A carnival of technology

Apparently it’s illegal to track mud into Roswell. I noticed a sign at a construction site today explaining how the maximum penalty for not rinsing your wheels off before leaving is $1000 and 180 days in jail. I wonder how many members of the Roswell city council are moms.

Election day is coming up; is everyone sick of it yet? Georgia has an early voting thing going on, but there have apparently been even worse lines there than for regular voting, since there is only one early voting location per county (I think. Fulton has two, since Fulton shouldn’t be one county anyway). Lots of people are doing it, though, probably spurred on by the fear that Puffy will kill them. I figured I’d prepare for my civic duty by looking over the practice ballot and trying to figure out who some of those other people are, and maybe figure out what the hell that other amendment was all about. One thing that struck me as odd was that there are only three presidential candidates on the ballot. I’ve never voted in Georgia before; is this normal, or a result of the Green party’s failure to get their act together? I would have expected the Constitution party to have made it, at least. Alabama has five candidates that have received the Secretary of State’s blessing—Peroutka and Nader in addition to Bush, Kerry and Badarnick—though the Constitution and Libertarian party candidates are both listed as independent. Still no Green party. I’m not trying to endorse the Green Party, since I think they’re mostly a bunch of annoying hippies, but I find their absence odd.

In other news, there was a lunar eclipse last night. The moon was supposed to change colors while fully obscured from twilight and dawn sunlight hitting it, thus offsetting the fact that lunar eclipses aren’t the cool kind of eclipse, but it wasn’t too impressive. From here it just turned a kind of hazy orange instead of the apocalyptic blood red that I was hoping for. Earth and Sky misled me! My morning’s 90-second shot of education will never be quite the same. Now I’m not even sure what to think of mountaintop removal mining or the restoration of Iraqi swamplands. What other deceptions have I been fed?

For those of you following my car saga, I do not yet have a new car, but I am now insured in the state of Georgia, so I don’t have that obstacle to worry about. Thanks, mom and dad, for letting me ride on your more insurable statuses and saving me a good part of that pile of money I owe. My current plan is to wander down to a car dealer on Saturday and get a better look at what they have to offer. Maybe if I dress up in costume and bring a really big bag I can get one for free.

I have something very important to say to everyone here. Occasionally I will casually mention the Georgia Tech radio station, WREK, usually to make fun of it. I will admit that I am a WREK listener, but never do I intend for this to be an endorsement or recommendation. I listen to WREK because I’m dead on the inside; rather than being content to listen to normal music, I crave eternal novelty and have trapped myself, forever, within a cage of fresh and unique challenges to my ears and my sanity. It’s similar to the time theories of Terrence McKenna, everyone’s favorite hippie scientist: as novelty is injected into the time wave, great things can come about, huge advances to civilization remembered throughout history, but if a time has too much novelty, its manifestations become destructive. I have no other way to seek novelty than to destroy myself.

Now that I’ve hopefully deterred any more of you from becoming WREK listeners on my account, WREK has been a bit of a disappointment in the afternoons. Their morning classical show is sufficiently thinky and occasionally avant-garde enough to keep me entertained during the drive to work, but the afternoons, lacking a regularly scheduled show, are terribly inconsistent. On two days of the week the afternoon is filled with talk, either the student-run show about nothing in particular or the Atlanta Independent Media Center’s Currents of Resistance (I was fooled into listening to some of this yesterday, since they said they had someone from New Order. It turned out that they weren’t talking about the band.), and Friday is blues day, usually a pleasant diversion, but the other two days are “Rock, Rhythm & Roll”, which is often their way of saying “we let winamp pick the songs”. RRR sometimes has something exciting, but more often it’s just fairly bland. Sometimes they even have music that I’ve heard of, which is usually disappointing. The last couple of times they played some songs from bands that I’m actually somewhat familiar with, like Run DMC, King Crimson and the Sex Pistols. The tracks still fit their mission of playing music you won’t hear on the radio, either by being from before the band was popular, an obscure B-side, or an old recording of a live show, but just the fact that I’d heard of the band makes me feel like I was being cheated. Where are the new ideas? Where are the unknown voices? I want WREK to be an attack on my mind as well as my ears! Where is the challenging programming? Maybe it’s time for someone to start the radio station that plays the music WREK won’t play.