Sounds and Silences

I'm quite displeased with this house. I'm sure it's hotter in here now than it was eight hours ago, despite the cool night air being blown through the window. Someday I'll have to get down into the crawl space and plug up that Hell Mouth which I'm sure has opened there. Aside from the house being possessed, the night has in fact been pleasant. I heard a night bird of some sort calling earlier. It was neither hawk nor owl, and I don't recall ever having heard it before.

There was also some creature more agile than a raccoon but less so than a cat climbing over my fence. I didn't get a look at it. I was thinking that perhaps a fox has ventured here from the deeper woods. It's been years since I've seen one, but I'm sure they are still around, lurking about the edges of the town. Being quicker and more shy than raccoons, they are less easy to spot. This is trash night in the neighborhood, so it is the night most likely to attract all manner of small scavenging creatures, and those who hunt them.

Because the house was so uncomfortably warm, I sat outside for a while as the sky turned pale. I like those few moments when the trees are etched black against the deeply luminous eastern sky, an hour or so before dawn. It is the most serene part of the day, and, were I not nocturnal and thus still awake, I would find that time well worth rising early to see. Those who rise with the birds have missed the best part of the morning, when the silence of night yet prevails and the dim light is as yet the merest suggestion of day. I guess that means that the birds themselves miss the best part of the day. Poor birds.

Three Entries In One!

It sounds like wind in the trees nearby. Where I stand, the air is warm and perfectly still. Maybe it is only my wishful thinking turning the sound of evening traffic into the sound of wind. But it is that time of year when night winds flow from the high deserts, making the trees sing and the stars sparkle. Tonight is the new moon, and there will be only starlight and reflected ground light illuminating the forest. There will be no shadows. Everything will be shadow. It would be a perfect night for wind.

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I'm not very happy about the fact that my late summer allergies have been making me sneezy all day, and I feel a bit dopey, too. If it keeps up much longer, I'll start to get grumpy. It wouldn't be so bad if they made me sleepy, because that might help me get my schedule back on track. Well, at least allergies aren't one of those illnesses that make anybody too bashful to go to the doc.

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Meanwhile, as the world continues to disintegrate, the movie and music moguls are busy with a project they consider more important than the fate of humanity- namely, getting Congress to pass their favorite piece of legislation, the INDUCE Act. In essence, this law would undermine the Betamax decision of the Supreme Court, which made Sony's (and by extension all other) video recording device legal. The Betamax decision is the only reason we can have CD burners, ipods, and a host of other recording devices, including some as yet uninvented. The moguls would love to get around it.

While there are undoubtedly some more important things about which people could nag their representatives, the plans of the movie and music industries are potentially quite destructive to the public's right to communicate freely, and thus deserving of attention. Legislation which would force the manufacturers of recording and copying devices to install some sort of Draconian technology to protect copyrighted material could diminish the usefulness of these devices for other uses as well, thus reducing the possibility of competition for Big Entertainment from independent artists. I have cone to suspect that the main goal of the industry is not so much preventing copyright violation as it is heading off that competition, which would use the new technology to bypass the moguls' existing near-monopoly on distribution, and retaining their stranglehold on popular culture. This legislation is something we need to watch carefully.