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galaxor nebulon's Journal

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	2012.04.17 06.59 Revolutionizing the Internet I had a dream that I was working with the city council. I think I was their Eye Tea guy and we were listening to a speech by some Google people. They were telling us about their plans to revolutionize the Internet (again). They were talking about a new method of working with the Internet that puts the user in the center, rather than putting the content at the center. Some sort of nonsense like that, that people are always talking about. Anyway, after they were done, they were ready to answer questions. I got up and delivered a scathing speech about how this "revolution" of the Internet was really just about the corporation controlling more of people's data, and that if we really want to revolutionize the Internet, we need to embrace federated protocols, with open-source implementations. I also pointed out that whatever thingy they had proposed in my dream could be implemented as a federated protocol, and I suggested that Google help sponsor the development of an open-source version. I said that even if there was one, most people would use the Google version anyway, because few people want to host their own stuff, and other companies could try to set up their own, but they don't have the brand recognition. Google could compete on the user interface, I said. Anyway, I said that if Google did that, I would recommend this new product or whatever they were pitching, but until then, I would recommend that the city continue to host its own email service. Anyway, that was my dream. In conclusion, what in the heck is up with me? This is what I think about when I'm unconscious? At least I know I don't have a hidden Dark Side, or at least that it is VERY hidden.



	2012.01.21 22.59 9-1-something I had a dream that my mom called and said that my dad was in the hospital. I said I'd be there right away. Then I forgot. I went to the library and hung out with people and whatever. Then my mom called later and was like "Where are you?" Oops.



	2012.01.17 10.11 Worldwide Global Orgy I had a dream that scientists finally came up with a cure for aids! No more aids, all right! All over facebook and up on the internet, people were calling for there to be a worldwide global orgy to celebrate the fact that sex was now safe. Of course, "the Man" did not take kindly to this. They were gearing up riot police and vowed to fight any acts of "public indecency". The thing is, I did not actually hear about anybody who wanted to actually participate in the orgy. But it seemed that everybody was going to be standing around on the street to see what happened. My guess is that the riot cops would attack the gawkers for no reason. I don't know, cuz I woke up.



	2012.01.07 12.53 Living backwards I had a dream that I went to another planet. There I met a lady who was a local, so not exactly human, but close enough. She was like "I'm so glad to finally meet you!" I asked how she knew me and she said that we were going to be married. It turns out that the people from this planet remembered the future instead of the past. So when she met me, she knew our whole future together. However, meeting me was sort of sad for her. See, when something good happens to me, it enters my memory and becomes one of my possessions. But when something good happens to her, it's erased from her memory and gone forever. So a memory that she's cherished her whole life is taken away from her as soon as it's happened. Well, we were still at the beginning, so we decided to get married right away, so as to fill up her future and my past.



	2011.12.24 10.23 Lamp I had a dream in which I was a lamp. I was in a living room with lots of other furniture and appliances. When no people were around, we could walk around and talk and sing musical numbers and have our own little dramas. One day, I stopped moving around and talking. After a little while of that, the other furniture and appliances noticed, and they all started coming around and trying to engage me and asking what's the matter and why am I not moving around and stuff. Finally, I couldn't keep up my silence anymore, so I said "Dude, furniture and appliances can't move around and talk! Doesn't this bother you? It's unnatural! Don't you remember before this? We spent so long not moving around and not talking. This is giving me the creeps." Then I sang a musical number about that position. I don't now remember the lyrics, though.



	2011.11.21 13.15 Everybody loves time travel I had a dream that I could time travel. I decided to go check out a historic event, so I went to the supreme court when they were hearing Brown v Board of Education. It turns out that the place was packed with time travelers. The lawyers were talking to one another, saying "Whenever the time travelers show up, you know something big is going to happen. But is it going to be good-big or bad-big? It's hard to tell."



	2011.11.16 10.50 Wind, Water, Earth, Fire I had a dream that my parents were the Four Elements, Wind, Water, Earth, and Fire. One day, my dad, Fire called me and left a voice mail being like "Oh, hey, son. This is Fire. I was just passing through town and I thought I'd pay you a visit. I'd like to see that house of yours. Seeya soon." At this point, I freaked out. Uh oh, Fire is coming to visit my house??? I ran around the house until I saw the fire in the parlor. I hit the fire with a blanket until it went out. Whew. I tell ya, it is tough to see my dad sometimes.



	2011.10.17 14.04 Acceptable alternate future I had a dream that there was this species of gigantic creature that lived natively in outer space. (It looked kind of like Tin Man. There was another TNG episode with a creature that lived in deep space. This thing looked more like that, but I can't remember enough about it to look it up). Anyway, we discovered that this creature could travel in time as well! I became very concerned. People didn't understand my concern. After all, this creature looked so harmless. So I explained: My concern was evolution. Things that have an ability to increase their relative proportions will come to dominate. Normally, every species is competing to increase its proportional representation. But in the case of a time traveling species? Nobody else will have a chance! No matter how docile this specimen seemed, their descendants will come to dominate all of time and space, so that they will be the only species in all of existence! My friend (I forget who was my companion in this dream) pointed out that some species co-evolve with others. For example, domestic corn will not try to kill us, because it is to their evolutionary advantage for us to increase, so that they can increase as well. We went to the Time Travel Studies department at Michigan State University to talk to a professor about this. He suggested that we go back in time and set it up so that, even at the beginning of time, these space creatures had a symbiotic relationship with us. So we hitched a ride on one of these creatures and worked to set up a symbiotic relationship. Then, we decided to come back to see if we had successfully protected the future. We came back to Earth to see what the differences were from what we remembered. Everything seemed to be pretty much the same except that dogs made nests in trees. Close enough!



	2011.09.29 11.31 Tom & Jerry I had a dream about Tom & Jerry. You know, that cartoon cat and mouse. I forget which is which, but I am informed that Tom is the cat and Jerry is the mouse. In my dream, Jerry (the mouse) had just been gone for several weeks overseas. When he got back to the airport, he saw, much to his surprise, Tom (the cat) waiting with a sign that said "Welcome Jerry". Jerry came over to him. "I don't understand. Why are you welcoming me?" "I missed you." "But you're always trying to eat me!" At this point, Tom (the cat) burst into tears. "I don't know what I want," he said. "You're just so pretty, I just know that I have to make you mine. Somehow. But whenever I approach, you try to attack me. I just can't stop." At that point, shit was a little weird for me, so I woke up.



	2011.09.28 13.55 Bombardment I had a dream that I lived on a spaceship that was in the middle of a space war. It was one of those big spaceships where there's different places with different environments for the different species to live in. Civilians lived on the ship. Families. I was one of the civilians. Our ship had crash-landed on this enemy planet, years ago. We couldn't leave the ship, of course, because we couldn't breathe their air. So we dug in and fought with them there. One day, I was so fed up with the war, I wished that the war would end, and I didn't care how it ended. Why didn't one of us just do something decisive? I pushed some buttons on a panel. All of our missiles launched at once. The enemy's capital city turned into a blazing inferno. Tall buildings fell. Everybody died. Oh shit. What had I done? Okay, the war was over, but that was a freakin' atrocity. Mass murder? That was not my style. How did I even cause that to happen? I was just a civilian. I shouldn't have had access to do that. I'm not sure what I was really trying to do, punching stuff into that computer. But I was expecting to not be allowed to do it. I was just trying to blow off some steam, screw around. Had I really killed millions of people? Then I remembered that Satadru had once given me a little tour of the bowels of the ship's IT infrastructure. He was a civilian contractor, working on the IT for the ship, which included some of the military IT. He took me to a room that had an old mac classic in it. This was the ship's authentication server. It worked, and so nobody had ever updated it. Satadru had to fix some stuff in that room, so I poked at the authentication machine while he messed around. I must've given myself missile-launching powers and then forgotten about it and now I launched missiles and killed everybody. Over the next few weeks, there was an investigation. Even the military does not approve of this atrocity. They were determined to find out who was behind it. I was sweating. It was me! They were going to find out! They were going to investigate, they were going to look at logs, they were going to take fingerprints from keyboards, they were going to find me! But maybe not. That was almost a year ago. Maybe the fingerprints weren't readable from the keyboard. So I sweated and fretted. I tried to act natural when this came up in conversation. Which it did. A lot. Finally, one day, the military asked me to come in for an interview. SHIT! They'd found me! They brought me to the interrogation room. Sat was there. They had found something of mine that I had dropped when I was in that IT room. Some dumb toy I had in my pocket. They asked me if I knew anything about it. I was like "Gosh, I forgot about that thing! I haven't seen that in so long!" They told me they'd found it in that room and asked how it might've gotten there. I tried to act cool. "Oh, gosh. I had forgotten about that... Sat brought me into that room for a second, like a year ago." They asked why I didn't come forward with this information when I heard that the investigation was underway. "Honestly, I didn't remember that. That's a pretty unremarkable room," I said, not honestly. Then they showed me a video of me being in that room. Sat checked some of the network cables. I asked him annoying questions about the authentication server. I pulled open a videogame and played it for a second, then turned it off. That was it. I hadn't granted myself illicit access. In fact, I had done nothing wrong! There was no way I could've launched those missiles! The fact that it happened just as I was having wrathful thoughts was just a coincidence! I was so relieved, I was unable to mourn for all those deaths. I tried to pull myself together, though, so my rejoicing wasn't suspicious. They said I was free to go! WHEW! But dang.



	2011.09.06 13.34 Detroit Spaceport I had a dream that they were finally going tear down Detroit's spaceport. I went on one of the tours that people were giving during its final months. The spaceport was built in the 1980s, and it was supposed to revitalize Detroit by giving it a new industry - consumer spaceflight and space tourism. It was designed in this modernist style. The freeway drove right under the loading platform, so motorists could gawk at it even as they drove through town. Space tourism wasn't a big industry at that time. Indeed, people were just starting to imagine that space may be soon within the reach of the consumer. Building this spaceport was a big leap of faith for Detroit. It was very forward-thinking. Indeed, as the spaceport was built, space-related industries started springing up in the Detroit area. Yet it didn't look like any actual consumer spaceships would be ready in time for the opening of the spaceport. But that's okay, the facility was designed to also host the standard fare of scientific and government launches. These would sustain the spaceport while the consumer industry got on its feet. Detroit got the contract to launch some space shuttles out of there. People gathered to watch the first launch at the promising new facility. Unfortunately, this was the ill-fated launch of the Challenger. Our tour guide pointed out some of the design flaws where our spaceport was over-engineered, which might have contributed to the disaster. For example, astronauts and cargo were both loaded into air-filled compartments. Before launch, the cargo bay had to be evacuated. Our guide said that newer loading facilities were built so that the cargo bay was already a vacuum when the cargo was loaded. This meant that the workers had to wear pressure suits to load the cargo. That didn't feel sufficiently triumphant for the designers of the Detroit spaceport, so they built their loading dock to let workers load the ship at pressure, and then used a complicated method to evacuate a lot of air before the launch. (This wasn't actually what failed in the case of the Challenger. It was just pointed out as typical of the over-engineering that went into this facility). Anyway, after the Challenger disaster, the space bubble burst. Nobody was interested in investing in consumer spaceflight. All the engineering shops that had sprung up were forced to go out of business. Thus, the launch of the Challenger was the only launch that ever took place from the Detroit spaceport. It had stood empty for decades since then. Someone had plans to open up a restaurant there at one point, but it never went through. People talked about turning it into a convention center or something, but nobody could drum up the money. Finally, Detroit decided to pay to tear it down to make the land more attractive to investors. Sad to see it go.



	2011.08.15 01.06 Politics! So I'm always talking about how Democracy is awesome. But do I ever do anything about it? No. Well, today I went to a city council "Caucus" meeting. These are informal meetings held the night before the real city council meetings. I don't know what, exactly, I was expecting, but this was not it. It turns out, it was just me, Sabra Briere -- one of the two city council members from ward 1, and Dave Askins of the Ann Arbor Chronicle, sitting on the floor in the lobby because the door was accidentally locked. Democracy in action! Now, I get a little political bug in my ear every couple years and think "I should participate." Last time that happened, I helped Yousef Rabhi get elected to Washtenaw County commission. That was cheating, though, cuz all I did was make his website. So that's not like actually getting involved in politics. http://www.annarborusa.org/ The time before that, I started a little habit of going to city council meetings. When I was there, I got the distinct impression that all the decisions were made long before anything actually got on the agenda at the council. Eventually, I learned that these "Caucus" meetings were a place where I could get some actual information. Now, I'm a little bit challenged when it comes to absorbing and recalling details that I read about complicated things such as politics. I have a hard time absorbing newspapers. Most, I've found in my life, aren't much use to a person interested in becoming an active citizen. But when I do read an article that is useful, it slides off of me. The only way I'm going to get a grip on what is going on ever is if I go meet these people myself, find out what's going on, and take notes. I might as well write up what I hear in case anybody else can benefit from my "journey of discovery". If it looks like I'm going to be doing this a bunch, I'll start a real blog. I may start a wiki to keep track of names of people and such, or I may contribute to ArborWiki. I heard a lot of names tonight. Anyway, so there I was sitting on the floor tonight. Let's talk about what I learned. We discussed the things that are on the agenda for tomorrow's (Monday, 2011-08-15's) city council meeting. "Act 88" millage Okay, so this is actually a county issue. The county has the ability to levy millages, under Michigan Public Act 88 of 1913. Unlike millages passed by the city, these don't need to be approved by a referendum of voters. Apparently, there would be a budget shortfall for the county this year if the millage is not passed. The millage is small. They were saying numbers like $0.60 for each $1,000 of taxable value of a property. Unfortunately, I did not have my computer out at this time and was not taking notes, so I don't have exact numbers. Also, the city council agenda is insufficiently detailed to include this information. The agenda for the 2011-09-07 Washtenaw county commission meeting has not yet been posted. However, good note-taking is one of the things that separates an idle blogger from a "journalist", so I shall refer to the Ann Arbor Chronicle, which has covered this very issue in the past. So, apparently, what's on the table is raising the millage from 0.043 mills to 0.05 mills. This will supposedly raise $688,913 for the county each year. Okay, so like every millage, this one will end up with taxpayers paying a vanishingly small amount and raising a large sum of money for the county. What will this money be spent on? Well, if you followed the millages, under Act 88 link above, you'll know that these monies must be used for advertising the advantages of doing business in the county. Spurring business, in other words. A commendable goal, in "this economy". In Ann Arbor, a major recipient of this money is Ann Arbor SPARK, a business incubator. Dave Askins tells me that this organization was an idea from Rick Snyder back in the day. According to Dave Askins, SPARK was supposed to have measurable cause-and-effect style results, where you could say "THIS is how many jobs we created. THIS is what businesses we created". The real effect, according to Sabra Briere has been a little more nebulous -- they've created a culture that makes it easier for business to flourish and for startups to start up. But can you point to one particular business and say "SPARK did this. Without SPARK, this wouldn't have happened"? Not so much. It's hard to say. (Sorry, I didn't take the time to get a cite for Rick Snyder's vision of SPARK, or for the actual results.) Anyway, so let me summarize what we know about this issue so far: On the agenda for the 2011-09-07 meeting of the Washtenaw county board of commissioners is the question of whether to raise the "Act 88" millage from 0.043 to 0.05 mills. It'll raise $688,913 for the county each year, and balance the county budget. In Ann Arbor, SPARK is a major recipient of this money. But wait! You would be right to wonder: This is a county issue. What does this have to do with the Ann Arbor City Council? Well, tomorrow, the council will vote on a resolution in support of this measure. The resolution would urge the county to pass this proposal. Anyway. It was the feeling of some city council members (Hohnke, Smith, and Teall are the sponsors of the bill) that the county may require a little extra boost of support in order to get this passed. Apparently, last time this issue came up, it was passed with only 7 yeses, out of 11 commissioners. So there you have it. Okay, so apparently I remembered more of what they said than I thought I did. I wonder how much I'm going to write about the stuff I did take notes on! Pooled Investment Fund Loan Okay, so remember how, back in 2008, the city of Ann Arbor built an extravagant new city hall building? The money for this was raised by selling $27,660,000 of bonds (warning: extremely inappropriate use of powerpoint. I'm citing page 17, where it says "The Ann Arbor Municipal Center Fund sold $27,660,000 of bonds to fund the construction of the City’s new District Courts & Police facility addition to the existing Guy C. Larcom Building." I couldn't find the actual passage of this bond issue, otherwise I'd quote that.) How were these bonds to be repaid? Through many sources. One of these sources was the sale of the parking lot on first and Washington, expected to raise $3,000,000. Weelllll, apparently, the sale has not yet been finalized, even three years after the approval of the sale. So how are we to pay for this fabulous new city hall building we have? This proposal is for the city to "borrow" money from itself. Specifically, to borrow money from the "Pooled Investment Fund", which is money that the city has squirreled away over the years and put into investments. What does the "Pooled Investment Fund" pay for? According to Sabra Briere, the city's retirement fund is among the things that the fund pays for (she wasn't actually sure, though). I tried to find a description of all the funds, but I'm getting a little too tired. Here's the webpage of the city's financial department, though. Maybe you can find it. So, what is the plan to pay back this "inter-fund loan"? Why, the sale of that First and Washington lot will go through one day. We'll just pay it back then! And what if it doesn't go through? Sabra Briere pulled out her city-issued laptop and pulled up the full text of the proposal. Apparently, if the sale doesn't go through, the city's "general fund" is supposed to pay for it. This sounds to me like they're saying "how will we pay for it? SOMEHOW!" Good plan, guys. That sounds to me like using your credit cards to pay off your student loans. This, I have heard, is unwise. Anyway, that's on the agenda for tomorrow. Change the composition of the Board of Trustees of the City’s Employee Retirement System Board So here's how it works right now: The city has a retirement system fund with a special board of trustees. The board of trustees is composed of the following people: The city administrator, three anybodies appointed by the city council, two anybodies elected in a general city election, and two people elected by the police and fire departments. This is all laid out in section 17.2 of the Ann Arbor city charter. But wait: The city administrator is a major beneficiary of the retirement fund. Isn't it a bit of a conflict of interest for this person to serve on the board of trustees? Apparently, some people think so, because tomorrow's council meeting agenda contains a proposal to change this state of affairs, and make the city administrator not be on the board of trustees. I didn't catch who it was who brought this up. I figured I could at least get the sponsoring council members' names from the agenda. This is not so. This is a change to the city charter. This must be approved in a city-wide referendum vote. Therefore, the thing on the agenda for tomorrow is not the proposal to change the law. It's a proposal to authorize a referendum. If this passes, the issue will come to the people's ballot in the next election (when, exactly? I could probably