I’m sure they must have told me sometime before yesterday that they were going away from Tuesday till Friday, but I can’t remember it at all. So, since my parents will be enjoying themselves on the cape I get the place to myself again. Except it is during the week. How boring. Maybe I’ll drive down to see my friend Patty (who gets a big congrats for getting a new job!).

I just turned on comment moderation for people who aren’t using TypeKey. I’ve gotten fed up with having to keep going and deleting comments. Sorry for any inconvenience. Real comments will still show up, though not right away.

John Perry Barlow has a good idea for something to do during the RNC

Dancing in the Streets:Revolution with a Smile

I spent most of my political life as a Republican. While that’s a little hard to imagine now, I have sufficient experience to know that the commonly held view that Republicans either can’t dance or won’t dance is inaccurate. When I was a Republican, I was as dedicated to dancing as I am now and there were others like me, as I recall.

Still, part of what drove me from the party – aside from a categorical repudiation by the current administration of most Republican principles – is a dour dancelessness that crept into Republican “culture.” It seems increasingly ironic to call the GOP a party at all…

…I want to dance in the streets.

I don’t want to confront the Republicans. I want to discombobulate them. I don’t want to argue with them, which would only convince them further, I want to throw them off their game. I don’t want to be aggressive in my discontent. God knows there’s been plenty of that on all sides. I want to be genial. But disconcerting.

So, to that end, I propose the following: I want to organize a cadre of 20 to 50 of us. I want to dress us in suits and other plain pedestrian attire and salt us among the sidewalk multitudes in Republican-rich zones. At a predetermined moment, one of us will produce a boom-box and crank it up with something danceable. Suddenly, about a third of the people on the sidewalk, miscellaneously distributed in the general throng, will start dancing like crazy and continue to do so for for about a minute. Then we will stop, melt back into the pedestrian flow, and go to another location to erupt there. [BarlowFriendz]

I can just see the headlines…

While I was in the midst of my search for Drive-In information, an article from the NYTimes showed up in my news reader about renegade drive-ins.

LIKE most cities in Silicon Valley’s outer stratosphere, Santa Cruz has a district dedicated to an odd marriage of high and low tech, where lumber mills and cement factories squat beside gleaming software business parks. But the geeks and hipsters who parked their bikes on this slab of broken land and sneaked past the “no trespassing” sign were not here on business. They were going to the movies.

Few theaters consist of dead weeds and a mound of gray slag squeezed between a laboratory and an alloy manufacturing firm. But these movie buffs have brought their own theater with them. For three years, cult-movie buffs have been organizing “guerrilla drive-ins” in a number of cities, rigging together a nest of digital projectors, DVD players, and radio transmitters or stereo speakers, spreading the word online, and assembling on parking lots or fields to watch obscure films beneath the stars. [NYTimes:Technology]

This sounds just too cool. I wonder if anyone is doing anything like this in my area. I’m going to have to do some research. If not anyone wanna try to organize one in the Hartford, CT area? I think it might be easier to do here than in MA.

Recently I’ve gotten an itch to go to a Drive-In movie. I haven’t been since I was a kid and it just seems like it would be a fun thing to do. In doing a bit of research online I found Drive-Ins.com. It is a guide to Drive-In information. Everything from reviews to QTVRs of drive-ins. It also has a fairly completely database of past and present Drive-Ins. The fun thing was looking to see how many were in the area I grew up. It almost seems like there was one every other town. And, I did find one that is open not too far away (That also has their own web site). Along with a review over on Mapquest that made me laugh and cry:

this place is awsome for 7 dolars u get 2 movies and u get to watch them in ur car!! thats better than that o wait when its warm out get some chairs and watch the movies and have a picnic its like dinner and a movie and ur not at home!

D00D!