i haven't actually been contacted yet about this, but it looks like i will be performing at mms after all! how about that!

go to midwestmusicsummit.com, click on "showcases", & check out day 3 (which is saturday, august 14). i'm playing at united states of mind. & curiously, infinite number of sounds is playing the same showcase! (they have also performed at recycled rainbow a couple times.)  ¶ 8:14 PM

it's really amazing that michael moore frightens and upsets conservatives so badly that they will pick apart every cut and camera angle to try to discredit him. and for every detail they find that they disagree with, they'll scream LIES and DECEIT and THE SKY IS FALLING. as if michael moore sits there in the editing booth thinking "how can i make the most maliciously misleading, unfair, and untrue piece of slander ever in order to further my anti-american goals?"

i looked at 5 pages of posts on moorewatch.com after they counterintuitively decided to "attack" moore by releasing the movie (illegally) online for free. (moore has said he doesn't care if people pirate the movie as long as they see it. so his enemies decide to help him out by ensuring that many more people will watch?) i was not impressed by the site. all of the posts that were worth reading were reprinted from other media outlets. much of the rest was self-important back-patting, speculation, trivial bickering about minor editing choices, with the occasional "why didn't he include all the kickass pro-iraq-war argument?" or the super-lame "here's a pleasant story about iraq; if michael moore had his way blah blah blah." these are the kinds of people who were talking about how horribly inaccurate the film was before they'd even seen it. but, if you like partisan bickering and petty flamewars, you might enjoy reading some of the comments.

other sites like this one that compile all the "deceits" in the film are similarly subjective: every possible error and opinion that the writer disagrees with are "lies" no matter how trivial. they don't bother to analyze whether any of these anti-moore arguments or claims of inaccuracies are truly accurate or even make sense: they get added into the pot. the site is quick to point out when moore uses bush's jokes against him, but if moore dares to make a joke it's cataloged as a "deceit" (or even three: see 8-10). it pulls a "hitchens" and if it finds a fault with anything moore has ever said, even unrelated to the film, that too is cataloged as being a problem with fahrenheit 9/11. it attributes opinions and conclusions to the film that are not actually there. sure, some are the complaints listed are actually valid. but let's just put it this way... the introduction states:


i haven't taken the time to actually count how many of these i think are deceits (nor will i bother), but if i did i'm not sure it would even fall into the double digits. sorry dave.

honestly, after spending 4+ hours writing that lengthy rebuttal to the over-the-top rantings of christopher hitchens, i have pretty much cashed myself out on this debate. but that's okay: michael moore and especially craig unger are doing a decent job of defending themselves on their own. right now unger's site has several letters at the top that totally blow holes in the arguments of isikoff at newsweek (lib: this is the article you emailed me last week)... and unger knows a lot more about the bush-saudi connections (with detailed records and documents) than most of the people attacking f9/11's "accuracy". (but craig, why no permalinks to the letters?)  ¶ 11:58 PM

ken lay has finally been indicted. but will kenny boy's downfall rub off on his buddy bush? obviously bush distanced himself from lay immediately after the enron scandal broke; will the public remember their close ties? or perhaps more pertinently, will the media conveniently forget?

i'm reminded of the "two justice systems" sketch on chappelle's show, where dave reversed the treatment of blue collar & white collar criminals: a swat team raids the unethical executive's home, shooting his dog and railroading him through an unsympathetic court into prison, while the drug dealer receives a polite phone call asking him to turn himself in, pleads the fifth, and gets off on a technicality. enron's victims (and there are possibly millions of them, even if you don't count the citizens of california, who were screwed over by the energy crisis enron engineered) have been howling for lay's head for years. indicting him now is better than not indicting at all, but i'm not sure how comforting that will be to all those workers who lost their retirement funds.  ¶ 10:54 PM

the savvy & geeky have long used "alternative browsers" like mozilla (i have firefox at home; mozilla at work) or opera instead of that steaming heap of security holes and non-standard-compliance called internet explorer. i give mozilla (and mozilla firefox) my highest recommendation for its wonderful features like tabbed browsing and built-in pop-up blocking (you can't get tabbed browsing in IE at all, & need to add a third party plug-in to get pop-up blocking in IE). i adamantly refuse to even open IE unless i'm going to a site that won't work without it (in which case i'll try to ignore that site) or for browser compatibility testing when i'm doing web design.

but recently reports of IE security flaws have reached such a fever pitch that security heavyweights like CERT and others are in the news beseeching people to install other browsers, saying that IE is too insecure to use at all. of course, this is what many geeks have been saying for years, but for this to show up in headlines on places like cbs is a new development.

m$ just released a patch to fix some of the newest flaws, but reports are that this band-aid is virtually useless at keeping out attacks. no worries, m$ says, because service pack 2 will address all these problems... but SP2 will only be available for winXP so if you are using any other operating system (win98, win2k, mac os [like any self-respecting mac user would want IE anyway], or whatever... or if you have a pirate version of xp, for that matter) then you are not going to see any IE fix anytime soon.

alas, if you're a wage slave like me, you might not have the option of installing a usable browser, because in many "enterprises" (read: ginormous faceless behemoths), users and IT managers don't want to switch. the problem is that many of these enterprises fucked themselves over by making their sites dependent on m$'s proprietary "activeX" controls. m$ won't release the information necessary for other browsers to make activeX work, though maybe that's a good thing because activeX controls are what hackers are using to install malware on your machine in the first place. but the good news is that others are trying to build their own alternative to activeX that will use open standards, so the time might soon come when the only reason smart users will ever need to use IE is for browser compatibility testing.   ¶ 11:30 AM

the recording of my set from rr8 is now online! check out the rr8 art gallery to download it (and keep checking back for future recordings). it's a big-ass file, but the download speed is hecka fast (it only took me 3 mins to dl here at work!) so if you have broadband you should be fine.

today they will announce the musicians who've been chosen to perform at the midwest music summit here in indy in august. i fully expect to be rejected, but maybe they'll surprise me. if i actually get chosen, i'll post it here and at awia news.  ¶ 10:56 AM

any negativland fan already knows that the tune of the US national anthem was actually "appropriated" from a british drinking song. but this is still a bit of trivia that most americans don't know. does the story pop up somewhere in the news each year? i don't know, but it's hit a few places this year, even indianapolis star.  ¶ 8:30 PM