Xanax online using cod

My favorite website discovery: Le Moleskine A Beleg. Found via BoingBoing, where Xeni explains:

On this wonderful little blog, a young man in Bordeaux, France sketches his way through life in a series of moleskine journals. He scans the results, and posts them online for all to see.

The beautiful thing about this “blog,” to me, is the way in which the traditional blog architecture is used as an interface to a fundamentally different experience, one which is elegant in its design and almost tactile in its implementation. I almost wish the designer had gone a step further, and had the “Archive” option link to nothing but a series of thumbnails of each day’s entry…

So, as best as I understand it, Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution reads:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers

Now, as a resident of the District of Columbia, I have no congressional representation (either in the House or Senate). Since the Constitution explicitly links representation and taxation, why am I obligated to pay Federal taxes? What happens if I decide not to?

It’s such a simple approach that it seems like it must have been tried before, but a few quick searches haven’t turned up much in the way of solid information…anyone?

Update: Okay, I spoke too soon: the Supreme Court addressed this issue in the 19th century. I’m not sure that the answer is satisfying, though…as lawyer George S. LaRoche wrote during a washingtonpost.com live chat a few years ago:

Ever since, the law has been unshakable: there is no claim under the Constitution for “taxation without representation.” But legal claims are not the only way to make “cases.” The taxation issue, however, is easy to discuss, not to mention popular, but when it comes time to do something, you’d be surprised how quickly everyone backs away from being the one to not pay taxes or even add a written protest. So to do something through the “taxation” issue, you would have to put yourself on the line, big time.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an uncomfortable relationship with sleep…to put it simply, I just don’t get tired when normal people seem to. That’s not to say that I don’t every get sleepy; I do, it’s just that it happens when the sun comes up, rather than when the sun sets. It runs in my family, too…my Mom is worse than I, and her dad was just the same.

That’s not to say that I just toss and turn – one might say that I learned my limits early on in life, and embraced my nocturnal nature. As a child, I used to spend hours each night reading by flashlight, a practice which gave way somewhere in high school to the late radio broadcast of Larry King. In college, the one-two whammy of a heavy courseload and 2 am reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Comedy Central meant that I was more likely to see 4 am than I was to see 9 am, and by the time I got to grad school, it was A&E’s 3 am episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street and journal articles with which I whiled away the early morning hours. When I needed to be up early, I would take a sleeping aid of some kind (Sominex et al), which usually got the job done but left me feeling all sorts of groggy the next day.

Then, while doing a research on insomnia a few years ago, I discovered melatonin supplements. It was a revelation; I could take a pill and within a half-hour feel the easy sleepiness that everyone around me seemed to take for granted. I’ve never been formally tested, but it seems pretty clear that the supplements make up for the melatonin that my own body doesn’t seem to produce once the sun sets. For more than three years, melatonin has been a part of my nightly routine, and I’ve actually enjoyed a regular, dare I say “normal” sleeping schedule.

That is, unless something happens like tonight; I opened the medicine cabinet to find the bottle empty. “Crap,” I thought. It was too late to go to a drugstore, too late to replenish my supply. See, the odd thing is that melatonin doesn’t build up in your system, so if I don’t take it one night, it’s right back to my old tendencies. Thus, it’s close to 4 in the morning, and after spending several hours clearing my inbox, fiddling with blog templates and catching up on other work, I’m still uncomfortably wide awake.

I’ve got to admit, it’s an extremely familiar feeling, and one that I don’t miss in the least.

Along with everyone else I know, I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened on Nov. 2, and how to move forward after it. Leaving aside my tinfoil-hat indulgences and million-to-one fantasies about ballot turnarounds in Ohio, a common theme since I walked into work on Nov. 3rd has been the idea of secession.

Secession, of course, can take many forms: there’s the literal secession of states from the union, which isn’t really a viable option (these graphics aside). There’s the personal secession of moving to Canada or elsewhere, regardless of how difficult that might be in practice. For me, however, the idea I can’t seem to shake is a more theoretical secession, stepping back from the image of the United States of America as a single, unified whole and moving toward a more vision of heterogeneous states tied by a loose and scaled-back federal government.

