(no subject)

I'm thinking I should attend alchemy more. I don't know - the music I like isn't getting much play, and I remember bailing on alchemy as the crowd grew dumber with the music. Is it better now? If not, what can I do to make it better? I don't mind the mandatory hits, whether I bitch about them or not, but the hour or 2 hours stretches of noise/ebm/synth were just annoying. Still, if I don't patronize AND BITCH then I won't hear anything. There won't be big spaces to dance anywhere in DC soon, and I don't relish trying to hunt for parking in Adams Morgan to hear good music in a smoke-filled place with a 12x12 concrete dance floor. The smoke in Black Cat and DC 9 makes my eyes bleed. I also don't want to hear crappy music, so what do I do?

Why is it summer and I still have no time to work social events into my calendar?

(no subject)

European vs. American conceptualizations of privacy from cultural perspectives:
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October-2004/review_rosen_sepoct04.html

"Instead of seeking a good name that will bring them honor, people seek to be famous in the way that a celebrity is famous—that is, "a person who is well known for his well knownness," as the social historian Daniel Boorstin memorably put it in his book The Image. Boorstin wrote before the development of the Internet turned every citizen into a potential public figure. Thanks to the Web, private citizens now have the same technological opportunities as celebrities to expose and market themselves to strangers, with similarly unsettling results.

Consider the proliferation of blogs, the personal Internet journals that often combine political musings with intimate disclosures about daily life. There are more than a million and a half of them, according to one of the latest estimates. Some are devoted exclusively to public affairs while others are nothing more than published diaries. (A site called Diarist.net collects more than 10,000 journals from self-styled "online exhibitionists.") Often, these diaries are virtually unreadable examples of self-display, dreary accounts of navel-gazing whose primary function seems to be therapeutic. But they reflect a desire for public attention so powerful that it erases the boundaries between public and private."