Another Rejected Poem of Winter

Anti-Yungian Death Sentence

The road-side snow grows hollow, wrinkled, shrivled,
carved by snowmobiles, shrunken by sun,
scraped off and piled, gray like road scum,
like the cinder block clouds it came from...

The mountain-side snow stands sculpted
into place, determined to stay, hiding from sun
that only briefly reaches through the scrum
of trees protecting it. Each rock is a crumb

of homicidal heat in marshmallow--s'mored
by sappy maples, buds nearly toward sun
melting sugary white with yellow tongue.
The trees--like an albino's eyelashes--hum,

providing contrast, vibrating on white-skinned
shadows--abraded and afraid of the ascending sun
come to make it bleed before it finally succumbs
to the ubiquitous, incessant, violent green young.

Scott Supak

Deep Discounts for Doing the Wrong Thing

We're big believers in doing the right thing. We stopped eating pigs on the Chinese New Year of the Pig a few years back now. This year we stopped eating factory farmed beef. We recycle. We compost. We have a garden. We keep our tires properly inflated. We only had two kids.

So it really pisses me off when I get into situations where I see people get rewarded for doing the wrong thing, while I'm paying more for organic food and green products in general. There are many examples, but the granddaddy of them all is a reward for having more kids.

Now I'm not talking welfare here. I'm a firm believer that every kid on this planet deserves a fair share. But I'm sick of pricing in the market that makes me pay more than someone with 8 kids. I don't know if penalizing the prodigious populators is constructive, since it would inevitably punish the children, but damnit, I should not be punished for having less children!

The latest example is shopping for dental insurance, a luxury in this day and age where 1/3 of Americans don't have dental coverage, but something we were looking into since we haven't seen a dentist in a long time due to our recent prolonged poverty.

The best plan I could find has costs about $1500 per year in premiums for a family, while capping the per person payout per year at $1500. So, with our family of three, we would get a maximum of $4500 worth of dental coverage per year, while a family of eight would get $12,000.

That means we're subsidizing that family. WTF? I thought there were too many people on the planet. Add this to the fact that conservatives have more children than liberals and that means when this child bonus does take money out of my pocket, more often than not it goes to conservatives--the very people who complain when people take things out of their pockets.

No wonder Republicans want to protect the big insurance industry.

Right Wingers are Violence Prone

For a personal take on the recent violence and terroristic threatening coming from the "conservatives" in this country lately, head over to my R rated post at the Bush Treason Blog. If you didn't care for Joe Biden's F-bomb, you'll want to move on. Nothing to see here.

If you thought it was about time someone got real on a National Level and just said what most of us were thinking, then head on over and read the post about how I put up with assaults on a regular basis because of the bumper stickers you see here.

Global Warming Quote of the Year (so far)

Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their ass I’m not sure they could hear me.--James Cameron

RIP Mark "Big Ferb" Ferber, Hollywood Bowl Production Supervisor

If you ever went backstage at the Hollywood Bowl, you probably had some kind of run-in with Big Ferb. Even if you just saw a show at the Bowl, you were still familiar with Mark. To millions of concert goers, Mark Ferber was the voice of the Bowl:

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Hollywood Bowl."

When I was a kid, I spent my summers hanging around the Hollywood Bowl, where my Dad, Frank Supak, was the head soundman. Mark was the go-to guy for just about anything you needed, especially our comp tickets. He was the perfect guy to hold crew tickets, because you could see him from anywhere (he must've been 6'6"). We called him Big Ferb, like Big Bird, because I remember when Sesame Street did a show at the Bowl, Mark and Big Bird were about the same size.

He leaves a big tuxedo to fill.

Mark's LA Times obituary says he died from injuries sustained in a fall. I don't know the details yet, but it is the off season, so the fall was probably not a result of his running around backstage.

"I'm a detail man," Ferber said at the time. "I run around backstage and make sure everything goes correctly."

