Mourning, but busy these days--60 Minutes time travel footnote

I've been spending nearly every waking minute on the PEGASYS situation, and those friends of mine who are currently going through travails must think I have forgotten them.

I have not, and this posting is intended to sent a hug to you, from me, because I am aware of what you're going through, and mention that I'm something of an empath and know how that feels, actually.  Nobody goes through life without some trauma, and I'm aware of everything from a breakup with a girlfriend to an impending surgery which made attention to a living will necessary.  My heart does go out to each and every one of you who consider me to be a friend, and even to those acquaintances who do not.

These are not easy times, even for me, actually, but I do happen to know that in times like these, a friend and a hug can make a world of difference.  You hereby have one from me, and with the following words from a televangelist (even though I'm an atheist, I recognize wise words when I see them regardless of the source)...

Tough times never last; tough people do.  (Robert Schuller).

Hang in there. It can only get better.

This is making the rounds on FB, this Sunday.  Well timed.

P.S.-- big ole hug goes out to +Moukhtar Tba just because he's Tipa. ^_^
I'd hug his birds, too, but they're pretty small. :D

Have fun in Casablanca today, my friend. See?  Even Morocco has a White House. 

Tipa UPDATE: His sister just had a baby!  Congrats to the mother and the new uncle, Tipa! ^_^
+Moukhtar Tba

Uncle Tipa & newborn nephew

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PEGASYS UPDATE: Paid a visit to the court house and had a chat with the court clerk. PEGASYS initiated the lawsuit against the City on January 28, and that docket number is CJ 2014-17-02, and that last number indicates which judge will hear the case.  That would be Judge Hladik.  As of today, the City has not responded, and they have 20 days from the date of the filing to respond.  I asked the clerk for a schedule of filing fees, stating that I wanted to submit an amicus brief.  Took a pic of the whole schedule and will sort that out later.

Ah yes, friends and neighbors--Islamic law isn't the only type of law I'm fairly well versed in.  As I told one of the involved attorneys: when I represent myself, I do not have a fool for a lawyer.  Been there, done that, and won--twice.

Sure, that ain't much compared to a professional attorney, but what this says is that I must be doing something right, and for two victories, we're not talking about just getting lucky. As someone who was born and raised in the Catholic Church at a time when only Latin was the language of church service, the legal Latin is a cinch...with a little help from Black's Law Dictionary.  Yup, I'm familiar with that too.   Here we go.

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While nearly everybody else is watching a st00pid ballgame this Sunday, I was watching the reruns on 60 Minutes. Most notable rerun was the one about Magnus Carlson, something about him being a chess playing prodigy.  When he was asked about some event in chess history, he messed up.  Well, folks, that's because his time travel specialty isn't the past--it's the future, and the same sort of geotemporal mapping to navigate the past is also applicable to navigating the future, and the one thing a person can do in chess, even blindfolded, is geotemporal mapping.  That's basically the secret behind his ability to play multiple chess games simultaneously.

60 Minutes mentioned something of a canard when it said that Magnus played several games at the same time and the number of possible moves are infinite.  When you consider the limitations of cause/effect, erstwhile known as consequences, the number of possible moves are not infinite at all.  As previously noted by me, a first move can ultimately get you into a pocket universe where it's checkmate in 4 moves and it's game over, regardless of the number of theoretical possible moves you may have.

He has mastered future time travel, because of his use of geotemporal mapping.  Really.  That "conference call" on Doctor Who very crudely called those co-ordinates "time space co-ordinates" but it's more aptly described as symbolic representation of geotemporal map co-ordinates, and one doesn't need to be fluent in Gallifreyan to read them.

Quoth the Doctor: "Humans are so-------linear."  He's right, of course.  We are...except for the chess masters among us, and, well, me.

In all this talk about Doctor Who among G+ communities following that show, I've neglected to mention another time-space production of interest on a number of levels, not the least of which was the MacGyver connection: Stargate SG-1.  The time-space factors really came into play with the episode Window of Opportunity.  To wit:

Still in mourning--this time for Pete Seeger.

