"People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music," Densmore said. "I've had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn't commit suicide because of this music…. On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That's not for rent."

I always liked the Doors. Seemed like real music. I also recall the experience of seeing Led Zeppelin in an ad for Cadillacs to be a rather jarring contrast. My image of the Cadillac is refined, comfortable, and boring. Unless its an Escalade, which is another matter entirely, but neither evokes 70s rock music for me. W1ld informed me that I'm not the target market for this and so I'm just not going to get it. Its people in their 60's who were rock'n out to Zeppelin in their 20s who might pay attention to the ad because of the music. In any event, I get why Densmore doesn't want them using Doors music, and I'm glad.

Ex-Door Lighting Their Ire - Los Angeles Times

Among respondents who described themselves as conservative, 58 percent said the Miers pick was excellent or good, and 29 percent thought it was only fair or poor. By contrast, 77 percent of conservatives in a July poll thought the Roberts nomination was excellent or good, and just 13 percent found it fair or poor.

What I find interesting about this is its the first time in a long time that I recall a large swath of conservatives breaking ranks instead of towing the party line. Blogs like powerline and instapundit that are constantly running the Republican spin are opposing this nomination because they don't think she is qualified. Clearly the Republican party hasn't drunk as much of it's own koolaid as I had thought.

CNN.com - Poll: Support for Miers not as high as that for Roberts - Oct 5, 2005

President Bush, increasingly concerned about a possible avian flu pandemic, revealed Tuesday that any part of the country where the virus breaks out could likely be quarantined and that he is considering using the military to enforce it.

Yikes! Pandemics, Natural Disasters, Terrorists, Recessions. If I was an evangelical I'd be preparing for the rapture.

Military Quarantines of Cities Planned

"It's important that whomever I pick is viewed as an independent person from politics. It's this independence of the Fed that gives people, not only here in America but the world, confidence."

Wasn't it also important that the judiciary be independent?

Bush Preparing for Greenspan Successor

The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.

Mr. Ryang chose “The Shining,” Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. In his hands, it became a saccharine comedy — about a writer struggling to find his muse and a boy lonely for a father. Gilding the lily, he even set it against “Solsbury Hill,” the way-too-overused Peter Gabriel song heard in comedies billed as life-changing experiences, like last year’s “In Good Company.”

His 'Secret' Movie Trailer Is No Secret Anymore - New York Times

As the Gulf Coast reels from two catastrophic storms in a month, and the Carolinas and Florida deal with damage and debris from hurricanes this year and last, even some supporters of coastal development are starting to ask a previously unthinkable question: is it time to consider retreat from the coast?

The problem is that there are major earthquake risks in most of the rest of the US, but those things happen much less frequently. Ironically the safest areas in the country are probably the west-central quaridor (Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Montana, etc..) which are also the least populated.

Some Experts Say It's Time to Evacuate the Coast (for Good)

Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications. Social apps are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.

Boggle...

Ning | Home: Front Page

Rattle wrote:

"This is inevitable -- Wi-Fi. It is long overdue," [mayor] Newsom told a news conference at San Francisco's City Hall. "It is to me a fundamental right to have access universally to information," he said.

I love San Francisco. Only there, could free WiFi be considered a natural right.

Fuckn commies! Follow this muni-wifi movement through to it's natural conclusion.

First, its cities like SF that are really dense. They spend $16 million on gear, which is within their budget, but there is an ongoing cost associated with paying for wireline network access and maintenance. Of course, the actual telecom providers in the city can't compete with free, and so they start to go out of business, particularly as the FCC provides new spectrum for unlicenced wifi and people start making wifi voip phones. This causes the cost of the network access to go way up because its presently priced as a mass market commodity. This puts a squeeze on the budget. Things get bigger, more formal, more expensive, more institutionalized, more beaurocratic. Eventually small towns also get into the act as people expect this service to be available everywhere. People expect their wifi voip cellphone to work on the road, so eventually the state and federal authorities have to get involved with building the infrastructure. The end result is....... Postal Telecom and Telegraph, where the entire national telecom infrastructure is run by the government!

If you think MaBell was a barrier to innovation you haven't been to Europe! The reason people in Europe adopted cellphone technology so rapidly is because the PTTs suck suck suck and GSM was the first time most people could actually get a good quality phone!

To make matters much, much worse, the company that is first in line to take San Francisco tax payer dollars is Google, who will most definately install a big, fat, "Google Carnivore" to the network which will keep logs of your every move forever while simultaneously claiming its "secure." They already keep video and audio records of everything that occurs on muni busses in SF for *7 years.* Don't think for a minute that big brother won't be watching you if you accept his internet access!

Now, if municipalities can help secure rights of way for private companies to offer new kinds of cheap wireless internet access I am all for it, as long as there are competitive rights of way and I don't have to choose Google. However, the users of the network should pay for the service and not the fucking tax payers.

This is how we do things in America! The low marginal cost of wifi access is not a good excuse to convert over to a communist system. I would be much happier if the government handed out "internet stamps" to poor people so they could get online for free then if they build and run the whole system.

Don't forget that San Francisco is the city that came within a handful of votes 5 years ago of turning their entire electric power system into a socialist collective manned by a bunch of environmentalists who didn't know the first thing about engineering. (There was only one guy running for one district for the municipal power board who had any engineering experience at all.)

RE: Reuters | Newsom sees wireless service as basic right

He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

I don't really mean to take a position on Bush's nomination by posting this, but I thought it an interesting reference nonetheless.

The Federalist #76

Harriet Miers
From Wikipedia

Hopefully this resource will expand as things develop.

Harriet Miers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia