Jon Snow on the eavesdropping thing

One of the highlights of my day is receiving the latest Snowmail. Jon Snow is a presenter for Channel 4 News in Britain, and he sends out a daily news update around midday (well, it's evening in Britain, but midday here). There's always a little commentary, but mostly it's a quick headline grab.

I love it for how quickly he sums up the news and throws a common-sense take into it. Essential for those days when I skip reading the newspaper and/or can't follow the news all day.

An item in today's Snowmail summed up Bush's defense of eavesdropping quite simply. It's good to take a step back and look at this rationally from an outsider's perspective (outside the US, at least), absent the rationalizations of the kneejerk defend-Bush crowd. And I quote:

Bush defends the listeners
=============================================
George Bush is in an ever deepening mire about tapping people's phones without permission.

It's a long and sordid tradition that US presidents tap themselves - remember Nixon?

But tapping others? An American's home is his castle as are the wires running in and out of it, people don't like it - can Bush recover?

Amazing to think that his second term is not even 12 months old and it has come to this.

'Nuff said.

Addendum

Oh, and by the way.

I've been keeping two blogs going for a long time, basically simulposting almost everything between the two (though I think the posts, etc., relating to He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named all got stuck on livejournal so as not to clutter up the self-hosted one). But I think it makes more sense (particularly since there is at least one political blog list that pulls the RSS feed for the slywiz.com blog ... there's also one on livejournal, but I have to pick one or the other here) to split them out and maintain them separately.

So henceforth, the personal and band stuff will stay on my livejournal page (www.livejournal.com/~celtichris) and political and social commentary will go to the slywiz.com one (www.slywiz.com/celtichris/celtichris.html). And I'm not using my myspace blog for anything at all. I may occasionally cross-post between livejournal and slywiz.com. Occasionally.

But this should keep the people wot want to read my political rantings from having to deal with my day-to-day life, and keep my friends from having to slog through pages and pages of boring politics stuff (their loss, I say, but ... enh, I understand). But if, by chance, you're interested in both, bookmark both or, better yet, plug in the RSS feeds to your favorite reader and effortlessly follow them (Sage tells me there's one for the livejournal page, here).

personal: A festive weekend

Wow, I really haven't been posting much lately. Fortunately, that's because I've been pretty busy. We start tonight with a birthday party for Mason and my brother-in-law, then head to a holiday cocktail party tomorrow night at the home of my step-sister and her husband (more about that below).

And as far as political commentary, Rachel is doing a much better job. I feel redundant. Not giving up; just casting about for something a little more unique to do with it. Until I figure it out, that part of this blog is most likely going to be limited to AFAmail and RNCmail when they're particularly outrageous (instead of predictably so, as they've largely been for the last couple of months ... though AFA taking credit for Ford pulling back on advertising in specialty publications [not just, or specifically, gay ones, it must be noted] was particularly amusing).

I've been, as I said, keeping very busy for the last couple months, mostly with the band. And I'm pleased to say that we are inches away from finishing principal recording for our CD. If Richard weren't leaving for two weeks to spend Christmas with family in Oregon, there's a good chance we could've had it finished by the end of the year. Ach, well. Of course, after the principal recording comes mixing, producing, adding in various other instruments and vocals as seasoning, etc., etc., etc., blah, woof, blah, woof, then we have to figure out what order to put the songs in, master it, come up with a title for the blasted thing, do the cover art and typeset the booklet and send the whole thing off to be manufactured ... If we're extremely lucky, we might be able to have this stuff done by the end of January. If we're lucky.

But the point is, we're getting there. And it's good. Another good thing is that we're actually starting to be offered paying gigs. Up first, tomorrow (saturday) evening we're playing at a cocktail party my step-sister is hosting. And she's paying us! We've been encouraged to invite anyone and everyone we want, so if you're in Phoenix and you know one of the three of us and/or my family, and would like to go, just drop me a line. We're playing from 7-9, but expect it to be an all-evening event.

There's another party on the calendar and then an interesting event at the Paper Heart on March 25, of which more details will soon show up on our event calendar. And we're looking into places for St. Patrick's Day. And possibly our highest profile gig yet, if I can bow and scrape sufficiently before the promoter ... can't be more specific right now, for fear of embarrassing myself if it doesn't pan out. And ... we're planning a tour of the West Coast next fall.

After laboring for more than a year pouring money, time and stress into this project and seemingly getting next to nothing out of it, it's nice to see the seeds we've planted starting to bear fruit. Soon, $11-an-hour coffeehouse gigs and just-for-tips (when nobody, simply nobody tips anymore unless they're a friend) art gallery shows will be a thing of the past.

But things are finally happening! We started podcasting last week, partly because we want to have a record of preparing our album, partly as a tool to promote the album ... but mostly because we're a strange and interesting group of people, and it gives us an opportunity to invite people into Richard's living room once a week. We recorded a new episode last night, so all that remains is for me to plop down at my computer and edit and fix it up. I know, podcasting is painfully trendy. But it's fun.

*phew* I think I've gone on long enough. Happy Christmas to all, as appropriate; Happy Holidays to all others.