and more political satire...

A great cartoonist...

Mark Fiore is a political cartoonist currently living in San Francisco, the Promised Land of satirists. His work appears in print and on the web and is seen by millions, possibly even scrillions...

A cube with a view.

I have spent the past seven or eight years wedged into cubicles flooded with florescent lighting. Tight walls and fake lighting, this has been my destiny. In March 1999, as an employee of techies.com, I had the fortune of being moved to a very large cubicle (almost two normal cube lengths in size) on the west side of the building. The western walls of this majestic cubicle were an array of ceiling length windows, walls of glass that allowed the light to stream through. Unfortunately, the uber cube was short lived, and I was moved to a new cubicle, and then to a new building.

Fast forward a few years and many florescent cubes later, and here I sit in a carbon copy of most every cube I have ever occupied, grayish, brownish, squarish, and flooded with artificial light. Then a ray of light (sorry), I noticed that the woman who has occupied the cube next to me, the cube that sits on the south western side of the building, the cube that overlooks the man made pond outside the building, the cube that sits aside the ceiling length window, has moved. She has gotten her own office, and has left this cube unoccupied.

So now starts the scheming, the plotting, the sleeping with the operations manager, anything to get my respective can placed safely in the cube with a view? Sun, sweet sweet sun, shine your light on me...

Tales of a lumbering American in Thailand:

Westerners are a large people. The lumps on our foreheads from the low hanging bathroom doorways will attest to that. I am still struck by the people we met in Thailand. Gentle is the best word I can seem to come up with…elegant maybe, calm and pleasant. Then cut to Tony and I trying to navigate our way through the night market in Krabi, our heads bouncing off one low hanging tarp to another, and the vendor laughing as Tony stands upright too quickly without looking, and dumps the water that was caught in a low hanging umbrella over his head.

We walk down the beach, and a man sitting outside a bar asks Mike where he's from. Mike, reaching about 6' 4", responds, "The United States", the man giggles, and says, "You a big man."

The land of a thousand smiles….

What do I have to do to get you into this computer today...

sup·ple Pronunciation Key (s p l)
adj. sup·pler, sup·plest

1. Readily bent; pliant.
2. Moving and bending with agility; limber.
3. Yielding or changing readily; compliant or adaptable. See Synonyms at flexible.

I was looking at a spam message I got today telling me how I could make money sending spam. I always come to the conclusion that someone must be responding to these spam marketing ploys, or otherwise the spammers would eventually give up. But, who are these people? How do we find them so we can smash their cable modems to pieces?

Then I remembered an old roommate. He had gotten one of those chain letter moneymaking scheme type letters in the mail (the forbearers of the reams of spam we are lucky enough to get today). He figured he had found his goldmine. The basic premise was as follows: You send a check for however much money to a mailing list company to receive a large list of viable mailing addresses (suckers like yourself), and you address a letter to all these sucke…err…people. You tell then to create a letter much like the one you just sent them (and had received yourself). There is a list of four or five names at the top of this letter (yours included on this list). The recipients are to remove the last name (and address) on the list, and affix theirs. They then send a dollar to every one on this list, and then send out this letter to the (suckers) list of addresses that they have been lucky enough to purchase from the same company you did. Then you sit back and watch the money roll on in.

There are many flaws and basically offensive things about this mail scam…err scheme..err business, but the most amazing part of this story is that my roommate never sent the list of five their dollars. His whole money making scheme was based on the idea that people would be fair and reasonable, and send the five on the list a dollar, and if people did so, and propagated the list, they, just like the person on the list before them, would make a great fortune. However, he himself wouldn’t even send the damn five dollars. I tried to argue this point to him, but he just couldn’t see it.

In the end, he received just one dollar in the mail, and one person looked up his phone number via his address and asked him if actually made any money with this scheme.

However, if each of you sends me one dollar, and then tells all your friends and relatives to send me one dollar, I will guarantee that I will make money. Also, if I receive a dollar from you, you will no longer receive any spam, your penis will grow three inches, and your breasts will become larger and more supple.

A friend sent me good article about the Minnesota Senate election over at Salon:

It was a dreadful low moment for the Minnesota voters. To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.

An article from the Progressive by the late Paul Wellstone.

it's not about "message"--a word that describes the shallow incrementalism of the Clinton era.

In the long run, Democrats cannot inspire voters' imagination and regain power merely by appealing to whichever group of swing voters this year's consultants make fashionable.

In the long run, the success of a political movement depends on doing something of consequence. Progressives must step to the plate with real proposals again . . . We must sound the clarion call to improve the human condition. As British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said, "The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery." If a political party wants to avoid being buried, it must become a champion of change.

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." -Franklin Roosevelt