brykmantra.com

Watching Attack of the Show tonight I saw the trippy new trailer for A Scanner Darkly, the latest in a long line of adaptations of works by Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Paycheck, Minority Report, etc. etc. etc.).

What makes this one so interesting is that it’s directed by Richard Linklater in the same almost-animated visual style (called rotoscoping) as his Waking Life from a couple of years ago — except the effect is so much sharper than before.

The story involves America in the possible near future, when the government has one out of five people narking on the other four, and the pyschological implications of such a widespread conspiratorial lifestyle.

But what could be just another thriller starring Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr. gets a whole new dimension with the rotoscoping technique.

I would tell you to visit the official site but the Warner site was organized by idiots: You have to click on Upcoming Releases, then scroll down to A Scanner Darkly; they won’t let people link to it directly, or even find it easily …

But anyway: Seriously, check out the trailer,, because the movie isn’t due out until the summer.

Local and regional politics in America have always provided their share of train wrecks, from New York’s Tammany Hall to the first Mayor Daley’s Chicago.

And of course Texas has never been one to be outdone, like with LBJ’s 1941 Senate campaign, in which there were accusations of thousands of dead people’s names on the ballots, and of course Tom DeLay’s current woes.

Now, though, we’ve got a couple of situations that might offer a glimmer of hope.

The first is that last year Kinky Friedman declared his cadidacy for governor.

In case you’re not from around here, Friedman is a longtime musician-turned-detective-novelist, and a fulltime rebel. Here’s a clue: He calls his band The Texas Jewboys.

And now he’s an independent candidate for the governor’s office, and in a year when people are fed up with both parties, he’s got a fighting chance.

But now, as of last week, there’s a new development: As expected, our highly popular comptroller, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, has declared herself to be in the race — but as an independent, not a Republican.

Aha! The race is afoot!

This makes her my kind of conservative: A Republican that’s disgusted with the party system.

She didn’t give specifics, but here’s an example: Ever since WWII, the Republicans have complained about the Democrats abusing their control of the state legislature, in particular their long tradition of gerrymandering (i.e., drawing serpentine district maps to help ensure a majority in the U.S. Congress).

But when the Republicans took over a couple of years ago, what was the first thing they did? They gerrymandered. Just like they complained about the Democrats for doing all those years.

And what did the Democrats do? They complained about something they themselves had done for so long.

Sure, you can argue that the GOP taking their turn at the trough was only fair after all those years, but if it is, they shouldn’t have complained about the others doing it. They should have stepped up and done the right thing — the should have drawn evenly shaped territories that let the voters fall wherever they may. They had the opportunity to do the right thing, to prove that they really are reformers, but they blew it. The only proved that they’re just as bad as they’ve always said the Democrats are.

So maybe that’s what Ms. Strayhorn is rebelling against.

Or maybe it’s all just rhetoric. Maybe the real reason for running as an independent is that her pollsters tell her she doesn’t stand a chance against Rick Perry (aka Governor Goodhair, aka Governor Ken-Doll) . Maybe she expects that the big corporate interests and the puritanical extremists will flood the polls at primary time, but that she can draw enough general voters in November to kick his butt.

Whatever her motivations, th0ugh, there are two things I like: She’s a female Republican — that’s a good middle-ground combination; all other things being equal, I’ll pretty much vote for female Republican candidates over whoever they’re running against — and she’s distancing herself from the GOP.

That being said, it’s hard to tell from her website (called OneToughGrandma.com, after her longtime campaign slogan) what she really stands for; there’s just a long list of press releases, with little insight behind the political philosophy behind them.

Also, she needs a campaign blog really bad, to keep the site content fresh and encourage people to keep checking back.

And one more thing: Has she got the best Texas Governor name EVER or what? Strayhorn: It’s like a combination of Stray and Longhorn; it conjures images of cowboys trying to round up errant mavericks on a dusty cattle drive.

Governor Strayhorn: I can see it in the headlines all across the country, reminding everybody that, like Australians whose ancestors got their start as a penal colony, so also are we a state descended from cowpokes and trail bums.

Gotta maintain our image, you know.

But anyway, back to my original point: With Kinky and Strayhorn in the race, it’s guaranteed to be a colorful election season.

Whether or not their participation offers us any hope at all is another matter; if not, at least the hopelessness is entertaining this time around.

