You can’t read this - or can you?

I got the axe.

I was taken to the gallows pole.

They pulled my plug.

I no longer appear to exist.

They took away my voice - at least over the airwaves.

 That won’t stop me. 

BWAHAAAHAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

 PEACE!

I used to do a lot of visual art. I haven’t drawn much since I was about 18. I don’t really know why I stopped. Maybe it was replaced by music or some other equally muse satisfying pursuit. I take photographs occasionally, or maybe they’re all just pictures. It’s all in the wording, really. Photograph is to picture what cuisine is to food, or what portrait is to drawing.

In any event,  I was cleaning up my office at home today and managed to get my scanner back up and running in the process, and decided to take it for a test drive. While I was scanning an old pice of my so-called art I looked at the calendar and realized the date:

December 8th.

28 years ago today, John Lennon ate his last breakfast, gave his last interview, took his final ride across the city, nurtured his muse just one more time in the studio, and breathed his final breath.I thought I’d share with you a morsel from my past: A skeleton from my art closet circa 1987-1988.

Imagine. 

It’s fun to be anonymous: You can say and do whatever you like without fear of consequence. Such is the appeal of any form of communication outside of a face-to-face interaction.

Take comments on a blog:The blogging world is a strange place sometimes. Just like many aspects of technology, blogging (the Internet in general) affords folks a sort of cloaking device. With this invisibility mechanism in place, folks often say and do whatever they feel like doing. Anyone who has bothered to read the comments posted beneath a politically-charged online article can see the vitriol that often accompanies said postings.

I was updating some posts and checking comments today, and a comment struck me as a little odd. In the comments section of my first post on the blog, you will see \’)/* ekibastos. Yes, strange, to say the least. With great curiosity and expectation, I googled this (seemingly) gibberish, to find that if you maintain a blog, this \’)/* ekibastos person has hit a lot of blogs and message boards online for a while now, but always with the \’)/* ekibastos post, and nothing more. I seem to be in a large contingency of folks who post articles online that have been visited by this entity/person/mystery organism. Strangely, I don’t feel special as a result…

Andy Warhol talked about 15 minutes of fame. Assuming ekibastos is in fact a person, I wonder - because there is always a trail of binary code out there in cyberspace from all of our respective Internet pithering - if this is ekibastos’ attempt at immortality? Is this the modern equivalent of the carved bust, or a Great Pyramid?

Anyone?

Ekibastos?

Bueller??

Mountain biking is great fun, and living along the Front Range means a great number of trail heads with short commutes. Getting my bike up and running again means more of these ventures into the hills. Now, I’ve never actually encountered an off-road unicyclist, but I have seen videos of them, like those posted here and here. I think I’ll stick to two wheels for now.  Then, I encounter what I think to be the epitome of humankind’s desire to conquer nature and subdue our own fears of the Unknown: A Brit wants to summit Mt. Everest on a unicycle!! He intends to descend on the thing as well. Will this end in disaster, or will it open the doors for even more creative forms of “extreme” unicycling? Stay tuned… Here’s a link to the story, which includes some tasty pics as well…