He was no stranger to tragedy: his first wife, Elaine Welton Hill, died of cancer in 1999. He was survived by his second wife, Suzanne Friedline Ferber, and his son Daniel, 5... I just choked up thinking that Daniel will never get to really appreciate his Dad, or see him at work--so comfortable doing what he did.

It was like Mark actually enjoyed every moment of his 45 years at the Bowl, even the bad ones, like when an airplane would inevitably fly over during a quiet passage in a symphony. He took everything in stride, and it is a real shame that his son won't learn from one of the coolest heads the business has ever known.

A Very Long Wake for Alex Chilton

Even though I spent a lot of time and money in Memphis when I was young, I never heard of Alex Chilton until I met my wife, Robin. She made me a mix tape that had Bangkok on it (to this day, after I hear Bangkok (originally a single, but on the album Stuff) I expect to hear Robyn Hitchcock's My Favourite Buildings.

After listening to hours of Chilton yesterday--and honestly, Big Star is exactly the kind of rock with a twang that I just can't get enough of--I kept coming back to his more punk sound, and Bangkok is fucktastically hard and irreverent, with a great beat that you can definitely dance to, Dick.

The Ballad of El Goodo

From the truly awesome Big Star album twofer #1 Record/Radio City

Like Flies on Sherbert

Alex Chilton, Like Flies on Sherbert

Alex Chilton in the House!

What's New At Supak.com

Just a quick note to note that we now have a blog just for what's new at Supak.com. It's going to be a history from the what's new section of our home page, so people can go see all the new things that have been posted there, which, in the past, were just lost to the black hole of bytes.

It's not so much that liberals and atheists are smarter...

It's that smarter people tend to be monogamous, liberal, and atheistic.

Imagine the evolutionarily novel brain it took to create this cave painting.

I have parking-lot-snow-sized piles of anecdotal evidence for this phenomenon, but I'm going to go here to the science pen and pull out some peer reviewed reason and logic, not that Science will impress the mostly religious dumbasses who still think they know better than science. None-the-less, here goes.

My friend Thomas D. blogged about this article from Science Daily that explores a new study from Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Even if you don't believe in evolution, or, for the Scientologists out there, psychology, it's hard to ignore the data from this study.

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."

"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."

When we were living in caves, we were paranoid about the slightest thing, from wild animals to thunder. So, we developed cute little stories to make ourselves, and our families, less paranoid about them. We invented Gods who held our fate in their hands, thereby alleviating ourselves of any responsibility for What Happened. As we evolved further, we could go to war with our neighbors and just say, hey, God told me to.

Explains George Bush, doesn't it?

Kanazawa's study looked at the IQ of adolescents, and sorted them out according to self-described liberals and conservatives, and, voila: the higher IQ's were more liberal and less religous.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa's hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

[snip]

Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

The story goes on to mention that monogamy is also evolutionarily new, and practiced more by intelligent people, which certainly explains why it's mostly Republican politicians who cheat on their wives

This whole line of thought is not so much shocking to me as expected; further proof that those of us who think are more likely to think something everyone else doesn't. Those of us who flock to church every Sunday to listen to a watered down version of Rush Limbaugh are less likely to come up with anything new. They will simply regurgitate the hate, injecting their Biblically-backed venom into the same veins, exhausting those of us who would like to progress, and, at least in the case of climate change, dooming us all to a self-fulfilling Eschatological prophecy that it seems they actually want, rather than a reasoned, logical, and much less painful path toward sustainability.

Fucking idiots.

What does amaze me is how much effort the more intelligent people put into trying to convince these neo troglodytes that they should think outside the cave. It's time to stop bipartisanship efforts. They don't think like we do. They never will. Climate deniers (and evolution deniers and George-Bush-is-a-war-criminal deniers) are just not that smart, and we're wasting time and effort trying to bring them up to speed. It's time they were left behind, for the sake of the rest of us who have managed to pull our heads out of our asses long enough to look around, see the world as it really is, and do something about it.