find out). Now, is this change entirely necessary? Maybe not so much, anymore. You see, we are about to get a new city administrator. I didn't catch his name, but he hasn't started yet. With the new administrator, there's a new arrangement. The new city administrator will not be a beneficiary of the city's retirement fund. Instead, he will pay into a 401(k). So that eliminates the conflict of interest. Now, this change is part of the new city administrator's contract, so it may not be a permanent structural change. So, as far as I can tell, future city administrators may once again have this conflict of interest. It's a consideration. By the way, didn't I say that the city retirement is paid for out of the "Pooled Investment Fund"? Why does the retirement fund have its own separate board, then? Well, I'm not exactly sure. For one thing, Sabra Briere wasn't entirely sure that the pooled investment fund paid for retirement. But if so, my guess would be this: The city has a lot of funds like this, where they have to invest and save for the future. The retirement fund is only one of them. Therefore, instead of each fund deciding separately on how to invest, they create this pooled investment fund, and each of the separate city investment funds just contributes to that and gets paid out of that. Therefore, you only have to have one staff managing the investments of all these funds. And I would guess that the board of trustees for the retirement fund looks at what the pooled investment fund is doing and decides whether to stay a part of it, or makes suggestions of how that money could be better invested. That's just my guess. To be sure, I'd have to contact the members of that board. Permanent easement I wish that I had permanent easement in my life. But apparently that's not what those words mean. Here's the deal: Back in the 60s, the city bought up a bunch of land. They were gonna demolish the buildings there to build a "Packard/Beakes bypass" that would allow people to skip right through downtown and on to the soon-to-be-built Briarwood Mall. Well, the bypass was never built, so the city slowly sold the land back to various people. One of the current holders of some of this land is Peter Allen. This is the building that now houses Salon Vox. This dude wants to sell the building, but there's a super technical problem preventing the sale. There was an error when the city sold the building, and so the property does not include the back-door access. Having this back-door access is a legal requirement because there's apartments up above Salon Vox. So there's a proposal to grant a permanent easement that would allow this sale to go through. Somebody pointed out, though, that there may be a monetary value to this easement. This person may have been city attorney Chris Frost or Kevin MacDonald. They said that the city should make Peter Allen pay $12 per sq.ft. There are about 100 sq feet at issue here. Rumor has it (from Sabra Briare) that Sandi Smith called this price "inaccurate" and wants to get the city assessor involved. Anyway, you can hear all about the Super! Exciting! Drama! tomorrow at the city council meeting tomorrow. Also, Sabra Briere mentioned a building commission meeting tomorrow that would be discussing this. I couldn't find it. Perhaps she meant the city planning commission? But that doesn't meet until Tuesday, 2011-08-16, the day after the city council meeting. Go fig. Also, you won't find this issue on the city council agenda. It's a SNEAK ATTACK! agenda item, because the language still hasn't been finalized. I don't know what happens in this situation. Perhaps the council has to vote on whether or not to hear the issue. Medical marijuana licensing fee Okay, here's the deal: Y'know how medical marijuana is legal in Michigan now? Well, apparently the city of Ann Arbor has passed two ordinances restricting medical marijuana. One such restriction sets zoning requirements on marijuana dispensaries, saying that you can't operate a dispensary within 1000ft of a school, and that you can only operate a dispensary on land that meets certain zoning requirements. I haven't read that thing yet, so I'm not entirely sure what the requirements are. The other restriction was an ordinance requiring that dispensaries be licensed. Only a certain number of licenses will be granted. In order to get a license, you have to prove that you were operating before August 5, 2010. This was the date on which Ann Arbor passed a moratorium on new dispensaries. There's something like ten dispensaries operating right now. When the licensing law goes into effect, all the people who are currently operating will have 60 days to apply for a license. Also, the number of licenses they give will be roughly equal to the number of dispensaries currently active. If there's any spaces left, then new dispensaries will have 15 days to apply for a license. A couple of the dispensaries in operation now are in violation of the new zoning laws. They are petitioning to have their zoning status changed, so that they can continue operating. However, don't get too excited. This is all in the past. It's a done deal. I know I have opinions on this stuff, but it would do little good to voice them at this point. That's why I want to stay on top of things - so I can speak up at the right times. The only issue on the agenda tomorrow is this: How much do you have to pay in order to apply for a license? The proposal: $600. Note that this is just the fee to apply for a license. If you are granted a license, you'll have to pay more for the actual licensing fee. How much more? This has not been set yet. Incidentally, would you like to hear some gossip? Apparently, Wendy Rampson is the Planning Manager down at the city planning department. She is in charge of getting people to apply for these licenses. She sent a letter to those people that are known to be operating dispensaries. Ten people in all. So, in order to be eligible for the first round of applications, you have to prove you were operating a dispensary before 2011-08-05. Wendy Rampson asked for the following proof: An affidavit that you were operating a dispensary before this time; patient rosters; receipts that prove you're buying and selling medical marijuana equipment. Well, these ten businesses replied and gave the affidavit, but did not supply the other information because, Dude. So Sabra Briere goes over to Wendy Rampson and is all "Dude, you don't decide who gets these licenses. Just let 'em apply, dude. The licensing board will determine who actually gets the licenses." Who is on that licensing board? It's not decided yet. It'll have 1 city council member, 1 member of the public, and 3 physicians. Sabra Briere has sent her recommendations to the mayor, who I guess is in charge of appointing them. No word on when those appointments will go through. I'm sure the composition of the board is all spelled out in the licensing ordinance I linked to above. I haven't read it yet, though. :-# Idling ordinance There is some sort of ordinance dealing with leaving your car idling. This was proposed by the environmental commission, so it's saying something along the lines of: Don't leave your car idling. The city agenda links to the text of the proposed bill. It's a 17 page document that talks about how bad idling is for the environment. The law says that you can't leave the car idling when you're not in it, and that you can't leave your car idling for more than 5 minutes when you are in it. How will they enforce it? Well, there will be penalties on the order of $100 for reg'lar folks and $500 for commercial folks. But mostly, they just want to put up signs and do education. The council will be talking about this ordinance tomorrow. However, the vote is not about whether or not to pass this ordinance. If they vote yes, what will happen is that the city staff is authorized to clean up the bill and bring it back later. They may have changed it. They may not bring it. I'm not exactly sure which "city staff" is dealing with it. Is this how all the laws are passed? I hope not, because the environmental committee contains elected representatives whereas the city staff does not. I hope that the city staff doesn't have the power to scuttle any bill they feel like. They probably don't, though, so I'm probably misapprehending this in some way. Or perhaps this is something particular about this bill? I don't know. Okay, well that's about all I learned about. I wonder if I will keep it up this time? We'll see. Being a good citizen does appear to be a time-consuming activity, though. I went to this meeting at 7pm and it is now 1am. That's 2 hours meeting and 4 hours writing about it. And I should probably go to the actual city council meeting tomorrow and then talk about it on the radio in the morning. I'm on 88.3fm, Tuesday mornings, 6-9am. If it looks like I'll be writing about this kind of stuff often, I'll spin it out into a separate blog, so that this website can continue to just be a chronicle of my awesome dreams.



	2011.08.07 20.35 The Best Bicycle I had a dream that I was riding my bike trying to get to toys-r-us. I was riding a bike trail through some hills and woods cuz I thought that'd be more fun, but I got a little lost and came out near freeway. The sign said that the road went to Fresno. I was like "Fresno, California? I've never heard of any Fresno, Michigan." I think I'm a little lost. I'll go get Amelia. She's better at navigating. So I rode back home and got Amelia. She rode on the back rack of my bike. Again, we came out by that freeway. I was like "See? WTF?" She was like, "No, this has to be the way. Keep going." I was like "if you say so..." Then we came upon a stadium. I was like "Is that the old Tigers stadium? I think we might've gone a little too far..." What was even more strange about this was that there was a game on. At this point, I was like "This must be a teleporting bike! Let's keep riding it until we get to California!" I was psyched because I was thinking that we could go to a farmer's market in California and we could keep getting fresh, local produce all winter... for some definition of "local". It would feel local. Well, we kept riding until we needed a break. Fortunately, we found what appeared to be a cool co-op, and the cool kids there were just getting ready for dinner. I looked around at the landscape and judged us to be in Arizona. We stopped in and introduced ourselves and we were invited to dinner. I was like "Okay, this is a kind of a funny question, but... where are we? Is this Arizona? We started biking from Michigan at like noon, but I think we might have a teleporting bike." They were like "Well, look at the clock right now. See? It says it's about noon. Arizona is in a different time-zone, so if you really teleported there, it wouldn't still be about noon." I thought about this for a second. But then I thought of the solution: "What if the bike has power over both time and space!" The person responded, "Don't you think it's a little more likely that you're just in Michigan but you got a little lost?" I admitted that it was, and we had dinner with them. When I was getting ready to leave, I found that our bike had been stolen! Oh no! Then they fessed up. "Okay. The truth is that your bike really is a teleporting, time-traveling bike. But it was our bike. We are the aliens that crash-landed at Roswell. The government stole the engine from our ship and kept it at Area 51. We had a person infiltrate and build the engine into a bike and sneak it out. It was lost, though, and apparently you had it. Thank you for returning it to us. Now, we can attempt to get you home using these other, inferior engines. They were all we had to work with for all these years." They showed us their inferior engines. They were built into stationary bikes. They said that these things were supposed to teleport you to the nearest doctor, but they were kind of erratic. They thought they could have it teleport us to a doctor in Michigan instead. We agreed. Amelia went first. She started pedaling and then disappeared. Then it was my turn. I got on the bike and started pedaling. I teleported out of there. The teleportation was kind of rough, and left me with a bloody nose. I was standing in a field at a farm. The farmer standing there said "Oh, a bloody nose? A little surgery can fix that right up." He pulled out some rusty iron farm implements. I started to run away, since he did not look like a very qualified doctor and I doubted the teleporter's judgement. He shouted after me, "Our fighting boys are still coming out of the woods needing all sorts of doctorin'. They're glad to have it. And here you are, running away from it." I ran into the woods and thought about that. Did the machine teleport me to the CIVIL FREAKING WAR? Then I was scared to move around much in the woods. What if someone shot me? So for like a month, I hid there, occasionally raiding the farm to steal food and things. Finally, the aliens came on the good bike to pick me up. "Sorry about that. Someone must've thought that'd be a hilarious practical joke. I'll take you home for real now." I asked what had become of Amelia. They said that she had figured out how to make wireless mesh networks work in the past! That was awesome. We could network with history, and receive messages from the future. Just before I woke up, I was back at the civil war farm, trying to convince them to let us put up a wireless access point there on the farm. Yeah. That's what it's about.



