I’ve been revisiting the seminal Girl Talk album, “Feed the Animals” in preparation for the upcoming copyright discussion thats certainly to be had at BarCampMIlwaukee5. Gregg Gills’ album was heralded by some as one of the best albums of 2008.

It must be said, I really like this album.

It should be also said, I have no idea what the legal status of the music is anymore. I don’t care. The fact is, Feed the Animals is a great, immersive audio experience that gets me into a working mindset faster than most other music.
It’s not because the album is entirely derivative, playing over 300 samples in 53 minutes. The magic of “Feed the Animals” is that Girltalk threads together over 300 emotive states into a seamless floating experience. It never lingers on a hook to long, moving without stop into the next emotive state. You’re listening to a party on fast forward. Your brain can’t help but move along. And somehow, that tricks my brain into getting work done.

My belief is that when you publish your work, you’re releasing your work into the world to become bigger and greater. “Feed the Animals” does that. Good for it. I can’t help but feel like “Feed the Animals” is the ultimate truth twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.

Is it legal? Who cares? Smarter people than I have a lot to say on the matter. What matters is that the music is good. THe rest of the conversation around it is just so much intellectual masturbation and gets in the way of an otherwise really good musical experience.

Life is to short to leave something as great as “Feed the Animals” stillborn. I’m grateful that Gills was able to take the music already all around us in the world and make something from it. This is what creation is all about. We take what we have, (in Gills case, the music that surrounds him) and we interpret it, improve on it, and then pass it on to the next generation; the work is forever changed through our experience and it is better for it.

Being overly concerned with the legality, artistic and moral ramifications of his work just get in the way of the humanity behind it.

Tomorrow, my baby starts kindergarten. It is the next of her inevitable steps in her Great Work.
She is ready.
And, through my tears, I am proud.

I have made some horrible logos for BarCampMilwaukee over the years.

BarcampMilwaukee3 was a really great bad logo and should make you think about Mortal Kombat.

BarCampMilwaukee4's design had a Brent Favre feel to it.

And so I am most proud to reveal here to you, today; this is certainly not going to be the logo for BarCampMilwaukee5:

I wanted it to be almost one of those pictures you could rotate 180-degrees and have it still say the same thing. Like a word that is almost a palindrome.

Please come to BarCampMilwaukee5 anyway. Its on Oct. 2 and 3. Register. Do it.

Rest, Lake.

Let your head relax and dip beneath the surface. You hear only the sound of your own breathing and every song of joy ever sung. She is all around you, cradling you in her wake, washing you with her light, and refilling your heart. Your eternity with her is too, too short.

Millenials! So short-sighted! So dramatic!

I try to remain hopeful, I really do, that the coming generations will have something special to offer our world. I think they will— but they’re going to have to pay some dues along the way. And dues are something, in my experience, the millenials don’t like to pay.

I’ll leave out the conversation about why I think that’s the case. Smarter people than I are on that, and can probably explain it in sociology of it more completely than I will ever understand. But if this woman is a hero to the millennials, then my faith that they will eventually come around is shaken.

Here's the short version of the story: A would-be broker is hired as personal assistant and is, after two years, sexually harassed by her boss, but instead of going to the authorities, she quits dramatically by emailing her resignation letter via key points delivered through a ‘clever’ series of photographs of white board messages.

Of course, I don’t believe it’s a real story. the site that hosts the photos' claim to fame is hoax. Whoever they are, they are not to be trusted as a resource. (And I mean hoax in the lame-internet sense of hoax, which in beter days might have been called “told fairly transparent lies to national media outlets.” )

But if it’s not real, why is my faith in the millennials shaken? Fictional or otherwise, this girl’s resignation is heralded as heroic by millennials and that's sad. What this girl, fictional or otherwise, is doing is not heroic. It’s stupid. And unnecessarily dramatic. And short-sighted. She’s throwing her future as "a broker" a way to gamble on a short-lived internet meme.

There are laws and policies designed to protect this girl. She has a right to seek justice within the system to make her point. The women who have endured this sort of thing in the past and will endure it again have made hard choices so that she has options withinthe system.