There’s no shortage of portable game devices these days: The PSP and Nintendo DS, plus the new generation of multi-purpose phones, PDA’s and music players.

But the new issue of Wired mentions the new GP2X, a $180 Korean handheld that also plays other media files (like music, video, photo and e-book). What makes this new device special is the fact that it runs on Linux and it completely open-source.

It also supports a variety of emulators to let users run games originally meant to run on other platforms.

The GP2X is a big change from the regular game racket, where the devices play only the overpriced games that are sanctioned by the manufacturer, and any deviation from this profitable norm is highly discouraged.

For instance, there have been emulators written for the PSP which allow it to run old Mario games and others, but Sony, which lately has been building quite a reputation for treating its customers with contempt, released a firmware “upgrade” that prevents the emulators from running. Users with older models can reverse the upgrade, but there have been reports that some Sony games have the ability to restore the upgrade to lock out the emulators.

Gaming industry expert Jeremy Parish was quoted as saying, “Sony is determined to cripple the PSP end-user experience at every opportunity. It only reads a limited selection of music formats, (user-created) video can’t run at the system’s native resolution, and now the company is obsessed with quashing home-brew development. It’s a shame, because the PSP would be so much more compelling if the company would let it live up to its true potential.”

That’s why the GP2X is such a great idea: It not only lets you play homebrew games (in addition to the ones that were professionally programmed), it also allows programmers — and you — the freedom to innovate: according to the Wired article, the device ships with a software development kit.

Our culture is coming to a technology crossroads: We have the ability to create and enjoy media in so many ways, but the entertainment industry and their lapdogs in the government keep trying to lock us into proprietary file formats and playback-crippling “Digital Rights Management” schemes.

That’s why supporting open-source projects like Linux and the GP2X may be our last hope for the future of entertainment.

For more info on the GP2X:

The Wikipedia article on GP2X.

Reviews of the GP2X on Engadget, Linuxdevices.com, and Gizmodo.

GP2X Emulation News.

In a time when the record industry treats its customers like criminals, it’s especially shameful to see multimillionaire “artists” (like Metallica, Madonna and criminally dim shopaholic Britney Spears) telling us that they’re not getting a big enough slice of your paycheck.

That’s why it’s such a relief when a band like Harvey Danger comes along and willingly makes the album available for free download.

And it’s a really nice bonus when that free album is great.

But I’m not going to attempt to review it for you- hey, it’s free; go download it now and decide for yourself. (I particularly recommend “Cool James” and “Diminishing Returns”.)

And if you like it, make a donation.

Even if you don’t, contribute to the cause of taking down the Britneys of the music world, and tell everybody you know that some people in the music business are finding a new way of doing business.

Being out of town for several days — out of my comfort zone, living out of a suitcase and a snack bar — gave me a fresh perspective, and lots of time to think, and I’ve arranged several of those thoughts into three related areas, the first of which is this:

Here’s what you need to know about Lubbock: When I was there in October 2004, right before the elections, the airwaves were filled with congressional campaign commercials, just like they were all across the country.

The ads for Republican candidates said, He’s a strong conservative candidate who supports the President!

The ads for Democrat candidates said, He’s a strong conservative candidate who supports the President, and who doesn’t take orders from the party bosses in Washington!

That pretty much sums up the city these days.

Now, I’m a fairly conservative guy, with “conservative” meaning that I go to church on Sunday, and I belive in a strong military, a balanced budget, and a small federal government that keeps its nose out of people’s lives.

“Conservative” doesn’t seem to mean that any more.

These days, conservative means that you support stretching the military to its breaking point, legislating people’s lives in favor of corporate and radical religious interests, and assume everyone is guilty until they can prove themselves innocent.

Regardless of how many times you say the words “freedom” and “liberty” in a State of the Union speech, it doesn’t cover up the fact that America is on the wrong track, and Lubbock is fully on board that train.

Here’s another example: When the local Air Force base closed in the 90s,
Lubbock became MORE conservative.

In other words: The U.S. military is liberal compared to Lubbock.

Of course, it’s not as simple as that: The base brought in hundreds of people from all different parts of the country, meaning that there was a diversity of perspectives present in the city. In addition, many of these outside people were college-educated officers who, although the tended to be fiscally conservative, as are a lot of well-paid people, they also had an expanded world view that informed there opinions and tastes.

