The Beatnik

I'm in San Francisco with a small group of people, maybe a tour or a seminar. We're listening to an old beatnik giving a talk. He puts a plastic tub on the table in front of him, puts a few objects in it. "This," he says, pointing to the tub, "is what we know." Then he takes out a length of string and tosses it in the air. "And this is our questions." The string falls partly across a corner of the tub, but most of it lands outside of the tub.

The beatnik won't give his name, but he knew Kerouac and was friendly with the people mentioned in "On the Road" - although, he hastens to add, he himself isn't mentioned in the book. He also knew Stephanie. Because of this connection, I get to spend some time talking with him alone - the rest of the tour group has moved on - but I don't remember much of what we talked about.

There was a building with some columns - this must have been a retreat in the woods - and the question had once come up whether to paint the columns in a way that would make them look like trees, or somehow enhance the perspective so that they would appear taller than they really were. But the beatnik had been against it because he didn't believe in tampering with reality in that way.

And that's all I remember.

Fifty-one kinds of North American quarters.

Note to self:

If it has a picture of Queen Elizabeth on one side and a caribou on the other, it's Canadian.

Otherwise, you can do your laundry with it. This includes bisons (Kansas), palmettos (South Carolina), Minutemen (Massachusetts), ships at Jamestown (Virginia), peaches (Georgia), and the Statue of Liberty (New York).

Note to the United States Mint:

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE PEOPLE. 

Is there some sinister plot by Al-Qaeda to flood the American economy with worthless counterfeit twenty-five-cent pieces?  Perhaps Osama bin Laden wants to plunge the innocent people of the United States into an abyss of abject misery with a lifetime of expired parking meters, jammed vending machines, and wet underwear.

Or maybe the good people at the Treasury Department just have way too much time (and money - duh) on their hands.  I'm betting on the latter.

Is it oxymoronic to say that "the Mint is making too much money"?

Grrrrr.

I'm all kinds of geekiness.

Just finished spending almost the whole day getting Firefox and Thunderbird up and running on my two PCs and two Macs. W00t! Now that I've got Foxmarks going on, I don't have to worry about the vagaries of dot.Mac, and I can sync across platforms too.

That, after I spent the weekend putting up my fist web page - I mean a real Web. Page. Downloaded FTP clients (StaffFTP for Windows, Cyberduck for Mac) (and anything with a name like Cyberduck, you can be sure is for Mac), got hooked up with an account at a free web hosting site, dusted off my meager HTML skills, and managed to put a simple practice page together. Even played around with the hexcodes for RGB color. I want to go back and start editing with GoLive ... but part of me is afraid that will take the fun out of it.