Praying Prey

Oh you, you know you must be blind
To do something like this
To take the sleep that you don't know
You're giving Death a kiss,
Oh, little fool now

Pimpto Bismol

The real deal. One block from home, Rainier Ave. Silver boots and check the ring.

GOD BLESS HER

Currently not hearing the music, but I do love Booth. One of the best cartoonists ever.

FYI

Validation for self, and this blog. Goodnight, and you're welcome.

UNCOMMON VALOR (A Vietnam Story)

Jedi Mind Tricks W/ R.A. The Rugged Man

[Verse 1 - Vinnie Paz]
Yeah..

I don't know why I'm over here this job is evil
They send me here to Vietnam to kill innocent people
My mother wrote me said the President he doesn't care
We trying to leave the footprints of America here
They say we're trying to stop Chinese expansion
But I ain't seen no Chinese since we landed
Sent my whole entire unit thinking we can win
Against the Viet-Cong guerrillas there in Gia Dinh
I didn't sign up to kill women or any children
For every enemy soldier, we killing six civilians
Yeah, and that ain't right to me
I ain't got enough of mother fuckin' fight in me
It frightens me and I just want to see my son and moms
But over here they dropping seven million tons of bombs
I spend my days dodging all these booby traps and mines
And at night, praying to God that I get back alive
And I'm forced to sit back and wonder
Why I was a part of 'Operation Rolling Thunder'
In a fox hole with nine months left here
Jungle like the fuckin' harbinger of death here

[Interlude]
(soldier speaking)
I don't want to be here. I'm scared, I just want to go home.
(officer speaking)
You fucking kidding me? Don't be a pussy. Don't you love your country?
(soldier speaking)
I like being here. I'm ready.

[Verse 2 - R.A. The Rugged Man]
True story...
Call me Thorburn, John H. Staff Sergeant, Marksman
Skillin', killin', illin' I'm able and willing
Kill a village elephant, rapin' and pillage your village
Illegitimate killers, US Military guerrillas
This ain't no real war, Vietnam shit
World War II, that's a war, this is just a military conflict
Soothing, drug-abusing, Vietnamese women screwing
Sex, gambling and boozin', all the shit is amusing
Bitches and guns, this is every man's dream
I don't want to go home, where I'm just a ordinary human being
Special OP, Huey chopper gun ship, run shit
Gook run when the mini-gun spit, won't miss, kill shit
Spit four-thousand bullets a minute
Victor Charlie, hit trigger, hit it
I'm in it to win it, get it
The lieutenant hinted the villain, I've ended up killin'
I did it, cripple, did it, pictures I painted is vivid, live it
A wizard with weapons, a secret mission we about to begin it
Government funded, behind enemy lines bullets is spraying
It's heating up, a hundred degrees
The enemies the North-Vietnamese, bitch please
Ain't no sweat, I'm told be at ease.
Until I see the pilot got hit, and we about to hit some trees
'til the rotor broke, crash land, American man
Cambodia, right in the enemy hand
Take a swig of the whiskey to calm us
Them yellow men wearing black pajamas
They want to harm us
They all up on us
Bang, bang, bullet hit my chest, feel no pain
To my left, the captain caught a bullet right in his brain
Body parts flying, loss of limbs, explosions
Bad intentions, I see my best friend's intestines
Pray to the one above, It's raining and I'm covered in mud
I think I'm dying, I feel dizzy, I'm losing blood
I see my childhood, I'm back in the arms of my mother
I see my whole life, I see Christ, I see bright lights
I see Israelites, Muslims and Christians at peace, no fights
Blacks, Whites, Asians, people of all types
I must have died, then I woke up, surprised I'm alive
I'm in a hospital bed, they rescued me, I survived
I escaped the war, came back
But ain't escape Agent Orange, two of my kids born handicapped
Spastic, quadriplegia, micro cephalic
Cerebral palsy, cortical blindness, name it they had it
My son died he ain't live, but I still try to think positive
Cause in life, God take, God give

Twin Peaked

Blair, lurking with cat-prowl.

Caption?

Secret MLK sidewalk gap. We need to go back and face our demons, and harness the Dan Tien.

p.s. Promise to post proper pics of Blair blasting over this accordingly, once we go back.

COOL OBIT

Cool lady.

I DON'T DRAW MUCH ANYMORE.

Lost art or sign of the times? I think it was a good habit. And good meditation, as long as you're not trying to perfect it.

I DO MIND

"Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry." The book doesn't just concern the influence of drug companies in the profession. Carlat believes in prescribing medication, but he says too many psychiatrists have all but abandoned talk therapy — leaving in-depth interaction with patients to others — while they pursue medical fixes for mood problems and mental disorders.

