Burnin’

I’m live blogging this entry from the MGM Grand on the Vegas strip. The place lives up to it’s name. According to Wikipedia, it’s the world’s largest hotel building, with 5,044 guest rooms, suites, villas and Skylofts (including 3,153 no smoking rooms).

In 2000, in an attempt to appeal to a more mature clientele, the hotel underwent a major renovation. The theme is now more of the Art Deco era of classic Hollywood and the hotel started billing itself as The City of Entertainment, a similar title given to Los Angeles.

I must say one could wander from shop to show to fine dining to gambling to the bar to the pool and so on for days. Not that it’s a healthy pursuit. I’m just saying.

Kottke is pointing to a Legal Affairs article on yellow pads, objects many find useful even in a modern world dominated by screens and gadgets.

Once used only by law students and lawyers, the yellow legal pad is now employed to a degree unrivaled in stationery. “End career as a fighter,” President Richard Nixon wrote on a legal pad in August 1974. Five days later, on the top of another one, he scratched, “Resignation Speech.” Jeff Tweedy, front man for the rock band Wilco, writes his songs on a legal pad. Jim Harrison, the laureate of the untamed heart, wrote Legends of the Fall on legal pads; Elmore Leonard writes his crime novels on them.

In 1888, Thomas W. Holley, a 24-year-old paper mill worker in Holyoke, Mass. had an idea for how to use the paper scraps, known as sortings, discarded by mills. Sortings were anything trimmed away as scrap or considered of lesser quality than the writing paper eventually packaged and sold. Holley’s notion was to bind the scraps into pads that could be sold at a cut rate. Convinced he had a winning idea, he founded his own company–AMPAD–to collect the sortings from local mills (Holyoke was then the papermaking capital of the world) and began churning out bargain-price pads.

Philip Moustakis, a mid-level associate at the New York firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, uses one legal pad per case, and prefers yellow over white pads and a faint, as opposed to a dark, rule. “The darker lines intrude upon my thinking–they’re yelling back at you,” he explained. “You want a more subtle line.”

The yellow-to-white sales ratio can be as high as 2 to 1. Some consumers feel white pads emit too much glare.

How does the word “democrat” make you feel? Given the Democratic Party’s total ineptitude at present, and the current state of American “democracy” chances are you’re not feeling too good about it. I know I’m not.

In December of 1949, 80-year old Frank Lloyd Wright, descended upon Radio City Music Hall and The Mary Margaret McBride Show. While discussing his organic architecure and his Middlewestern sensibilities, he said the Midwest is the heart of the country and the heart of democracy.

If democracy has a heart, of course, that’s the thing that particularly distinguishes it, isn’t it, from other -isms? The fact that it has a heart. The fact that it insists upon the individual as such and defends him. It has to live on genius–democracy. Democracy can’t take the handrail down the stair. A democrat has to have courage–keep his hand off the handrail and take the steps down the middle. That’s a democrat.

As with most things Wright, I’m blown away. The man could really think and he had an undying passion to care a great deal about important things. Nothing is more important than freedom and nothing is more American than freedom. Democrats–affiliated with the political party of that name, or not–need to be free to stand up and tell it like it is. I, for one, am not loyal to a man nor an office nor a political party. I’m loyal to my country. A country that needs me to be an agent for change, to speak up against institutional injustice, to offer better ideas.

Here’s one: Let’s stop paying oilmen to invade other countries and start paying teachers to educate our youth.

As we fast approach the mid-term election, Princeton University has bad news regarding the integrity of voting machines used in precincts throughout this land. Princeton computer scientists studied Diebold voting machines and found that they can easily be hacked and an election thrown all in a matter of seconds. A paper trail would help safeguard against this malfeasance, but the machine in question leaves no such evidence.

Kathleen Rooney interviewed poet and rock star, David Berman, in 2003. Berman’s first book of poems, Actual Air, was critically acclaimed. Now that it’s sitting on my coffee table, I can see why, for he writes strangely lucid lines like: “Out the garage window he sees a group of ugly children enter the forest. Their mouths look like coin slots.”

KR: Whose work, if anyone’s, are you influenced by? Who do you like to read?

DB: The books I took the most from were Henry Miller’s Nexus, Sexus, and Plexus when I was a 14-year-old. It gave me permission to enjoy life. He was filled with praise for the universe and scorn for suckers. After that, I’d say Robert Stone, especially Dog Soldiers and a short story called “Helping.” Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samara, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Melville’s The Confidence Man had an effect on me.

KR: I can’t help but notice that you don’t list any poets among your chief influences–are there any poets (or, for that matter, songwriters) whose work you especially enjoy or from whom you draw inspiration?

DB: There are hardly any great poets from the last 50 years. Poetry has been taken over by uncharismatic nerds who use the word “desire” pointlessly and “absence” as a noun even more pointlessly. That being said, the poets that kill me are, Kenneth Koch, and…..Kenneth Koch. After that it’s Michael Burkard (who I can’t figure out why he’s so amazing), half of Franz Wright, Robert Frost, and, big surprise, Wallace Stevens. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is like the “Stairway to Heaven” of 20th-century poetry.