Pete Seeger is kind of special to Oklahoma regardless of where ever else he's been.  He's one of the rare few that Arlo Guthrie didn't sue for performing Woody's "This Land Is Your Land", for one, and he was a sort of regular performer at the town of Guthrie (no relation) when it held its annual banjo festival, and was definitely a regular at the two towns (one in Texas, one in Oklahoma) that celebrated Woody Guthrie.

And I think he caught on to how music is an essential part of any time traveling machine.

R.I.P. , Pete.

A death in the family: R.I.P. PEGASYS

Oh, I know that the nuts in city hall promise that nothing will change but the management, but that's exactly why the PEGASYS we all knew and loved just died.  The city had already turned it into a zombie, a walking dead thing by picking its bones before the corpse was cold.

This blog is now in mourning.

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The following article can be found HERE but after a few views, they won't let you read unless you're a subscriber, so it will be the policy of this blog henceforth to produce only images of articles under Fair Use law without the ability to post links in the future, as that would prohibit future Fair Use access to everyone else in the future.

Nice sentiment, but the bull in this editorial is the expectation of PEGASYS keeping up with the times with repeated budget slashings. FAIL

Link to the editorial is HERE but lotsa luck getting past the subscription gestapo.

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UPDATE: this story isn't over, folks.  The remainder of this post will be devoted to visual note-taking for future use.  With the feds, the fat lady don't sing until the feds say she can sing.

This image covers the regulations governing CPB (you know it better as its underling, PBS.  It's not cable, but that's covered somewhere further down this PDF file.  It's where I'm going with this).

Wikipedia ain't worth much as a reference, but as a roadmap thru federal regulations, not bad as a map.  And I totally love maps of all sorts.

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UPDATE:

What's the point of an FCC when they don't do enforcement? Amateur radio operators already know they're supposed to enforce compliance on the ham bands but they don't. But radio amateurs aren't 501(3)(c) corporations, either.  Perhaps the FTC and/or IRS will have some answers.

The Commish on YouTube

Note to Mr. J. K. and Sir M., Esq.-- if you're under the impression that when I appear to be bragging on my blog about stuff, that you can figure that I'm tipping my hand, you'd be wrong.  Welcome to the blog anyway, even though I happen to know that what you were looking for was MSNBC Newsvine. And I'm sure you found all my reports there.  Think you found my "secret identity", too, just like Tammy thought she did.  Look, kids--everybody knows.  If you didn't know, it's just because you're out of the loop, and I can't help that. By the way, as long as you're Googling me, how about try this one:  Listensprechen Huffington Post.  It'll be lots of fun, I promise. 

PEGASYS might die tonight.

New newspaper article about the killing of PEGASYS came out just this morning and I've been moving to post it on Newsvine and trying to contact each and every city commissioner about that fact.

That's why this is a rushed blog posting.  More to come about that, anon, so stay tuned.

Article on the Eagle's site

Vanhooser at his "finest"...

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UPDATE: I returned near the end of the meeting whereupon I was told that the meeting wasn't closed-door after all, that I got my facts wrong.   I entered the building with questions about that, and it turns out that the news about a closed door meeting was IF the Commission went into executive session, which it didn't.

I was told they would do that after voting on it at the Commission meeting tonight, so hang on tight, there's more to come.

I can see by checking the blog stats that there's been some further interest in my entry here, and possibly by those who saw me show up to the meeting site.  For your benefit, I say again that I am a citizen reporter with MSNBC Newsvine, and in 2008 worked with Huffington Post's Off The Bus Project, which was a separate website from HuffPo Actual and is no longer online.  And I will not let this issue pass without protest.

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UPDATE: It died. Oh, I know that Vanhooser said it'll stay the same but it's just under different management, but that's just one of a long string of other boneheaded things he's said during his tenure as wardsman.  And he hasn't met the feds yet.  FACT: PEGASYS that we knew and loved is truly dead, and what we have left is a corpse puppeteered by power-thirsty incompetent maniacs.

