Our president is proof positive of No. 1 on this list. In addition to No. 1, Terry, who sent me these pearls, likes No. 10 and No. 26. I’m kind of partial to No. 13, No. 22 and No. 25. On board the USS Bainbridge we used to joke that we were never more than seven miles away from land, it was just straight down. Which ones do you like?

16. Despite the cost of living , have you noticed how it remains so popular?
17. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
18. It is hard to understand how a cemetery raised its burial cost and blamed it on the cost of living.
19. Just remember…if the world didn’t suck, we’d all fall off.
20. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.

Little Known Facts, 1-5.
Little Known Facts, 6-10.
Little Known Facts, 11-15.

More to come tomorrow…

My Soundtrack: 6′ 1″ by Liz Phair on WOXY.

Have you ever had the experience of anticipating rolling over a significant number on your vehicle’s odometer, only to miss it when it happens? Something like that has happened here as I’ve missed by three days my 100,000th visitor. According to my Access Stats, the visit occured on Sunday, 21 may at 1019.

The reader found their way to Have Coffee Will Write from 206-159-161-188.netsync.net via Wazopia. That means that I finally have some local to thank for reading. So, Jim Fisher, the adult beverage of your choice is yours at the next Blogger MeetUp at the Town Fryer.

To be honest, I actually passed visitor 100,000 sometime ago because the site meter only tracks those who come to my main page first. All of my readers who link-in from other blogs don’t get counted in the same way. (According to Awstats I get about 250,000 hits per month.) So the number is the number and it’s just fun to take note of it.

My Soundtrack: Postcards From Italy by Beirut on WOXY.

I think that by virtue of my military service, I may be among the most traveled Hess in my extended family. I’ve seen strange lands, spoken with strange people and eaten strange foods. But I recall best the smaller journeys with my family like the one to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where I walked the battlefield, not really knowing where I stood.

As Garrison Keillor observes today, this is the stuff that makes a writer.

It was the trip of all trips. The busy two-lane highway through Indiana and Ohio, the country inn in Pennsylvania with the high poster bed, Valley Forge, the whine of traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the towers of Manhattan silvery in the afternoon sun, streets jammed with pushcart peddlers shouting in strange languages, and a hot night in Brooklyn — too hot to sleep, so Dad and I took a walk to a candy store and bought cream sodas and perched on the curb and drank them.

I came back to Benson School as the only boy in the sixth grade to have seen New York City. Enormous status. Royalty, almost. A girl asked me if it was true that trains ran underground and went fast, and I said, yes, it was true and I had ridden them. It was the first time I had original experience to offer to an audience. That’s how a writer is born. You went, you saw, and now you tell the others.

I think that perhaps he is right.

My Soundtrack: Party Dress by The Envy Corps on WOXY.

Who is Melanie Morgan and why does she think now is a good time for Congress to censure President Jimmy Carter? Apparently gay- and immigrant-baiting isn’t working and the NEO/Theocons are turning to lies and slander in an attempt to get everyone to look anywhere but at the man sitting in the oval office.

On Monday Cleveland Jobs With Justice honored Bill Callahan, George Nemeth and me with its Allison Bonagura Award for rank-and-file activism. We were selected for our work, along with seven other Cleveland bloggers, on No Cleveland Walmart, now The Writing On The Wal. We lost on Steel Yard Commons, but the global fight continues.

We also recieved resolutions from Cuyahoga Country Commissioners Jimmy Dimora, Peter Lawson Jones and Timothy F. Hagan that congratulated us on our receipt of the award.

Ah, another 15-seconds of fame.

My Soundtrack: The View From The Afternoon by Arctic Monkeys on WOXY.

Our president is proof positive of No. 1 on this list. In addition to No. 1, Terry, who sent me these pearls, likes No. 10 and No. 26. I’m kind of partial to No. 13, No. 22 and No. 25. On board the USS Bainbridge we used to joke that we were never more than seven miles away from land, it was just straight down. Which ones do you like?

