Dowbrigade

Those who embark on the Way discover very early that
there are two distinct ways to approach the goal. There is the Path of
Contemplation, delving deeply into disassociation, aestheticism, abolition of ego and transcendance
of desire. And there is the path of involvement, throwing oneself
full force into the flow of worldly events, striving through action to
bring enlightenment and liberation to others.

The first path tries to wend its way through life leaving no visible footprints,
disturbing as little as possible, and so becoming increasingly aware .
The second embraces subjectivity, action, human emotion and divine inspiration
to try to make a positive difference during the time each individual has
been given .

Both paths lead to the same place; nirvana, satori, call it what you will,
and in the final stages of the approach the paths are almost indistinguishable
because that close to enlightenment time and space are distorted, just
as they are when one approaches the speed of light, and the distinctions
between action and inaction, cause and effect, start to break down.

A lucky life is one that grants sufficient time and personal freedom to
spend significant stretches on each of these paths. Most of our lives,
however, are lived on the swampy wasteland that stretches between the paths,
wandering onto one or the other occasionally but without real direction
or appreciation.

What has inspired this intense spell of navel-gazing in the initial phases
of a life-and-death adventure of the first order, and after a day spent
dealing with cat people and the surly hellions of U-Haul?

Well, it seemed a natural seque to a change some of you may have already
noticed. The nature of the Dowbrigade News is going to change for a while,
and instead of being basically contemplative, collecting and commenting
on events in other parts and involving other people, searching out connections
others may not have noticed, we are going to be writing about our experiences
on the road, first at a conference in California and then, hopefully, if
we find someone to care for our cats, for three months on the Pacific coast
and in the mountains of South America.

Partly this will be because we will not have our now-customary access to
the news and views of the blogosphere. But equally a factor, such interesting
things seem to happen to use when we are on the road. We meet famous people
by chance, get involved in revolutions and captured by guerillas, discover
things about fascinating places, and about ourself and our home country.
We talk less, listen more, watch everything, and hopefully write about
it well. Never before have we had an outlet for our roadwork, other than friends, lovers and family.

Finally, we are thoroughly convinced that if this vestigial virtual vision
of using technology to make Democracy relevant again is to have any hope
of success, the movement MUST be global. No single nation, even one as
powerful and pervasive as the United States, can pull this off alone. Everyone
should visit a few different parts of the world and stay long enough to
really wrap your mind around another world view.

We promise to try to keep up with the news and post a funny photo from
time to time. And we are committed to coming back in the summer and teaching
at the law school. We are mad-anxious to blog the Democratic Convention
in July, and the Republicans in August. Meanwhile, expect more personal
stuff, weird stories, action photos, bemused beach briefings, impromptu
reviews of the digitalia we are schlepping around in our iBook, and assorted
notes from the road. Good to have you along for the ride.!

Inevitably,
the Great Experiment has yet to begin and we are already in crisis mode.

All three of our failsafe offers to care for our two lovely
cats while we are out of the country have fallen through at the last
minute. One
has gotten a new job in another city, another’s mother has just had
a nasty fall and needs constant care, and the third says her roommate
has
threatened to kick her out if she brings home two cats, now matter
how smart and well-behaved they are.

Poor Norma Yvonne has been crying all night. Two of the three retracted
offers were from her students. Today is moving day, we are off to rent
a U-Haul, and the poor cats are wandering around the boxes and bags
wide-eyed and anxious. They know something is up, and its not looking
good.

We can’t afford professional boarding. Besides, it might be an option
for two weeks, but for the two months we are going to be gone our cats
need human contact and companionship. That’s too long to be in a cage.
We have purchased a mountain of cat food and kitty litter for the woman
we thought was our savior, and now they are piled by the back door.

Our options at this point seem to be a) cancel the trip, b) leave them
in the back yard to fend for themselves, or c) Angel Memorial, the ASCPA shelter where unadopted cats get sent to swim with the fishies. There is a no-kill shelter on the North Shore, but they have a tow month waiting list.

Our first plan was to take them with us, and we went so far as to buy the carriers, advised the Airline, got their physicals, shots and get the US papers they would need to travel. However, there were requirements of the Ecuadorian government we couldn’t complete without being there.

We have been to the ASPCA (they run Angel Memorial) and had signs up at the Unviersity where I work and at 2 vets, although we took down the vet signs when we “thought” we had a committed caregiver.

These
are the sweetest and calmest cats we have ever had, and we are at our wits end. Why does love have to be so sad?

Honey, the svelte female, looks over at me reproachfully, then turns
back to stare out the bare window at the rain-soaked back yard. If
we ever needed to believe in the power of miracles, now is the time.

Passers by walking down Mt. Auburn St. this week were shocked to see
the venerable Harvard Lampoon Building bedecked in the corporate logo
of one of America’s favorite soft drinks. Officials of the Lampoon, reportedly
dismayed by flagging magazine sales and the excreable timing of the
latest film in the Vacation Series ("National Lampoon Bali
Holiday"), seem to have turned to architectural advertising to make
ends meet.

picture from Worth 1000

As as the
cardboard boxes climb towards the ceilings and the passageways of our
apartment become more and more obstructed with suitcases, packing cases
and garbage bags, the flashes of disorienting panic get more frequent
and severe.

We are so not ready. Too much to do and too little time.
Who will take the cats? Where has #2 son disappeared to now? Why hasn’t
he
fixed
the holes in the walls of his room like he promised?

We try to calm ourself by getting busy with packing; packing boxes, packing
suitcases, and packing our iBook with all of the digital culture we can
get our hands on.

So far, on this tiny 5-pound, 12-inch device with a
60 GB hard drive, in preparation for the Great Experiment, we have stored
the entire output of William Shakespeare, all 14 books in the Frank Herbert’s
Dune
series,
four
novels by Dan
Brown, including "The DaVinchi Code" and "Angels and Demons" (which we
are more than halfway through and hope to finish and delete before leaving
the country), hundreds of short stories and 8 novels by Philip K. Dick,
a recent rip of Pynchon’s "Gravity’s Rainbow",(in our humble opinion
the greatest novel
in
the English language and worth rereading for a fifth time), hundreds
of seafood recipies and card games, every issue of "The Incredible X-Men"
published between 1993
and 2003,
3 full seasons of the Simpsons, movies like Kill Bill, The Lord of the
Rings (II & III),
The Butterfly Effect, and 21 Grams, the last three episodes of the Sopranos,
the first 6 episodes of TV classic The Prisoner, over 2,000 individual
cuts
and
dozens
of
complete
albums
of
music, several computer programs we have been dying to get better at
using, like Adobe Photoshop (with "Secrets of the Photoshop Pros") and
Macromedia Flash (with "Creating Animations in Flash") and several games,
like "Diablo II" and "Baldur’s Gate" which we have never had the time
to learn enough to survive more than a few minutes before getting slaughtered.

Plus, as we write, there are a number of computers strewn around the
Greater Boston area which are busily downloading and compiling further
digital detritus for our possible perusal, as we STILL have over 30 gigs
of available space on our hard drive. We have started to think of our
iBook as a digital ark, carrying much of what we consider the epitome
of modern
American
art and culture to enrich our three months on the beach and in the mountains
in Ecuador.

Part of this digital archive was obtained "legitimately", via educational
discounts and public domain downloads. However, a lot of the material,
especially the music and video, was obtained through P2P programs like
Lime Wire and Bit Torrent. For the purposes of this discussion, our use
of
these tools is purely academic and investigational, and all of these
files will be promptly deleted after a single painstaking review to
make sure they are as advertised, complete and uncorrupted.

We are currently exploring the capabilities of Bit Torrent, a "next generation"
P2P file sharing program which purportedly makes it easy to download
large files (video mostly) more efficiently. It is still somewhat hard
to use, time consuming and unreliable, making it favorite of unreliable,
undergraduate geeks.

Despite the availability of some copyright-free torrents and the efforts
of visionary programmers like Andrew Grumet to integrate bit torrent
into practical next generation applications like independent video broadfeeds
and aggregation, Bit Torrent at this point is still primarily a pirate
tool.

This may have something to do with our enthusiasm for the idea. We are
attracted to anything with a wiff of the outr?, outlaw, rebel or iconoclast.
Even
the word "Pirate" itself brings to the Dowbrigade’s mind more of the
demented jocularity of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Carribean than the
present-day reality of, for example, murderous modern Maylays who waylay
yachts and trawlers and rape and pillage and leave no
witnesses. Downloading movies and TV shows via Bit Torrent has
that elusive air of cutting edge danger and risk to which we are unfortunately
still addicted, even in advancing middle age.

