Where’s the peanut butter?!

This took me a minute to figure out, but is brilliant:

But it’s really best appreciated in the full size version.

Am I hallucinating? I cannot believe the lineup for this year’s Sasquatch. Ironically, the bands I want to see most are bands I’ve either passed up in the past or who put on what I thought were marginal shows: the Cure (yes, it hurts very much to say that), REM, Stephen Malkmus, Kinski, Mates of State. Or worse, who I know from the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack (thank you, Rilo Kiley). But then the Flaming Lips will also be there and when I last saw them 14 years ago (!!!) at Lollapalooza, they were incredible, and I keep seeing and reading things about their shows since that make me expect them to be even better. I can’t wait!

I can’t wait forever for Microsoft and T-Mobile to get together and get a Windows Mobile phone on the market that supports UMA (the technology behind T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home and TalkForever services). There aren’t any Windows Mobile devices on the market or even forecasted with the stack (forget about carried by T-Mobile), so now I’m looking at a BlackBerry, which is different, but probably the next best thing. So now the question is whether to go with the Curve (8320) or wait for the update to the Pearl (8120) (which is rumored to drop in a week or two). The specs on the updated Pearl are almost identical to the Curve - it looks like basically a Curve that: adds video recording (yawn), weighs almost 20% less, has bluetooth 2.0, trades the full qwerty keyboard for their SureType thing, trims the screen from 320×240 to 240×260, and cannot be tethered to a laptop as a modem. Also, the Pearl comes in 8 fabulous colors while the Curve only comes in gold or silver. Decisions…decisions…

Not unlike the Dysfunctional Family Circus, it turns out a small modification makes Garfield funny, too. Just take out Garfield:

…hillaryismomjeans.com? follow hillarymomjeans

HILLARY BET ON THE PATRIOTS

I’m a little behind on my feeds and missed this post from Nick promoting (?) this video for our shared home town, West St. Paul. It’s kind of charming, but still weirds me out.

Some Virginia Tech grad student has designed a lamp where you lift some weights and as they descend under gravity, they spin a motor and generate LED light in a lamp that’s supposed to be about equivalent to a 40w bulb and lasts for about 4 hours. I hope these are on the market by September 21!

There’s another nipple in town.

Hey - I just found out that the wildly popular band Spoon are not the band Spooner, who I’d heard in high school and didn’t care for. Looks like I have some catching up to do.

I haven’t written about politics in a while and have been pretty happy about that because for the last 7 years it’s been almost impossible to touch the subject without winding up incredibly, incredibly frustrated about a situation it’s very hard to do anything about. I’ve marched, written letters to the paper, boycotted companies, avoided buying the products of sweatshops, felt righteous indignation and as far as I can tell a lot of the world is still pretty broken…but there’s an opportunity for change coming again, so here goes.

Last Saturday Washington held the Presidential primary caucuses. Washington does this funny thing where ballots are mailed out but the delegates representing the Democratic selection from the state are allocated exclusively by the caucus (making the ballot meaningless for Democrats) so I went to the caucuses. This was after Hillary Clinton spoke to a capacity audience on Thursday night at Pier 30 on the Seattle waterfront and after Obama addressed a capacity audience at Key Arena on Friday afternoon. I didn’t make it to the Clinton speech but I did get to Key Arena on Friday.

The Obama event at Key Arena was really overwhelming. He was due to speak some time around 1 but the doors opened at 11 so I tried to get there in time to make it in. I walked up past the west side of the Science Center and when I got to the Exhibition Pavilion I realized there was a huge line. So I started following it back to the Center House, toward the Opera House, around Mercer Stadium, back past EMP, and all the way past the east side of the Science Center (and proceeded to kick myself for not starting out a block away from where I started!). I could not believe what I was seeing - this was a work day and we were just a day before the primary, right? So I got clever and thought “there’s no way they’ll fill Key Arena, I’ll go get some of the famous velvet foam and get back in line after most of the people have filtered in.”

And they filled the 18,000 seats at Key Arena. Still, about 3,000 of us waited outside to hear the address over the PA. We waited out in the cold and drizzly rain for about an hour, listening to inspirational music from inside and shivered from the weather. Eventually a motorcade appeared near the southeast corner of the arena and Obama got out to address us with a bullhorn. It was impossible to hear him from where I stood, but it was still an invigorating experience standing with thousands of people who couldn’t get into our basketball arena but all waited to hear him anyway. And I think we were all pleased and inspired that he did speak to us rather than trying to stick to a tight schedule and get inside to address the larger crowd.

Speculation about Obama as a presidential candidate started circulating as early as the 2004 election and at the time I thought the idea of a black man running as a serious contender for President of the United States was crazy - the candidates around that time certainly were and are. But here we are in 2008 and right now it’s hard to think about trading Obama’s progressive platform and charisma for another candidate. He might not quite have been my top candidate on every single issue, but a candidate is a sum of parts - not just a list of positions on issues. In that larger equation he got my caucus support on Saturday and is almost sure to get my vote in November.