11. He’s not dead, he’s electroencephalographically challenged.
12. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted then used against you.
13. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.
14. Honk if you love peace and quiet.
15. Pardon my driving, I am reloading.

Little Known Facts, 1-5.
Little Known Facts, 6-10.

More to come tomorrow…

My Soundtrack: Heaven Alive by Oceansize on WOXY.

And here I thought it was only the Christianists who couldn’t tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Police in Florida want Philip Sandifer’s fingerprints and DNA because he writes stories about murders. I hope there’s more to this than there appears to be, but with today’s paranoid atmosphere, I’m afraid that may not be the case.

Does the illustration at the left offend you? Does it appeal to your purient interests? Well the idiots at Live Journal think it might and are threatening a breast-feeding blog with expulsion for using the offensive picture. LJ claims that swarms of emails will not change its mind. Well, I think it’s about to find out if that is true or not. Thanks George.

On 16 May I posted about the 14-year old girl tossed in jail because she wouldn’t testify against Galo Sanchez-Pesantes, her 20-year old boyfriend. The courts kept her in jail for 12 days before Ohio’s 9th District Court of Appeals ordered her released. “It’s something I never want to do again,” the eighth-grader said. “I felt so alone for a while.”

Our president is proof positive of No. 1 on this list. In addition to No. 1, Terry, who sent me these pearls, likes No. 10 and No. 26. I’m kind of partial to No. 13, No. 22 and No. 25. On board the USS Bainbridge we used to joke that we were never more than seven miles away from land, it was just straight down. Which ones do you like?

6. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
7. I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.
8. When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.
9. Seen it all, done it all, can’t remember most if it.
10. Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t.

Little Known Facts, 1-5.

More to come tomorrow…

My Soundtrack: Gold Lion by Yeah Yeah Yeahs on WOXY.

If only it were that easy. Telling a person who is depressed to smile and look on the bright side is like telling someone who has had a limb amputated to get over it and quit screaming. Terry, in Bootstraps And Botox once again shows her bravery by pulling back the curtains and allowing others to see that they are not alone.

Everyone has at some point been sad; from losing a toy or a loved one. Depression is different. It’s crushing. It rules your life. And all the exits are closed.

My Soundtrack: Mosquito by The Caulfield Sisters on WOXY.

Driving to school this morning I caught Liane Hansen’s interview with T Bone Burnett. He has two new CDs out: New False Identity and Twenty, Twenty. The later is a 40-song retrospective that includes his cover of Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend. Burnett’s take on the song channels Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground.

When you’re a hired gun there is always a tension about how much of yourself you’re hiring out. In the 21st century there’s a pesky little rule called work for hire. What it means is that if you agree to it, your employer owns everything you do for it during the time you’re employed. You can’t walk out the door with just a kiss.

Now that can be acceptable if you’re a regular employee, but when you’re freelancing, it can be a disaster.

Will Kessel and I talked about this Wednesday evening at the Blogger MeetUp and he’s decided to blog what we talked about. Will wisely walked away from this contract. But not everybody can do that. He writes:

Recently, a local entity asked me to create a web site for them. Needing the work, I agreed to enter an approval process so that their parent company would approve my payment.

At the end of the process, I was presented with a letter of approval which also stood as a contract. The contract contained this clause:

The Contractor (that”s me) acknowledges that any and all products delivered to the Corporation (that”s them) under this Agreement, including without limitation, any reports, are works for hire. All documents, reports, analyses, drawings, designs, blueprints, photographs, sketches, software (including without limitation, enhancements, modifications, customizations, fixes and workarounds to software) and other materials (the “Work Product”) prepared by or for the Contractor in the course of the Contractor”s Services shall belong to the Corporation, and the Contractor grants, the Corporation all right, title and interest, including copyright and trademark, in the Work Product.

Ahem.

What this means is that the “Corporation” owns everything, lock, stock and barrel. Any bits of CSS coding, including that which creates a certain look and feel, the use of any and all images, belong to the Corporation, right down to the last (God forbid I ever use one) spacer GIF.

