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In the office again.

Holidays are over. back to work. Yay.

In this clip, Ironik manages to kill three birds with one brick of a video and song.

Meshing those previously unmatchable elements of New York Balla rap video and Madonna's 1991 infomentary made of soft porn S&M.
The way I got here:
Looking for scholarly articles on TKM film, someone mentioned Cameron Crowe's love of Mulligan's movie and supposedly, in "Almost Famous," the title sequence is an homage to the 1962 film. I couldn't find the titles, but the "Tiny Dancer" scene kept popping up. The Ironik song was one of the related vids.

Baptismo

So here is what I don't get about baptism:
It is supposed to be about saving the babies' souls, right? but why would any one worship some entity who couldn't just look at a baby and say " you know what, we can forego hell on this one. He really didn't have a chance to do wrong that we could punish him for."
Even guys like me, who never want to have kids, can cut a baby some slack.

That morning in the last one did not work out to well. But since Friday, I have been cigarette free. that's cool right. An unhealthy amount of Spore playing has had a lot to do with the lack of smoking. Pris' has gone a whole week and some change without smoking. That's pretty tough.

P.S. if anyone has a job waiting for me, you forgot to call.

P.S.S. If anyone has heard of MattRock & the PowerBoxx, they are playing at the Geronimo festival.

New and Old Things.

I am not going to smoke cigarettes this morning, and they are shoving kids into phone booths again.

The Eye Update

So for those of you who are interested I went to the eye doctors last week. At the appointment prior to that one I met my new docs (the clinic switches them out every three months) and they seemed to think I might be able to get surgery for the cataracts soon. I guess I should update from where I left off.
So last you heard I had almost 100 % gas, as opposed to vitreous jelly which is normally in there. Well over the course of time the gas was replaced by jelly and I started to be able to see motion and then eventually I could actually see a distorted shape if it was close to my face. The docs told me that not only was I trying to see through gas, but at least one new cataract, I think the t0tal is two now, but for a while the back of my eyeball was bleeding. The blood apparently mixes with the jelly to make a very opaque substance, not good for vision in that eye.
So now, I think we are at a resting point in the vision repair. The eye is still essentially useless, although there has been major improvement. The docs said that the healing they were observing was unexpected, and is uncommon. They credit it to my fleeting youth, and my good diet. Who would have thought that cigarettes and coffee would be good for eyesight.

Taxes

So I e-filed my federal taxes today. Or I guess I should say free-filed.
(P.S. if you qualify for the free fed filing and live in LA don't give them your state info unless you want to pay for it. Not much but still not free. )
Same old same old.
Except:
I was nosing around to see what other government cheddar was coming my way besides the normal refund. I found this - the IRS retort to those pesky citizens who wonder what law requires them tho pay taxes.

I didn't get very far, but was amused and relieved to see bureaucracy was still going strong with answers to questions like this:

"The stance that is taken is that until the IRS can prove to these taxpayers’ satisfaction, which is effectively impossible because they never will be satisfied, the existence and applicability of the income tax laws, they will not report or pay income taxes. These taxpayers reflexively dismiss any attempt by the IRS to identify the laws, thereby continuing the cycle."

As far as I can tell, and I'm obviously no lawyer or accountant, they basically go through all of the skeptical claims and say, "You're wrong because we said so." I think that mostly the rights of the IRS to collect a percentage of your income lie in civil law. However they say that criminal charges can be pressed against non-payers. I am gonna check out some of the case files they cite in the document and see if I can't make a little more sense of this stuff.

If you are wondering where the voice of dissent is coming from, you can check out this movie that I watched. Only the third part is about the tax stuff. The rest is about other accepted institutions in our society. The movie is called Zeitgeist the Movie. If you search around on you tube you should be able to find anywhere from the full version to different cut up segments. They do a pretty good job of explaining the situation, and they even have some interviews with "former IRS agents," but you get the feeling that something is too simple, some info might be missing. I am sure you can find other films which address this situation.

I have to check it out more and study the laws to know the real deal, I'll keep you updated.

By the way, I don't mind paying taxes, and if it is voluntary, I would still pay what I could. I do wish that the money were spent a little more on the account holders than the executors of the account, but that's a whole other issue.