Earlier this month I visited San Francisco with my father for a couple of days.  Among other things we visited the De Young museum.  There I was struck by this photograph, and on inspection, recognized the name of the artist, Imogen Cunningham.  Not because I have any especial knowledge of 20th century female American photographers, but because in googling my first name she pops up in the results because she named her first son Gryffyd.  A younger son was called Padraic, and since this was my older brother’s name, this was apparently my mother’s inspiration.  I’ll have to verify it.  You’d think the history of our naming would be a minor bit of family lore, but it has not become so established.  I pointed out the picture to my father and related the information about Imogen’s sons, but her name and story and likely influence on my mother were not familiar to him; he offered no alternative, however.

When I was gathering the links above, I came across a reference to Imogen having been born here in Portland.  I don’t think I knew that before.

Selected Short Stories William Faulkner

Watchmen Allan Moore & Dave Gibbons

Topics in Contemporary Mathematics Ignacio Bello et al

Shadow Divers Robert Kurson

The Assassins Joyce Carol Oates

The Darkest Evening of the Year Dean Koontz

The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service Andrew Meier

The Fortress of Solitude Jonathan Lethem

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume III Edward Gibbon

Broken Angels Richard K Morgan

Western Civilization: Volume II: Since 1500 Jackson J Spielvogel

Further to yesterday’s post, yes, every man’s death diminisheth me and I have no personal animus for the man.  But just now I finished listening to Social Distortion’s “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell” and it occurred to me that every song on that album is filled with infinitely more energy and emotion than anything I’ve ever heard from Michael Jackson, and the fact that the latter has sold millions is a terrible indictment public musical consumption.  And I say this as a man who has, under the influence, gleefully danced to “ABC”.

In tenth grade, my friend Aykut and I gave a presentation on heavy metal to our French class.  I don’t recall much beyond us posing in our jeans jackets with the patches of various bands, thumbs hooked in our bullet belts, boom box playing a few select tunes.  I do remember someone asking what we thought of Michael Jackson, and us replying that we couldn’t stand him and would beat him up if we saw him on the street.  I can’t recall the French phrases we used, but they seemed to shock our interlocutor.  Back then such partisanship seemed appropriate; one of the local French stations had a monthly heavy metal video show, and once when it was pre-empted because of the murder of Marvin Gaye, I was full of puerile resentment.

I’ve learned a few things since tenth grade; among them to not wish harm on others because of differing musical tastes.  I still don’t have much appreciation of Jackson as a musician, and who knows whether or not he was a pedophile.  I feel largely indifferent to today’s news.

Mrs The Fyd seems to be coming down with a cold.  Is it the swine flu?  She did cook a pork dish for dinner last night, and last week she made tacos.

I was looking for a phone number on the Safeway Pharmacy website, and noticed that they have a blog.  I hesitate to investigate this phenomenon further.

Something I leap at with alacrity, however, is the amazing satellite photo o’ the day from NASA.

I am a middling-t0-late adopter of technology, but I recognize a fucking waste of time when I see one.  So I’ve opened up a Twitter account as ‘thefyd’.  Though I’m sure the feeds are full of absolute inanities and glories of the mundane, I hope to surpass (or more accurately, to underachieve with regard to the goal) that standard with occasional posts about the irritations experienced by the quotidian bus passenger.  Among other things.

Sawyer’s Internal Auditing: the Practice of Modern Internal Auditing, 5th ed. by Lawrence B. Sawyer, et al.  (I cannot praise too highly this book, and recommend each and every single one of its page to you, yes, all 1,446 of them)

Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to your Tank by Lisa Margonnelli

Death’s Acre: Inside the Legendary ‘Body Farm’ by Bill Bass & John Jefferson

The Long Valley by John Steinbeck

Million Dollar Baby by F.X. O’Toole

Mala Noche by Walt Curtis

Gulag: a History by Anne Applebaum

So over the weekend I came into possession of a $15 iTunes gift card.  Browing through the offerings I looked for some of the more obscure albums I used to own but lost with most of my vinyl collection (entirely due to my own laziness).  One of them was We  Don’t Want Your Fucking War, a punk compilation from 1984.  Lo and behold it was on offer and I promptly bought it.  Apparently it was re-issued as a CD a few years ago and I guess that step of digitization ensured it would end up for sale at MP3 sites.  Anyway, I’m sure that the few tenths of a cent in royalties that accrue to the Soledad Brothers’ account for their song “Burn the Rich” will make up for the painful failure of the revolution in the intervening 25 years.

It is past time to repeal this nation’s counter-productive and repressive drug laws.  The erosion of civil liberties that have accompanied the last twenty years of drug policing should be reason enough, but the added benefit of taxing a legal product should add impetus for change.

The main danger with such a shift in policy is that po-faced assholes must then find some other project by which they can regulate our lives.