However, so far the RIAA and other guardians of cyber-chastity do not
seem to be actively persuing Bit Torrent users, perhaps because of the
decentralized
nature of its P2P connections and the fact that the technology is still
so hit and miss frustrating that it is beyond the technical capacity
or patience threshold of the far majority of internet users. The list
of media captured in our iBook that opened this post represents but a
tiny
fraction
of the "torrents" we have attempted to download over the past two weeks.
We are willing to bet that at this very moment there are dozens of brilliant
nerdy undergraduates vying to become the next Mr. Napster by creating
a dependable, attractive and easy-to-use implementation of the BT protocol.
When one of them succeeds, we are sure the RIAA will sit up and notice,
because it will become wildly popular.

Meanwhile, we are amazed at the capacity of this little machine to find,
acquire and store the essence of what passes for "culture" in the Dowbrigade’s
world. After thinking about this we have concluded that it would be theoretically
possible to recreate almost all of Western civilization exclusively from
the contents of a single 60 gig hard drive.

Thought of in another way, should a xeno-anthropologist in the far, far
future, long after the disappearance or transmogrification of the human
race, somehow come into possession of a single functional hard drive
from our era, he or she or it would be able to study and understand the
21st century homo sapien world better than all any of the academics of
today are able to understand past cultures through the study of the art,
literature, architecture , relics ruins and remains available to academics
today. If the hard drive in question belonged to the Dowbrigade, the
reflected view of society might feature lots of robustly unencumbered
female figures and seemingly silly flights of fancy, but who is to say
that these are not as representative of the tenor of our times as the
formula for interferon or the fine points of counterinsurgency?

Meanwhile it is scary the degree to which my worldview and emotional
well-being are becoming dependent on this five-pound slab of plastic,
metal and silicon. Over the next three months it will be our companion,
our post office, our library, our TV, our newsstand, our juke box, our
confidant, our journal, our game chest, our worthy opponent in games
and puzzles, our cookbook, our darkroom, our calculator, our telephone,
our scrapbook, our window on the world and our lifeline to our past.
It seems a miracle that one object can fill so many roles and desires.
Our preciouuusss.

Of course we realize the mistake, the sin, the trap of becoming so attached
to a mere physical object. Permanence is an illusion, the worship of
technology is a sickness, and pride in possessions is a karmic quagmire.
Considering how deeply we have sinned it would indeed be a miracle if
the miraculous iBook survives the trip to South America without being
stolen, dropped, drenched, forgotten, confiscated, sat on, short-circuited or
smashed.

But hey, it’s the persistent possibility of miracles that makes life
worth living.

LONDON
– A teenage boy pretended to perform a sex act on a head which had been
removed
from a body in a graveyard tomb, a witness told a court today.

The 15-year-old girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, also told the High
Court in Edinburgh that Sonny Devlin, 17, was "chucking the head around".

It is alleged that on June 30, 2003, they forced open the entrance to
the Mackenzie Mausoleum in the city’s Greyfriars Cemetery.

The
witness, who was going out with the younger of the accused at the time and is
still dating him, told the court that
a member of a group
of "goths" had said to her group, "Do you want to go
and get the head of George Mackenzie?"

from This
is London

Opera
Software is to include IBM’s embedded speech recognition technology ViaVoice
in the next version of its Web browser.

Web users will be able to navigate, request information and complete Web forms
by speaking, which should offer added convenience as more users access the
Web on smaller, mobile devices, Opera said.

Hey, Opera, open my bookmarks folder.  Now open subfolder named
"Cheesecake". Now open the fourth link. Right, now scroll down the page.
Whoa! Back up! Click on the the
word
"Here".
No,
NOT there!
Back
one
more.
Now click!
Now scroll down.  Click on the word "Enter". Of course I am over
21, you have my date of birth in your database! Now, scroll down sloooowly.
Ohh yeah, stop stop stop. Right there. Copy picture to clipboard.
What do you mean that’s not permitted? Has Norma Yvonne been messing
with your permissions again?

