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Would you believe I once knew all of the German province names and their capitols? Austrian, also. Nerd.

Whelp, I’m leaving the continent in about ten days. Going to Berlin to stay with Brenna for a little over a week (with a couple days bumming around in Prague). Should be awesome.

Anyway, I’m leaving Friday evening, March 5th, and will return Sunday night, March 14th.

If anyone has any suggestions for things to check out while I’m over there, let me know. Kurt has already given me the heads-up on a couple of good places to go get a drink and listen to music. The only other person I can think of who’s intimately familiar with the area would be Hana, who grew up in Prague. Otherwise, I’m probably the most familiar with Germany of people I see regularly these days, having been over on about a half-dozen different occasions over the years (though only once to Berlin, and that was back in, like, 1993). Anyway, Brenna will of course be on-hand for advice.

That last trip to Berlin, by the way, was a short exchange program between LBJ High (my school) and La Grange High here in Texas and the Kaiserin Augusta Schule in Köln. A bunch of us went over with our teacher, Frau Hastay, and travelled around the country for a week, went to school with the Kölners for a week, and then travelled around for another week.

Anyway, one afternoon in Berlin in a patio area at a bar, some of us were playing cards — hearts, probably — and someone accused Zane of cheating (hiding cards). Zane flipped out, jumped on the table, and started ripping his clothes off until he was down to his underwear, loudly proving his innocence. I stilll remember that pretty well. Good times.

Very well, then.

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Coté, doing his part.

A bunch of my domains have just gone live — now I need your help in deciding something good to do with a couple of them.

They are:

• educate-the-president.com
• waragainstevil.com

Both seem like they could be good, old-fashioned meme-of-the-week sort of sites of a political nature.

I registered Educate-the-President.com after listening to Mr. Bush talk on the radio about something. (I forget exactly what.) During the 2000 election he billed himself as an education president, citing his “Texas miracle” that reduced drop-out rates in certain areas. And after the election he sent the apparently under-funded “No Child Left Behind” Act through Congress. But with all of his tripping over his words and fumbling through speeches, with his mispronounciations and too-common “Bushisms,” and with the sort of pseudo-Christian rhetoric that he spits out on a regular basis, a good joke would be that the people should band together to educate the President — that the educational energy shouldn’t be flowing from this guy to the world but the other way around. Clever shit. Anyway. This is what happens when you start registering domains after a couple of beers…

I registered WarAgainstEvil.com around the same time, after hearing about the “Axis of Evil” for the four-billionth time. And I don’t know if Mr. Bush has actually used the term “War Against Evil,” but it’s clear that this is what he feels he’s doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Taking a popular meme and registering a domain for it is a time-honored web tradition which now I can proudly say I have participated in with this domain. Really, it surprised me that it was even available this late after the coinage of “Axis of Evil” in January 2002.

These registration stories are both wondrous and beautiful, but now I don’t really know what to do with the domains. That’s where you come in.

I want your suggestions.

What should I do?

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“John Kerry watches President Richard Nixon announce the cease-fire in Vietnam on January 24, 1973.” - Boston Globe

Melissa Block interviewed John Kerry on NPR this afternoon, and though the interview started off a bit contentious, once they got into their groove Kerry sounded pretty good. (Listen.)

I like Kerry. He seems like a guy with a long and strong history with the United States government, from his service in Vietnam to his lengthy stay as a U.S. Senator (since 1984, though perpetually a junior, behind this institution). That’s valuable to me, because (despite all the fuss made about the importance of being a Washington outsider) I have respect for someone who knows our political system well. Edwards has served just one term in the Senate and Kucinich has been in the House since 1996. Clark has never been elected to public office. Dr. Dean has — though as the Governor of a small, relatively homogenous state (as Michael Ventura pointed out, though in Ventura’s world Dean governed New Hampshire). If a Democrat ends up in office, they will be working against a hostile House and Senate. Plenty of advance experience in this area would be valuable. Clinton wasn’t particularly succcessful navigating those waters and many of his ideas never saw the light of day.

And Kerry generally says things that play well with me — the exceptions I can think of right now being his support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2002 (though, to be fair, he was being manipulated and lied to with regard to the facts) and his wishy-washy stance on gay marriage (supporting civil unions but not marriage).

