Driving with Boys

Trying to get back into the regular blogging habit. So lets start with some recently seen movies:

Kill Bill. Quentin Tarantino serves up a tasty dish of Uma Thurman and lots of blood.

Before Sunrise One of my favorite films. It had been a while since I had seen it. The perfect post-modern romance. I think that the couple in the film discuss more topics in depth in thier one evening together, than many people do in a lifetime.

Riding in Cars with Boys Drew Barrymore does an impressive job of portaying a woman who gets pregnant at 15 up to some time in her late 30's.

May Day

I had quite a nice weekend. Lee Joramo

-MORE-

Friday night, I saw three student one act play projects at Mesa State's Experimental Theatre. The first play was a send up of Othello. Othello focuses on the men, with the actions of the three major female characters occuring largely off stage. In this play, only the three female characters are seen. It turns out that most of Yagos stories about Desdemona's whoring are true, and yet the men still obviously didn't get the stories quite right....

The last play was as strange Tennessee Williams work. Set in the future after a great war, the world is run by a dictatorship, there is no water and women are few. It was sort of "The Road Warrior" meets "Angles in America".

Saturday morning was consumed with restoring order to a very sad web server.

Saturday evening, I celebrated May Day at Heidi and Corry's place up Little Park Road above "Bangs Canyon". Jana and Eric, Toby and many of the Nickel Crew were there. We built and danced around a wonderful May Pole. Then we took a short hike to watch the sunset over Bangs Canyon. Finally it was time for the bonfire.

Sunday, I attended services at UUUS. Took a drive around the confluence of the Gunnison and Colorado triangle, and went to a friends college graduation party a week early.

..::;;

Free as in Freedom

Resources for Free Culture.

http://creativecommons.org/

Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share. ... Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain Ñ or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. ... Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc.

http://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is the home to one of the largest public domain texts on the internert.

http://www.gnu.org/

The mission of the Free Software Foundation is to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users. The majority of software that runs the internet is under GNUÕs GPL or similar free software licenses.

http://ocw.mit.edu/

With the publication of 700 courses, MIT OCW offers educational materials from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT's schools.

http://cnx.rice.edu/

Connexions is a Content Commons of free, open-licensed educational materials in fields such as music, electrical engineering and psychology. Mostly college level, but some content for younger students too. Connexions is a place for communities of authors and instructors to create, find, and share content.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/

Wikipedia.org, Wiktionary.org, Wikiquote.org, Wikibooks.org, and Wikisource.org. The goals of the foundation are to encourage the growth and development of free content, Wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge and without advertising.

http://www.ibiblio.org

Ibiblio is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/

Standord Law Professor Lawrence Lessig has written many books on issues related to freedom of expression and copy right laws. He has aurgued copyright cases before the Supreme Court, and is major player in the Creative Commons movement. His most reccent book is ÒFree CultureÓ and can be purchased as a book or downloaded for free under the Creative Commons.

http://www.joramo.com/freedom/ccmessage

A copy of todayÕs Message released under the Creative Commons License, additional information and all of these links may be found here.

Fortinbras

The event of my weekend was to see the play "Fortinbras" preformed at Mesa State. Fortinbras is the name of the Norwegian prince who arrives at the end of Hamlet to find everyone dead. This play starts with that scene. However, while Hamlet is a dark drama about a man who is all thought and no action, this play is a comedy about Fotinbras a man of action and little thought. Where Hamlet frets about the ghost of his father, Fortinbras has an affair with the ghost of Ophelia. Where Hamlet spends the whole play trying to decided wether to take action to avenge his father, Fortinbras sends his army out to rattle their sabers at the Poles in a move to distract public attention, only to have his army conquer most of the world without a fight.

The story arch of Fortinbras mirrors that of Hamlet. So you know that everyone ends up dead, but for the opposite reasons.

Very Funny. My favorite bit is the way Hamlet's ghost shows up on a TV screen that is carted around the stage.

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Men in Portugual

The "UUUS" Men's Cooking group had yet another blow out festival of food and drink last night at Dick Pierce's home. The food was Portuguese, and that means Port wine and salty food. I didn't know that Portugual was the land of salty food, but considering that nearly every dish tasted salty. Salty fish, Salty pork, salty sausage stew, salty bread, the Portuguese must love salt.