from theRegister

Graphic by APAK

Yet another article explaining and extoling RSS, this one
by BoingBoing’s Cory Doctrow in the current issue of Wired
magazine.
Unfortunately, RSS is a perfect example of something which, like certain
Asian massage techniques, is almost impossible to explain
to
someone
who has
never seen it in action, but which almost everyone immediately gets when
they do.  For example, the following paragraph makes perfect sense
to anyone who knows their way around an aggregator, but will mystify
most readers who have never used one:

Shorthand for "rich site summary" or "really
simple syndication," depending on whom you ask, RSS lets publishers
use XML code to define the content of their Web sites, much the way
HTML
lets them determine the format in which content is displayed. With
RSS, visitors can access multiple sites without having to go to each
one.
You subscribe to the RSS feeds of sites you like, and voila: The content
comes to you by way of an aggregator, which sends headlines and links
to a browser or a downloadable news reader on your mobile device or
desktop.

Still, interesting and well-written, as we have come to
expect from the Doc.

from Wired

World
financial markets and intelligence agencies around the world are jittery
this week, although no one wants to come right out and say why, other
than the usual mealy mouthed mumbling about "security concerns".

However, the Dowbrigade’s highly placed sources report that most of
the unease can be traced to an interview given by Osama Bin Laden’s left
hand man to an Australian paper, in which he claimed that Al Quaida
had already
obtained a suitcase nuclear device. From
Haaretz.com

In the
interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp. television, parts of
which were released Sunday, Mir recalled telling al-Zawahri
it was difficult to believe al-Qaida had nuclear weapons when the terror
network didn’t have the equipment to maintain or use them.

"Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri laughed and he said: ‘Mr. Mir, if you have $30
million, go to the black market in Central Asia, contact any disgruntled
Soviet
scientist and a lot of…smart briefcase bombs are available,"’
Mir said in the interview.

Obviously, officials don’t want to panic anyone when there is no way
to confirm these reports or any way to predict when and where these suitcases
will appear. However, it is increasingly clear that a number of these
devices have disappeared, and the $30 million price tag seems both reasonable
and sufficient to entice any disgruntled ex-Soviet military officials
with access. Al Quaida certainly has the money. Getting the thing into
the US through our porous ports and borders should be no problem.

So it is looking like the operant questions are less "Is this possible"
than "When and where will this happen?" Al Quaida’s penchant for spectacular
strikes and utter disregard for civilian casualties make the unimaginable
conceivable. But where?

It’s a complete crap shoot, although many targets
would seem to be attractive to the
terrorists
twisted
attraction
to symbolic dates and PR potential.  Washington on the 4th of July?  How
about New York City during the Republican National Convention?

The Dowbrigade has long been convinced that the 60 year hiatus on nuclear
attacks is admirable but temporary. Never in human history have new weapons
been built and stockpiled but never used. In fact, warfare is such an
ingrained tendency in human society that, although it can be avoided
for extended periods, to eliminate it entirely will require a significant
upgrade in our system software, otherwise known as "human nature".

We are convinced that the only imaginable event that could trigger or
act as a catalyst for a worldwide change of underlying operating assumptions
that determine human behavior would be an actual nuclear attack on a
populated area, broadcast live, in dying color and Dantesque detail,
into the living rooms and community centers and modems of every city
town and village on the planet.

For years we have secretly hoped that this inevitable and unenviable
tragedy would be visited on some benighted land as far away and out of
the global jet stream atmospheric distribution patters reaching North
America as possible. South Africa, the India-Pakistan border or Taiwan
came to mind as candidates. We imagined a worldwide uprising against
politicians, armies, weapons and governments that could allow such a
thing to happen, and an overwhelming, irresistible massive human movement
to destroy all nuclear weapons, reactors and laboratories once and all
and forever.

We still believe that this is the only hope we have to avoid, or at
least to delay, the premature extinction of the preadolescent human species,
before we have a chance to learn to walk, develop our potential, or
reach for the stars. To survive, we need a major upgrade in our OS.  It
is clearly not an impossible task, as individuals throughout recorded
history have raised their level of consciousness way beyond the level
necessary for the species to survive a while longer.

But it has never been done on as massive a scale or in as short a period
of time as is necessary now to save our sorry asses. Unfortunately, it
is looking increasingly likely that the necessary lesson is going to
take place a lot closer to home than we had hoped.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Medicare will have to begin dipping
into its trust fund this year to keep up with expenditures and will go
broke by 2019 without changes in a program that is swelling because of
rising health costs, trustees reported Tuesday.