Race relations in focus today, MLK's b'day

I'm white and I can't hide that.  I'm in Oklahoma, and I can't hide that either, but I'll just address the people who have already judged me as being a stereotypical okie: you're prejudiced.  I didn't grow up here--I moved here.  And it's not because I find common cause with the Oklahoma history that you think you know. I've got a word for you guys to look up: redbone. If you're one of those who already knows what that means along with all its implications, you'll know exactly what I'm getting at regarding prejudice.  If you have to look it up, I can assure you that you won't appreciate the full range of all that it implicates, but that's a good thing because it means you're not likely to be as prejudiced as those who use the term in their own lexicon.

But before I get into that, I'm going to address again the skeptic who thinks that if I'm a time traveler I should already know the future fate of PEGASYS.  I've tried drawing you a picture and you don't understand.  I could get into the mathematics of it, but I know you'll understand that even less.  Permit me to take a different approach: stand me beside Stephen Moffat right now, and compare us as writers.  Moffat gets the big bucks for figuring out time travel just enough to sound plausible for an audience to consider seriously.  Two people on Facebook took it seriously enough to post a call for all time travelers to show themselves provided that they're visiting the present time from the future.

Now consider me by comparison: which of the two of us has a 10 year long trail of frustrated pissed off historians (very unprofessional, IMHO) to show for it?  Moffat?  Hardly.  Of the two of us, I'm the one who actually knows what I'm doing; it's Moffat that makes stuff up.  Two terms for you:

Amazon.com

Nate Silver 
(also HERE)


These two have a firm grasp about what traveling to the future is all about.  They get it, so even if you don't get it, that doesn't mean it's not possible.  Chess masters get it. Good enough for me.  The fact that remains is that people are still masters of their own fate as determined by their own here and now.  Moffat uses phrases about rewriting time as a substitute for changing universes as I do.  Those phrases are equivalent, and what we do agree on is that past and future history is a matter of record--not a matter of what any historian has anything to say about what happened or is going to happen.

Time travel to the future does NOT involve predestination, which you suggest is the case.  It is not. People who think that the future is predestined are the same people who believe in other religious tommyrot, and if you want to discuss the religious tommyrot like predestination, let's take that out to the back of the woodshed. I'm not a rookie in that arena, either, as my long time buddy +Rasmus Gjesdal  knows all too well. I mention Ras because if you take me up on this, odds are good to excellent that he'll chime in too, and I will not object. 

Ras, if you're reading this, you might get a kick out of that thread because quite a bit of it was preserved from the old PBS Discussions Board, ha.  I'm sure you'll recognize The Apostles Quiz.  Ahh, good ole days. Now I'm gonna have to dig up Fred Nicolai's old bag of nuts.  Boy, that was fun!  ...or you might dig it up, Ras, if you saved any of that. BTW, Robert Larimer went over to MySpace after the board closed, and since the overhaul I haven't seen him, even on his old website. Me, I have some of antifascist's stuff saved in the musty archives somewhere too. Check the bottom of this page for images I'm sure you remember with amusement.

The task for everyone at any given point in time: Make every minute count.

"While you're hung up on yesterday, you've got nothing going today.
While you're hung up on tomorrow, all the good now times are slippin' away...
 Try to live life like a lover, try to keep time from keeping you down.
There's only one way to make it--that's makin' every minute count."

---Spanky & Our Gang

Meanwhile, back to Topic A.  The word "redbone" should have gotten the attention of a particular demographic in my audience, a demographic that would be familiar with the denotative definition of the term as well as the entirety of its common usage connotative definitions.  The question that should have popped up is, how the hell do I know anything about that?  Well, there's only one way a person can be familiar with common usage connotative definitions, isn't there.  I apologize to the members of my audience who can't figure out this crypticism, but what I've doubtless done is touch a nerve, and I'll have to leave it at that, sorry.