Fun with Google Public Data Explorer

Great Photographs Touched Up to Be Even Greater

About a month ago, my Maui bed and breakfast friend Cherie sent some pictures from a friend of hers, Mike Eilers, so I posted a few of them. Great shots of whales, dolphins, and this sea turtle.

But this isn't the original photo. This picture was retouched by Mike's friend, Carl Bringas, who has a great photography site full of his work--photographs retouched to become very web-ready works of art.

These artistically retouched photographs make great desktop wallpaper, and I've added them to a Carl Bringas Gallery of retouched photographs (both his and Mike Eilers's) over at the computer backgrounds blog.

Yet another attempt at poetry rejected by the gods of words...

What's Left is Miraculously Ordinary

A not-that-old man grudgingly wakes
to a wine hangover, high-mileage joints
wail Rice Crispy sounds as he warily climbs
out of the warm bed to return what's left

of the fermented liquid to the ecosystem.
He eats eggs and toast with spread, combs
over what's left of his hair, straps down
an ear flap hat and the gear in his truck bed

bereft of the tools for tending grape vines
on hills now spotted with McMansion views
of the corn monument field of rusting harrows,
subsoilers, cultivators, and trailed foragers--

like giraffes still tall near the decomposing barn.
He taps the brakes--slow on the frozen driveway--
drives as if in tow behind the snow plow,
veers to slide down the side road through

white walled woods to the lake like a salt flat
where he walks on the water--still fueled by
the warm eggs and bread with spread--where a shed
over a hole evolves into a fish factory, while snow
falls like cotton on what's left of the vines.

Scott Supak

Hollywood Downside Up

My Dad, who was the soundman at the Hollywood Bowl for a couple of decades, died 10 years ago on March 3, and while I didn't publish anything about it, I did have a drink and listen to Jazz at Oberlin and Kind of Blue. They remind me of summers growing up in Hollywood, riding my bike around and marveling at the fact that it was a very dreary place (and probably still is, although I haven't been back in a while now). Everywhere you look, under the bright billboards, marquees, theaters, and lights was a pervasive kind of crumbling concrete gray. The kind of gray where you break the cinder block and the dust is the same color as the brick, just as drab and plain on the inside.

It was also about 10 years ago that I started my Hollywood Downside Up photography series, which resulted in a bunch of free desktop wallpaper pictures of Hollywood that you can download, use as your computer background, or print as a post card. The series tries to capture the underbelly of Hollywood, not so much behind the scenes as under them, the greasy wheels of addiction and despair that fuel the machine.

I spent the day fixing some of the CSS issues that were screwing the site up, and it's presentable again, full of ads for things you photographers need, or just things to click on for the sake of helping a high-mileage lump of Hollywood Blvd. road kill.

How Much to Mail a Letter to the States?

I actually heard an overly made-up, clashily-dressed middle-aged woman say that in a post office line in Hawaii once. Nobody laughed because they were sick of that kind of thing. In fact, there were more than a few heel-of-the-palm-to-the-forehead reactions. And yet it goes on.

Contrary to the opinion of 6% of Tea Baggers, Hawaii is a US State (4% are unsure). But enough about them. Really. Way enough. I have something more important to talk about. But then, just about anything is more important than them.

Buy Gourmet Organic American Coffee!

Not only can you buy domestic coffee in the US, but it is, as Mark Twain put it, the best damn coffee in the world. OK, Twain didn't put it that way. Here's what he actually said:

The ride through the district of Kona to Kealakekua Bay took us through the famous coffee and orange section. I think the Kona coffee has a richer flavor than any other, be it grown where it may and call it by what name you please.

Now click yourself over to do your duty as a patriotic citizen of the United States and buy some organic Kona coffee beans. It's a little more expensive than Folgers, but you'll drink less and it's better for you, the people growing the coffee, and the planet.