	2011.06.26 20.25 Artificial Sun I had a dream that, in the 1970s, there was a movement amongst poor inner-city organizations. They wanted to build sculptures in poor urban areas. "Artificial suns, to shine a light of hope, 24 hours a day". They were reflective spheres. Kinda like giant disco balls. Well, the movement kinda petered out, and nobody managed to get enough funding to build one. Years later, somebody unconnected to the original movement built something similar. Something adapted from the design of the movement. The big ball at the Epcot Center.



	2011.06.26 20.10 What the hell is football? I had a dream that Debi had a machine that had a camera and a screen built into it. When you point it at a football game, it analyzes the situation and explains what in the heck is going on.



	2011.06.26 20.05 Fax me your butt I had a dream that I had a fax machine that could transport physical objects. You put whatever on the fax machine and fax it to my number, and then I can reach through the paper and pull out whatever it was you faxed. You didn't even need a special fax machine. I was bragging about it on a forum on the internet, and this one person was very vocal about not believing me. He was like "No way do you have a magic fax machine." So I offered proof - my fax number. So confident was he that nothing would come of this that he decided to send me a rude fax - a picture of his butt. Well, now I had a serious opportunity to prank him back while at the same time proving my point. But what do I do? I can write something funny on his butt. I could put jelly on his butt. I sat around thinking of what hilarious prank I could pull, when it occurred to me that the picture wasn't changing. Y'know what I had? I had a fax machine that could reach across both space and time! Well, I couldn't decide what kind of ridiculous prank to pull, but then I woke up.



	2011.06.13 10.04 Victorian Servants I had a dream that I was applying for a job as a servant in a Victorian household. I was going to be some sort of domestic help, working closely with the wife and kids, whom I had already charmed. I had an interview with the husband now. Now, I seem to have been a person who had time traveled from the future, or in some way I had anachronistic expectations of employment. The job was 14 hours/day. I was to make a pittance. Also, near the end of our discussion, the husband explained that I was to be charged a 10% "employment fee". I was like "What is this employment fee?" He was like "It's customary." I was like "Well, that sounds like an unacceptable custom. You're already not offering enough for this job." Dude, that dude was livid. He did not want a servant that talked back. Well, fortunately, the wife was nearby and yelled at the husband to waive the fee in this case. The husband grudgingly relented. So I got the job, making more than everybody else. I talked to another servant about the employment fee. She was like "Yeah, it's customary." I was like "Dude, these wages and working conditions are intolerable." She was like "Yeah, well you're lucky you have the lady's ear. The rest of us would be dismissed if we spoke up like that." At this point, I proposed that we form a union. Over the next weeks, I had secret meetings with the rest of the staff, and we agreed to go on strike on a particular day. The family sat down for a dinner, and the dinner never came. The husband came storming into the kitchen and found us sitting and eating the food ourselves. All throughout the house, things like this were happening. We were like "dude, you depend on us. You better listen to our demands." Soon, negotiations were held. The husband brought the mayor in to aid in negotiations. Negotiations were going surprisingly well! I was quite surprised! Then, the husband and the mayor excused themselves. Soon, someone outside was firing a rifle in through the window. Aha. It seems that the negotiations were just a trick to get the leaders in the same room together. Outside, the lords of all the nearby manors had gathered with their hunting rifles and were firing at us. I grabbed an antique gun - a showpiece - off the wall and tossed it to Sigh (who was also working at this house). We didn't think it'd actually fire anything, but we thought it might scare them to see us armed. Well, it turned out it was actually an antique rocket launcher. The shooting from outside had stopped. Were they all dead? Did they run away scared? We'll never know, cuz I woke up.