On the day that Philip Glass’ “Songs from Liquid Days” was released in 1984, the vinyl edition was sold out of the store I went to on the first day. Of course, there were probably no more than three or four copies, but this was just at one store, and the fact that they were sold out on the first day meant that there was at least a handful of other folks in this little cowboy city with an appreciation of the finer things.

Now, though, I have to wonder how much culture still exists there. Of course, there are postive signs: The city has a symphony, a ballet company, Buddhist meditation classes, health food stores, a classical-music-and-NPR radio station, and, of course, Texas Tech University.

Large universities in even the most straightlaced towns are havens for contrary thought, and Tech is no exception.

I bring this up mainly because I spent a lot of my five days in Lubbock last week listening to KTXT-FM, the campus radio station, and the contrast between the station and the city was both striking and refreshing.

And that brings us to Part 2 of these Three Related Thoughts …

One thing I’m starting to notice about the effect of five days of my living out of a suitcase and a snack bar is that my grasp of news events was a bit lacking. Of course, I couldn’t have commented on some of the stories anyway, having only limited PC access during that time, but still it was a weird feeling finding out a couple of days late about, say, the death of Rosa Parks, or the nomination of Alan Greenspan’s replacement.

In fact, here’s how slow I am: I didn’t know until this morning — after it was all over! — that the World Series was being played.

Hey, shut up — I’ve been busy. I had to change a tire, for Pete’s sake. That act alone devoured a lot of my ability to pay attention.

Now that I think about it, though, I do seem to recall that a baseball game was on the airport cafe TV in Lubbock yesterday, and that a lot of people were focused on it, but I didn’t think much about it.

In retrospect, it all starts to make sense.

I didn’t even know for sure who was playing, although I had heard in recent weeks that the White Sox were doing better than they had done since the bribery scandal of 1919, which involved “Shoeless Joe” Jackson and others (see, I do know a little about the subject), but, not knowing that The Big One had started, I was unclear on the participants.

Anyway: The White Sox won, and I say more power to ‘em. Not that whoever they defeated were less deserving, but unless it was the Cubs (and I feel fairly sure it wasn’t), they weren’t a bigger underdog.

It can be the Cubs’ turn next year.

Anyway: I did catch the occasional bit of news while I was in Lubbock, and sports news at that: The big news item of Wednesday was that Sheryl Swoopes is gay — an announcement that resonates in The Hub City because she first rose to prominence as part of Texas Tech’s championship Lady Raiders basketball team in 1993, plus the fact that she’s from nearby Brownfield.

This generated a lot of local chatter, Lubbock being the conservative bastion that it is, but is anyone really shocked these days when a female professional athlete turns out to be gay?

I’m more shocked when they’re not.

At any rate, ESPN reports that even though she had been open about her sexuality, the announcment was part of her new endorsement deal with a lesbian travel service, which only hires celebrities that are all the way “out”.

No turning back once you’re on the ship, I guess.

But finally: Here’s another piece of news — nerd-news in this case — that I found out just today, and only because I saw it on Look at This: William Hootkins, who played rebel pilot Red Six (aka Porkins) in the first Star Wars movie (he was the first to get shot down in the battle to destroy the Death star), has died of pancreatic cancer.

I guess I’m just not enough of a Force geek, because the movie roleI’ll always remember Hootkins (another Texas native!) for is his portrayal of Major Eaton in Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of two U.S. gvoernment officials who persuaded Indy to go searching for the Ark, then stonewalled his attempts to get any information on the ancient artifact after he had recovered it. (Hootkins’ character told Jones that it was being studied by “top men”. Like who? Indy inquired. Fixed stare: “Top … men.” Why do I think of Dick Cheney whenever I watch that scene?)

And one thing that I haven’t seen in a lot of the news reports is that Hootkins (love that name! HOOTkins! Ha!) has further geek cred as the voice of several of the elven and dwarven NPC’s in the talky RPG sequel, Everquest II.

==================================

So anyway: I’m just about caught up on the news now (having heard about the Miers withdrawal several hours late), so I’m almost back to normal.

