap, so, sort of like a mini-freegeek, I've been going through and evaluating what works and is useful and what does not and is not. Literally 1 machine out of 6 was useable to us out of the last lot. It's incredible to me how people will "donate" stuff they know is total junk. For instance we actually received a 486 with the old pre-ps2 keyboard jack, and no hard drive. wow, thanx a lot. reminds me of the super8 film camera sent down to the Chiapas Media Project in "solidarity." c'mon, people - charitable media organization does not mean "dumpster." Although I guess it is better than just throwing it in the dumpster, since we're going to dispose of the crap properly.. We plan to take it to a sort of Freegeek-like place called Desert Waste Not Warehouse.
• Anyway, I've been installing Blag linux on the machines that are useful to us and I'm pretty impressed with it so far. The installer and configuration tools are really slick. I especially like the "automagick install" feature where you can just hit a key and it does a standard install without asking any questions. I'd prefer that it were based on debian rather than fedora, but it looks like it will be just as easy to keep updated. And it's nice to use an OS created by an anarchist collective.
• I'm loving watching this stupid NSA cookie thing unfold. Let's see how far the hysteria grows. I so hate it when the press perpetuates ignorance and fear about how everyday technology works, and even politicians believe the scare stories. When will someone in the corporate media make it clear that everyone from Barnes and Noble to your niece's blog to your bank uses cookies on their websites, and that it's a basic enabling technology for the web? And that just handing out cookies doesn't fricking mean that your computer is being scanned for information. It doesn't even mean that they can tell what other websites someone has been to. No. Cookie technology is really pretty well-designed for privacy. If I have a site, I can use them to track when you've previously been to my own site, and to store information that you GAVE to me willingly before. But that's about it. I never go to the NSA website or the White house site, and if I did, why should I care if they know I've been there before? Now if the NSA was planting viruses on my computer, then I'd be afraid.
• We're having a Zapatista anniversary party/fundraiser at Dry River on New Years day. I've been trying to figure out what the official channel is for getting money to the Zapatistas, and it's proving difficult to find information about that on the web. Very weird. Although I have discovered that the EZLN now has a really pretty website. anybody know how to donate to them these days?
• My grandmother, suffering from steadily progressing Alzheimer's for the last few years, finally left this world last night. So I'll probably be flying to Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places, next week.

that's it for now. have a good new year's eve.

Today on the NPR show Fresh Air there was an extensive segment about reggaeton - its 20-year history and how this year was its big break. All year long, especially when I was in Guatemala and Mexico, I've been hearing it and noticing what a big trend it was, and now I realize that everyone else has been, too. The penultimate nail in the coffin of any underground cultural development has to be mention on Fresh Air. Any day now there'll be a cover story in Time magazine.

It's funny also because the reviewer on Fresh Air sounds like just about the squarest, nerdiest, whitest, gringo-est guy to ever turn on a stereo. He's like Professor Frink from the Simpsons explaining the virtues of hip hop or something. Listen to it and you'll see what I mean.

my friend petr made this drawing on a card for my birthday. isn't that great? I wish i understood it. hah.

I have found my new favorite comic strip ever. What could be better than mention of anarchy and mojitos in the same frame?
(thanx, brian)