What in the hell …

The infamous Doctor Power shamelessly calls for the destruction of all that is holy. Tremble, good hearts, and pray. (more…)

I put up a speech Staughton Lynd gave in Minneapolis a few years back, about general strikes. (more…)

By ‘anything’ I mean ‘my work,’ actually. I’m halfway through the Steinfeld. It’s gotten better but is still pretty slow going. It feels very much like a pretty far remove from a lot of what I’m doing. It’s in the same ballpark I guess but not a work that speaks directly to my project. (more…)

I’m back to climbing. I definitely feel like I used to be better at this, but I wasn’t climbing all that long so I should get back to where I was in short order. I’ve found I really like to go to the climbing gym by myself, especially if it’s not crowded. I do more climbing in less time that way, it’s a more efficient form of exercise and I like the focusing part of it. I mean, I like to climb with people too but it’s just a different head space. I particularly like to go when the gym’s not crowded, like I said. I like to do the same routes or route several times, and I’ve started to track numbers of climbs in my notebook. I track attempts and completions. Today I had 8 attempts up the wall and 6 completions. Those were all at 5.7 or 5.7+ level. (Actually, the 2 attempts I didn’t complete were on this one 5.7+, the 6 completions all on this one 5.7.) I also had 8 attempts and 6 completions on a traverse. For folk who don’t know, a traverse is climbing along the bottom of the wall, parallel to the floor, as opposed to climbing up the wall. I was at the gym for an hour and a half or so, maybe two hours tops. The two times I’ve gone on outdoor trips with four or more hours at the site I’ve climbed up maybe 5 or 6 times, so this is about twice the climbing in half the time or less than half. Pretty cool. My immediate or maybe middle-term goal is to get to 10 completions each, at the wall and on the traverse, regardless of how many attempts that requires. I plan to keep going on days and times when I think it’s not likely to be crowded, to go two to three times per week, and to stick mostly with the same routes and in the same difficulty level. After I get the ten and ten I’ll try to climb all the routes in the gym at this level, aiming for the same number of completions. After that I’ll up the difficulty level and pick one route to concentrate on again until I’m back to ten and ten with that. That’s the plan anyhow. It feels really good to be back to climbing.

They’re the title of two columns from the Industrial Worker newspaper. Minority Report was a column that ran a while back and isn’t running anymore. Workers Power started a few years later and is still running. I think both are good. I’ve helped on the Workers Power columns. The Workers Power columns page includes illustration from my friend Jefferson. You can see more of his artwork here. Definitely more relevant than my scattered IWW musings and all.

So back here in the What In The Hell (Am I Doing In This Cave) Cave I have a computer monitor that tracks in real time how people found my site, what they’re wearing, and what their last meal was. It’s awesome. Through that device I found this link:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2008/02/29/is-the-best-lightbulb-joke/

Some discerning well dressed character who had just eaten a tasty meal of corn chowder and sourdough bread, washed down with a natural cola and a dessert of fresh strawberries and cream (me, I’d have had chocolate cake, but I’m not one to judge) posted my lightbulb jokes up for the amusement of others. This fine altruist also listed the following (more…)

I circulated that draft of a thing I wrote on mass work to some comrades and got a few comments in response. Here are some of those comments and what they made me think of. Part of what I’ve got rattling around in my mind is a phrase Adam used when we talked recently about the Furious Five, “building a new base for anarchism.” Also rattling around in my mind are the various things in that diagram on organizational work that I sketched out on note cards to try and get clearer on stuff. (more…)

Let’s see if this works. If it does, the image will still suck cuz I’m bad at this stuff. (more…)