I will keep the gig calendar current, and it is also on my MySpace profile, linked in the left sidebar here.

A Primer For the Coastal Elite: What Do the Tea Party Folks Want? An on-the-scene report from a rally in North Dakota, with photos. At The Awl.

The Hypocrisy of Healthcare Protesters at Salon.com. Darren Hutchinson of Dissenting Justice guest-blogs at Glenn Greenwald’s spot while the latter is on vacation. So many people have rediscovered the dangers of big government, which they ignored or even supported under George Bush. But really, it’s worth reading for the way it points out that we have nothing like free-market competition in health care as it stands.

My favorite of the many nutty protest signs seen recently? “Get Government out of My Medicare!” You can’t make this stuff up.

No Way Out

Growing Up

There's more, but you'll see the links when you're there. I don't know who any of the players are except Tony Levin but, um, wow.

The woman who organized the service asked eight people to share some memories of Marty at the service. My own thoughts (as written, not exactly what I said) follow after the jump.

It’s a weird weekend for any number of reasons, but not anything I feel like going into here. I do get the feeling that huge changes are in the air, not just for me but for everyone. A feeling that wheels are turning and a new era is coming soon. There are all kinds of reasons I feel this, not just because of my sister or the fact that our celebrities seem to be dying off in droves. Whatever. We shall see. In the meantime, if you feel like reading a few memories of my sister, follow the link below.

You can try to be prepared for your parents' death. In our case, we had a fairly long period of time when we knew they didn't have long to go. Of course you're never prepared, even when you know it's coming. Death is always a surprise on some level, I think.

But Marty's sudden passing was a whole different thing, of course. Just that morning, she had sent a personal email to our brother Steve and me. We got the newsletters and such regularly, but this was a personal note about what she was doing, the things she was spending time on, and she apologized for not writing more often. I'm very glad she happened to drop us a note that morning.

Marty was my older sister. She was always there, had always been there. I know we fought, but not nearly as often as I fought with my younger brothers. Occasionally we were co-conspirators: one time we were both home and supposed to be sick, but instead we just played around all day. In a panic because our mom was supposed to be home soon, I remember she was frantically searching the medicine cabinet to find any kind of sedative so we could be asleep or at least appear to be sleepy. Another time we were both “sick” at the same time, our medicine was Coca Cola syrup poured over crushed ice. I can't imagine now what that was treatment for, but it was the best medicine ever!

Two years difference in age and a difference in gender were pretty large barriers, especially in as individualistic a family as ours was, so I wouldn't say we were close confidants. I do know I missed out on a lot of the Beatles' early albums because Marty was a huge fan, and so therefore I couldn't like them. But then somebody (Marty? I can't remember) gave me a copy of Sgt. Pepper's for my 15th birthday, and it was all over from there. Of course, by the time of Abbey Road even our dad was a fan.

But still, despite our differences—differences our adult lives probably magnified rather than diminished—there was always a bond between us, a feeling that though we might come to different conclusions about a lot of things, maybe even most things, we had, after all, started in the same place. A feeling of understanding, of knowing where we came from. In a world where ultimately all of us come and go alone, that is a connection to be valued.

Marty was one of the funniest and smartest people I've ever known. I can't quite grasp that she's no longer in this world. It's going to take a long time for me to wrap my head around that, and I'm guessing that is true for many of us here. Perhaps that was her final lesson to us: you'd better live each moment to the fullest, because death is a surprise. The exact nature of that surprise is something I don't suppose any of us will know until we get there ourselves. All I know is I miss my sister, and I can't imagine a time when I won't.

FacilityRepairman.com—a quick one-page site which is just what it says it is. Allen Foley had done the design in Photoshop and needed it converted to a live website.

KansasCityShooters.com—another quick site. Larry Brewer has been doing video work in Kansas City for years—check the logo crawl at the bottom for a small sampling of his extremely impressive client list. A couple of potential clients needed him to have a web presence for one reason or another; hence this site. He uses the slideshow from slide.com because he wants to be able to change photos himself whenever he feels like it. For similar reasons, he did the logo crawl in the Vegas video editor and gave me a Quicktime movie to post—credit where credit is due. FWIW, I would have done it in Flash, which would have been a much smaller bandwidth, but again he wants to be able to change it any time he wants, and I respect that.

A much larger project was the redesign of Kinisue’s Tropical Boutique. We had originally put the site together last fall, but as Cindy (Kinisue) learned more about her business, selling tropical jewelry through boutiques and at shows, she wanted to make some changes. Also, the site uses the free open-source Zen Cart shopping cart software. Zen Cart is designed to run the whole site, rather than an add-on to a static HTML site, so that was a major consideration in the redesign. Cindy considered adding a slideshow from slide.com as well, but didn't like the associated advertising. Besides, I already had the Flash slideshow set up, and it’s a matter of only a few minutes from the time I receive a new photo till a revision can be posted.