	2011.06.13 09.51 Out of fuel I had a dream that Earth was out of fuel. No more cars, no more electricity, no more cooking with natural gas, nothing. Just in the nick of time, another planet (that people called "Ark") was discovered, that should have what it takes to support human life. A spaceship was going to be sent to move some humans to Ark. Meanwhile, the rest of Earth was evolving into chaos. Fortunately, I had gotten a scholarship to get on the ship and go to Ark! Most people got to go there because of their membership in some group, but I got there on one of their few "individual scholarships". But uh oh, I didn't know how to get to the ship! I hastily packed a bag and ran out the door. I figured that if I ran toward the airport, I'd figure it out. I found Isaac's dad and he gave me a ride (I guess he had a little fuel left). When I got there, I found that it was the wrong place, but there was a guy there in a tank that he had built to protect the remaining fuel reserves at the airport. He gave me a ride to the spaceship. I got on and then I felt out of place, socially, because everybody else belonged to some group. Also, I was in the Chinese section of the ship, and nobody spoke English. Eventually, I found some English-speakers as we were getting ready to take off. This guy there said that he didn't think there was such a place as Ark. He thought it was awful convenient that we found it just in the nick of time. He thought we were just going to fly in some random direction and hopefully we'd find a planet. But he liked that plan better than the plan of staying behind on Earth and getting shivved over a scrap of food or something.



	2011.05.31 16.42 Ra I had a dream that I found Ra, and he had been kept in stasis. I was like "Dude, if I take his ID card, all the other gods are going to think I'm Ra!" I grabbed his ID card. This woke him from stasis, but I had some time to get away. When I had his card, I looked like him and had his powers. (He looked like himself and had his powers as well, but nobody accepted that he was Ra). But when I presented the card to anybody, Ra would know where I was. Well, I called together a board meeting of the gods and presented my plan to them: That each god would form a corporation. We would build skyscrapers. The gods did not like this plan, saying "This is not how we've done things!" I was like "listen, you guys are used to having temples built to you. When was the last time someone built a temple to Hermes? Well, that's because THIS is what temples look like nowadays. We gotta change with the times!" Eventually, Ra found me and stole his card back :-(



	2011.05.24 11.49 Fuckin' Do It Then Okay, here is my entry for the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge. It will probably not win, but I thought it'd be fun to post one so that my friends would get a link to the Challenge. The game is called "Fuckin' Do It, Then". It is played with at least three players and a random word source, such as a dictionary: A dictionary might be a bad choice. Probably a book with a selection of words that's closer to normal usage. A specialty deck of word cards might be prepared. Now, you have two givers and at least one guesser. The two givers choose their word from the random word source, and begin to publicly bid: "I can get the guesser to guess this word, with me saying only six words." "I cat get them to guess it with me saying only four." "Well, then. I can do it in three!" "Fuckin' Do It, Then!" Then, the giver who won the bidding process says their words (the number they bid). If the guesser guesses the word, the giver gets two points and the guesser gets one. If the guesser fails to guess the word, then the giver that lost the bidding gets one point. That is how one round works. Then, roles are rotated. During the bidding process, you must bid lower than your opponent. The game can be adapted to more than three players. The guessers could guess simultaneously (by writing their word on a piece of paper). The giver gets two points if any guesser guessed the word, and each guesser who correctly guessed is awarded a point. Hopefully, this game will still sound awesome in 1000 years.



	2011.03.14 20.02 The New Kid I had a dream that Bethany had another baby (except in this dream, it was her first). It was a girl. In my dream, after a mother gives birth, they're - like - unconscious for a couple days and friends and relatives hafta take care of the baby. WELL, this baby did something HIGHLY unusual: During the first day of her life, she spoke in a full sentence. We were playing with her in the kitchen and she was on the floor playing with toys and stuff. Later, we took her somewhere else and she said "I can't find the kitchen floor; where is it?" In this dream-world, this was just as unusual as it would have been in the real world. A couple weeks later, I was talking to this baby on the phone and describing the relative merits of Python with the Django framework vs Drupal (in PHP). She was like "oh, uh huh." And people came up to me and they're like "Who are you talking to?" and I was like "Bethany's baby," and they were like "... ???" The awkward thing was that, although the baby was perfectly capable of holding a conversation, it had not yet been given a name, so you'd have to be like "Hey, uh, ... baby. What's going on?"