Petrichor

Petrichor

(PET-ri-kuhr) noun. The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.

[From petro- (rock), from Greek petros (stone) + ichor (the fluid that is supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology). Coined by researchers I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas.

"Petrichor, the name for the smell of rain on dry ground, is from oils given off by vegetation, absorbed onto neighboring surfaces, and released into the air after a first rain."

Matthew Bettelheim; Nature's Laboratory (Mt Shasta,Ê California) Jan 2002.

Name Remembered

As I was leaving my favorite coffee house Higher Grounds, I stopped to talk to Mark.

Mark is one of the regular patrons and is often sitting in front of a chess board beating nearly all comes on. From what I have gathered, Mark use to be an successful architech. But that was before the accident he had on a bicycle. Now his memory is very erratic and he has the habit of laughing "Ha Ha" at odd times. Mark has a difficult time remembering names and faces. He likes to flirt with all of the women in the coffee house, and I have noticed that he tends to remember their names after an number of chats.

However, Marks has not rememembered my name in the two years that I have gone to this coffee house. Of course, I am not a cute girl.

But today, Mark asked me "Your name is Lee, Right?"

Yeah!

Bad Frog

Christella is back from France.

So she came over to my house for a drink and dinner. Sounds like she had a great time. I hope that she blogs about some of her stories, like the adventure with the American Neo-Marxist who lives in a hip villa in the south of France and who keeps a slave in the basement, and who likes to cop a feel.

Appearently the frog that I gave Christella to take to France was a bad frog who stayed in the hotel room and watched CNN. I don't think that I will give anyone a blue frog again. Bad Frog!

Amazingly, Christella really enjoyed the French food. Yes, she does love good food, but being mostly a vegitarian, she is

Green Is Red

As we exited from the Avalon after watching Fog of War last Saturday, a young man wearing a sort of hippy beaning cap came up to me. He held out hand which grasped a card, and asked "Are you Good?" I said, "No I am evil".

I knew right away he was selling something, of course he was selling Jesus. He was expecting me to say that I was "Good", then he would show me that the card which contained a green printed dot, would turn to a red dot to show that I was sinful.

Or something like, that I never let him explain himself. I have never grasped the concept of original sin. If there is a God, and if God is Good, then I can not understand why we would be created as sinful by nature. No I believe that a

Good God would create us as being Good by default and it would take action to do evil. (Darkness is the absence of Light, but Light is not the absence of Dark.)

So I played with this young Christian. No I did not engage him in a direct logical discussion, but a surrealistic dadaist logic. The lad became more and more bewildered.

Finally, I said "Sorry, I am taking my Jewish ass and leave with my Pagan friends." And I left. He was confused.

Back in the USA

My best friend Christella Lans is back in the USA after her trip in France. I am excited to see her when she gets home and can tell me all of the stories.

Moving Dirt

I started working on my garden. It is exciting yet difficult to start creating a new garden after the last seven years of hard work. Hard work that resulting in a wonderful garden that is open of my proudest accomplisments.

Now is time to begin again.

Fog of War

Plenty of work at the Nickel this Saturday. Setup and configure those G5's.

Helped out at the Soup Kitchen briefly.

Had Jana and Eric and Kyra, David Miller, Toby Farley over for dinner.

Went to see the movie Fog of War. It is a documentary that is made up of one interview with Robert MacNamara about his life up to his leaving the Johnson administration.

The movie transported me back to 1992, and my decision not to work in Washington, D.C. because I did not want to become a MacNamara.

Smart people, behaving in rational ways, who think deeply about matters from every angle, who struggle to come up with the best solution, using the best data they have, and who constantly reevaluate their options, will still make massive mistakes. And when smart people make mistakes, they make BIG mistakes.

Party at Pauls

I met Doug Freed, Karl and Christy, David Miller and Lynn Campbell at the new Ale House (aka the former Gladstones) for a Friday beer. The Ale House is the new hip place in Grand Junciton. It is packed the entire parking lot is filled. Not sure if the video store and liquor store that share the strip mall will be happy or mad about this situation.