Read article: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php

This is the exact same type of problem my old man had with the medical industry. But as a doctor he chose to spend more quality time with fewer patients, at the risk (and immediate fact) of not making nearly as much money. Part of this is choice –an ethical one, which is foreshadowed by the “income differential” (which Dan Carlat calls himself out on, is aware of, by being a psychiatrist and not a therapist), and the other is actual limitations imposed by the business in contracts with pharmaceutical companies, medical tech companies, hospital CEO’s, etc. The latter of which can be just as disconcerting to the practitioner who requires more freedom to practice in a thorough, methodical manner. Very frustrating, and a real concern for practitioners and patients alike. He did everything he could to talk his sons out of becoming a doctor. (lucky for him, I isn’t smart enough anyway!)

I also had a professor teach us in depth about these pitfalls of the American Psychiatric industry as well. He called it a triple-bind system, which establishes that the therapist be dependent on the APA and drug companies for regulations, standards, and product; the patient be dependent on the therapist for treatment and controlled substances; the companies dependent on the patients continually needing treatment for new diagnoses (i.e., stimulating and maintaining demand). He amplified this lament with the fact that DSM diagnoses never leave one’s record and that some organizations and individuals, (however seemingly highly illegal and obviously unethical) in light of mandates confidentiality, can access a main national database of all U.S. patient records with the right credentials/means, for multiple reasons. (e.g., employment concerns, political sleuthing, Homeland Security) Sounds like a conspiracy, but it aint.

This is a guy who hid his under-insured patients records under his bed at home and counseled them for free, so there was no liability or oversight.

Quick psychobabble: Is this the death knell of psychoanalysis? We need another revolution in psychology, but it will probably not come from or any new form of psychotherapy, but from advances in neurology (neuro-engineering). And I do fear the ramifications of physical transmitter-tinkering. Can we re-program/overwrite pathology?? You need to understand the cause before you can treat the effect.


Food for thought.

WE ARE HEMORRHAGING

"This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us..."

Read more...

The Guardian, Saturday 19 June 2010
"Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world" by Naomi Klein

STAR*UCKS

One of my first jobs was working as a "Barista" for Starbucks.  As a 22 year old, it was an okay job. I was treated fairly by managers, had a flexible schedule and full benefits without having to work full time. I was young and inexperienced, so at first I didn't really notice the erratic schedules, the weak pay, the shifting to different stores when needed on the same day, or the over-all fast food attitude of the process. I had never worked in fast food before. (People still look at me weird when I call coffee franchises "fast food." A river in Egypt....)  And as I learned more and more about their investment practices, (their facade about shifting over to Fair Trade commodities, lack of foreign workplace safety standards, paying unlivable wages with no benefits or pensions to plantation workers), contemplated in horror their lack of a recycling program in any of their stores, what it means to cultivate uncertified industrial coffee farming, and started hearing stories from management about how they were treated, I quit.

And this is before the Sonics were sold.

Q.

A recent upbeat article from the Washington State Labor Council website:

TUESDAY, JUNE 22, 2010
Union-buster Howard Schultz is Pacific NW's highest-paid CEO

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz -- the guy who sold out Seattle by giving away its SuperSonics to a bunch of Oklahoma City yahoos -- is now the highest paid CEO in the Pacific Northwest. The $15 million he got paid in 2009 is more than the the CEOs of Microsoft, Boeing, Nike, Weyerhaeuser... all of them. And the truth is, Schultz collected tens of millions more than that last year by exercising stock options.  

In September 2009, with Starbucks earnings and shares in the toilet, Shultz spoke of "the shared sacrifice I want to make" as he vowed to take almost no salary for the rest of the year. But as the Seattle Times reported last week, Schultz not only took in $15 million in total cash and equity pay in 2009, he cashed in more than $26 million in stock options from 1998 and 1999. Meanwhile, the company awarded him a new package of stock options in November 2008 that are now worth $46.8 million.

So what else is new, right? Some overpaid corporate executive continues to get super-rich -- in his case by buying coffee for about $1.50 a pound and selling it for $10 a pound -- while the rest of us struggle to find or keep a roof over our families' heads amid the Great Recession.

What's even more deplorable about Howard Schultz's embarrassment of riches is that he has also achieved it by aggressively and illegally denying his employees the freedom to choose whether they want to form a union. He has overseen the spending of millions of dollars on anti-union consultants and lawyers to block his employees' attempts to unionize. 

Even as he was becoming the richest CEO in the Pacific Northwest, his company was getting thumped by the National Labor Relations Board for unfair labor practices, including the firing and punishing of pro-union baristas in New York, Michigan, and elsewhere around the country. And because of the lax labor laws in this country, Starbucks has been able to enter into "settlements" that avoided fines and, in most cases, even avoided admissions of wrongdoing.

Schultz has reportedly said that he takes his company's employees' efforts to unionize as a "personal insult."

