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i am leaving for thailand now. see you later.
Wednesday, December 26, 2001

Merry Christmas Eve Day Eve
Monday, December 24, 2001

The other day I played Sex Pistols in class for the 14/15 year olds. They really didn't like it. But, their book has a section on "the history of rock and roll" and they'd never heard sex pistols before, so I let them have "anarchy in the UK", some random live version I got from kazaa. they just sat there stunned. the 5 most important elements of the history of rock and roll are elvis, beatles, abba, sex pistols, and madonna. the music of the 70s was anger against governemts. the music of the 80s was to help third world countries. artists started to include environmental issues in their songs.

This week I played operation ivy, because one kid said he was a punk and he knew about rancid. they kind of liked it, but they said the english was really hard to understand. that's true. the words are not important. the important thing is to FUCK SHIT UP. I guess they're just realizing this though.

next week is christmas, so the other day I had "ernie's DJ time" where I went on the air while they were eating lunch and played some music. I played ernie and bert singing "have yourself a merry little christmas", the pogues "fairytale of new york", guided by voices "teenage fbi", and low "just like christmas". all stuff I got from kazaa lately. one teacher asked me if the gbv song was by pet shop boys. no, it isn't. it's by gbv, and you've never heard of them. it is pretty cool, ever day during lunch the kids get to pick out any music they like and play it for everybody. they wouldn't let a 13 year old near a mic at my school back in the usa.

Here are the songs I put on an MD I gave as a prize for the kids.
1 Sesame Street - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 (11!)
2 PROPAGANDHI - 05
3 Kermit the Frog - The Rainbow Connectino
4 Propagandhi - 02
5 Low - Just like Christmas
6 Weezer
7 The Pogues - Fairytale of New York
8 Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland 1945
9 The Pogues & Sinead O'Connor - Haunted
10 Guided by Voices - Teenage FBI
11 Ernie and Bert - Have yourself a Merry little Christmas
12 The Rock *A Teens - Betwixt or Between
13 Crash Vegas - Pocohontas
14 Millencolin - Vixen
15 Naohito+Uchiyama - Red Hip
16 Grandaddy - Glassy Dusty
17 Deadbolt - Tikiman
18 Guided by Voices - I am a Scientist
19 Yo La Tengo - By the Time it Gets Dark
20 Deltron - Virus
21 Yo La Tengo - Madeline
22 Mana - Vivir sin Aire
23 myeck - michelle I give them a little lottery card if they come up and try to use english on me ("ernie... you... girlfriend?" accompanied by a little pinkie sticking in the air, which means girlfriend). Then I pick some of them out of a bike helmet and give out prizes. Anyway, I gave them copies of that MD.
Thursday, December 20, 2001

some searches that have led people here lately:
"bon jovi groupies" well, that is pretty sad. But, here in Japan, there are quite a few bon jovi fans. They also love the Carpenters. So when I'm in class teaching the 13yearolds english, the teacher busts out a Carpenters song to practice listening. "ernie, do you like carpenters" "they are popular in america, yes?". and I'm like "no, actually that is just a really weird thing that japanese people think about america, but it's totally not true. everyone in america thinks the carpenters are dumb."
"mp3 something stupid kidman" she was smart enough to get away from tom cruise, the scientology freakboy. i wonder if scientology has a special program they run celebrities through. because no celebrity would put up with the bullshit that a regular CoS guy has to go through.
actually, recently I downloaded some clips of the voice of L. Ron Hubbard from Xenu.net and I was really surprised. He doesn't sound crazy at all.
"japanese symbol of hexagon means" I don't know what it means. howevery, mathworld.wolfram.com just came back online after a year of being gone. I was reading about plane mappings there the other day, that is some cool shit.
"women wearing masks" I don't know about this one. I think it's because I wrote something about how in the future, rebellious kids will start wearing masks around in public to foil facial recognition cameras.
Thursday, December 20, 2001

Notes from the Road
a story about this guy who lived with a bunch of homeless people in san francisco for a while.

Standing there serving the food brings a parade of freaks right in front of me, single file and slow. Nearly every face is pierced and/or tattooed, and passing out the bagels I don't put a single one into a clean hand, and many of the hands are caked with dirt, shaking and have scabs on the knuckles, something all junkies get for some reason.

They're way caught up in the mythical archetype of the down on his luck American hitting the road to find greener pastures but at every turn finding only more of the same. They will not smile, so by way of thanking us they might tip their head and plate in our direction and snarl off in a cloud of nihilistic bliss.

