Sunday, March 20, 2005
Ministry of Strooth
The Administration's cheerleader for extending the USA PATRIOT Act recently told a roomful of people that there is no provision in the Act to allow access to a citizen's library records. While strictly true that libraries are not explicitly mentioned in the Act, there is a provision that the FBI has used extensively as basis for requesting patrons' borrowing records, and the courts have upheld that interpretation. Talk about bending the facts....
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This year's Phoenix Folk Festival had phenominal good luck, IMO. For the first time in the 9 years I've been playing it we didn't have perfect weather; the sky glowered all Saturday as if it were going to open and pour buckets any minute, but we never got more than a meagre sprinkle. My set in the boathouse went really well and I sold some CDs. I felt a little badly that the song everyone told me they liked the best - Larry Warner's Lesson - isn't on any of those CDs.
I have mixed feelings about my albums the older they get, because they're really snapshots in time, and I'm constantly trying to improve my craft. Listening to Anchored to the Wind - now 10 years old - is like looking at my high school yearbook picture with the awkward smile and goofy 70's hair. I feel almost as if it were a geekly kid sister who sat down in Robert Sampler's backroom studio and laid down those first tracks - they're so earnest, but so unpolished. But people still buy the album, and enjoy it, so who am I to argue. (I think Paige Sullivan's beatiful artwork has something to do with the sales.)
None of which explains why I was so exhausted after the first day of the Festival that I went home and fell asleep in front of the TV.
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My garden is extremely confused. I have a Christams cactus that is getting ready to bloom. (This plant is supposedly so picky about blooming on winter Solstice that you have to follow a complicated regimin of keeping it in a dark closet for X hours each week.) Also, where I planted corn I now have tomatoes and cucurbits sprouting. That's what happend when you use your own compost...
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The Administration's cheerleader for extending the USA PATRIOT Act recently told a roomful of people that there is no provision in the Act to allow access to a citizen's library records. While strictly true that libraries are not explicitly mentioned in the Act, there is a provision that the FBI has used extensively as basis for requesting patrons' borrowing records, and the courts have upheld that interpretation. Talk about bending the facts....
--------------------
This year's Phoenix Folk Festival had phenominal good luck, IMO. For the first time in the 9 years I've been playing it we didn't have perfect weather; the sky glowered all Saturday as if it were going to open and pour buckets any minute, but we never got more than a meagre sprinkle. My set in the boathouse went really well and I sold some CDs. I felt a little badly that the song everyone told me they liked the best - Larry Warner's Lesson - isn't on any of those CDs.
I have mixed feelings about my albums the older they get, because they're really snapshots in time, and I'm constantly trying to improve my craft. Listening to Anchored to the Wind - now 10 years old - is like looking at my high school yearbook picture with the awkward smile and goofy 70's hair. I feel almost as if it were a geekly kid sister who sat down in Robert Sampler's backroom studio and laid down those first tracks - they're so earnest, but so unpolished. But people still buy the album, and enjoy it, so who am I to argue. (I think Paige Sullivan's beatiful artwork has something to do with the sales.)
None of which explains why I was so exhausted after the first day of the Festival that I went home and fell asleep in front of the TV.
---------------
My garden is extremely confused. I have a Christams cactus that is getting ready to bloom. (This plant is supposedly so picky about blooming on winter Solstice that you have to follow a complicated regimin of keeping it in a dark closet for X hours each week.) Also, where I planted corn I now have tomatoes and cucurbits sprouting. That's what happend when you use your own compost...
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