I’ve been hearing rudimentary forms of this argument for close to two weeks now, ranging from a colleague and I arguing that the best plan would be to cut Red State welfare like farm subsidies to a friend’s vow that she’d stop worrying about abortion being kept legal throughout the country, and that instead she’d simply work to make sure that it stays legal where she lives. This makes sense – we’re all retrenching, moving back to more stable ground after an unsettling defeat, and there’s an element of reactionary anger underlying much of this rhetoric; a sort of “Alright, fuck you, I’m taking my ball and going home.”

The Seattle paper The Stranger has made a similar argument, using the city rather than the state as the unit of analysis:

Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion–New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too–a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland “values” like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country.

The thing that makes their manifesto required reading, however, is the fact that this secessionary rhetoric is funneled into constructive action. Leaving aside a few cheap shots, this essay is the clearest, most straightforward statement of my values that I’ve seen in recent political discourse. I’m an unabashed urbanist, and would love to see the Democratic Party embrace this philosophy explicitly.

Some choice excerpts after the jump…

So, most of the freelance writing I’ve been doing in the past two years has been in the form of unsigned reviews for Publisher’s Weekly, but I’m pleased to report that the very first published chunk of my dissertation has appeared on newsstands across the U.S. this month: the November issue of The Believer contains a lovely one-page essay on the blinking 12:00 and its cultural significance…

Spent the last week or two lost in several programming projects, one involving a Flash interface to some of the tools we’ve developed at the Center, the other involving a MediaWiki implementation inside of the current ECHO site. Throw in a few days of post-election funk (which I’m still shaking off), and you get a sorely-neglected blog.

Those of you who actually see this site, as opposed to simply reading the RSS feed, will notice some changes…at long last, I’ve updated the site to Movable Type 3.0, dynamic pages and all. The dissertation counter along the right sidebar has stopped for good, finally removed a good three months after my defense (for anybody interested, the final word count was 69,043, coming in at 265 pages). In its place are a few experiments, including a del.icio.us feed as well as my most recent media consumption. Still to come are an updated blogroll and some other bells and whistles (not to mention actually coming up with a usable category scheme), but it seems better to just get a new version up and running than to wait for everything to be finished – as a good friend recently noted, the site was well past embarassingly out of date.

That in mind, the new subhead speaks volumes…one of the things I’ve been learning in my new job is that though I can do many things well, design is sadly not one of them. Thus, I’m defaulting to one of the basic MT 3.0 templates for the moment, until I either develop a designer’s eye, or sucker someone who’s got one into helping me out. Feh.

See, now this is what I call using new media to do history in innovative ways:

“The Lost City. A group of architecture students have to reconstruct the historical evolution of the city of Lausanne. They have to understand how the old urban structure of the city from the Middle Age survived and melted in the actual city. Instead of using a current map of Lausanne, they download on their phone the 1850 map. The group members split into the city centre and attempt to follow the old streets as displayed on the phone.

“From time to time, they bump into a building or they are not able to find where the urban tissue hides the old structure. In these cases, the students drop a landmark on the virtual map. Later on, in class, the actual map and the historical map are merged with the landmarks the students defined on their field trip. Finally, the professor collect the maps built by the students and use them in his next lecture.”

[via Anne Galloway]

“Scientists create and collect their own data, while humanists work with data collected by others” (heard at the DLF Cyberinfrastructure and Humanities panel).

Thoughts?

I’ve been hanging around at the Digital Library Federation’s Fall Forum in Baltimore. Most of my notes are jotted on low-tech paper, but I did type in my notes on John Unsworth’s keynote address, “Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences” (slides here) Here’re my raw, unedited notes:

Basic vocabulary of “cyberinfrastructure” can be problematic

Term comes from Atkins report (“Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure”), Blue-ribbon panel funded by NSF

• NSF expects recommendations when giving funds
• ACLS panel more like an amicus brief, and less concerned with how to disburse actual funds

“Cyberinfrastructure” described in layers:

• layer below cyberinfrastructure comprises hardware, etc..
• layer above cyberinfrastructure comprises “software programs, services, information, knowledge and social practices” in specific local contexts and practices
• cyberinfrastructure itself lies between these layers, of enabling “hardware, algorithms, software, communications, personnel”
• most important is that this is a shared layer across practices and sites, but isn’t “electronic plumbing” shared by everything

I. Am. So. There.