CURRENT LAW SAYS workers have the right to decide for themselves -- free from threat of firing, punishment, harassment or other employer coercion -- whether they want to form a union. But the law has no teeth and is broken with relative impunity by companies like Starbucks, which has reportedly spent millions on high-priced lawyers to subvert unionization campaigns using those illegal tactics.

Here is an account -- from portfolio.com -- of the of one group of workers to form a union at a single Starbucks store:

Four years ago, a small but hardy band of baristas attempted the near-impossible task of unionizing a single Starbucks store on Madison Avenue in New York. The leader of the effort, a young firebrand named Daniel Gross, took on what he called "the myth of the socially responsible Starbucks," complaining of subsistence wages, sadistically unpredictable schedules, and understaffing. He noted that only four out of 10 Starbucks employees actually receive its vaunted health benefits -- a lower rate than at Wal-Mart -- either because, as part-time workers, they don’t work the 240 hours a quarter required to qualify, or because, at between $7 and $9 an hour, they can’t afford the premiums, copays, and deductibles. (A Starbucks spokesperson says it’s because they have coverage from other sources and that 80 percent of its employees are covered by some kind of insurance.)

As soon as the unionization drive was announced, Schultz sent out a company­wide email expressing his dismay and disappointment. It was almost as if his feelings had been hurt. He visited the epicenter of the unionization effort, the store on Madison Avenue where Gross worked. Gross, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a.k.a. the Wobblies, says that when he tried talking to Schultz, he was rebuffed, though Schultz denies it. Gross was later fired.

After his visit, the I.W.W. says that Starbucks sent antiunion managers into the store and sicced high-priced lawyers from the Washington, D.C., law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld on Gross and his cohorts. The local office of the National Labor Relations Board sided with the union, filing complaints that Starbucks had engaged in numerous unfair labor practices and twice taking it to court. One case was settled; the other, which required weeks of testimony, is still pending. 

(The baristas eventually prevailed.)

Gross and his lawyer, Stuart Lichten of Schwartz Lichten & Bright in New York, estimate that Starbucks has gone through several million dollars in legal fees to suppress the union. Even if the Wobblies had successfully unionized the Madison Avenue store, Lichten says, Starbucks could easily have shut it down; after all, there are plenty of other Starbucks stores nearby. Why then, I ask him, would the company spend so much to squelch something so weak?

Partly, Lichten says, it’s to keep Gross from ever returning to Starbucks. But partly too, he adds, it’s because of the boss’s vanity. Under Schultz’s benevolent rule, unions should be unnecessary; it is "a personal insult," he says, that anyone feels otherwise. "They also see it as retro," he adds. "It’s not new-age to have a union. Unions are for General Motors. They’re the 'third wave,' or whatever they call it." Schultz says he won’t talk about the matter because it’s still in litigation.

Workers shouldn't face such hurdles to exercise their legal right to decide for themselves whether they should have a union. This is America. Democracy doesn't stop at the employers' door. And yet, Human Rights Watch lists the United States alongside many Third World nations as a violator of basic human rights, due to the degree to which we restrict the freedom of association and the freedom to form unions.

Each year thousands of workers in the United States are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized by employers in reprisal for their exercise of the right to freedom of association. In the 1950’s, victims numbered in the hundreds each year. In 1969, the number was more than 6,000. By the 1990’s, more than 20,000 workers each year were dismissed or otherwise victims of discrimination serious enough for the government-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to issue a reinstatement and “back-pay” or other remedial order…

Howard Schultz is not only the highest-paid CEO in the Pacific Northwest, he's the poster boy for why the Employee Free Choice Act is necessary in America. Now more than ever.

JUST A LITTLE SOLITUDE...THAT'S ALL.

Andy Jenkins is a definite favorite of mine, and one of my earliest influences in the world of art. Any skateboarder who picked up a Transworld mag from the late 80's and early 90's must recall with delight Wrench Pilot. Not a lot of people can get away with drawing someone skateboarding without making it look, well, silly.
Anyway...not to pigeon-hole him either. His talents are far reaching, much further than Lettus Bee. Check out his site, and here's a good interview.

SPREADING THE WORD OF GOD

Fierce ants build 'torture rack'

 

The ants divide labour according to age, with the oldest individuals being trap builders

A fierce species of Amazonian ant has been seen building elaborate traps on which hapless prey are stretched like medieval torture victims, before being slowly hacked to pieces. With cunning and patience, Allomerus decemarticulatus worker-ants cut hairs from the stem of the plant they inhabit, and use the tiny fibres to build a spongy snare, Nature magazine reports.


This ingenious feat of engineering has only ever been observed in one other species of related ant, French researchers say.
The ants cut hairs to clear a path under the plant stem, while leaving some hairs standing to form "pillars" on top of which the lethal platform will sit.
Using the plant hairs they have harvested, the ants weave the platform itself, which is bound together and strengthened using a special fungus.
When the ants have completed the chamber they puncture holes all along its surface, each just big enough to poke their heads through.
Then, hundreds of worker ants climb into the chamber and wait for an unfortunate victim.

