Greetings, Twenty Oh Eight

I’ve been spending the last couple of days furiously organizing things. I’ve got all sorts of grandiose plans for the upcoming year, but they require my being able to remember what they are, and then, when I do remember, they require my being able to do them. Careful preparation is definitely necessary! Between the few empty days this week and the upcoming weekend, my emptiness should be full and rich.

First of all, I’ve gotten organized with iTunes. Considering that I had an iPod since day one of the PC version (yes, I have a history of heresy), I’ve never been much of a downloader, for the reason that I hadn’t scoped out copying music to disks. The thing is, as much as I listen to my iPod, I listen more to my good old stereo in the living room, which has easily a thousand or three CDs hither and yon. That’s a lot of music. Anything solely on my iPod is excluded from this universe, until I finally just followed the instructions (i.e., this being Apple, looked around and discovered the obvious), and I started burning the little purchased music that I had onto disks. Then I recently acquired a disk player for my stereo that is capable of handling mp3s, so that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms, and then there’s all the old cassettes that I am laboriously porting over to mp3-dom (or, occasionally, pure CD-dom), so yesterday I went out and bought a few gazillion jewel boxes and some Avery inserts and started printing away, and all of a sudden all my music plays anywhere I want to play it, albeit in an old-fashioned way. But not even a spalpeen like you will contend that CDs are not higher quality than mp3s, much less mp3s of cassettes of scratchy old LPs. Anyhow, the upshot of this is that Toto Bona Lakua and Madeleine Peyroux (to give you an idea of what I presently have on heavy rotation) are now available any which way I want them. The down side of this is that the download floodgates are about to open, with the resulting hit to the wallet. Oh, well. Music is worth it. Always.

Then I’ve been cleaning up Little Elvis, who has been mostly suffering iPhoto constipation, which is way worse than eating too many fluffernutter and bacon sandwiches. Little E only has a 30 gig hard drive (nowadays you get disposable Christmas cards with more electronic storage space) which means that for healthy gastrointestinal operation, at least 4 free gigs is absolutely essential. Photos eat up memory like, well, Real Elvis ate up fluffernutter and bacon sandwiches. So, I’ve backed up and backed off, and there you are. Unfortunately, I’m about to upload some new ones taken over the last few days (including some inspired by my daughter’s little tripod that sent me to acquire a little tripod of my own), so the cycle begins anew. But for a few hours at least, no spinning beach ball!

I did go over to the Parsnip Ritz, which in my mind had mixed results. Geopolitics is fine (feel free to co-opt its thinking for your cases: it’s posted under greatest hits, and it’s now nicely polished and complete) because it was written with a beginning, middle and end, but the leftovers of Caveman felt like leftovers. I probably should have done the Postmodern Condition lecture (which exists only as a lecture at the moment, and not an essay). Those who feel cheated on the Caveman front can listen to it in its entirety (it’s on my podcast page) and find that it all does really hang together. Meanwhile, I do plan on delivering the magnum opus to the Sailors the end of this season, and I also plan to upgrade the pdf with illustrations. While I’m at it, I need to confront Justice and Morality. I’ll probably run them by you here first; they’ve already served as Sailor lectures, but I want to open them up a bit. You know, Kant used to charge big bucks for this stuff (not to mention that he wrote in German, making it hard for many of us to understand), while I give it away free. Either Kant or Menick hasn’t gotten this worked out correctly.

Anyhow, we’re back in business. Coming up, a full menu of tournaments (with exactly one weekend off) from 1/12 to April. Bring it on!

(And I’ll throw this in. Yes, “Sweeney” is good. Real good. Makes you immediately want to listen to the original, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I can’t wait to buy the collector’s edition 11-disk DVD Platinum Gold Nuclear Warfare edition when it’s released in the Spring.)