Jason Griffey

Off to visit friends for the weekend (or part of it). Should be interesting…hopefully get away from the war coverage for a bit, and unfortunately maybe get some work done on my papers.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I haven’t laughed so hard in weeks….

http://crossspot.net/objective/propaganda.html

An exerpt from the link:

“However, these propagandists aren’t just targeting the young. Take for example Apple Computers, makers of the popular Macintosh line of computers. The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called… Darwin! That’s right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don’t advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an “Open Source” license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, “lickable” buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.”

ROTFLMAO

One of my favorite blogs “Is That Legal” recently had a post about my little town: Carrboro, NC and its recent stand against the war in Iraq.

http://www.isthatlegal.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_isthatlegal_archive.html#90763283

Very, very funny stuff. I love my little town and its radical history.

So, watched the Oscars last night. Thought that some of it was interesting…mainly the controversial parts of course. Michael Moore was phenomenally brave, I thought. To say what he said:

“We live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man who’s sending us to war for fictitious reasons, whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts.”

“We are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you.”

Was really amazing given the current state of the country. I completely agree with his “fictious” comments…I’ve been complaining for weeks about the made-up nature of the war, of the rational for it, of the attention paid to it…just amazing.

In the interest of getting some real news out there: 70 people were arrested in Cuba just a few days ago in an attempt to quiet government critics.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/cuba/

more news available by searching google.

Just doing what I always do at work…listen to LOTS of music. Lyrics are a great thing for me…love the poetry of good lyrics. So, here goes:

“She was the kind of girl who never touched a smoke or a drink, yeah…
but she smolders like an empty church left to burn in the rain…”

That’s from Wiseblood, written by Kurt Stevens and covered frequently by….take a guess…..yep. Counting Crows.

Gonna try something new for the blog….every few days, I’ll post my favorite _legal_ MP3 file…live stuff from my favorite bands, stuff that’s in the public domain, or stuff that has been licensed for sharing.

Today’s MP3 is kind of interesting. It’s by one of my favorite bands (Counting Crows) and it’s a cover of a song by another of my favorite songwriters, Ryan Adams (former lead for Whiskeytown and a local boy from Raleigh, NC).

Take a listen. The name of the song is “Winding Wheel”

http://www.unc.edu/~griffey/CC_Winding_wheel.mp3

Enjoy.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/19/sprj.irq.main/index.html

Bush gives order to attack Iraq
Cruise missiles target Saddam in morning attack
Wednesday, March 19, 2003 Posted: 10:53 PM EST (0353 GMT)

Well…it’s started. An unjust war, created by the White House and the corporate opportunists in it, fed by the media and its “reporting” of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt campaign FROM the white house, and foisted upon the American people who don’t want it.

Then again, we didn’t ELECT the guy either.

Fuck.

And it arrives….the birthday.

I’m oddly just kinda “blah” about the whole thing. Looking forward to good food and presents, but overall I never was big on the whole celebration thing. We’ll see how it goes.

Other random Counting Crows lyric, from an unreleased song that’s one of my favorites:

Dust me off and shut me down / And dream of where I haven’t been
Close the door inside my heart / Stuck in the south Atlantic wind
I have hollow eyes / Haunting only to myself
Even so, I can’t stop carving / These great big hollows in my self
I took the train from California / To the far side of the continent
Woke up in Kentucky / Where a wedding was about to end
I looked up at Anna / She turned back to look at me
It’s best to kill the ones that matter / Render blind the ones who see

and again with the break in blogging.

Lately I’ve been giving lots of thought to my upcoming birthday. I’ll be 30, and for reasons unknown to me, it seems important somehow. I don’t know if it’s some wierd societal thing that I’m just subconciously projecting, but it actually is making me think about it. I don’t feel old, and don’t expect that this birthday will start me feeling old, I just think that this trip out of my twenties is going to be something different than it was, different than it has been.

very unsure about it.

Ok…some time since blogging due to spring break and being without internet access.

The most interesting thought that I’ve had recently has to do with the title of my blog and the way I seem to handle information processing. In several classes we have discussed info processing of sorts, and I’m starting to try to pay attention to how it is I operate. I probably take in more info in a day than I should…I’m constantly connected, visit 6-10 news sites repeatedly thoughtout the day to stay on top of stuff, get tons of email, and IM with friends. In reflecting on that, several people have asked how I tell good information from bad on the internet (a common question from non-netheads). The best explanation that I have been able to come up with is that I do some kind of pattern recognition for what my brain tells me is “good” or “safe” on the net…things like level of language use, proper grammer, is it recently updated, keywords used, and other things I’m certainly not aware of. Somehow, though, I ferret through stuff. The same goes with searching…I google for something and can pick the most likely result on the first page to give me what I want in milliseconds, without consciously reading and processing the information in the text.

This phenomena interests me. I will be writing more as I think of situations and anecdotes.