There was one little shouting outburst where someone starting yelling "Yo, don't give him no food, yo," pointing to someone we were serving, "He lives in a house, yo, and eats steak every night." The worst thing you could say about somebody.

Santacon

our Santa clan -- 100 strong -- walking en masse towards the parking lot, trailed ten feet behind by two police cars going slow enough to keep a little distance. We were being kicked out of town.

God is Santa Claus for Adults
Monday, November 26, 2001

Richard Dawkins on religion

Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.

It's a tall story, but worth a try. You'd have to get them young, though. Feed them a complete and self-consistent background mythology to make the big lie sound plausible when it comes. Give them a holy book and make them learn it by heart. Do you know, I really think it might work. As luck would have it, we have just the thing to hand: a ready-made system of mind-control which has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations. Millions of people have been brought up in it. It is called religion and, for reasons which one day we may understand, most people fall for it (nowhere more so than America itself, though the irony passes unnoticed). Now all we need is to round up a few of these faith-heads and give them flying lessons.

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

from crime to christ - A man does heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth, then goes to church and is saved. (action-packed)

Gasping for breath, he opened his mouth to speak his last words-and to his amazement, what came out was a language he'd never heard. Seconds turned into minutes as the language continued to flow. It was wonderful! "Every time I breathed it felt like an electrical charge moved in and out of my lungs," Ben explains.

Instead of dying, Ben Priest was becoming more alive by the moment.

"I was happy - but uncertain about what was taking place. I went to a nearby convenience store and tried to ask the woman behind the counter if she knew what was happening to me. But when I spoke, that same strange language came out of my mouth, and the woman fell on the floor."

later, he receives a bike and finds his ministry:

I poured a can of motor oil on that bike and anointed it for God. I dedicated it as a machine of war in His army. In my search for the security of a family, I was part of a real family of brothers and sisters. The Bible called it the Tribe of Judah.

I went back to Brisbane and to Sue, my new wife of four months. Then, with a $26 drill, God led me to start "Heaven Sent Security Doors" - building security screens and doors.

Explaining Arab Anger from the BBC

For them, Israel is a terrorist, gangster state which has usurped Palestinian land and water, demolished Palestinian homes, and stopped at nothing in pursuit of its interests and enemies, including torture, murder and pioneering the use of the car bomb in the region.

article from counterpunch

Last Tuesday's events reminded me of the shock and horror I felt in 1965 when the U.S. sponsored a coup in Indonesia that resulted in the murder of over 800,000 people, and the subsequent slaughter in 1975 of over 250,000 innocent people in East Timor by the Indonesian regime with the direct complicity of President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The thing that caused the 9/11 disaster is "people from messed up backgrounds believing everything they're told". Islamic fanatics are the same as christian fundamentalists.

I have found a T-shirt machine. Therefore I will proceed with my T-shirt making plan. They will say:

FUCK

JESUS IS A CROCK

GOD IS A MYTH
Saturday, September 15, 2001

burningman
I'm leaving for burning man today. see ya'll. if you happen to be going too, uh, you probably won't see me. maybe ill be hanging out in the subgenius camp. -ernie
Friday, August 24, 2001

BURNING MAN
I'm going to burning man in a couple of weeks. if you're going, say what's up or something.
-ernie
Wednesday, August 15, 2001

Is wearing a mask in public illegal where you are?

it's illegal in lots of the south, designed to stop the KKK also says that wearing a mask in the commission of a crime can make the penalty worse somtimes - the "mask upgrade".
illegal in chicago but being challenged- they make a good point about muslim women wearing masks.
about The lone ranger mentions that one former lone ranger actor was sued to make him stop wearing a mask in public appearances.
Sunday, July 22, 2001

face recognition
I know what the young rebellious style will be in 5 years - we will wear masks everywhere. by that time there will be a network of face recognition surveillance cameras with outposts on every street corner, on expensive cars, and on mobiles flying through the air. although it will be resisted at first, the media will decide that it's for our own good, and everyone will accept it. eventually, since everyone seen by the camera might actually be on their way to commit a crime, all movement and identity information will be stored, and to help criminal investigation the system will also learn which people often are seen together, and where they go. the above link is another story about that town in florida where they installed those face recognition cameras.

also, The Surveillance Camera Players!
and

Ear Biometrics! includes mention of "ear prints"!
Sunday, July 22, 2001

Texas Problems

To measure the problem [mosquitos], the control board dispatched inspectors and 'surveillance specialists' to stand like scarecrows beneath trees and wait for 60 seconds. Then, each inspector and specialist counted the number of mosquitoes that landed on their body.
Anything more than 25 landings every 60 seconds is considered bad; some inspectors reported rates exceeding 100 landings a minute.

