April 25th thru May 1st, 2004

After that we picked up D5V and went to Chinoise in Wallingford for sushi, which was good but a bit pricy. Then we drove over to Discovery Park, and had a really nice hike. Non-Seattlite readers of the Blog: be sure to remind me when you visit that we should go to Discovery Park. A wonderful hike, a nice wander on the beach, and then some more hiking back to the car. AT D5V's we had a cuppa, and then PB drove me home. And now it's Hank5, leftover Persian Rice, potato chips, coca-cola, and this, my Blog.

Monday April 26th, 2004
Last night I did a weird thing (for me). I was working the blog, and then I noticed it was midnight, so I decided to go to bed. Just like that. I wasn't done with the blog, and I wasn't droopy wrecked; I just figured I should sleep. That's weird. And then I dreamt of the blog-- not directly, but it came up as part of another altercation, and I also dreamt of a phone-call, and it was the most self-aware I've been in a dream without it being that I knew I was dreaming. Specifically, on this phone call I knew I was talking too damn much and I needed to quit being such a dork. Normal anxieties, that's what dreams are about. But it suggests a bit of philosophizing-- is it the case that self-awareness is not so self-aware, if it can be mimicked in a dream but not prove sufficiently real to make one realize one is dreaming?

IN 1950 Alan Turing, the man who more or less invented the computer, came up with an idea called "The Imitation Game," wherein an interrogator is communicating with an unseen human and an unseen machine. The idea is that if the interrogator cannot figure which is the human and which the machine, the machine can be said to have as much intelligence as either the human or as much as the interrogator himself (within the context of the interrogator's conception of humanity and the context of the mode of communication).

Extrapolated to the dream state, consider you this: you are immersed in a situation, and it is either a dream or it is real, and if you cannot tell the difference, then what's to say that the morsels and pieces of your "reality" are any more evidence of your existence as those of the dream state? I consider myself to be self-aware, but what if I just think I'm self-aware? This is troublesome, especially since I am limited by the context of my conception of self-awareness and, of course, my conception of my self.

I'll toss this one away with my old tool which I call "The Edwards Justification." It is either the case that we do or do not have free will. If we do not, then we do not have control over debating if we have free will or not, and so it is uneceesarry to consider if we have free will or not. And if we do have free will, then it is unnecessary to consider if we do not have free will. Therefore, we do not have to consider what it means to not have free will.

Blah blah blah. Lunch with Space Racer at Jitterbug. Meant to go to Wallingford Pizza; they were closed. We had a nice chat about this and that. Home again was a work-a-thon. Then a walk around Greenlake with D5V. Then Rata dropped by-- we had tacos at the Taco Stand over there on Northgate and Meridian, then some cake, then she went home and I went to sleep.

A Musical Aside
So get this. Pooh Bear and I are on our way over to DV5's house, and I hear some song on the radio, and ask, is this The Darkness? And no, it was Incubus, and I don't like Incubus, (I don't like The Darkness, either) and a few songs later its Incubus again, and then another song comes on, and I'm like, hey, I like this, and so does PB, so we get to DV5's before the song is over and we sit there in the car listening to it. "Slither, Revolver," the DJ says. So, after we go to Discovery Park and come back and have a cuppa, on the way back to my place they play "The Outsider" by A Perfect Circle, making Pooh Bear think maybe she should give Tool another chance since its the same singer (she doesn;t like Tool so much), and after that, This "Slither, Revolver" song comes on, so we listen to it again, and we're talking how that guitar sounds like Slash, and there's something else that reminds us of Stone Temple Pilots, but what is it?

Back at home, on the computer, I finally find the band. It's called Velvet Revolver, and it is made up of Slash (of Guns and Roses) on lead guitar and Scott Weiland (of Stone Temple Pilots) on lead vocals! Man, that sort of thing makes ya feel good, you know? Its a kind of vindication-- that its not all the same, all this rock n' roll, it has its rich textures and tapestry of character, and we're justified in liking one thing and not liking another.

So I go to Kazaa to download it, of course, cause I want to make sure its the right one and I want to grab a few of their other songs, to see if it's worth the money to go buy the whole CD. I can't bring myself to pay $17 for just one song anymore, but I don't believe in grabbing whole albums for free, so if I like 3 songs or more, I'll pay for the record. But oh, those tricky bastards at RCA, VR's label. They've supplied people with broken versions of the song, so that what's available for download is a bunch of irritating noise. And they fattened it up, so it takes a while to download, and you don't know it's crap until you have it. And these dumb Kazaa users don't delete it once they find out it's no good, so all searches point to these broken version. (One poor girl had 10 different versions of the song in her shared folder. All of them crap). In otherwords, there's no P2P trading of the song.

I finally found a website that offered a free download of the song-- but the link was broken. I had to read the source file of the page itself to see their little note which said the download had been taken out as of April 9th. Eventually I found VR's own website, where they point you to one of those download-for-cash websites, and you can have "Slither" for 99¢. I don't think so. They ALSO have a streaming version of the song on their website, which you can NOT save for your own... unless, like me, you have a program that can build sound-captures of anything that passes through the sound card, and voila, I got the MP3. Have I broken the law? I don't think so-- I will NOT be making this file available for P2P trading, and anyway, thanks to this, VR can probably expect one more sale when the album comes out June 6th.

