You know who I admire? I admire Ice Cube. He's a standout lyricist and his verbal skills in terms of execution and annunciation leave me and my BFA-holding ass jealous. Not only that, but he's built a career as an actor, with a family-film out now that's getting pretty positive reviews. That's fucking awesome -- bully for you, Cube -- and not least of all because it should show some hip-hop-haters what it's all about: being an artist. We could use more of that kind of consciousness.

Thanks all for the votes and comments. The Time Of Great Renewal is upon us. Thanks to my mother, I have a spiffy new 12" powerbook, which gets five hours of battery life and is light as a feather. I just slapped a 1gig RAM module into it after running around trying to find a screwdriver that was small enough. I went to the tiny local spot across the street, run by a friendly old guy who's always hanging out watching baseball with Horatio -- my local bodega-man -- when I drop in to get pounders of Tecate. Horatio is himself a great local character; a scrupulous price gouger who still hangs a painted portrait of JFK behind the register, calls me "capitan" (cap-ee-tan).

But I digress. Since it was a local hardware place, I just dropped two bucks to borrow a set of screwdrivers. Sadly none of them worked so I walked up the hill to get an even smaller one -- Apple, when will you just let us use regular tools? -- and popped in the RAM module. The Pbook is smooth as ice now. It comes stock with 256mb, which is a pittance in modern terms. Now it's a demon on amphetamines, a steroid-drivin aluminum-shelled calculating dervish with a Napoleonic complex. And all told it cost about 70% of what my last one did. Nice trendline, that.

It's going to be a worky time these next months. Itinerant consultant boho hobo pomo mofo faux pho foe, and maybe even a little po'. The site shifts will come as time and inspiration dictates. Until then, bear with the business and crap.

I hate my website design as it is, and I'm pretty unsatisfied with how my content is organized. When I think about my life going forward, I don't see this internet thing really being any less a medium of my expression. What with the coming audiovisual revolution, it's just gonna kick more and more ass. So anticipating a growth in online publishing and projects, and already being dissatisfied with the organization. I'm thinking about how to bifrucate my publishing apparatus.

There's a poll on this just down the page an inch or two. I hope you'll take it.

I want to take outlandishjosh.com back to the old-school, back to life stories and art and rambling fits of whimsy and inspiration. I want it to once again be a real-time autobiography, a place for me to develop The Philosophies and shit like that. I also intend to make it a index/aggregator for all the content I produce.

Principally, that means taking my "professional" writing (politics, technology, opinion) and maneuvering it into a new container, and finding good containers for more project-oriented things.

This would mean when you come to this website, you'd see more stuff about me and my life and less stuff about the wider world. If you're a fan of my opinions about the wider world, there would be another place to go to get those, or you could probably click on something here to get the most recent poop.

I made this, along with Matt Stoller and Bob Brigham design credit goes to the timely Miles Kurland). It's a good project and a good time to launch it. Kudos to Matt for snapping up the URL.

Maybe Paul Krugman will link to it in an op-ed. That would be worth starting a scrapbook for.

If you want to get in on the action toss us a link and use the words Social Security when you do it. Take it, google!