Consider, also, the denotative definition of the word "prejudice". In the broadest common usage sense, it's a judgement one leaps to without proper consideration of sufficient facts at hand.  In a legal sense, it's a judgment arrived at after careful consideration but intended to be held as applicable should a particular issue gets re-tried...you know, "dismissed without prejudice" or "dismissed with extreme prejudice".

Now consider what a gross error it is to render judgment on a person you don't know but you've convinced yourself that you do.  It's more than an error when you render this judgment on another person and cause that person pain and/or loss or denial of access or service when you do that. What you've committed is a gross injustice.

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MiniUPDATE: Thusfar I've referenced PEGASYS in a number of different posts. In one, I remember mentioning that I wasn't going to go to Huffington Post with the issue because after all this time has passed since the Off the Bus project (2008), and the launch of the new (at the time) version of HuffPo, they'd also made serious changes to their policy on an account holder's identity, and that a pen name identity isn't good enough.  Well, after my long absence, I decided to visit HuffPo today only to be surprised at how my fan base grew even though I was long gone.  I guess what I'm going to have to do now is establish my pen name as a real person or something--can't let my fans down!

Mini-UPDATE UPDATE:  I'm as smug as a bug in a jug--I found a loophole in the rules.  Logging in with my Facebook account gets me back into HuffPo without guff.  It's official: I'm back on HuffPo! WOOT!!

It took me a while to find the World section on HuffPo, so for my blogger friends who want to keep an eye on that over there, here's a handy link for you.  If I find a way to post about PEGASYS on HuffPo, it'll be in the Media section.  It also looks like I'm going to have to start over again at the bottom, posting no articles as such myself, and because of the identity image issue, I'm afraid it'll have to stay that way.  I still have Newsvine on MSNBC, though.  I'm grateful for that.

Looks like HuffPo still has a record of this dispute, regarding an invite they sent me to work with Off The Bus again (previous: 2008).  They were adamant about it and so was I, so I left.

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Just for you, Ras! ^_^

I don't seem to have CMI's large version of that, sorry.
And for some reason I can't locate my Didieload Award.  Dang. Still looking for that.

===================later==================

I found the preliminary jpeg file, but not the final gif file. So, here's the do-fer...

Hmm.  Totally forgot that I had some of this stuff up on Photobucket.

THERE we go!

Ahhhh.....good times. XD

Meanwhile back in Egypt...

...moving right along...

This is worth a post dedicated entirely to it: Egypt's version of The Onion!

http://www.elkoshary.com/features/egyptian-prosecutors-question-god-over-controversial-cloud-formation

Don't overlook This article either. ROTFLMAO!

Still, the situation remains serious with not just Morsi on trial but journalists, too (Ahram Online).  Still, journalists who work for state media aren't really independent and I don't care how many American journalists work for the state media (Al Jazeera).  It's still state media. More about Egypt from Ahram Online.

The Square (on YouTube)

Meanwhile in Iran, U.S defense contractor goes for the $$
Occupy Iran??

Shafaaq News -- Baghdad

Fellow Blogspot blogger writes about Syria

Syria, Lebanon wait breathlessly for Geneva II as Iran chimes in on that one, too.  Who's following Iranian lead? Turkey. Imagine that.

The good news in Asia is that there hasn't been any reports of Chinese incursions in the South China Sea for a good while now.  The big trouble spot remains Thailand.   Conclusion: the TPP talks are more good than bad, at least where Asia is concerned, but the west coast of South America is in the TPP coverage, too.  But from what I hear, what's good for Japan is good for Peru, given the large number of Japanese there. So, Argentina, are you going to follow suit toward peace and get less belligerent toward the Falklands and Antarctica now? Can't say I'm holding my breath for that one.  I note with interest, though, that Argentina wants to move its capital closer to the Pacific. To quote Arne Johnson: verrrrrrrry interrrrrrrrrresting.  And I'm wondering if Chile & Peru will feel easy about that. I'm thinking Chile might want to guard its eastern border a little more ardently even if that is a mountain range over there.