Tuesday April 27th, 2004
Netscape Radio sucks. Here's an open letter to them:

Today the weather is cold and gray, which is not delightful as far as being outside and bathing in the sun is concerned, but will make the coffee shop tonight that much more cozy. What would life be like if you could program the week's weather in advance? Some sunny days, a rainy day for reading, a snowy day to enjoy the fire, a windy day for that bike ride? Who knows. Think I'll eat a twinkie now. And play with Photoshop.

Coffee-- no new faces, but the regular ones are nice. Dinner with two of them at the Greenlake Grill. Went home, had a phone conversation, and in bed before 11! WTF, as the kids say!

Wednesday April 28th, 2004
Hey y'all. What is, where it's at.

I keep losing my cell-phone ear piece. The last time I lost it was on Saturday-- I looked everywhere, mostly in the car because that was the last place I knew I had it. So, today, to heck with it, I wanted to go buy ye olde mall anyhow, so I picked one up. And sure enough, as I am getting in the car, I sit down, I look at my feet for some reason, and there's the one I lost. Right there in plain view. Seriously, folks, its as if someone was playing a trick on me.

I also picked up Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which has been good for the first 80 pages, but I wonder if he isn't going to go all fantasy-smarmy on me. Don't get me wrong, I liked Brian Jacque's Redwall, but damn, using animals as characters can get cheesy, but fast. If he holds his own I'll be happy cause I need a new author to explore and I've never read him before. I'm not too thrilled in the idea of pursuing more genre fiction, but, hey, I'm a snob, and I need to be taken down a notch or twelve.

I stopped at G.I. Joe's to look ay inflatable kayaks. Maybe I'll get one. They range in price from $70 to $500. The paddle, though, will cost ya about $80. Can't inflate those.

Walked around Greenlake with D5V and then we met up with Lepine and drove to Columbia City for fried chicken at The Wellington. Damn that was good. I am going back to try everything on the menu. And they do brunch! Fried chicken, baked ham, cat-fish... goodness gracious.

Thursday April 29th, 2004
So, yeah, okay, since I don't recall much about Thursday, except that I had dinner in Bellevue with Limbadda, I should use this space to rant and rave about something. But what? How about lately the cold hard logic of existentialism makes more and more sense just as my emotional reaction to it becomes more certain that it is, in fact, not actually an accurate description of reality. Maybe I can tell y'all about how I seem to be sleeping well, indeed, too well, as I get my 8+ hours at night and then a few hours in the afternoon. Estivation? Low metabolism? Ah who knows.

Friday April 30th, 2004
This started MAD with the stress. You know, what with the deadlines flying by faster than single dads to a Britney Spears concert. I am a wee bit balder thanks to some hair pulling. But it got done, and I think I ate something or somewhere for lunch. And I finished Neverwhere, I think. And played some Unreal Tournament 2004.

D5V and I walked around Greenlake, which is what one does when ones have a lake and feet and about an hour of time. Then I went home and Azure picked me up, we went to the bowling alley cause her employers were participating in some big fund raiser thing there. So I bowled a game and got just a wee bit inebriated. And THEN I sobered up and she took me home...

And off I went to Queen Anne to meet beautiful people. We had some Mexican food at a place called Peso? Paso? And the over to Chopsticks, a dueling piano bar. THAT was fun! Two guys on two pianos taking requests and... well, I guess everyone had fun, but how do I describe all the sexual jokes at the expense of the women, without sounding like a jerk? They seemed to enjoy it... they were drunk, of course.

They placed started to thin out so we went for a walk around some of the nice houses in Queen Anne. The view of the skyline! One of us said it's not the same unless you're making out, but as none of us had a smooch buddy, we had to content ourselves with the view.

Saturday May 1st, 2004
Today is my parent's anniversary. 33 years! Wooohooo!

I fiddled around at home and then decided to go to my favorite bookstore for a book. It's in Lake City, and called Third Place Books. Its both new and used books, all right there on the same shelves. And its under ths same roof as a food court, divided by one of those half-walls, giving the place a wide-open feel. I like to go there, grab a new tome, then have a cheeseburger and read half of it. But I was too early for lunch, so I just sat in a comfy chair and got a good way into American Desert by Percival Everett. Then I walked over to nearby Tree Top Toys and picked up some new ducks.

Called mom and pop, then grabbed sme lunch at 125th Street Grill, one of those motel-restauants hanuted by the elderly. Had a Roast Beef Dip. You'd think I'd learn to lay off the high-sodium products, but apparently I am addicted.

Grabbed a nap (it was delicious) and then picked up Veni, Vidi, and Vici, and we met up with Cogi, Rogi and Pogi at the U-District for some more sodium, and then over ot West Seattle and the Admiral Theater for The Rocky Horror Picture Show! I was a virgin, so I had to get up on stage and use my mouth to pluck a cherry from another man's mouth. It was over quickly, thank god. Then the show started, complete with actors on the stage in front of the screen acting it out (Frankenfurter played by a woman, oddly). I think my favorite part was throwing stuff in the air (rice, water, toilet paper).

Then some of us went for a walk around Alki beach, just chatting and enjoying each other's company. Aaaah, such company. Then I took them all home, and then I went home, and it was like 4 or something, so I stayed up for a while playing Tiger Woods Golf.