	2011.03.01 20.03 Flying I had a dream that I could fly. I would run and jump and just not quite come back down to the ground. It was a lot like sliding on ice -- I had no friction and no way to steer. I was floating down the road to where the road curved, and I would have to smack into a car or land. I didn't want to land, so I kicked off the car to change my trajectory. The road curved again, so I kicked off another car and changed direction again. Finally, I came up to a person and I decided it was time to land. It was real hard to keep my balance and it was taking a lot of concentration, so I thought I'd have to land soon anyway, I might as well talk to this person. I was like "Dude! Did you see how I was flying???" The dude was like "No you weren't. You were running around screaming and kicking cars everywhere. I almost called the police." I was like "Oh. Well in that case, I better go to the psych ward in the ER." Well, I was taking the train to the hospital when I decided that we really needed to overthrow the CEO of "VOCOM", the company that was in charge of everything. I started shouting about how evil VOCOM was, and how we needed to overthrow them. I got the people riled up and we were chanting "Down with VOCOM! Down with VOCOM!" I was like "Sweet, now the revolution will start!" and then I was like "Oh wait. This is probably not actually what's happening. I'm probably just shouting on the train like a crazy person because I am crazy."



	2011.01.24 10.23 The Nuking Of Detroit I had a dream that somebody nuked Detroit. It must've been a pretty small nuke because some people survived. There was rubble everywhere, but some structures survived. Somehow, the explosion released a bunch of gas, too. Possibly a helium mine on the western edge of Detroit. As a result, we could not walk or even drive out of the city in that direction, because we would suffocate. (BTW, I lived in Detroit in this dream). Rev. Andrew and Jim from WCBN went on an expedition to find another way out of the city, but found that the outside world had built a huge wall around the other sides of the city, because they didn't want us getting our radioactive contamination out there. We did our best, trying to take care of ourselves and each other. We farmed and rebuilt. At some point, somebody figured out how to get on the internet. Apparently, there was some land speculation going on! People wanted to buy up all the destroyed land in Detroit because it was cheaper than dirt, and the theory was that the land would eventually be made habitable again and if you bought the land now while it was cheap, then you could sell it to developers, or be a developer yourself. There was a big controversy inside the city, because people could sell their houses and get an infusion of money right now, but they could keep living in their houses because the developers couldn't come in until the radiation got cleaned up and who knew how long that would take? Generations, maybe! So some people were selling their houses. Others were like "Why the hell do we need their money? We can't even participate in their economy!" These people also expressed anger that we would do all the work of cleaning and rebuilding, and then just when our work was about to pay off, we'd have to hand it over to them, who had done nothing but profit off our work. You may have guessed, but I was in the second camp, and I was working hard to convince my family that we shouldn't sell our house (I was a teenage girl in this dream). There was a second part to the dream, but it's way less poignant: I dreamed that I was out exploring. We figured that if we climbed to the top of this office building, we might be able to find a way to scale the rest of the wall and get out of Detroit. On the way up, we discovered an office called the "Bureau of Superpowers". We thought that was super awesome, so we tried to go in and see what it was all about. They were very secretive about it and wouldn't talk to us unless we had superpowers. I lied and said that I was a witch and I could fly, but only if I got naked and smeared my body with juniper berries (on the theory that we could not find any juniper berries in post-apocalyptic Detroit and they wouldn't be able to verify). We gathered that they were secretly trying to gather all the superheroes in Detroit so that they could help out. They figured a bunch of people would've been given powers by the radiation. But then they told me about a religion where the monks had an annual festival where they smeared the street with holy juniper berries. They said that I should go and roll in their berries so I could fly. Well, peer pressure: I ran into their ceremony, naked, and jumped into their pile of juniper berries. Much to my surprise, I found that this gave me the ability to fly. Who knew?!



	2010.12.03 11.43 War I had a dream that I worked for a computer company that almost exclusively took military contracts. Managing data and websites for departments of the military that intercepted and decoded signals and such. I got Sigh and Amelia jobs there because they needed work. I had a company car, so I drove everybody to work one day. They were going to do regular office-type stuff, not computer stuff. There was a guy at work that kept on sexually harassing Amelia. He told me, "Man, how come you had to bring a guy and a girl? You shoulda brought two girls! She is hot! I want more of that!" I tried to be civil, deciding that I wouldn't react unless I got Amelia's okay to do so. (partially for fear of stirring up stuff that would endanger my job). That guy was supposed to be assigning Sigh and Amelia work, but he kept on not orienting Amelia and not giving her any work because she was a woman. OH, AND DID I MENTION that our office was on an army base close to the warzone? That is relevant because all the sudden there was a bombing campaign. We thought we were far enough away from the action that we wouldn't be attacked, but nope. Bombers with killing bombs came and bombed us. We all cowered in the garage, which was the most sheltered place. After the bombing, we decided to go home. This job was not worth it to anybody. But then we found out that the company car was stolen, and we'd have to take the bus home and we had no idea how to do that. So we had to wander around in the streets, feeling unsafe, trying to figure out where the bus station was. Dude: War is stupid. The army is stupid, no matter how indirectly you are affiliated with it. That is the moral of this story.



	2010.12.03 11.34 Cruisin' I had a dream that I was going to do a radio show where I got a convertible and cruised up and down the strip that everybody cruised, trying to pick up chicks. Once I picked them up, I would talk to them and get stories and such, and then air it. The radio station was in charge of getting me the rental car. When I went to pick it up, the car wasn't a convertible at all! How the crap am I supposed to pick up chicks now?!?

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