So, as you may have heard, Atlanta is running out of water, and nobody really seems to know what will happen if the unthinkable occurs and drought persists for another two months. But it's not as if this is really a new thing.

It seems like somehow in the latter part of the 20th Century, we in the US lost track of the fact that we're actually quite small and powerless in the face of macro-scale events. Droughts and other disasters (some of them manmade) have always happened, and will happen again, but we've forgotten this. We seem to believe too deeply in our exceptionalism, that we're somehow exempt from history and the cruel twitches of fortune.

As Bukowski said, "The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed.". We have no feel for loss. We've constructed massive metropolises -- the fastest growing in the nation -- in the middle of deserts. There were dead cities in the same places when white people first got here. It's a failure of history and memory; hubris.

As Dick Cheney said, "The American way of life is not negotiable," and indeed it seems literally inconceivable to our leadership class that shit might not work out. I find this baffling and sad.

Politically I think this is part and parcel with the rise of post-modern conservatism. It's a particular blend of resource-intensive, non-scalable, non-sustainable infrastructure -- think exurbs, big lawns, etc -- coupled with a paradoxically anti-government philosophy (juiced with reactionary cultural backlash, of course).

This is clever stuff from the Huckster. He's had a lot of trouble raising money, but is starting to gain ground in recent Iowa polling. I do honestly think he would be the most formidable Republican candidate. His ideas are generally bad (National Sales Tax! Outlaw Abortion!) but his presentation is incredibly disarming. Unlike il Rudy -- who is sufficiently obvious in his megalomaniacal insanity -- and Romney -- who's equally clearly a used-car salesman at heart -- I think Huckabee's calm and earnest manner would probably sell very well in a country suffering from Bush Fatigue.

He comes off like your best friends square dad: kind of a downer stick in the mud, but not in a way that you initially/actively dislike, plus he wrote a book on weight loss. He's the aw-shucks Republican, the only really "feel-good" candidate on right. It would be a challenging contrast to the pragmatic effectiveness of Sen. Clinton, and I daresay he'd out-grin Obama or Edwards. Hopefully the antipathy towards his candidacy from the Money People will nip it in the bud.

James Lipton: French Pimp.

The law of diminishing returns is kicking in. This is the third straight weekend worked through, which is something I don't really mind terribly -- I've gone months and months like this before -- but which I recognize as questionable in effectiveness over time. If all you do is work, it's easy to slide into a mode of semi-constant semi-production: there's nothing to look forward to at the end of a task but the next task, so you don't really dig in and focus the way you might if, say, you had a big fun trip planned once work was done.

Yeah, 12 hour days at 66% productivity; belly up to the desk and stare into your pint of workahol, rummy. This is how so many "professional" people end up with broken relationships and no social life, I think, and it's frightening to see it might be happening to me.

Life is contrasts, a holy waltz of experience. Change is the only thing we can perceive. I believe it's true on a literal/micro level, and more importantly at a philosophical meta/macro level too. The feeling you get from moving fast isn't the speed itself, it's the delta, the change. It's physics. Force equals mass times acceleration, the difference in the velocity-vector over time. That's what we feel.

Which is a highfalutin way of saying I've been more than a little rut-stuck lately, and rolling with the dayjob 24/7 isn't helping much. I feel numb and restless. It was a convenient distraction at first, a nice excuse to shut out petty personal problems, but now we're down to the grind, and the pressure is throwing all my psychic flaws into sharper relief than ever. I'm struggling. The most important thing is to stop struggling.

Things I'm spinning my wheels over:

If you haven't seen this already, give it a peep. It's quite funny and good. I never made any effort to get into the entertainment unions, but as someone who has paid his/her rent from time to time with my cultural production, I would like to express my solidarity with the writers.

One big union, bitches.

A quick nerd-note. Since upgrading to my new laptop, which came with the new version of the Mac OS, Leopard, I've been stymied by the fact that drop-down menus don't always work in FireFox. Basically, select form elements on a lot of sites (including Basecamp, which we use for work) don't drop-down when you click them. You can still switch the settings using the arrow keys, but this is unpredictable and a pain.

Anyway, leaning on my ever-expanding reach of A-list contacts, I hit up Mr. Ponderer and he pointed me to the nightly build ftp spot. The 2.0.0.10 package has dropdowns working fine and isn't unstable in any other ways I've observed yet. Plus, you can run some pre-release software, which is worth at least two or three geek credits.

So, just in case anyone has this problem. Maybe google will send them here and find a solution.

I got a chance to peep the OLPC product at Drupal Camp last weekend in Berkeley. Now mine is on its way.

This project may or may not work, but it's the strongest concerted effort to date by socially conscious technologists to directly alter the course of human events. I think it sets an important precedent.

Plus, based on my brief test drive, these are awesome little machines. I'm looking forward to playing with mine.

Update: extended through the end of the year if you want one (thanks for the tip, Andrew!)

Well, slow blogging of late because I've been pouring most of my psychic fuel into work. This month looks to be a record-breaker for those precious billable hours (oh, if only they were denominated in euros, or better yet barrels of crude oil), and it's a good thing to be operating at Full Capacity, but it's also a bit stressful. Not that I've been doing anything all that important with my spare time over the past few months that I regret curtailing, but shifting to 10-to-12-hour days is darkening the circles under my eyes, and drawing forth a great buried longing for true wild big-city-style partytime.

Honestly, I haven't worked this hard since I moved out here, and the old mantra of "working hard, playing harder" is untested here in the HC. It's been more like "work an honest day, then relax and maybe take a hot tub." Different frequencies and extremities of oscillation, you know? How to cut loose and balance all the grindstone-nosing? Getting drunk, eating a huge meal and watching tv isn't quite it. This is a good question for me to get into. It's part of who I am -- the lighter side of workaholism is that I often have a lot of fun under pressure -- and it's a welcome challenge to try and figure out. No gray hair yet, so I'm happy to keep experimenting.

Another imageless post, but via Atrios check it out: The Eagles are also disintermediating record labels.

Building on early work by Prince, and several upstart indie successes, it looks like more and more established acts are taking this route. Look for a new kind of helper company to emerge that can do online distribution, fan-club stuff, and booking for tours.

My comrade Franko and his lovely lady Laura are preggers. Way to be procreative, kids.

Also, nice to know that years of bike-riding did nothing to deplete Mr. Robbins' virility. Big ups to the ball-channel.

I'm looking forward to visiting them this New Years. It's been too long!