I'm happy to let souse Rodman handle N. Korea...sneak a little saki in the suitcase next time, will ya?

The only thing any country in Africa is doing right now is proving that religion doesn't guarantee morality.  End of story.  Well, mostly.  I still support the Ghana fair trade org that has a shop in OKC, but Africa's biggest problem is its natural resources because everybody and his kid despot brother is going to be fighting for control over it.  The last time the African continent was more peaceful was when the Ghana Empire stretched almost entirely from west to east as it traded with the Arabs in ancient times.  Since the rise of Europe during the Age of Discovery and after, Africa's nations went into a tailspin and hasn't recovered since.  That's because it's too rich.  But it's also where China comes in and suddenly we're back at the TPP with indirect impact on Africa.

Where China is concerned, it's not just petroleum, or any of the typical gold, silver and gems that have always come from that continent into Europe and beyond--what concerns China these days is rare earth minerals, and in bringing up those, we're cycling back to its belligerence with Japan, which isn't confined to just the South China Sea.  Just as DeBeers got a chokehold on the global diamond market, and Russia has a chokehold on natural gas going to Europe, China wants a chokehold on rare earth minerals too.  Rare earth minerals are necessary for your smartphones and all computing devices.  Besides "blood diamonds", nations of Africa also have blood tantalum, and the like.  But the globe likes its cheap tech gizmos so much that it'll turn a blind eye to atrocities committed to ensure they'll keep coming.

O Canada! Your CBC is still a wreck. Fix it. Edited to add Fred Waterer's comment about that...he says it's already been neutered.  Yeah, Fred, I know--that's the problem!

Meanwhile in the U.S. this Sunday, there was an excellent discussion about science & religion on Moyers & Company.  Trouble is, when you go looking for it on his website, the program is PAGE NOT FOUND .  Too soon right now, I guess.  Good to check back at a later date, and I suggest that you do.  I know I am going to check back because listening to that at the same time I'm listening to Fred Waterer's Radio Time Capsule as I try to do every Sunday, is a major challenge.  He's worth it, too.

Hey Fred--this one's for you, buddy.

And wouldn'tcha know it--just as soon as me & Fred were cracking wise about the CBC, in walks CBC's David Lennick. YIKES! lol. Tous mourir de rire...so to speak. Sounds better than Tous meurt de rire, so THERE. David dropping by wasn't the only treat of the evening, though. Bob Zanotti himself (Swiss Radio International) did a promo for the program.  Shortwave old timers know him as half of The Two Bobs, and he's now more regularly on PCJ Media in Taiwan.  That's Keith Perron's baby, besides the revival of the old Happy Station Show, which I personally know that Tom Meijer (former host of The Happy Station Show of Radio Nederland Wereldomroep in the good ole days) endorses heartily.

Edited to add that just as I went looking for the RNW URL to put into the link, I found an announcement that it's a *new* RNW in process of launching.  What? AGAIN??  When they did that while Tom Meijer was still employed there, disaster ensued.  I'm inclined to filing that under Same Ole While Expecting Different Results.  I'm not optimistic.

Bob Zanotti, originally of SRI's Music Merry Go Round, also hosted by Bob Thomann as "The Two Bobs". He used to run Switzerland In Sound, but not since he joined Keith Perron's PCJ Media.

Victory Gardening revisited & the drought

During both war efforts (WWI and WWII) the Victory Garden went hand in hand with the promotion of home canning, to free up domestic commercial industries for military support of wide variety.  Fast forward to today's urban farming efforts, people buying groceries according to the 100 Mile Rule, and people on food stamps who face cuts looking to dig up their own back yards (or, if renting, growing groceries in flower pots & barrels).  All that's fine as long as you can compost your own fertile soil regardless of what the native soil's condition is in, but you're going to need water with that, in all cases.  The U.S. Drought Monitor shows the major challenge:

So, gardeners--want to re-think your early seed-starting yet?  There are serious field fires in Oklahoma as well as in California these days, and both locations (and Texas, Florida) are the areas that usually provide produce over the winter in the rest of the states.  Some of those states are also the ones that treat fracking favorably, and that uses a huge amount of aquifer water to mix with the chemicals that they inject into the ground to get that done.  Texas and Oklahoma have been embroiled for some years in fights over the Ogalala Aquifer in particular.  The water I use for gardening, winter and summer, taps the Ogalala.  After 2 years of water rationing in Enid because of the massive draw created by the Koch Nitrogen Plant, more individuals have paid to have their own wells drilled, creating a significant backlog on well drilling.

Still want to grow your own?

Actually, you the individual has a better shot at success than large commercial farms because you can use rain barrels and they can't.  It's the scale that's prohibitive.  You can re-route the "brown water" from your washing machine (provided you don't use bleach, that is) to your veggie patch and the commercial farmer can't.

Are you in a northern tier and scoff at home gardening because you can't grow squat over the winter?  Got any Christmas lights? Hehehehe...there are ways of cheating Mom Nature, you know, and that includes watering with fluid water even though you're worrying over your house's plumbing.

A tip for you gardeners who are still itching to start indoor seeds right now because you can cheat with a grow lamp.  You can't.  If you're ahead of the game by having an established compost pile out in the yard, you can fix your itch by planting in that right now.  Yes, in January, and even in the northern tier.

You see, compost generates its own heat by the process of decomposition, even when you think it's frozen solid.  Get your eskimo coat on, put your gloves on, grab your potato fork and turn it over.  Yes, right now.  It'll give a lot easier than yard soil, and when you've got it forked over to where it's an even mix, throw spinach seeds all over it.  You can throw radish seeds in there too, if you like.  Cover that with clear plastic, anchor that down with bricks, and you'll discover that's the first spot that will green up before anything else does.  Compost has the moisture that was contained in whatever vegetables the scraps came from.

You're welcome.

If you're really ambitious, next time you go to the grocery store look for clearance vegetables like scallions (green onions). They might look like crap, which explains why they're so cheap, but it's not like you have to eat 'em like that.  Look at the root end and see if the roots there are white, not brown.  Buy 'em, clean up the dead-looking limp green parts, stick that in your spinach patch and they'll happily take root right there.  You can eat 'em after they've grown a bit more, but I'd recommend just letting 'em go feral, as you snip whatever parts you want to eat and just let the rest grow.  You'll be surprised just how huge feral scallions can get.

I have done gardening in the Phoenix desert, too, but not until after I took lessons on how to do that at the Phoenix Botanical Gardens, where I learned that Rio Salado irrigation still won't take you where you wanna go.  It is, well, salty.  Stuff will die of salt poisoning.  There's a trick to that, too, which I'll reveal anon.  Stay tuned.

If you have an account with Care2Connect, you can view my old gardening picture albums HERE. I'm not sure if they're viewable without an account, so if you don't, give it a shot anyway. Basic how-tos are in THIS album.

Spinach & romaine patch under plastic arch equipped with "wall o water" and Christmas lights. In January.  However, this patch was started in October. Punctured hose hooked up to the well pump provided the moisture. This pic taken with 2005 technology. Meh.

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Oh good grief--I have to address this cynicism regarding time travel to the future.  It's been presupposed that I already know the future of PEGASYS and the fuss is just theatrics on my part.  That's not how that works at all.  Again--time is not linear; it is fractal and from this point in time, in this particular universe, PEGASYS has a number of possible futures, not just one, and taking the wrong path from this point to a possible future can lead me to a pocket universe where everything ends, not just PEGASYS.  I'm here in this universe now, and I'm not going there.

The future of PEGASYS, at this point in time in this particular universe STILL depends on choices being made here and now.  Future history isn't about future historians either--it's about the record of what actually happens, and there's only one extant record of one important event which established a fixed point in this time, in this universe, and where the future branches off from this fixed point is what's in question. There's a universe where it does exist and there's a universe where it doesn't; causes and effects also come into play.  Choose wisely.