I suppose it doesn’t hurt to remind people of the web design work I do—my work comes 100% from referrals—but really I’m posting this to help search engine rankings on these sites. Every link helps! And besides, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the services of these clients, so I’m happy to do a little advertising for them.

I figured out what happened: sometimes Mikey likes to try to get my attention by jumping on the desk between my keyboard and the laptop. He must have sat on the Enter key on the keypad while GoLive was in Layout mode, so each repeat was counted as a new paragraph. I remember I came back to the computer and shooed him away. I had done whatever I needed to do to the page and uploaded it without looking. The browser will only display the first of a series of blank paragraph tags, which in this case was a very good thing, because it had probably been online close to a week.

Even cats think they can do web design these days….

The Conversion widget is excellent, converting area, currency, energy, temperature, time, length, weight, speed, pressure, power, and volume. Say you read a statistic about land use in Africa (it could happen!) and the value given is 45,000 hectares. Choose hectares in one popup menu and acres in the other, and it calculates as you type, showing 111,197.42 acres. Or 173.74597 square miles. Of course you can select the value and copy and paste it. Did you know that 100 Kilowatts is equivalent to 5,686.9029 BTUs per minute? Do you care? Me neither, at least not at the moment. Still, you get the point.

The widget I use most often, though, is the Dictionary/Thesaurus, especially since I’ve been a New Yorker subscriber. When you run into an unfamiliar word, just double-click it to select, command-c to copy it, F12 to open Dashboard and command-v to paste. You’ll get the Oxford Dictionary entry on the word, including its derivation and origin—not only interesting, but it makes it easier to remember, and to use properly (oh, I am such a geek). Or you can flip over to the thesaurus side and get synonyms, antonyms, etc. Big fun!

But the reason I’m writing today is that it turns out you don’t even have to use the widget to use Dictionary/Thesaurus. Move the mouse cursor over a word, hold down control-command-d, and you get the Oxford Dictionary definition. Continue to hold those keys down and click the mouse to scroll down if it’s a long entry, or click the popup menu to switch to the Oxford Thesaurus entry for the word. Totally cool!

This works in all Apple applications, such as Safari and Mail. In, say, Microsoft Word, my guess is probably not. But it’s easy enough to try. The tech email I got this tip from notes that in Mail, if you accidentally hold down the shift key instead of control, you will send your email draft immediately. But that’s only if you’re writing an email at the moment, and probably you’re not going to be using a word you don’t know anyway. There is that caveat, though.

Go ahead. Command-control-d on “caveat.” You know you want to.

So, let’s just imagine for a moment: what if she and we were, say, Saudi or Yemeni, instead of American? And she was in, say, Guantanamo instead of Teheran? How much different would we feel?

Of course what the Iranians are doing is wrong. And I am certainly not saying the prisoners in Gitmo are innocent (though under American law, aren’t they presumed to be until proven otherwise?). I’m just asking, how much different would we feel?

When I posted, I asked—begged, really—for anyone who might provide a cogent counter-argument to Simon’s article. Well, here you go: Andrew Leonard writes How The World Works, a blog at Salon.com. Originally it was a blog about globalization, but more recently it has almost exclusively covered the world economic crisis and has been an almost daily read for me (I also recommend NPR’s Planet Money). Anyway, Andrew Leonard has posted “Prophets of Doom,” thumbnail profiles and links to 14 economists and others—from Paul Krugman to Ron Paul—whose opinions about the roots of the crisis, its solutions, and their critiques of Obama’s stimulus plan could hardly be more varied. Right now (Thursday afternoon) it is the featured article on the front page of Salon.com.

In my daily travels, I hear basically two opinions about the financial mess: 1) “I trust Obama to get us out of this,” and 2) “The government is spending too much of our money!” Oddly, those who espouse Opinion #2 never seemed to have a word to say during the Bush administration about the massive deficits being piled up, and they seem to have forgotten the first $700 billion of government money was handed to the banks by that administration with no questions asked and no accountability. But that’s neither here nor there. Neither opinion is very satisfying in my mind.

After reading “Prophets of Doom” I don’t have any answers, but at least one thing is clear: Michele Bachman is an idiot addicted to publicity at any cost. Ditto Jim Cramer.

Final word: I almost made it through this post without mentioning teabagging. Snark, snark.