I'm sure those 10% of teabaggers who doubt Hawaii's statehood don't have a clue, but they might be onto something... Seems that back when the US made Hawaii a territory, there was some doubt as to the legitimacy of the transfer of authority (yes I said that South Parky). The Hawaiian Independence Action Alliance protested the 50th anniversary of Hawaiian statehood last year. According to the Hawaii Kingdom Independence Blog, Hawaii is not a state because the prolonged occupation of Hawaii, going back to before the islands were a territory, was and is illegal.

So, I suppose if the tea baggers wanted to smarten up their argument a little, they could join forces with some of the ardent leftists, who actually have a decent argument, if you ignore Stare decisis, as the current court is apt to do. Good luck with that. Even if you managed to get a court to agree that the occupation was illegal, therefore the becoming of a territory was illegal, therefore the statehood is illegal, therefore Obama was born in the Kingdom of Hawaii not the state, you'd still have a hell of a time getting him out of the White House, what with him being such a fascist and all.

For the rest of us, who enjoy a good lefty argument (like the illegal occupation of Hawaii voiding the US's claims to the islands) for the sake of argument, but with no real expectation that anything will ever come of it, I suggest you check out my big site full of Hawaii Stuff, where you can decide which of the illegally occupied islands to visit. I suggest you start with a few days at this Kauai beach house, followed by at least a week in an organic Maui bed and breakfast, and then finish off with some time in an affordable Kona vacation rental on the Big Island, where the best damn coffee in the world is grown.

And don't forget the Hawaiian post cards!

Liberal Drinking Link Alert

Quick post to say here's a good list of political sites to read... Even a few off subject links, like, well, to Internet Marketing and Organic SEO. But hey, that's what you get when you're Drinking Liberally in New Milford.

Take a good look at what's going on with this link page. It's a bunch of links, using good anchor text, but as a blog post instead of a separate page. Nice. I like to do even shorter posts like this one with just a few links out, which sculpts more page rank to the intended targets. But that's a lot more work. And takes time. And there's beer to drink.

Links pages aren't so bad, and it's a shame Google discounts them sometimes. I often link to link pages because they're good resources for your readers. For example, if you were going to be looking for a Hawaii beach accommodation like this beach rental house on Kauai, you'd want to know what cool things there are to do in Kauai, and then you'd like to have a bunch of links to cool sites in Kauai.

But I dilute.

Hall of Fame Baseball Outing Called on because of Snow

We were going to Cooperstown today anyway, actually. While there, it was hard to resist taking some pictures of the Baseball Hall of Fame covered in a slushy six inches of new snow. Finally. We were getting jealous of all the southerners getting all the snow.

It was a winter wonderland this morning, and it was already melting when we got there, but it still made for some great Baseball Hall of Fame desktop wallpaper pictures I just posted over at the free wallpaper backgrounds blog.

This winter wallpaper picture was taken not far from the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum. at the south east end of Lake Otsego, where the lake drains into a creek that is the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, it almost immediately becomes this little lake, behind the Cooperstown Waterworks damn. If you look at the big version, you'll see a beautiful stone bridge at the north end of the little lake. Picturesque indeed. Feel free to download all the shots over at the blog, they all make great free desktop wallpaper backgrounds!

More Free Desktop Wallpaper Pictures Taken with the New Lenses!

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I just love posting pictures that people can download as free desktop wallpaper. Regular readers also know that I've been on a bit of a kick with this subject recently, because we just got some new lenses for the camera.

Well, I just put up a new desktop wallpaper post and gallery of winter wallpaper pictures over at the computer backgrounds photography blog, including this wide angle lens (Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 USM Wide Angle Lens for Canon SLR Cameras) shot of the sunrise through the icicles out our window. My variation of the Erma Bombeck novel, The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank is going to be The Icicles are Always Longer Over the Drier Vent. After a little research into longest icicle ever, I found a rumor that there was once a 100 footer somewhere. These little 8 footers will hit the ground long before that...