She could have done something that would have made the world better for everyone, not just her. But instead, she opted for vigilanteism. She takes the law into her own hands and instead of building a case for the dismissal of the offending supervisor in a documentable way that would have long term implications for the better of all of her fellow employees, she breaks information policy, network policy, and — judging from the pictures — dress code, for the sake of a short-term revenge payoff.

It’s foolish to take the easy way out and provide vigilante justice in a dramatic way. It cheapens all of us. I hope you really are going to be 'just fine,' internet meme girl. Somehow, I don't think there is much hope, but I will hold to providence that you will find your way.

It's not the first time I've been called a priest. And not the first time I've been called Liberal. But the first time I've been called them together? Maybe.

Pleased as punch when Creative Commons just works-- except it never does. Lookie here! This picture of mine was re purposed and reposted as part of a conservative catholic leadership blog. Or something. I have no idea. The Google translation seems to imply that my tie is somehow a liberal catholic? I'm confused.

Anyway, Nice of Kreuz.net to properly attribute the work. I hate to be a ball-buster on this, I know how you conservative clergy like to have special rules just for you, but I share my work under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Share Alike licence. Which means that you're welcome to use my photo for whatever you want so long as you offer your product under the same terms as I did. And the standard copyright notice at the bottom of the page implies that you don't.

So, yeah. No tacky tie photo for you.

There was something about Iwo Jima. The air was thick and somber. Twighlight had set in and the evening’s only breeze wafted across the memorial, bringing with it the smells of the oncoming harvest season: Hot lawns and warm cement.

My eyes kept catching on Ira Hayes. Ira was a Native American. He never really got over the war. He never really became comfortable with becoming an american icon. He fought those battles within himself through substance abuse. He was found dead in a pool of his own vomit in January of 1955. He was 32 years old.
As I write this, I am three years older than Hayes lived to be.

Just pulled into Wales Community Park. I'd been circling around Wales looking for a forest or tree to crawl in, feeling kind of crummy and avoiding being mad at my client who had just called to tell me he was going to be a half-hour late.

There are a number of "old" subdivisions in wales. Nice big houses on big lots with old growth trees and that sort of thing. Nice houses tucked way back from the road behind a ridge of trees. Very nice.

Found a house for sale there: $425,000. I suspect I could negotiate down the $25,000. I wonder briefly where the other $400,000 will come from.

I look up and see the disk golfers-- fucking hippies-- following their frizbies around a largely un-treed savannah grassland. This isn't a park, its a wasteland.
Maybe one day it will be beautiful. Not today.

The downs I'm paying for the up I sustained last week-- and will sustain in the coming week of road travel-- are massive. And, what's frustrating about them is not that they're so painful or desperate. That the're just so goddamn apathetic. Big picture stuff wraps itself around my legs making me anxious, but little picture stuff-- the here and now-- is too easy to let go of. Too easy to not care about.

One step at a time. One more step forward. Towards the top of the mountain. Towards hope. And all that.

The clover at the park is deep green and pocked by the white flowwerheads, which bobble in the feeble breeze raking the Wales Community Park. This is not living. This is hiding. I close my laptop and head over to my client meeting. I will try very hard to be engaged and energetic with him. He will not be able to tell how morose I feel.

Tomorrow is another day.

When I was in DC recently, Gaia and I also saw the pandas. I’m told by locals you don’t always see the Pandas. Strange thing, this National Zoo.
Don’t take this as a criticism, but it seems that the National Zoo is built for the benefit of the animals, not so much for the benefit of the people. I think that’s great. The result is a zoo that is more about exploring a natural park and less about riding the trains. We only had a chance to see a very limited part of the zoo, so we stuck to the Asian area, expecting to see the famous pandas boxed up and on display. I mean, there’s only like 10 of them in America, so I figured it would be a “take a turn staring at the panda” line wait.
Turns out we were right. But also very wrong.

Mei Xiang and Tian Tian were, in fact boxed up. But that was only because the didn’t seem they wanted to go outside. And I don’t blame them. It was 98-degrees in the shade with some crazy high humidity that day. I had carried Gaia on my shoulders up the uphill mile-long hike from the “Zoo” Metro stop to the gates to the National Zoo. More on that later, but it shows that, I, like the pandas, were in a place to appreciate air conditioning.
But there they were: Pandas!

