Tonight I fell asleep quite early on the sofa, fully dressed (including an old sport coat), which in the dawn-ish hour gives me the simultaneous sense of insomnia and of being fully rested. I listened to Creative Commons netlabel tunes on my mp3 player, until in a blinding flash of light is proclaimed that its battery ran out, just as Peter Koniuto's "Past Andromeda"'s appealing ambient drone faded into Lisa DeBenedictis' lovely "Plaisir d'Amour". I read the English translation of a Portugese site that quoted me, and felt very continental indeed.
In my hobby pursuits, I am in one of those phases in which much more learning happens than creative progress. This is not a bad thing, but it is always an interim thing, a waiting for the next thing.
I take amusement where I find it. I love that the netlabel Earth Monkey Productions features a side project of poetry releases termed "talking monkey".
I follow with interest the Scooter Libby trial. I posit no theories about the likely outcome of the trial, as media reports almost always miss the point in their reportage of such things. I always wish I could spectate at the entirety of such a trial, to see what the news misses. Only in the most obvious situations do the pundits show me much insight into the guilt or innocence, as trials involve an entire consistency of things, and not merely the cool sketches and quoted sound bites of the miedia reports.
Yet the trial reportage appears important to me, because it shows both the current administration and a small set of press folks in a very unfortunate light. Even if Mr. Libby's defense prevails, the whole matter amounts to a cautionary tale about people who imagine they wield too much power to be subject to old-fashioned rules like being candid under oath before grand juries. I note for my own edification that such arrogance often fellow-travels with a sense that the administration in issue follows some higher moral imperative in some "culture war" or other. Perhaps Mr. Libby will one day have a talk show, as did Oliver North. As to me, I use times like this to remember that the pursuit of humility is a good thing. The ramifications of this newest set of revelations would be to further lame the duck, except that I begin to wonder if a duck may become so lame as to merely be a decoy.
I am trying to figute out how to best use something called a "wave sampler synth", which sounds very impressive, but will in fact only be impressive if I figure out how to make it always sound cool.