Ancient sacrifice
"Workers will hide inside the platform, with their mandibles just inside the hole and they will wait there for prey to come," co-author Jerome Orivel of the University of Toulouse, France said.
Anything with legs slim enough to fit through the carefully constructed holes will meet a miserable fate if they are foolish enough to enter the trap.

There is no limit to the ants' ambition - they will try to catch any mammoth of the insect world

"They will catch almost anything that goes on the trap," continued Dr Orivel. "And they will grab anything they can - legs, antenna, anything."
Once the prey is well secured by jaws fastening all its extremities, it is stretched over the platform like an ancient sacrifice to the gods.
Scores of worker ants then stream out from inside the trap and sting it vigorously to cause paralysis.
Once the creature is dead or fully immobilised, the ants will carry it to their nest, where they will dismember their prey before carrying it inside.
"Small insects will be immediately dismembered and transported to the nest," said Dr Orivel. "But bigger insects will stay on the trap for up to 12 hours."
There is no limit to the ants' ambition and they will attempt to catch any mammoth of the insect world - so long as it has slender legs.
"Their success depends on the type of insect," Dr Orivel told the BBC News website. "The insects' legs have to be smaller than the holes otherwise they cannot get hold of them.
"The ants must have something to catch - for example, caterpillars will have nothing to get hold of so they will not be preyed upon." 

It's not a torture rack. Just a mean snare...

The Irish don't like McDonalds?

"As long as there are people who are creatively empowered...there will always be the breaking of the mold. American movies to me, and I've said this before a million times...are becoming more and more homogeneous. Because the marketing objective...and marketing now plays such a major role in movies...it almost, uh, it almost obliterates everything else.  The marketing objective is the lowest common denominator. 'You can't put that here...let's put the car chase there, put the sex scene, let's put the fight in, let's get them back together, they end up happily...they walk off into the sun....' So that there's a formulaic predictability to American movies. That allied with the cynicism of the way movies are put together -the product placement and spin offs and ties and all kinds of crap that you know has nothing to do with the telling of stories...they've turned American movies into McMovies.

So that when the movie goer gets his movie it's like a hamburger. He doesn't want a piece of aubergine in there. He wants his onion, his tomato, his hamburger and his bun. And he doesn't want the bun hard, he wants it soft. And he wants it in two minutes."

-Gabriel Byrne

Kauai, I miss you dearly....already.

White-rumped Shama.

South end of Waimea Canyon.

"Whayouwant?"

Spinner Dolphin doing its thing.

80+ percent visibility. This yellow fish swooned Lara away from the boat multiple times.

Tribal Death Mask Orb Spindler of Doom.
(Okay, actually an Asian Spiny-backed Orb Weaver....my name for it is better.)

Tail wagging on prompt. He understood the word "food."



Size matters....

Looking up in the bathroom at Tunnels....I see Her. 5-inch-long Sugar Cane Spider. I went back 3 days later to shoot this. I've heard stories of these chasing people across hotel rooms.

Bummed On Self.

In my 21 years of skateboarding, I've done the following twice, now:

You get back to your car, a little tired from skating, and you lean the board up against the car. You take a seat, leaving the car door open, because, you're going to skate some more. You sit and drink some water or whatever, and due to reason A, and maybe B, or A minus B, or just out of sinking back and getting comfortable, you decide to throw in the towel and leave. ("I'll come back in the morning when nobody's here...yeah.") And you close the door to the car and you drive off.

Forget anything asshole?

The first time I did this I was gone for a full day, and came back and the skateboard was still there, lonely, sitting in the middle of my residential street in Los Angeles. Lucky?

This time the Gods did not grant me such kindness. They reached down and scooped up my poor lonely axe, and are now fingerboarding on the cosmos with it as I write this. Hardy-har.

Does God laugh harder when you announce your plans -or when you change them quietly and do something stupid?

No Gods. No luck. No board. Some little kid is reveling in his found treasure, and is probably still asleep somewhere, without a care in the world about plans.

USE YOUR HAZARDS AND TAKE IT IN.

Rainier will never cease to be stunning. And did you know there is a great viewpoint from the 520 bridge? And that there is no housing/development in the shot? (two of these statements are true...click on image to get full timewarp experience.)

Where is my mind?

After work syndrome.

I LOVE LAMP

First "photoshopped" image. I immediately fell in love with the program. I already had a lamp fetish.

Selasphoprus Rufus

Green-flecked Rufous Hummingbird. Camera shy. Probably hates my guts.

Was just thinking I need a bigger telephoto when someone at work offered one up that she's selling. Hoowa.