I’ll not have much access to the internet for a couple weeks, maybe a bit more. So no worries friends, all is well.

To keep spam and such off the site I’ve set all comments to full moderation. So I’ll get them, but they’ll not appear for a bit. They are still much appreciated of course. I just don’t want the site to fill up with spam for drugs, investments, fake watches and perfumes and the like.

At the drive in of course!

And if you drive this please park in back…

As a brief recap: In 2004 three teen boys befriended Rex Baum, a homeless man, at his camp in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and drank beer with him. Before long they were brutally attacking him and ended up killing him. They were caught and sentenced, aided by their bragging about the act around town.

This action was blamed on video games.

I’m hardly a big supporter of video games and I’ll not be an apologists here for them but I do feel scapegoats are a lovely thing to have rather than face the cold reality. Kids made choices and the choice in question was to kill. The Playstation wasn’t there to prompt them.

At penny-arcade.com the step mother of one of the boys allegedly wrote in to respond to a posting there two days previously. The original post is here, as the third item on the page, and the step mother’s response is contained within the second item on this page. Apparently the boy was not just a monster in the making–he was already well past the evil stage.

On the upside: attacks against homeless people may be officially declared a hate crime in California. Currently this is only the case in Maine.

The result of an actual dream by the artist, Harrod Blank’s Camera Van is covered with a collection of more than 2,000 cameras, ten of them functional Canon EOS cameras controlled by shutter buttons on the dashboard and a monitor that serves as the viewfinder. Harrod and his van have traveled across the United States, England, and Germany, capturing the expressions of a startled public. He now dreams of taking his unique rolling photographic studio around the world to document the reactions of other peoples and cultures.

Visit the Camera Van website and see photos of bewildered people captured by the van.

This V8-powered RV has four axles, one fixed, two steerables at the front and one steerable at the rear. Built from three vans stitched together, it’s stuffed with a genuine oak-wood kitchen with microwave, refrigerator, stove and sink, sofas around the kitchen table, leather LZ-boy, radio, communication radio, cassette player, mount-in-TV, toilet, Queen size bed, hardwood floors except bedroom which has carpet, 2 separate ACs for travel and camping, heater, sunroof.

Sold about a year back for some twelve grand on ebay.

I haven’t written of late and at some point perhaps I’ll address that fully. But, I have been reading my email and watching the comments here on the site and I’ve appreciated them even though I’ve not responded. Real life must of course come before websites but I’ve apparently left a bit of a hole that needs filling.

“Readers” is as good a term as any I think. Regardless of the term you have motivated this posting.

I am alive and reasonably well. And you’re right, it is wickedly cold. Last summer I had decided to move south for the winter if need be–should I need the warmth. But each week here brought yet another reason to stay yet another week. Eventually, before I knew it, it’s Super Bowl weekend and I’m still here.

For the time being I do have warm accommodations thanks to a kind friend. It is not permanent by any means but while things are life threatening I do have some traditional shelter. I have learned in recent months that I can camp out in weather dropping to about twenty degrees without using a heat source. It’s not the ideal but it is possible with reasonable comfort even if “reasonable” means frost on my top blanket. But right now it’s negative eight fahrenheit and that’s just a wee bit too cold. So indoors I am.

It’s funny though how accustom to the cold I’ve gotten. Normally I’m the one braving the winter with sixteen sweaters on and shivering. That was of course in the housed days whereas now I’m far more subject to the elements and have rather handily adapted to them. Now I have to turn off the heat in the room I’m sleeping in as I’ve grown used to ice cold air and plenty of blanket weight upon me.