Sitting in a pile of bamboo leaves inside a cooled house, separated from each other and in the process of being reintroduced. Mei Xiang sat and ate several branches while we watched. As did Tian Tian. And so that was seeing the Pandas. It was special and crowded, and not a very long wait, so, overall, panda-riffic!

Here’s where we were wrong: seeing the pandas outside is not a better way to see them. From conversations with locals and others who have been to see the Pandas and not seen them because they were outside and therefor harder to spot, it turns out when the pandas are out they can escape your view if they feel so inclined. And so walking through the twisty turns and variety of paths that offer lots of angles to peak and peer into PandaLand, you have a good chance of seeing a panda, but not a panda-promise.

But the Bamboo! And the walk through the zoo! And the other rare and unusual asian animals on display! This was all great, too. Red Panda (not a panda), sloth bears (not a sloth), Asian Otters (really otters), and The Fishing Cat (sleeping not fishing). All rare and special sights to see. Gaia was particularly impressed with the Red Panda since her familiarity with it comes exclusively from the Katamari games.

Having grown up within shouting distance of the Milwaukee County Zoo, I can tell you this: Milwaukee County used to be the kind of a zoo that was about “experiencing” natural animals in their natural setting doing natural stuff. And I suppose that’s still true. Perhaps its familiarity with the Milwaukee County Zoo that makes it seem so mundane; but when you walk through the asian animals area within the National Zoo, it’s sort of like walking through a different place. You’re almost connected to the animals native places— in an idealized and safe way, don’t get me wrong. But, unlike the aging exhibits in Milwaukee, the National Zoo was, for me, as much an botanical experience as a zoological one*. Seeing the gardens, the winding trails, the beautiful bamboo, and the misty walls surrounding PandaLand are worth the price of admission.

>

Speaking of the price of admission, this is truly the zoo’s greatest feature. No admission costs. Just walk right in. But the walk, oh yes, you will pay for the walk. So here’s a pro-tip for those of you who take the Metro the the National Zoo, shared with me after the fact by a zoo greeter:
Get off at Cleveland Park, not at the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan exit on the red train. The cleveland park stop is the same distance from the zoo as the Zoo stop, but it is downhill. Then get back on the Red Train at the Zoo stop. Again, walking downhill.

*Notable exception for the Grey Wolf exhibit and recently remodeled Giraffe house in Milwaukee. And an extra asterisk in recognition of the unique challenge presented by Milwaukee’s colder climate.

Yeah. I saw the frog. And it was good.
It’s not, as some might have you believe, like I have some kind of weird worship fetish with the frog. It’s not that at all. I love the frog like I love my friends; he’s someone I’ve grown up with. He’s familiar and comfortable. He’s an inspiration to me. I grew up to be a journalist and its certainly because of the frog’s standup reporting at the scenes of many a fairytale sketch. When I was forming I read the frog’s magazines, I watched the frog’s movies and TV shows. I sang the frog’s songs. I lived through the frog. I knew, without a doubt, that it was not easy being green.
And, yeah. The Frog’s also a product designed to capture my fat and dirty dollar. Especially since he died. This second coming of the Frog has always felt a little weird for me; since the Disney sale, really. Nothing has been right since 1990.
I think that’s why the frog in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History resonated so much with me. This isn’t Brian’s Frog. This wasn’t the Disney Frog. This frog was donated sometime around 1979. I’ve seen the frog before in lots of contexts, but this frog was the real deal. This was Jim’s frog; and somehow, that changes things.

Yeah. I cried. The photos that I snapped of the exhibit don’t capture the joyful energy, the exploding creativity, the love that radiated from the frog. The frog could have stood up and done the happy feet dance in that glass case. The frog is alive with the spirit that one time made him dance. That energy is still in the frog and it radiates around him like a halo.

This frog, I think, is from the frog’s golden age. A master showman, working hard to make the best art he could make given his circumstances, aware of the challenges facing the world, but choosing to sing about those challenges rather than give in. And sometimes the frog gets angry. Sometimes the frog fails. But the frog picks himself back up. The frog makes hard choices, but he makes the right ones. The frog does the right thing, even when it hurts.
The frog is human.
The frog lives.