No time to blog, so i'll leave with you with Mittens the cute kitty courtesy of Paula!

Last night, I saw this film - Fast Runner at the SIFF. It was an amazing film about an Inuit tribe and their passion and politics all within the span of 3 hours (Ian stop rolling your eyes! It won the Palm D'or at Cannes). The landscape was beautiful, of course - Artic snow and purple skies, later turning to summer and spring -- a pattern of greys, browns, greens... The people were amazingly good actors - delivering lines in the first entire Inuit language film... Also the plot line throwing out the romanticized notion of the "gentle people", they were just as bloodthirsty as your Shakespear tragedy...
Back to Civilization, Salon interviewed author/professor Richard Florida about the Creativity Index of Cities and what it means to the vitality of where you're living. Very compelling arguments - but also somewhat too simplistic -- of course creative people are going to want to be around other creative people, of course diversity brings out creativity, of course gays and ethnic groups promote the arts, of course companies who have creative challenges and incentives thrive better than those with just monetary reasons... However, he does back some of this up with some data. I'd be interested in reading his book and seeing what stands out.
Some of this of course doesn't take into account the "Cheap Rent" index either... He does, however, acknowledge the fact that the creative index can chase out the locals and service industry because the rents are too high... And a good part of this is that if you can afford to live in the city, you have to accept the fact that city living is not going to resemble the idyllic suburb dream (3 bedroom homes, big bathrooms, 2 cars, etc)...
I also found the talk of conservative cities vs liberal cities to be a bit one-dimensional. I think more goes into play than just tolerant people... Histories and legacies unfortunately are ingrained so much into places like Detroit and Pittsburgh that you can't divorce the two and start to have a clean break... On a small scale, I think of places like Medford - the place where I lived and though how much there might be pockets of liberal thinking, they're ingrained in their redneck ways so much that it makes it impossible to do anything different than lumber or grow pears... (even if the former industry has to be euthenized)... The more I read this, the more I am wondering if Seattle isn't sliding down the Creative index (even though we rank in the middle)...

Dee Dee Ramone = Dead... Sigh - 'tis been a sad year for Ramones fans. We've lost another one of Debby Harry's old prom dates to the needle. (For those who collect Ramone's paraphanalia, be sure to keep Dee Dee's rap album under lock and key, the value is now sure to go up.)

Times they are a changing - I just read in the Obits section of the Stranger:

• The Julie Cascioppo Experience has ended it's 16 year end run at the Pink Door due to "tight-budget times". That's unfortunate. (LEG, are you reading this?) I do hope she takes it elsewhere. Her version of "Fancy" is still unforgettable, and her Nordstrom Lady should be trademarked and used in an ad campaign it's so hilarious. She is doing something later this month at the Rendezvous.
  
• Also, another institution goes - Cornish art school is moving off of Capitol hill (out of those big victorian mansions and into some industrial park in Lenora Square. It will keep the Roy Street facility... but that still takes vibrant, confused pretentious art students off Capitol hill... Leaving us to the yuppies and trendoids...
  

...And struck out on the dating scene? Consider a variety of personality types at Meet-an-inmate.com! Courtesy of LEG, this link can help you find your prospective partner, and determine if parole will be in time for a spring wedding... Probably not a big suprise, a lot of these posts are almost more honest and telling than the personals (*Check out some of the posts with artwork like this one - amazing!)... Probably because it's a harder sell for them to make to the outside world...

Courtesy of Ginger, here's a cool thing for all you big apple people (err, I mean - you're not "big apple people", but rather denizens of the big apple) a special
nyc bloggers directory by subway system... Aheeeemm... Hey Ian, Paula - doesn't this inspire you to get a blog going and join your fellow NY'ers? Come on people, show me the love... Start blogging today... Reach out! We've only a grand before we can stop this crazy ride....(*Can you tell I'm currently listening to KEXP's pledge drive at the moment?)

In the unmitigated gall department today, several people answered back w/a Collective "Really? No sh*t" to the recent discovery of Greenhouse gases... Yes - It's truly a world breaking discovery that we're responsible for the destruction of the planet.
Sorry, I just think that it's absolutely ludicrous that we've not done something to change this in the past 10 years. That transportation infrastructures in the US are as backward as driving a stagecoach across an open prarie (or rather car on the interstate)... But what's completely outrageous is this Ho-Hum accompanying piece that suggests we'll all have California Lemons and Florida Oranges growing as a result of Global Warming .... I am completely speechless. Someone pass me the SPF 80 proof while we slowly roast ourselves...

I finally ditched the wiener-dog and decided to throw good taste out of the window along with any HTML skill, used Yahoo's chinzy page-builder to assemble my homepage... Don't laugh, it's seriously tacky looking (ala 1995) because I'm bad at HTML, have just a free editor (that has the usefullness of riding a unicycle on I-5), and page-builder at least helped me get this up... The hope is in about a few weeks (months) i'll buy Macromedia or Go2 or something that can make this look a bit more high-design minded... This is, for all intensive purposes a skeleton (or essentially a geo-cities page. Sigh.) Expect the blog to move here when that happens as well...
In any case, the Sunday NYT magazine featured an interesting article on a case of 9/11 hysteria among girls, featuring Sheridan (where I think my mother's relatives live. I'll have to ask them...) An interesting, if not comic yet tragic look at how stress manifests itself in us all (not just 10 yr old girls), among other social influences (esp w.r.t popularity: "You got anthrax and I didn't" actually some of the root cause)... I loved the students thinking it might have had to do with the really old books from 1962!