Social Security’s finances showed little change, and its projected insolvency
date remained 2042.

What a coincidence! Medicare will run out in 2019 – the year the
Dowbrigade becomes eligible! It’s enough to make a lesser mind paranoid.
Actually,
this might be good news for the Dowbrigade, since our social security
checks will keep coming until we hit 89. At this moment a secret conclave
of shaman, herbalists, witch doctors, lamas and assorted other purveyors
of esoteric knowledge are working on the ultimate medicine. The final
solution, on the health front. One capsule cures all.

Of course, it will not be available to the general public, since
the anticipated supply will be quite limited, and pharmaceutical companies
and world leaders would literally kill for the formula if they knew it
existed.  However, limited quantities may be available to readers
of the Dowbrigade News, through DB Virtually Natural Pharmaceuticals. Stay
tuned for Paypal info….

story from AP

photo from Worth1000

They called it "the blob that ate the
Black Sea." And now the world’s most dangerous American biological
export — a jellyfish about the size of a man’s hand — has moved east
and is devouring the Caspian Sea.

This ecological monster, a voracious jellyfish called Mnemiopsis leidyi, was
accidentally transported from the backwaters of the US eastern seaboard two decades
ago in the hull of a ship. When the ship emptied its ballast water into the Black
Sea, the jellyfish began its rampage.

Last month, a five-nation group of scientists decided that the best hope for
saving the Caspian Sea’s caviar and restoring the Black Sea’s anchovies lies
with yet another gelatinous stowaway. For three years beginning later this year,
Iranian researchers will release small numbers of specially bred predator jellyfish
named Beroe ovata along the coastline of the Caspian Sea, hoping they will consume
their troublesome cousins and then die off.

Sounds risky to us. The Dowbrigade has had a number
of
embarassing
run-ins with both jellyfish and Iranians, and the combination
"Prediator Jellyfish" could be dangerous.Is Tom Ridge aware of what is
going on?

from The Boston
Globe

The Dowbrigade, like the
Redhead, has long been a fan
of the daily crossword in the Boston
Globe.  Frankly, the main reason
for this is that the crosswords in the New York Times are just too damn
hard. You
practically
have to
be a Nobel Prize winning polyglot with a photographic memory to finish
their Sunday puzzles without help, and if you do need help you have a
choice between doing your research via Google, which we consider cheating,
or paying $3.95 per clue to call the Times for the correct word, which
we consider a blantant rip-off useful only to those with both too much
time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.

On the other hand, the crossword in the Daily Metro, distributed free
on the MBTA, is much too easy to be any fun. Anybody
know
a six
letter
word for "lacks intelligence"?

The Globe, like the third option in the Goldilocks tale, seemed just
right. It usually took us between 20 and 30 minutes to finish, and if
we got frustratingly stuck, the answer was always there on the Comics
page.  We started our day with a feeling of accomplishment when
we were able to complete it without looking, which was about half the
time. Plus, we usually learned a new word or two, which is definitely
a plus in the Dowbrigade’s book. From today’s puzzle, for example, how
many of you knew that a "Sumpter" was a pack animal?  We
thought it was a fort!

So it was with some dissapointment when we saw last week that the editors
of the Globe had adopted the mercenary methodology of its nominal parent,
the NYT, and no longer included the answers in that day’s paper.  They
would, we were advised, be available in the NEXT day’s paper. Who keeps
the paper from one day to the next? Norma Yvonne would kill me. And if
you can’t wait, you can get the answers over the phone, for 3 bucks a
pop.

Now, we know the newspaper business in the United States has been waning
for years, and we are sure they are searching for additional revenue
streams, but was it really necessary to turn one of life’s little pleasures
into yet another reminder of the crass commercialism which is the hallmark
of our Times?

How rare it is to have a wish granted, without even filing a formal
request! Today, we were delighted to see that the puzzle is back where
it belongs, with the answers as well, back on the comics page.  For
free!

In addition, there is an excellent, on-line
Shockwave version of the puzzles available on the web site, so
we can continue to enjoy this diversion next month while we sip our
morning coffee and stare out
at the endless breakers caressing the pristine Pacific beach in Manta,
Ecuador. (All our non-Boston readers can see it there as well).

Enlightened by elation, we finished today’s puzzle in a near record
14 minutes, and without looking at the answers once!