My belief is that the current reaction against homosexuality stems more from ignorance than anything else, and that in the future denying a person rights due to their sexuality will seem just as absurb and wrong as denying a person rights based on their ethnicity. But. I suspect Kerry wants to hold the middle ground on this issue, not swinging to one side or the other. And this seems okay. Some states (including Kerry’s own) have taken the initiative to be more open about different sorts of couplings, and someone who will just let that ball roll will most certainly be better than someone so concerned with protecting our freedoms that he would not want activist judges to assert their judgment to allow you or I to marry whomever we wish lest those judges undercut the freedom of the community to tell you or I who we are and aren’t free to marry, even though that community might have already said it’s okay — or something like that… Makes my head hurt.

As for Iraq, I feel that Hussein deserved what came to him and that the Iraqi people will be better off because of the United States’ intervention. Great. But. The United States needs those hundreds of billions of dollars at home right now and our economy and our citizens should not have borne the burden of financing that intervention. That’s what the United Nations exists for and I believe that the U.S. should be making an effort to play nicely with the rest of the world not unilaterally throwing its weight around. Or we will spend more of our fiscal and political capital on enterprises that don’t benefit us as a nation much at all. And I resent spending money we don’t have on something we didn’t need. Etc.

But. I understand that we’re not at the Country Skillet Presidential Buffet, here, and no candidate have exactly the features our next President should have. I also feel like gay marriage should not top the list of reasons to support or not support someone: economic policy, leadership skill, and international political skill should top that list. Also, Kerry voted against both of the Bush tax cuts (as did Edwards and Kucinich), one of my litmus tests (since those bills seem so clearly wrong-minded and borderline corrupt, frankly). (Vote-smart.org has a ton of information about the candidates, including voting records. I’d recommend taking a look. Fuck trusting the opinion of some wind-bag blogger.)

I don’t really know that much about the different Democratic candidates. And because our system seems designed to only allow certain swing states a true voice in the Presidential election process (by spreading state primaries across months and through the out-of-date electoral voting system) — and because Texas is in the late half of the primary cycle (after about thirty states including California and New York) and a state that has swung quite to the Republican side lately — my votes for President will have less impact that the votes of others in states such as Florida and Oregon (swing states). Or rather, my vote will be tallied in Bush’s column when Texas goes Republican again. So will yours, since you’re probably living in Austin right now. (Not that I won’t vote.)

Anyway. It’ll be interesting to see how Texas swings, though I suspect the field will be much smaller (Gov. Howard Dean, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, and Al Sharpton will have dropped out by that point) and Kerry will have a sizeable delegate lead.

So for this election I guess I’m kind of a reverse yellow-dog Democrat: instead of intending to vote for the Democrat no matter who the rival, I intend to vote against the current Republican President no matter who the rival. Mr. Bush isn’t necessarily a horrible or stupid man, but I feel he’s making way too many missteps — from creating economic policy that’s going to cause the shit to hit the fan in twenty years when I’ll have to pay for larger part of it, by allowing (or threatening to allow) his pseudo-religious views to repeatedly interrupt people’s lives and work (banning stem cell research, the gay marriage issue, etc.), and by allowing to many edges to be worn off the Constitution (privacy rights, search and seizure rights, seperation of church and state, etc.). It’s too much.

So there you go. Some thoughts. In no particular order.

Lovely kicks from Europe courtesy of JD Sports.

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Found art.

I found this sticker pasted along one of the flourescent lights in a subway train in Manhattan.

Part of me wishes that the author had included a URL so I could go check out their website and maybe find some other cleverness to flip through at work. Part of me is glad, though, that they didn’t. They’ve left me to use a little bit of the imagination that seems so rarely exercised sometimes — now that seemingly any piece of information can be had at one’s fingertips — to wonder who put it there, whether other stickers with the same have been stuck all over the place, whether they say the same thing or have other comments, etc. Ask me and I’ll whine about how the mainstream news twists opinion by decontextualizing information, but sometimes a little decontextualizing can be a good thing. Like those watermelon stickers that have been stuck around Austin on out-of-the-way sides of buildings and traffic signs. (Also, The Crying of Lot 49 was a favorite book of mine in college, which you’ll understand if you’ve read it.)

It’s also a bit refreshing in this cultural climate that has so many people trying to behave like their own little micro-branding media empires.

Self included.

Vote Josh.

Balldroppings and Telesquishy featured in Neural.

Balldroppings and Telesquishy featured in Neural.