Wednesday, August 25, 2004

George Bush: "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes." 

NY Times: Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Resigns. 

More movies from today's travels. Here's a bridge across the Tennessee River at the border between Georgia and Tennessee. Now a movie with the view out the front window as I drive up I-24 in Tennessee. Another driving movie, this one with trucks. A third and final driving movie, no trucks this time, but some incredibly threatening clouds in the background. The sky eventually opened up, and I drove for two hours in the deluge. That was reallly tiring.  

Still pictures from Florida to lovely downtown Paducah, Kentucky, a very strange place. Okay, you ask, why is it so strange? First, it's in a very powerful place, at the confluence of two huge rivers, the Ohio and the Tennessee, just before the Ohio merges with the Mississippi. So you're looking at a very large part of the flow from the eastern half of North America, east of the Continental Divide. But the town is dead, or so it seems, but here's what's really weird, someone spent a lot of money trying to get it to come back to life, but it didn't work. They have a huge empty hotel and convention center. A huge and empty farmer's market. Some really nice looking empty restaurants. Shops and boutiques, well-stocked, open, empty. Lots of for sale signs. A Republican headquarters. An eerie feeling. And it was hugely hot and humid. While I was there the sky opened up, I took shelter, then it was over and five minutes later the sidewalks were dry, that's how hot it was.  

If you're waiting for an email from me, I can't send email. There's some kind of firewall here at the hotel or at their ISP that seems to be blocking port 25. A funny thing happened while I was talking with the support guy at the ISP. He asked what mail server I was talking to. I said mail.userland.com. He said "That's weird because that's one of Dave Winer's servers." I said "I am Dave Winer." He said they usually don't get famous people coming through this small town in southern Illinois. Me, I was surprised that anyone in southern Illinois knows who I am. Maybe there's a new career lurking in there for me somewhere? Too tired to figure it out. 

TA is a brand of truck stop in the US, here's a list of outlets. They have WiFi at many of their locations. The prices are quite good compared to what you pay at airports and Starbucks. $1.49 for an hour. $4.49 for 24 hours. 62 days for $22.49, 365 days for $169.99. If you're a trucker, what a great deal. Eventually air travelers will get the same deal or better. (This stuff should really be free, come on, we know how little it costs to provide.) 

Mary Hodder: "BloggerCon was radical." 

If you're looking for Internet access on I-75 in north Georgia, your best bet is Calhoun. I stopped at a bunch of exits before Calhoun, no Internet anywhere. But every hotel in Calhoun has free in-room Internet. I guess once one has it they all have to. It'd be really cool to have a map of the US with big red dots on all the Calhoun-like towns.  

Fact: Kerry overplayed his Vietnam experience and Karl Rove is making him pay for it. Rove's MO is well-known, attack the opponent's strength, not his weakness. Apparently Kerry's team doesn't have anyone in Rove's league, or we'd be talking about how Bush dodged the draft. Do the Dems have anyone in his league? Probably. Why not ask for some help?  

BTW, when I say Bush dodged the draft, I say that with the greatest respect. He should be proud of it, and should explain why he did it and help our national healing instead of supporting assholes who keep the wound festering. Dodging the draft is what young men were doing in the late 60s and early 70s. You got out of the draft any way you could. I have a clue what it must feel like, I missed the draft by one year, had a low lottery number and shitty grades. Kids just a couple of years older were going to Canada to get out of the draft. Vietnam was a lot like Iraq, a totally optional war, a war that killed lots of young Americans, and was built on Presidential lies, a Democratic president, btw. 

One more BTW, the Swift-Boat-Guys-Who-Lie is George Bush, President of the United States. I'm not stupid, and I wasn't born yesterday. It's so obvious. Let's get that fact on the table and out in the open and get on with it. What a crock that he seems to think we don't know. Amazing. 

Sylvia Paull, a friend from Berkeley, says: "Don't ever think of moving to Florida! What would you do for coffee, man?" Well, they have a Starbucks in St Augustine, and a Barnes and Noble, and NPR too. It's not quite as backwards as you might think. Also, to add to the global database of knoweldge, there's a Starbucks at Exit 62 on Interstate 75 in Georgia. A surprising place for a Starbucks? Yeah, for sure. But get this. McDonald's has southern style ice tea, sweetened and unsweetened, and it's about half the price of Starbuck's iced coffee, which I was starting to get tired of. The McDon's tea has lots of caffeine. Another trick to stay alert while driving long distance, pistachio nuts. An open bag keeps me going for miles and miles. And you don't have to stop for lunch.  

Thanks for all the great mail about yesterday's Scripting. People seemed to like it. That's cool. I like the movies of the birds, and the man on the bike and the waves. There's something magic about beaches, and that beach is the best in the US. Steve Hooker, from the UK, asked how long the beach is, because it seemed quite long to him. Steve, sit down before reading this. It's a thousand miles long, and runs up and down the coast from Miami to North Carolina and the Jersey Shore, Long Island to Cape Cod. That's the east coast of the US. It's all one great fcuking beach.