“To trace the trajectory of the novel is to follow the struggle of the novelist–even, perhaps especially, the male novelist–to be taken seriously–that is, to raise the perception of his chosen form from that of a piece of silly frou-frou to the higher, more male realm of capital-A Art.” -Margaret Atwood

According to In These Times senior editor, Lakshmi Chaudhry, the novel was once considered “a low-status, frivolous, pastime of ladies of leisure, unfit for real men.”

It may be so considered once more. Britsh novelist Ian McEwan last year tried to give his novels away for free in a London park.

Only one “sensitive male soul” took up his offer, while every woman he approached was “eager and grateful” to do the same.

Unscientific as McEwan’s experiment may be, its thesis is borne out by a number of surveys conducted in Britain, the United States and Canada, where men account for a paltry 20 percent of the market for fiction. Unlike the gods of the literary establishment who remain predominantly male–both as writers and critics–their humble readers are overwhelmingly female.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five star general and President of the United States for eight years, had some prescient words for the nation on the eve of his retirement from 50 years of public service.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence–economic, political, even spiritual–is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

It’s amazing to me how accurate his vision was. It’s 45 years later, and we are deep in the muck. In fact, the military-industrial complex–a term coined by Ike–is now in total control of our federal government. I don’t care what your party affiliation is, this is a HUGE problem that needs to be successfully addressed, so we can move forward as a nation.

I live in South Carolina’s second Congressional district. Republican Joe Wilson is my Representative. He won in a landslide two years ago, collecting 181,862 votes to 93,249 for the Democratic challenger, Michael Ray Ellisor. I lived in Chicago two years ago, so this November will be my first chance to vote against the conservative incumbent.

Since there are no radical independents running, I’m looking to Ellisor for the upset. And what an upset it would be. This district has had a Republican Congressman for 41 years running.

Here’s some copy from the candidate’s web site, indicating where his head (and his heart) is:

(I will) work to heal the wounds and reverse the damage to our society caused by President Bush’s flagrant political move to single out a decidedly small segment of our society and make them the scapegoats for what the Christian Right calls our moral decline.

While I’d like to know more about the man, the above sentiment pretty much sums it up for me. He has my vote. But clearly, he needs another 90,000 people in this district to vote for him, if we’re going to bring a more populist vision to Washington, DC.

[UPDATE] 137,849 people live in Beaufort County, SC. During the 2004 election, 52,696 Beaufort County residents voted for or against Joe Wilson. 36,903 for and 14,597 against. Another 1196 voted for a third party candidate. Clearly, a lot of people are not engaged in the electoral process. Peaceful change means bringing more people into the process.

Click here for a mail-in voter registration application. For new registrations, attach a photocopy of a valid I.D. Then mail to: Voter Registration, P.O. Drawer 1228, Beaufort, SC 29901.

Mexico is grappling with the same electoral issues the U.S. faced in 2000 and 2004. Claims of a stolen election were squashed Tuesday by a Mexican tribunal who named conservative Felipe Calderon president after two months of speculation and unrest.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the battle for Mexico is far from over.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is continuing his quest for revolution and promises to set up a shadow government aimed at toppling Calderon.

Lopez Obrador’s tactics–which include plopping tent cities, full of his supporters, in the middle of Mexico City’s clogged thoroughfares–have won him at least as many enemies as friends. As long as the tenacious former mayor of Mexico City is around, many Mexicans are convinced, Calderon is virtually ensured of a messy, miserable term.

Somehow, I can’t imagine Al Gore doing the same in the streets of Washington, DC. Not that Gore isn’t man enough, rather the disparity between our rich and our poor, while disgraceful, is not nearly as dramatic as the gulph that exists in Mexico.

Lopez Obrador, nicknamed El Peje after a gar-like fish found in his native Tabasco state, is unapologetic, saying Mexico needs “a radical transformation.”

Most Mexicans live in extreme poverty despite the country’s immense natural resources, he told his followers this week. And it’s urgent that they establish a “new republic,” he said.

Wall Street Journal questions whether bloggers, especially those who rely on their sites for income, can afford to ever take a break. It seems an appropriate question on this day of no labor.

In the height of summer-holiday season, bloggers face the inevitable question: to blog on break or put the blog on a break? Fearing a decline in readership, some writers opt not to take vacations. Others keep posting while on location, to the chagrin of their families. Those brave enough to detach themselves from their keyboards for a few days must choose between leaving the site dormant or having someone blog-sit.

To be sure, most bloggers don’t agonize over this decision. Of the 12 million bloggers on the Internet, only about 13% post daily, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Even fewer — 10% — spend 10 or more hours a week on their blogs.

I clearly fall into some strange category, for I have my hand in six blogs at the moment. Rain or shine, work day or day off, I take in information. Blogging is what comes out the other end. It may be shit somethimes, but it’s a totally natural process.