If you're really into photography, especially photographs you can use as desktop wallpaper pictures, cruise on over to the computer backgrounds blog and check out the large collection of photography, from abstract to snow, that we offer for free under the creative commons license. We have free desktop wallpaper photo galleries from all over the place, from Hawaii to Maine, including Los Angeles, Yosemite, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, Ohio, New York, and much, much more.

Feel free to borrow, mix, reuse, and post as web page backgrounds or framed photos for your wall. All we ask is that you give us credit (a simple Supak.com) with a link.

Free Desktop Wallpaper Pictures

When we started Supak.com back in 1996, we immediately realized that people loved to be able to download free desktop wallpaper for use as their computer backgrounds pictures. So, we started posting low resolution pictures that still took forever to download at those screaming dial up speeds. When we moved to Hawaii in 1998, we started posting pictures of Hawaii, and people really started visiting our sites in droves.

Over the years, we've added so many different pictures and graphics, from high resolution nature photos to hand-drawn pictures of Pokemon characters sent in by children, that we had to develop a computer backgrounds photography blog to help keep track of it all, and to help people keep up with all our latest computer backgrounds and wallpaper endeavors.

Here's a quick run-down of all the free desktop wallpaper we have available:

• New York City Wallpaper Pictures
• Hawaii wallpaper pictures
• Hollywood photographs for computer backgrounds
• Italy Desktop Wallpaper Pictures
• Maui Hawaii wallpaper pictures
• Cool car pictures of muscle cars for wallpaper
• Big Bear California skiing winter wallpaper pictures
• The Simpsons wallpaper pictures (screen grabs and comics)
• Pokemon free desktop wallpaper pictures
• Computer backgrounds pictures blog (many categories)

If you visit our computer backgrounds site, you'll see that back in 08, we got a new Canon Rebel XTI, right before we moved cross-country and took pictures along they way (like this shot, presented here for the first time, from Robin, using her motion technique for abstract photography, taken in Wyoming). The XTI is a great camera; it takes very high resolution photos, some of which we post, but usually we just put up 1600 pixel wide versions. If you see a picture you love, and you really want a full size version, just let us know and we'll send it (under the creative commons license). We're more than happy to share, we just ask that people give us credit and a link when they use our shots in a public way.

Recently, we got a couple of new lenses for the Canon, one wide angle lens and a telephoto. We've always loved wide-angle lenses (many of the Hawaii pictures were taken with a wide angle lens on a Nikon cool pix).

This new wide-angle lens, a Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 USM Wide Angle Lens for Canon SLR Cameras, has amazing focal depth, which can be adjusted to make the lens work well as a macro, for close-ups. We haven't really gotten out with this lens much, but here's a shot from this morning of our amazing icicles (the icicles are always longest above the drier vent).

The telephoto lens, a Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III Telephoto Zoom Lens for Canon SLR Cameras, is very affordable and takes great shots. We got it because I wanted to be able to get better shots of the birds on our back porch. As you can see, mission accomplished. In the full resolution version of this picture of a female cardinal, you can see the crystals in the snow on her beak!

Be sure to subscribe to the feed at our computer backgrounds blog, so you can keep up with all the latest photography for use as free desktop wallpaper. We're sure there will be something for everyone!

"...follow me without question"

This fun post today plays with the idea that the old Testament God seems awfully insecure.

Honestly, if you were an all-powerful, omnipresent being and creator of the entire universe, why would you be worried that people would doubt you. You could just smite them and be done with it.

If your answer is that God is a loving God who is trying to help us lowly humans with fatherly advice, then what's with all the smiting and smoting?

Which, of course, leads me to a Homer Simpson quote:

"O spiteful one, show me who to smite and they shall be smoten!"

But seriously, this is a Good post from Thomas D. today, extending his thought experiment that the Bible was written by Satan.
in reference to:

"This is very important. I have found the truth and I will reveal it soon to the world. You who read this simple little blog will be the first to know what it is and my true identity. I use a pen name now because my real name is probably known to you. The most important thing I want to impart to you today is that when I reveal myself and the truth, you must follow me without question."
- Satan Wrote the Bible - I Am The Greatest (view on Google Sidewiki)

...and a bottle of tequila!

