Least Romantic Gestures, Historically (number x in a series of x):

In college, was dating an artsy girl. We were both fans of the band Nine Inch Nails. Bought a card from a convenience store because it had a crying baby dressed up as an angel. Took it home and wrote some NiN lyrics from the latest album inside: Your god is dead / and no one cares.

Mailed it off to the girlfriend, thinking she'd enjoy the pairing of weird cutesy baby image and nihilistic lyrics.

Turns out, when a girlfriend gets a card in the mail, she's expecting something nice. Maybe a note about how you're doing. Kind words. Not 2nd person gloating about the end of hope, or somesuch.

Whoops.

Weekend's highlight:
Out walking around in El Cerrito and Amanda and I came across a discarded book on the sidewalk: Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD. There's been a copy in our personal library for awhile, as the book is about topics that interest us such as myths, fairy tales, Jungian analysis, women... what it's not so much about is "wolves."

Which made it all the more hilarious when we realized that right beside this discarded book was a plastic supermarket bag full of loose, large dog biscuits.

I can only imagine that some lady mistook the book's title, assumed the book was perhaps an instructional on how to lure and tame your own wolf pack, supplied herself with the requisite snacks... and a few pages in to the book just dropped everything to the sidewalk and went home.

Amanda and I are staying with friends in Oregon and eating entirely too much.

But while here, I got you a present. Here's a recording of Josh's cat Dexter. It is... something else.

As a bonus, you can kinda hear Josh's child Gus crying upstairs. It wasn't anything serious. Now he's running around with a bear that, when squeezed, says "I loooove chocolate" while the Germans murder England in the World Cup.

So there's that.

Just a heads up:

Renamed my Tumblr site because the old name didn't make much sense. Now it's straight-up signalstation.tumblr.com. Mostly it's going to be for sharing stuff I feel like scanning, whenever the urge strikes and if there's ever any time when I don't have stuff piled on the scanner. Like tonight, for instance.

I've been messing about with Google Buzz. That continues.

I favorite stuff on YouTube and don't always do anything else with it. So you could check that out.

For a brief while, I was trying to answer questions using Formspring, but their website kept failing, so I gave up on them.

Uhm. I don't think we need a complete website roll call or anything. But the Tumblr thing might mess up some RSS feeds, so...

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Link: http://drop.io/hiphopxtian

Rode the train this morning, headphones on as usual, when I heard a loud voice cut through in the way that normally only happens when you're riding with crazy people, people who want money, or very rarely, protesters.

Tried to ignore it, and when I couldn't, I decided to record it and share it. Near as I can tell, it's probably some white kid singing along with Christian hip hop in an egregiously self-aggrandizing fashion, especially for his audience: a sleepy train car full of commuters.

Personal highlight: at 1:10 - Proclaiming "the meek shall inherit the Earth!" doesn't seem in keeping with the sentiment. I love that his voice gets much less sure on the next line, as well. And the cough that comes after that, from a commuter? I like to believe that the recorded cough was a direct rebuttal.

I whole-heartedly endorse that cougher's sentiment.