And not just at the Circle-K...

I just got the strangest comment-spam yet. What usually happens is some bot crawls through your site and puts up a bunch of links to online poker, pharmaceutacles or (rarely, actually) porn. Sometimes they contain some weird randomly-generated text that can be oddly intelligent.

But this one was little droplets of floridly phrased philosophy. It wasn't randomly generated, more like randomly chosen from a deck. They all point back to this site, which as far as I can ascertain is some kind of art. This page leads (via a clever url-based hack on Sony's website) to this bit of fun, which is also art or prank and is of further interest.

Diving into WHOIS records for the latter I stumble on a name (there was no name on the first site) and uncover this post from my friend Sam Tressler is the first result on google. Which is weird. I owe him a phone call.

What's going on here? "Dickgenthechev's web-templates gambling advice," is clearly art, but the owner of the domain seems to have been a serious gambling operator. Is this spam alerting us to art-hacking? I don't know. Strange things are afoot on these here internets.

I've been feeling interestingly fluid in the past week I've been here. Decompression I think they call it. I'm enjoying the room to spread out, to live spaciously, to masturbate when I feel like it. It's an important American freedom, and one we'll surrender shortly after our right to bare arms. First they come for your sleeveless shirts, then they want you to quit jerking off. Two openings on the supreme court, people! It could happen.

Actually my evening was deeply thrown off course earlier when I caught some of the Hollywood shows that are on in the same timeslot as the Simpsons in syndication. That network dead zone between the news and prime time where the televised equivalents of People, US, In-Touch and the like do their trade.

Oh my god who watches those shows! Sycophantic emptyheaded worshipping of B-list celebrities combined with a kind of spectacular moralizing. There was one bit about how a current contestant on The Apprentice was formerly a stripper who's #1 client had been comitting murder to pay for the exotic dancing. It was covered on "Inside Edition" at the time, with a trashy yet by modern standards quite earnest effort to actually capture the strange moral dimensions of the situation. The contemporary piece tried to play this with an air of scandal, that a person with such a checkered past would be allowed on The Apprentice. The producers said, quote, that they "felt she had paid her debt." Whether that's for trying to transcend her social position as a stripper or for having a murderer as a client is unclear.

After that there was a bit about nominated Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' son, who's 4, and apparently misbehaved on live TV during Bush's announcement of his nomination. The story is he's back, but he's been on much better behavior at this week's Senate hearings -- now apparently rascally cute, which you didn't quite get before. Roberts being a conservative darling and staunch Catholic, I imagine this caused some embarassment 'specially for the missus.

Finally there was a raft of random teasers about Donny Osmond's near death experience, the baby Angelina saved, a look inside the life of some grey-haired good-looking rich guy (mogul of some sort I'll assume) with younger/blonder special lady... it all gave me the fear, quite frankly. So I took a bike ride to clear my head. It sort of worked.

It's strange. I feel more uncomfortability and fear biking the quiet streets of Eugene than I do cruising through supposedly "bad" neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I think it's a matter of not really knowing the lay of the land. Even though I grew up here, the topography is somewhat unfamiliar. I don't quite know what the deal is.

And that pretty much sums up my general state. The guy I told you to vote for in New York got trounced. Scored under 20,000 votes. Hopefully a learning experience for those involved. In the mean time, I'm hosting a meeting in a chat room called #revolution. What the fuck. The internet's a weird place. Today I met this guy, who just decided to go there from SF and be the media. I gather he does this thing kind of often. Hell, it works out all right.

The human power people are there now when the need is greatest, and that's cool, but they'll be run off when the rezoning orders grind on through just like the remaining population. Ain't gonna be the Big Easy like before. They'll save the tourist parts, but the rest of it gon' change. It was going that way anyhow, you know. But now it's drastic. Bloody. The Diaspora of New Orleans has begun. Hallelujah.