(...)

Floodwaters do not drown significant numbers of fire ants. Instead the colonies form a ball or ribbon, float, and flow with the water until they find land. As floodwaters recede, these floating colonies will get onto anything that they contact.

George W Bush is not the legitimate president of the United States .
Wednesday, June 13, 2001

Li Po's guide to the abyss
a really strange combination of D&D worldbuilding with christianity. by a very interesting guy who also happens to be XYY and a pathologist.
Sunday, May 20, 2001

gangs
A nice page about gangs. They have some really nice signage.
The next two are from a page that has great collections of gang pictures and symbols written in notebooks.
Sunday, May 20, 2001

Did Jesus Exist, and Does it Matter?

Their belief in Jesus gives them an indefatigably sympathetic confidant, assuages their fear of death and bereavement, wards off existential angst, assures cosmic purpose, and aligns them with the good guys. So handsome are the psychological pay-offs of belief that many, perhaps most, devout orthodox Christians are impervious to all countervailing logic and evidence. Their will to believe vanquishes every disquieting fact, every contrary line of reasoning, no matter how compelling to an impartial eye.

The Missile Shield, and other stuff
first of all, it will take 10 years to develop. Then, it won't work. Then, it will come out that russian agents have (or could have) buried suitcase nukes all over the states anyway. So the whole thing is a crock. it's just a way to make money for people that keep bush in power, and continue militarizing america.

Bush & his cronies are not enlightened. They don't share a dream of a future without war, where technology allows us to defeat man's problems. People are better and faster at doing almost everything today than we have ever been before, such as medicine, food production, disaster relief & protection, etc. and yet they don't intend to take advantage of this. Just keep going with the same old thing.

Does anyone know any good peaceful sane countries to live in that are easy to become citizens of? I speak sort of good spanish and japanese, and english. I have another year or two in Japan, but after that I don't want to live in the states again.

I guess you could accuse me of giving up on the US. and you'd be right. I don't have time to waste my life trying to convince republicans that they're wrong and fight against their irrational breeding machine, just the same way I don't have time to go to Israel/Palestine and convince them to chill out. Both groups are just the same - They're both totally insane, both have lots of kids that are thoroughly indoctrinated, and both have absolutely no relationship to me. I feel sorry for them, but I'm tired, and I want to live among sane people.

Read

The Viridian Newsletter- from the most recent issue:

In the corny zeitgeist of Bush II, 1989 never took place, so we've got Cold War II, Energy Crisis II, Star Wars II, and Stagflation Economy II, while telephone monopolies and giant oil companies rule the Congress.

Red Rock Eater, which often has really great political links. Check out "pointers".
Thursday, May 10, 2001

News

The national media also has displayed virtually no interest in the growing evidence that Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration conducted so-called “ballot security” which systematically reduced the black vote and likely took thousands of other votes away from Gore who was favored by African-Americans by 9-to-1.

Portable Shrine

I am in an Indian internet cafe in Tokyo. Everybody is indian but speaks Japanese. The theme colors are orange and green. The music is Phil Collins and ABBA.
Thursday, April 5, 2001

Stair Parity

I don't know about you guys, but I pay a lot of attention to the parity of flights of steps. Amazingly google has nothing about it.

Going up one flight that turns back on itself, I expect them to be odd, even.
Thursday, April 5, 2001

A piece of blue sky
An online book about Scientology written by someone who has left it. It's interesting to switch back and forth between this page and the scientology homepage Here are some questions in the security check you have to take to get into high levels of Scientology.

Have you ever warped an educational system?
Have you ever destroyed a culture?
Have you ever blanketed bodies for the sensation kick?
Have you ever bred bodies for degrading purposes?
Did you come to Earth for evil purposes?
Have you ever deliberately mocked up an unconfrontability?
Have you ever torn out somebody's tongue?
Have you ever been a professional critic?
Have you ever had sexual relations with an animal, or bird?
Have you ever given God a bad name?
Have you ever eaten a human body?
Have you ever zapped anyone?
Have you ever been a religious fanatic?
Have you ever failed to rescue your leader

I went to park.
There were a big hole.
I fall down.
My body was wrong.
I looked at my glasses.

Long Long ago there were old man and old woman.
Old woman found the peach in river.
Old woman cut a peach.
Old woman was going to eat peach.
He was born in Peach.

Yoshiyuki cooked Udon.
Momoyo ate and started to laugh.
Norie looked her and started to laugh too.
Maiko looked their and called hospital.
Doctor Rie checked them but she didn't know what's they happened.