After several rounds of beer, we (minus Doug) headed over to Paul's house where we preceeded to drink more beer. (Including a most yummy belgium beer with Pink Elephants on the bottle called Delirium.)

things heard

"I saw her tits, but you can almost get a lot of sex."

"I can't decide weither to denie that, or say 'Hell, yes I said that'"

"Your less not hip than I am"

When Henry Rollins Speaks, Drunks Should Run

The moral of this story: Don't go to a Henry Rollins Spoken Word performance if you are a ripped drunk.

I was told by so many friends that I needed to go to see Henry Rollins when he came to Grand Junction's Avalon Theater. Randy, Jana, Eric, Toby, Heidi, Patty, the Higher Grounds Crew, all told me that I had to see this guy. I don't think that I had ever heard of Henry Rollins; although, I think that I had heard of the early 1980's punk band Black Flag that he use to sing for. I wondered what "spoken word" by a former Punk singer would be, but so much praise could not be denided.

Prior to the show I had dinner at Suehiro. I entered by myself, but soon my workout buddy (and consulting client mainstay) Doug Freed walked in with his wife Shannon. So I ended up eating with them. They had never been to Suehiro's, and were not overly familar with sushi, so I helped them order. (Although, I ate mostly my order of curry udon.) The Doug and Shannon were going to see the play Intelligent Signs of Life at the Green Shoe Theatre.

After dinner, I headed over to the Avalon to see Henry Rollins. Dispite the fact that the show was at the Avalon, the Mesa Theater Club was the organizer. Have I told you how I dispise the Mesa Theater? What a great venue. What a lousy customer experience.

As the Avalon filled, I was surprised at how many people I knew. Friends, local volunteers, arts and culture patrons, bar flys, former girl friends, etc. In one odd moment a former girlfriend (who had stopped returning communications) and her campanions all vigerously waved at me.

Rollins comes on stage. A Man in his early 40's. He clutches the mic, the veins on his muscled arms pop out. For the next two hours he will hold the mic in this death grip. The rant begins.

He is angry

He is profane

He is smart

He is insightful

He is funny as hell

A drunk begins to talk back to him.

Rollins belongs to a long standing movement in punk called Straight Edge that is totally opposed to drug and alcohol use. In fact during the monolog, Rollins mentions that he has only been drunk once, and only tried Pot once. Both expereinces he thought were stupid.

The drunk is delirious and incoherrent. Rollins simply asks the drunk to leave. And "Give him back his $20 bucks for the ticket so he can go across the street and continue with his drinking."

Rollins spends much of the evening ripping apart the Bush administrations policies on Terror, Iraq, taxes, tits on TV, Mars. He recounts his experiences going on a USO tour to visit our troops.

But for me the most interesting story was the closing story. Less than 48 hours after being in Iraq, Rollins finds himself in a Nashville sound studio with a studio drummer and William Shatner to work on a track Shatner's new album. Remember, Shatners prior album is considerd by many to be the worse recording in history. The title of the track is "I can't get behind that" in which the Captain and the Punk trade verbal blows of things that they can't get behind. When Shatner decideds they need to add a guitar, the producer calls his buddy down the street the ledgenary Adrian Belew of King Crimson to come in. ("Hey Adrian, I got William Shatner of Star Trek, and Henry Rollins of Black Flag in the Studio. Do you want part of this shit?." "I will be their in 10 minutes.")

Why is the story of Shatner interesting? Because Rollins describes Shatner as a man who is enjoying his life, and when they go to dinner Shanter gracefully talks to all of the other dinners who are stunned to see Captian Kirk. While Rollins describes himself as slamming down every bit of food, Shatner enjoys every taste with passion. Too often I have heard the witty cyncial observer of life end on a sour note.

Wow!

ggggg

The PowerMac G5's arrived at the Nickel. More work for me. (but fun)

March Birthdays 2004

March is Birth Day month in the Joramo household, with my father, sister and myself having birithdays. As has become our tradition, we celebrated it at Dolce Vita. I gave my father a copy of my buddy Doug Freed's new book Colorado by the Numbers, and a copy of the DaVinci Code.

Monday at Folks and Pauls

A busy day, catching up after being out of town and working on new projects. I had dinner with at my folks, and afterward I stopped by Paul Lan's and drank a couple of beers.