It’s almost halfway through September, but there’s still no sign of autumn temperatures. But we’re used to it, so let’s do some quick things:

It’s Presurfer‘s birthday today, so drop by and send your regards! Even if you don’t see this until tomorrow, go over and say hi to the old guy …

Most people need a hot cup of coffee to start the day, but not me: My eye-opener is a big 32-ounce tumbler of iced tea, so thick with tea oils that it has a nice brisk bite to it. Even in the winter I consumer hot drinks only sparingly.

Why do I bring this up? Because when I got to work this morning, I spotted something in my half-finished tea: It was a dead moth.

Oh joy.

I just hope it fell out of the tree I parked under at work, and hadn’t been floating in there from the beginning.

More work matters: My department discovered that we need a typewriter — seriously, a TYPEWRITER, I couldn’t make this up — so I was designated to go make the purchase: In part because I’m the most office-technonology savvy person in the office, and in part because I get stuck with the crap work that nobody else wants to do.

It worked out well though, because I finished up the transaction tout-suite and swung around to The Wife’s beauty shop for an impromptu visit.

It made both our days.

But back to the purchase: When I went into Office Depot, the older guy who greeted me said he didn’t think they had the archaic devices, but another employee was able to lead me to the Stone Knives & Bear Skins department, to show me the two models sold by the store.

The reason we needed one is that some federal agency requires a paper form in four parts with carbon paper; I took a form with me to the store to test-drive the display models to make sure they could handle the Bueaucracy Test.

Oh wait, I remember the federal agency now: The USDA. Hmm … is it a coincidence that department that runs the Forest Service (and thus is probably having its strings pulled by the timber industry) is requiring massively dead-tree forms in the age of electronic data transfer?

They’re probably in the pocket of the carbon paper lobby too …

I’ve previously mentioned that Flickr photos with the tag of “Lubbock”, my old stomping grounds, were a bit thin in number, but these days that group is starting to fill out nicely, due in part to Flickr member Steven Segraves, who has recently posted photos of Lubbock’s part in the Katrina relief effort, with which he is doing volunteer work. I for one was interesting in seeing photos of the evacuees’ living quarters.

Segraves is also one of the few Lubbock bloggers of whom I am aware, so check out his site, BadIce.com.

One more thing: Regardless of whether you’re for or against John Roberts being on the Supreme Court, there’s one thing that bothers me, that I haven’t heard anybody else bring up: Shouldn’t somebody actually serve on the Supreme Court for a while before being nominated CHIEF JUSTICE???

Regardless of what I think about Roberts’ qualifications or views, I can’t help but feeling, with him being rushed up to the head of the line to be the Chief so quickly, that the country is being railroaded into something — kind of like how Halliburton has been handed billion-dollar contracts without having to bid. Doesn’t the news media pay attention to these things?

1) Today on NPR, All Things Considered had a story on a Mississippi couple that, because their house was the only one in the area with a generator and air conditioning in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, were asked to take in a newborn baby. Then they took in more injured people, and medical technicians started coming by to help take care of them, and before they knew it, their home was the center of medical care for their corner of the state. What little medical equipment and supplies were available were routed there, and a doctor, displace from his home by the storm, took up medical residence.

Like I’ve said before: Disaster is the mother of invention.

Listen to the interview with the homeowner, and read the whole story here.

2) Speaking of the recovery effort: We have met the terrorists, and they are our own government.

The Libertarian Party would really blow a golden opportunity if they didn’t exploit this fact in the 2004 election. They can just argue that we only put up with our huge, intrusive federal government, because someday we might need them and all their power …

And now we DO need them. And they’re useless.

Today on CNN there was an excellent live shot of a backhoe operator piloting an unpowered barge down the Mississippi, by pulling the rig’s scoop along the river bottom. It was fascinating to watch — the operator seemed to have perfect control, positioning the barge under the bridge to receive the sandbags for repairing the levee.

I’ve been trying to find video on the CNN website, but apparently they don’t think it’s important enough to post. Anyway, here’s a shot of the screen; click on it for a bigger view.

You’ve probably heard by now about Kanye West, during a Katrina relief telethon on NBC, going off-script to spout off about racism in America in general, and George W. Bush in particular.

If you’d like to download a video of that, you can find it here. The best part is seeing Mike Myers, with whom West was sharing the screen, looking totally stunned, and trying to bottle up his reaction and keep on-message.

