~ green line cafe quote:
“isn’t furness the same one who did our church?”

the trend mentioned in a previous post [+] has continued. at first it was merely a curiosity that lovely, clever-looking young ladies would spend their afternoons studying the holy bible. now it is no joke, with spring arriving, the tables are packed and you can not enter the place without seeing someone cracking open the bible or at least ‘dive into ecclesiastes’. we always knew there were christians out there somewhere, presumably running hallmark franchises in strip malls and trading in glass doves at craft fairs, but we didn’t expect that they had decided to co-opt the myth of intellectualism and cafe culture, exchanging incendiary discourse and revolutionary texts for the gospels.

we thought west philadelphia was a hotbed of radicals, but apparently it is a cradle full of holy rollers. there seems to be less overt christianity at the other green line; perhaps it should be moved up in the queue of scheduled tableaux.

anyway, cafe tableaux has a new green line photo.

~ another anatomy of a fieldtrip:

the angry red planet [single day] long distance record
continue reading…

~ somewhere in north carolina, a man steps up:

‘while I listen to you talk about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me from breathing clean air and drinking clean water and eating safe food. If I were a woman, you”d like to restrict my opportunity to make a choice and decision about whether I can abort a pregnancy on my own behalf….What I wanted to say to you is that I — in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate, and….’ –harry taylor, to gwbush

~ it isn’t our concern that a 55 year old is looking to pick up 14 year old girls for sex; there are prisons and inmates with a sense of certain duties to take care of that. what is our concern is that someone who works for the department of homeland security is so lacking in the skills to maintain a fraudulent identity online. does the dhs not have classes on altering your images in photoshop, staging camera angles, pulling phony images (of someone more attractive) from home galleries, setting up accounts at hotmail, configuring the switchproxy extension, and, for fuck’s sake, not telling a girl whom you are seducing that you are really 55 years old? how are we supposed to remain safe from the terrorists?

~ has anyone noticed that we have been converting the log archives from 2000 to 2003 from static to dynamic pages? once completed, it will remain as easy to overlook the earlier entries as it is currently.

~ all the panic can cease; we managed to score a copy of ‘amazing spider-man’ #529 at new york city’s forbidden planet this weekend. we dug through a pile of second printings and uncovered a few first printings; we left two (2) of them on the shelf for anyone who wants to pedal there immediately upon reading this.

~ speaking of marvel comics, it is news to us that marvel and dc have held the rights to the term ‘super hero’ since the 1960’s!

~ speaking of ridiculous ideas, we have seen parked in front of the abandoned church on 47th and kingsessing vans emblazoned with a logo for an ‘anti-graffiti network’ [w]. this is a surprisingly clever use of philadelphia’s limited resources; we need graffiti so much less than we need anti-stabbing, anti-shooting, or anti-getting beaten in the street in broad daylight networks. although, perhaps if more hoodlums were allowed to spraypaint, they would have less time to punch cyclists in the face [+] and steal routers and hand tools [+].

~ we were just as torn up as the next reader when we reached the end of ‘daredevil’ #81 and found that it was the last issue of the bendis/maleev run that has kept us riveted to the title for the past four years. wiping away two (2) months of tears, we cracked open #82 and #83 and discovered brubaker and lark might be able to ably succeed bendis/maleev. if not, we can always revisit ‘hardcore‘.

~ also, we were unable to get our paws on a copy of ‘amazing spider-man’ #529. who knew that ‘asm’ would sell out? that is like being told, ‘we are all out of coke.’ if anyone has an extra copy, you can send it to our box.

~ bush is pissed that a christian in afghanistan is scheduled to be executed for being a christian in afghanistan:

“It is deeply troubling that a country we helped liberate would hold a person to account because he chose a different religion over another.” -gwbush

didn’t we march freedom into that place years ago? we sponsored the afghan’s writing of their own constitution which establishes islamic law. the afghan people have spoken (‘kill all christians’), which is what we asked for, so why the bitching from bush? if our marching of freedom and spreading of democracy is to always result in islamic fundamentalist regimes, then we can skip iran – it’s already spoken for – because we know that ‘spreading democracy’ will be the next excuse for invading iran once the administration realizes that every sensible listener will hear the claim that iran is moments away from transforming dallas into a mushroom cloud and know that is bullshit they have heard before.

~ to those vegans who cared that l’oreal is buying the body shop: tom’s of maine sells out to colgate [enn.com].

~ after two (2) visits to the vet(s) phobos was diagnosed with conjunctivitis; after a week of ophthalmic drops, his eyes have cleared, and we recommend cat vet of south street whilst unrecommending girard veterinary clinic.

~ we do not know if anyone still uses lipstick or soap and shops in the mall, but we wonder if groups like peta [w] will still recommend body shop, now that it has been purchased by l’oreal, a notorious abuser of animals, according to bbc [w].

~ we aren’t allowed to comment on cafe tableaux [w], but there are some fallacies in a recent comment about their review for double shots espresso bar which deserve a small bit of our attention:

(errors from original post) “Hmm, I frequent this shop quite often and there doesn”t seem to be any books DISPLAYED but many are on some bookshelves along with many other works. WiFi is FREE and I use it for school work quite often but I guess if you stayed more than the 12 seconds you would have found that out. Maybe one should not be so quick to make judgements about books considering we all do have the right of freedom of speech (just like the freedom to write our thoughts online)” –shawn

» thos [w] wasn’t ‘quick’ with his judgment about the ‘drudge manifesto’; he was aware of the politics of drudge before entering the cafe, so there was no judgment about the material being made on the spot. thomas had long known the text to be partisan, kool-aid propaganda.

more importantly, the fact that there is such a thing as ‘freedom of speech’ does not absolve anyone from being judged. the conceptual gap between your whining that drudge should not be judged and your ‘defense’ of free speech is large enough to roll an f-150 through it. nothing is more embarrassing than seeing someone cry about their right to expression by bitching when someone else expresses a contrary view. shawn and drudge have the freedom to say or write whatever they want, and thos has the right to tear their drivel a new one.

in any event, at no time did thos claim that drudge did not have the right to espouse drivel; thos stated that he did not desire to ‘support a cafe that displays…Drudge’. the difference between these positions can not be made more clear.

» when a book is placed in the center of a shelf with its face turned to the room whilst every other book shows only the spine, that qualifies as a ‘prominent display’

» thos looked up double shots online at the time of review; they state that wireless access requires payment.

~ a discussion o’er at jawk [w] resonates with some earlier off hand comments made on the angry red planet upon hearing that the south dakota legislature has passed a bill which would require that doctors who perform abortions be fined and imprisoned for ending a ‘life’. no one who’s not as dumb as a stump fails to understand that the law is a gimmick to push the argument over which gov’ts, state or federal, has the authority, if anyone does, to interfere in women’s personal health. what if ‘we’ let them have south dakota? ignore the unconstitutional law and throw rights to the dogs in that welfare state; let safety and health of women in that state collapse, so that it can be preserved in the other forty-nine (49). they asked for it. lest some hapless woman who didn’t ask for it be abandoned to the dangers of child bearing in south dakota, take the millions of dollars that would have been blown in court cases and spend them on relocation of all those ladies to new york, california, and (maybe) oregon. what if evangelicals threw a party and we only let the dipshits turn up?