Again I use the game of chess as a point in time with many possible futures.  Make the right choice in your first move, you can make other right moves until you don't.  Make the wrong choice in your first move, and a chess master will put you in checkmate in 4 moves regardless of whatever the other possible moves might be. When that happens, it's like running into a pocket universe--it's game over.  There is no such thing as predestination; if that were true, then everybody can just sit back, let time happen as it will, and don't try to do anything at all.  Predestination is complete rubbish.

It's actually more like this...

Note the circular figure in the middle of the pic. Note where designated below...

Designated here are the parts that navigate a departure from a fixed temporal point into the future. Mathematically, it's the sigma of a series of thetas, which is why those parts rotate. OF COURSE I can read time-space co-ordinates (I call those geotemporal co-ordinates); I'm just lousy with the rest of the Gallifreyan language.

Didn't understand a single word of this?  I'm not surprised.

Seed catalogs and copyrights, TPP, Tuesday

I know that I've been letting down my gardening fans without mentioning stuff in the yard I usually do over winter, beginning in October. Truth be told, though, I've had to avoid gardening because of an injury which necessarily precludes shovel-wrangling.  With seed catalogs coming in around Christmas instead of the usual first of the year as used to be the case, all you green thumbs out there are itching for spring and it's inevitable that some of you have started indoor seedlings entirely too early at this point and will experience the inevitable damping off down the road.

I haven't forgotten you, believe me; it's just other recent events have overtaken my usual blogging on that topic (well, usual in other places on the Internet--not here--that is), and today is yet another day I should put it off again.  I'm now watching a replay of a hearing in the House of Representatives regarding copyright law, and this is important to me when I'm wearing my writer's hat instead of a straw one, and given how this is part of the negotiations of the proposed TPP treaty, and its bearing on software's nature as either machine code under patent or a written work under copyright remains an issue even though the ancient case of Apple Corps vs Microsoft's suit over Windows was supposedly the final answer on that.

I humbly beg your forgiveness for that lapse, and I do promise I'll get to gardening ere long, outside of stating most emphatically that, for the northern hemisphere, it's too early to start seeds, primarily for the reason of the current length of daylight hours.  Yes, the days are getting longer, but they're still not long enough yet.  Americans, you'll do better if you hold off til mid February unless you live in the southmost tier of the U.S. or in Canada, where even mid February is still too early.

What I can state right now initially on the topic of copyright law is that it's important to read the Terms of Use on websites you create an account on because some, like HBO and ABC/GO, will claim to have nonexclusive rights over everything you post on their site in perpetuity.

Precious few will state clearly that the rights over the content is under the ownership of the author and that the website wants you to agree that it has a right to distribute that content.  The latter is clearly most aligned with law as it exists while  the former is, I've always asserted, in violation of the U.S. Constitution Article I section 8 paragraph 8, which states clearly that all claimed rights to either patent or copyright must expire at some point to become public domain.

The hearing, which took place on Tuesday, is supposed to be referenced with additional information at www.judiciary.house.gov  but as of this posting isn't up there yet.

Edited to add: looks like I forgot to add what this all has to do with the TPP.  As it happens, it's copyrights and intellectual property that is the current snag in that going forward, and this whole big-dealing on Tuesday is pertinent to a contemplated change in our current copyright laws, referred to as some kind of copyright law reform.  All the hootin'/hollerin' about labor laws under the TPP is seriously overshadowed by intellectual property issues, and even if the secrecy over the TPP has been intact thusfar, I'll bet it's the move toward reforming U.S. laws will be where the chinks in the secrecy armor occur.

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As I write this postscript, I'm seeing a Mr. Collins from Georgia making peculiar claims about written laws and annotations regarding the issue of how written laws are exempt from copyright protection...which affects such law publication firms like Westlaw, whose publications which contain written law have been protected by copyright and has been used in legal cases on a citation basis.