Watched The Simpsons Season 3 episode Homer Alone (Rancho Relaxo) today and grabbed a few screens to post as Simpsons wallpaper at the Simpsons sounds and pictures site at our free desktop wallpaper home page. Truly great episode, one that we quote all the time. Of course, there's a Simpsons quote for everything.

In fact, a lot of them are available as Simpsons sound clips on our fun little Simpsons site I made years ago, from scans of Simpsons comic books.


So, please, follow those links, have some fun, and when you're done, click an ad or buy some Simpsons merchandise. It helps us keep all this stuff going.

Besides, when it comes to livening up your desktop with  fresh computer background pictures, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Aye Caramba!

Underwater Photography from Hawaii

We've been posting free desktop wallpaper on the web since 1996. We have some new Hawaii pictures over at our computer backgrounds photography blog, courtesy of Mike Eilers, a friend of a home sharing friend in Hawaii. Ha! Those links could keep you busy for a while!

Freedom of Speech Goes Only to Those Who Can Buy the Volume

Reading these opinions on what The Ruling means, and I'm intrigued with the ACLU lawyer Joel Gora's argument that this is a first amendment victory. Since money does pay for louder speech, I foresee even more deaf ears as a result of the cacophony of screaming that will result from this ruling.

Oh, wait, I just thought of the Republican staffers that were flown down to Miami to do some "impromptu" hallway screaming during the Florida recount, but that gets way too complicated to think about. And it was so long ago...

No, in this case, reading Gora, I see he goes out of his way to point out that unions can get in on the money = speech thing. But let's think about the economic logic here: large and very rich (stupendously rich as compared to unions) companies like Wal Mart will be able to bombard the airways with advertising for anti-union candidates, spending a small fraction of their profit on 10 times the ads any union could buy with a large fraction of their budget (unions are non-profit).

Is that fair? I suppose if you advocate other forms of campaign finance that would somehow make up for that difference in spending ability, then yeah. But I can't think of one offhand, at least not one that we can get passed in the Senate now that we only have an 18 vote lead.

Maybe Republicans, noting that many corporations actually prefer Democrats these days (it's all about Branding), will get on board (I'm looking at you, McCain) and pass something decent to make free speech equal.

Oh, and by the way, freedom of the press, on the other hand, goes only to those who own one. I can set up a blog for you. It's what I do.

I Get Along with Pain Relief from Building a Civilization

Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music. --Marcus Brigstocke

As a former stage electrician who loves to tinker with lighting, I sit in a bright room most of the time, munching pills for the pain, and I hate repetitive music (new favorite band: The Libertines). But my computer game, Civilization, does affect me, by relieving my pain.

Playing Civilization affects me in other ways, too, mainly in terms of interactive education about civilizations in general. In a recent John Robb review of The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quigley, Robb points out that Quigley charts out the evolution of civilizations much like other historians:

These levels of cultural development play a roll in how a civilization advances through Quigley's model (very similar to Toynbee and other historians) for a civilization's development.  These are:  1) Mixture, 2) Gestation, 3) Expansion, 4) Age of Conflict, 5) Universal Empire, 6) Decay, and 7) Invasion.  His analysis confirmed that all civilizations progress on this path, with an occasional jump from stage 4 (conflict) to 6 (decay).   At the time the book was being written, our current level of development was 4, an Age of Conflict (the Cold War) and he was unsure about the final outcome.  

 I'd like to see the Civilizations computer game go a little further into the future (it ends in 2050, before steps 6 and 7). Having the challenges of maintaining a Universal Empire grow exponentially would be a more pertinent and fun way to end the game, which would provide the kind of challenge that would keep my brain busy enough to relieve even the worst pain, while maybe teaching me a few things about resilient communities that could prove valuable someday.