For a clear picture of how slavery works in the tech world, keep reading.

My Soundtrack: Baby Don’t Sweat by The Cribs on WOXY.

I always thought that Harrison Ford (speaking as Indiana Jones) made a profound statement at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when he looked at the array of cups laid out on the table, searching for the holy grail, and selected the simplest. “This is the cup of a carpenter,” said Indy.

When we’re gone, do we want to be remembered for our houses and cars? Or do we want to be remember for how we made things a little better?

My dad sent me this little fable:

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university lecturer. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the lecturer went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups: porcelain, plastic, glass, some plain-looking and some expensive and exquisite, telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.

What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the better cups and are eyeing each other’s cups.” “Now, if Life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn’t change.” “Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it.”

Ah, the coffee…

Thanks dad. I love you.

My Soundtrack: Evangeline by Matthew Sweet on WOXY.

I began daily meditation when I was a senior in high school after I attended a lecture at Marietta College on Transcendental Meditation. I paid my bucks and got my mantra. TM requires twice daily meditation session of 20 minutes each. I later modified that to a once-a-day, 30-minute morning session of generic mantra meditation.

I do think meditation has made me a calmer person. But now there’s evidence that it’s also shaped my brain.

From Harvard University research Sarah Lazar comes this report:

Previous research indicates that long-term meditation practice is associated with altered resting electroencephalogram patterns, suggestive of long lasting changes in brain activity. We hypothesized that meditation practice might also be associated with changes in the brain’s physical structure.

Between-group differences in prefrontal cortical thickness were most pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning. Finally, the thickness of two regions correlated with meditation experience. These data provide the first structural evidence for experience-dependent cortical plasticity associated with meditation practice.

Meditation can be a completely secular practice, but most people meditate within some religious paradigm. I wonder if there would be any difference between say a Buddhist and a Catholic practitioner of regular meditation? I don’t think there would be.

My Soundtrack: It Isn’t Easy To Live That Well by Headlights on WOXY.

The wheel has become familiar,
I turn it

by the space inside them.

From Looking for a Rest Area by Stephen Dunn.

This joke from my dad made me think of a publisher I knew who once told a really lame story about convincing a patrolman that the speedometer in his rented car was working incorrectly; reading 65 mph when he was really doing 90 mph. If Dave Letterman chose to do a Top 10 list of all-time best excuses for why you were speeding?

This one has to be at least in the top five, don’t you think?

A Florida senior citizen drove his brand new Corvette convertible out of the dealership. Taking off down the road, he floored it to 80 mph, enjoying the wind blowing through what little hair he had left. “Amazing,” he thought as he flew down I-75, pushing the pedal even more. Looking in his rear view mirror, he saw the highway patrol behind him, blue lights flashing and siren blaring.

“Have a good day, Sir,” replied the Trooper.

Being quick witted takes lots of preparation. Do you have your excuse ready?

My Soundtrack: This Isn’t It by Giant Drag on WOXY.

Oh this is just so outrageously, insanely stupid. It reminds me of Naval firefighter school when the instructor had to explain to several of the students why one end of the hose was the male end and the other was the female end, and why they were that way. I’m betting that this guy would be all for moving from the B&P rule to the B&B rule for women.

From NixGuy on Ohio HB 515:

Sure. see. they”re just like everyone else? Come on. I”m a network administrator, if I come over to a user”s pc and find that they”ve plugged their mouse cable into the slot used for the keyboard, I fix it. If the user then says that his way is perfectly acceptable alternative way of using his equipment, Well, let”s just say it”s not hate to point out that he”s being stupid, that”s not the way the equipment works, evidenced by the fact that it doesn”t work if you have it plugged in wrong.

I”m sorry, but this is not normal, you”re using the equipment wrong, and you are self-deluded if you think you”re alternative is “just as good”

I’m with Russell, I wonder how NixGuy feels about fellatio and cunnilingus; or for that matter, masturbation?

My Soundtrack: Powder Burns by The Twilight Singers on WOXY.