The standing of law devoid of annotation is argued effectively as needing to be public domain because the public is forcibly ruled by such law.  Annotations exist primarily for use by lawyers anyway, and there's the matter of the legal standing that Corpus Juris Secundum  has enjoyed in previous court cases. That is a reference work covered by copyright but is used on occasion to argue law. Should that have the same exemption as written law itself because of its legal standing?  Hmmmm.

I also note with considerable interest the presence of Professor Mark Schultz, fellow Saluki.  For those who didn't catch this in a previous blog post, my first foray into university life began at the SIU School of Communications Radio/TV department, a School that has always been held by high standards even back in the day when they were still worshiping at the alter of Edward R. Murrow.  I changed major when I discovered that I couldn't stop fiddling with the equipment.

Personal identity info redacted, of course.

GO SALUKIS!!

And Gus Bode, too.  In all this blogging I don't think I ever mentioned that I like basketball, and the proudest Saluki moment was when its hoops team beat the snot outta Texas Tech during March Madness, 2002, and that's when Texas Tech coach was the infamous former NBA coach Bobby Knight. I remember that like it was yesterday.

I can say the same about the NBA Finals when it was the Suns vs the Bulls, and the Bulls had Michael Jordan while the Suns had Charles Barkley.  Neither one of those guys did squat for scoring the winning points at the buzzer.  It was a Paxson trey shot for the Bulls that sent the Suns packing--but Phoenix threw 'em a massive street party anyway.  Barkley had to bolt when the crowd got too intense in front of the Purple Palace...the crowd even managed to unseat a motorcycle-mounted security police officer.

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Thank you, George Takei, for a badly needed chuckle.

Old-school photo of the Purple Palace (America West Arena), downtown Phoenix, taken 1996. A few years earlier, you could follow those cars down Washington Ave. and drive past a building from which Fleetwood Mac got its name. It housed a machine shop whose name was only partially visible.  It was torn down just before I moved. Sure wish I had taken a picture of that, with as many times as I'd taken the Yellow line city bus past it.

Long view of Central Park, downtown Phoenix, behind a bus stop.  There's a fountain in the middle surrounded by a brick ledge, against which I propped up a freshly finished drawing of the Grand Canyon at dusk and took a pic of that, only to discover that the bright Phoenix sun made it look rather washed out.

I always take some sort of picture of my artwork before it leaves my hands to be delivered to its new owner.  In this case, I wish I had taken a better one.  I was able to do that much later, though.  The goal is to at least keep a photographic catalogue of every piece I do, and in recent years it's become a major issue that I do this. Anyway, me & the pic were downtown because I had just retrieved it from the company that did the framing. I've since learned how to do framing myself.

Speaking of which...

Best point guard ever, KJ (Kevin Johnson)

The courthouse, downtown Phoenix.  I took that because I take pictures of old buildings. One of the facets of my interest in history includes architecture. This set of pics were taken with the knowledge that I was about to move out of the area. Dad already passed away years before, and now Mom needed undivided attention at this point.

Another view of Central Park, downtown Phoenix

And now a rewind to the time when the Olympics torch ran through Phoenix.  Next is a stack of 3 pics showing the police escort, then the Olympics van, then behind the van with the runners following.  I was standing across the street from Central Towers on N. Central.

After I moved, and after Mom's funeral, I made a point of taking a pic of her band, the Merry Music Makers. The biggest guy in the middle is Owen Zuck.

Mom, attended by Vivian Crofts (right) and relatives (left--a girlfriend and her mom; the other friend, the sister, had passed away just before I arrived from Phoenix; yup, I cut myself out of that pic, far right).

What?  For security reasons already stated elsewhere, I will not post pics of myself...unless...well...my younger pictures because I don't look the damn slightest like that anymore. Deal?

High school graduation pic

1980's look with River Song hair. Aka "space hair". That tee shirt is one printed up by Motorola's Chandler plant, USA-1, which I was first recruited by Motorola for.

Always had a fatal attraction to machinery.