(a little bit early, as I won't have internet access next week)

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Every election there are some politicians who, despite the fact that they are not running for an office for which I can vote for or against them, do something which so offends me that they enter themselves into a list of people I am permanently opposed to voting for.

This year there were four.

Let me start off by saying that i'm thrilled that Sen. Obama has won and the Democrats have had their best Congressional election year since 1974. The next four years may be the high water mark for liberalism in this generation, and Sen. Obama may establish a governing coalition comparable to Pres. Reagan's. Moreover, while we may not have reached Dr. King's promised land, this election shows that we're damned close.

But I can only hold that in my mind for a minute or two before the walls come crashing in again.

On the way to work this morning, I allowed boredom to drive me away from my normal radio station (it was having a call in program about jazz), so I flipped to my secondary station, and found it playing Metallica.

I'm almost certainly going to vote against Proposition 4, in part because I have serious problems with the idea, and in part because it's the third time in as many years that the voters have been asked to vote on the same idea, and I think repeatedly asking me to vote on the same thing and not accepting the answer is an abuse of the process.

But it's possible that something has changed, and I feel like i have a duty to read the text of initiatives before I vote on them, so I was reading it this morning while trying to summon the energy to go to work.

Buried inside of it are two profoundly wierd provisions.

It is easy for those who are engaged in politics - or, worse, those who are not engaged, but feel its effects from afar - to become cynics. Nothing ever changes; the game is rigged in favor of those who can buy influence and against those who have nothing to spend; the words of politicians are bright shining lies signifying nothing. There is something to that, and I feel the call of the disappointed no less than any other man.

And there was silence in the House of Judgment, and the Man came naked before God.

And God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

Thursday night last, around 8pm, R343l and I stopped at the In-N-Out-Burger just north of the Grapevine, across the road from the IKEA distribution center.

Hilarity ensued.

Successes:

• The Verve. Holy. Fucking. Shit. I've never been a fan of theire genre, but they were simply mindblowingly amazing. (It probably helped that they were on X and the crowd had been waiting for this show for years, but still ...)
• Gogol Bordello. Slam dancing in the 95 degree heat in a tightly packed energetic crowd is fun, even if it results in surprising soreness two days later.
• Battles. Fantastic fun. :) A lot of the acts this weekend were threading the line of mixing the techno and rock sounds, but they did it best, and with the most energy.
• Fatboy Slim. I'd expected this to be my absolute favorite, but after the Verve it was something of anticlimax. (oops). Still, it was a great show. :) He's one of the best in the world at what he does, and one of the few artists in the genre that I like almost as much as I like DJ Shadow; so seeing him was at least an amazing anticlimax. :)
• Deadmaus. Great live mixing.
• Diplo. The best drum and bass I've heard since I fell in lvoe with the genre in the first place.
• Cafe Tacuba. Fun mexican rock.
• Carbon/Silicon. Strangely endearing aging british blues-rock band.
• Death Cab For Cutie: nice mellow music to relax to in the late afternoon.
• Kraftwerk: This was fun, albeit surreally like reading Adam Smith.

Sitting in channel last night, r343l mentioned that she should talk to her roommate A and get his list of the top 100 albums of all time (A has a very ... strange ... sense of music; much of what he likes I find bizarre and inpenetrable). This got me wondering, what are the albums which have moved me the most? Not the ones that I love, or the ones that I think are technically the best or historically the most important or anything, but the ones which, the very first time I heard them, made me sit back and go 'wow'?

So here they are, in no particular order:

    We thought that we would never see

    A suit to compensate a tree.

    A suit whose claim in tort is prest

    Upon a mangled tree's behest;

    A tree whose battered trunk was prest

    Against a Chevy's crumpled crest;

    A tree that faces each new day

    With bark and limb in disarray;

    A tree that may forever bear

    A lasting need for tender care.

    Flora lovers though we three,

    We must uphold the court's decree.

J and I live in an apartment on the second floor of a three-story apartment building. The first floor is half a floor up from ground level. Our apartment faces over a hill on one side and an underpass under a train bridge on the other, making it feel like a 5th or 6th floor apartment.

You wouldn't expect that an apartment in such a location could flood.

The leader of the band is tired
And his eyes are growing old
But his blood runs through
My instrument
And his song is in my soul

There was a time, in the mid-1980s, when Dan Fogelberg was my favorite musician. His lyrics were haunting.

Met my old lover in the grocery store
The snow was falling Christmas Eve
I Stole behind her in the frozen foods
and I touched her on the sleeve
She didn't recognize the face at first
but then her eyes flew open wide
She went to hug me and she spilled her purse
and we laughed until we cried
We Took her groceries to the checkout stand
The food was totaled up and bagged
We stood there lost in our embarrassment
as the conversation dragged

So, when I got to class last night, about 20 minutes before class time, the classroom was full of people who weren't my class. This is a little bit odd; there's no class immediately preceding mine in that classroom.

Milling about with my classmates waiting for the room to vacate, I saw a sign: there was a seminar going on in the classroom about the downside to diversity, and how diversity has gone too far and had unintended consequences.

(I disagree, but, hey, i'm not going to barge in and start a fight, now, am I?)

When the seminar cleared and people began streaming out, we went in. Strewn across the front of the classroom was a giant banner for the sponsoring club.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

After finishing my legal writing midterm, I took Jared to see the new "historical" drama. Elizabeth rocked, after all, so the sequel must be decent, right?

(Warning, for those not conversant with Tudor history: here there be spoilers).

A bizarre corner case in California law, which I encountered in the practice midterm for my legal writing class.

it's possible to get the same kind of the-world-is-beautiful-i-love-you-all buzz that i might get from drinking excessively or smoking out a bit ... just by being around people having a good time.

they were drinking, i was sober.

the world is a beautiful place, i love you all. :)

thursday night my school has a 'bar night', a social activity for the students that is so highly regarded that the professors will talk about it (and my thurs. night prof showed up at bar night tonight); so i went, had a few beers, then took the train home, having a few more.

i haven't been this wasted in ages. it feels good. :)