Personally, I though Kanye’s outburst was a refeshing little change from the scripted inanities of network TV. I don’t totally agree with his opinions, but they needed to be heard, and free expression of views seems to be an endangered species these day.

Stranded musician watch: The Neville Brothers are the latest well-known New Orleans artists who are just now get evacuated from the city. Allen Toussaint is still apparently stranded.

I spent part of yesterday buying food donations at Sam’s Club, and part of today dropping them off at our Presbyterian Church. Also, the fine folks of Budget Suites in our suburb are hosting over 100 refugee families, including one extended family with 27 members, so yesterday I stopped by the Walgreens, which is right by the Suites, and picked up some soap that was on sale, some 99-cent toys and a few packs of playing cards, mainly so I would have an excuse to go by and see what was going on. Only a few of the evacuees were out and about, but there was a sizable pile of donated items in one of the courtyard. I handed the small sack of items to a woman in a wheelchair, who said that they were in the process of sorting everything.

It’s good to know that our town gets a chance to help out locally …

Here’s how you can mess with your co-workers’ minds: Next time somebody mentions Hurricane Katrina, just say, “Which one? 1967? 1975? 1981?”

Because yes, there were Hurrican Katrinas in all of those years.

There probably won’t be any more.

Here’s former Presidents Clinton and Bush’s relief fund website: BushClintonKatrinaFund.org.

In almost three years of blogging, I don’t think I’ve post as much about any current event as I have about the recovery process of Hurricane Katrina.

I guess I’m just fascinated by seeing what happens when the normal trappings of civilization that we take for granted — food, electricity, water, communications — are knockedout from under us.

I haven’t heard any of the news outlets admit this, so I’ll just say it: This is a bigger story than the World Trade Center attacks (or as the politicians mindlessly call it, “9-11″).

I suppose it could be argued that New York is the most important city in the entire universe, and therefore anything that happens there is infinitley more important than whatever it is that happens anywhere else.

That of course is rubbish. The WTC attacks had a bigger death toll — initially, at least — and obliterated a landmark, but the flooding from Katrina has emptied out an entire major city, and total rebuilding and recovery could take decades. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are on the move, probably more than ever before in American history. A huge chunk of a state’s population has been displaced to other states, and a lot of them might not be coming back. A major port is shut down for several weeks. Places of employment, and thus jobs, have been wiped out.

Sure, there might not be any country western songs or patriotic bumper stickers or invasions to come out of this disaster, and it won’t result in you and I being treated in an even more humiliating manner in airports, but the stumbling early response could easily hurt the Republican Party, especially in 2008, which would be a shame if they actually nominate somebody good.

It could be that the destruction of New Orleans could be one of the two biggest stories of my lifetime, right up there with the fall of Communism.

Anyway, here are some things I’ve run across:

Information is one of the most valuable commodities in a crisis like this, but with local New Orleans media and infrastructure devastated, the area radio stations have banded together to form the United Rado Broadcasters of New Orleans, pooling what few resources are left to get information to people still in the area.

You can listen to live streaming audio of this barebones emergency network.

This is an opportunity unique to the Internet Age, that you and I can eavesdrop, unfiltered by the national news media, on the survival process inside a disaster area.

Also: Geraldo Rivera reported on Fox News that there is a group of Vietnamese evacuees at the Super Dome who are not only waiting patiently — they’re insisting that everyone else be evacuated before them, because they don’t want to “get in the way”.

Wow. That kind of patience and selflessness is rare these days. Fox interviewed another woman (Caucasian, for the record) who complained of being treated like an animal, because her husband was one of thousands of patients moved to a safer location and nobody took the time out from saving lives to come personally tell her about it.

Also: The Humane Society has launched an effort to help pets left homeless by the hurricane, so please visit the site and help out if you can.

Also: (You’ve noticed that I’m using “also” instead of bullet points, because I can’t find a suitable graphic …) The New Orleans LA post-Katrina Intel Dissemination Wiki has been set up as a central clearinghouse of information about the evacuation and rebuilding efforts.

Also: Fats Domino and Irma Thomas have been found, alive and well. Domino, 77, had been stranded in his home in the flodded 9th Ward; Thomas (who is probably best known as the person who recorded “Time is on My Side” before the Stones), had escaped the flooding to stay with relatives.

As for Allen Touissant, he’s still stuck at the Superdome.