After having failed miserably at working on a blog for his film company, my nephew Mike Hull started a food blog based on his Thanksgiving dinner. He started this off with a bit of family history, which has already gotten buried under last week's posts. His theory is to do one post per dish, with recipe, notes, and pictures. He's asked me to contribute, so I dropped a line on what's been cooking here in Cowtown.

I use my website as a portable filing system, and one thing I've had for a long time has been a cache of recipes that I've made and wanted to remember -- some from the family, but most cribbed from cookbooks. I'm pretty erratic about filling them out -- even more so lately, since I've been thinking I should restructure how they're put together. I used to put more notices on meals in my Notebook, a less pretentious concept than a blog, but I've fallen away from doing that recently as well. And I haven't been putting much of anything on food here, either. Don't want to start a third major thread alongside the the music and politics -- always figured on separating them, and indeed have two more unused websites for that purpose, but never got around to it. But every now and then I'll throw something on food into Porkalicious, and see how that works out.

There's this little widget on the left column of the blog called Calendar, and the dates get filled in every day I manage to post at least one entry. It serves as a constant reminder of how much I manage to get written, which most months isn't all that much. But I got off to a good start in July, which made me think I might be able to hit every date for the month. Did, too, although the satisfaction was fleeting, as the day after I filled it out an empty August calendar appeared. Already missed a day this month -- a day I would just as soon forget in general. Will most likely miss quite a few more over the next two weeks. Going out of town, so even on the instances when I am able to connect I won't have my usual tool set, office, and all that.

I do have quite a bit I want to write about, even putting aside Israel's going apeshit in Lebanon, which shot to the top of the priority list in July. The priority should be easy enough to explain. We like to talk about how 9/11 "changed everything," but that's just our usual myopia. It mostly became an excuse for overreacting on a global scale, bringing out many of our very worst characteristics. But while most of the rest of the world, including a great many and possibly most Arabs, sympathized, the world's tolerance of our great tantrum was bound sooner or later to run thin. Israel's destruction of Lebanon, and Hezbollah's defense of Lebanon, amount to another watershed event, and I think for most Arabs and a great many Muslims this event will resound like nothing in recent history. As an affront it is comparable to 1948, where the pro-West Arab regimes were so severely humiliated that most soon fell to coups led by junior officers. The Arab nationalism of the officers was critically damaged by the 1967 war, leaving the region's more progressive, more secular forces moribund, opening the way for an Islamist insurgency -- especially in the regions most oppressed by the US-Israel alliance. But two things have happened in this war that hadn't happened in 1948 or 1967: one is that the US role has never before been so nakedly exposed, and this is bound to taint every regime in the region with close ties to the US: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, the rump of Iraq. The other is that Hezbollah has thus far frustrated Israel bad enough to be widely seen as a viable force, and as such a model for the whole long list of complaints the region has accumulated. So the net effect of the US in Iraq and Israel in Lebanon will likely be to drive the region into increasingly bitter strife directed at us.

That may not seem like all that big of a military problem, but the US and Israel have weaknesses that their arms don't cover -- especially from people who aren't likely to back down. Over the last few weeks I've read four books about oil, which happens to be a pretty good place to start. The Saudi "oil weapon" in 1973 was flawed in several ways that aren't true any more, but even if it isn't deliberately employed, the US is extremely vulnerable to even minor disruptions, and such disruptions are likely to have sizable political costs. The US is also economically vulnerable, especially to China, and that's another front where arms aren't all that useful.

Meanwhile, the public in the US is totally clueless, and not just the segment that still follows Bush or points even loonier. The last month has made me vastly more pessimistic, not so much because of all the things that have gone wrong -- and there's a lot in that department that will prove awfully tough for many people to get over -- but for how little grasp our so-called leaders have of it. I've spent a good deal of my life watching corporate leaders follow the book straight into the jaws of financial disaster -- I've worked for three or four companies like that, and seen it coming every time, each time more clearly. This is like that, but this time the scale is humongous. This looks very bad.

Anyhow, for me at least it's probably good to take a break. Get away from the news. Burn up some gas while it's still only $3/gallon. Go to a town that actually has record stores. Maybe read that Ruth Reichl book I haven't had time for. Learn to tolerate a few holes in the calendar -- you just got the gist of it anyway. And at the end of August, the calendar will flip over and all those holes will be gone, replaced by a blank slate.

One thing I've liked about Billmon's website is that he has a little sidebar item on "Current Reading." I've been wanting to hack something together like that, and finally did. The cover images have been scraped from the usual places, but don't link to the usual stores. Don't have any accounts set up, and don't feel like linking for the hell of it. This could change in the future. In fact, I have a book review section on the website which I've never done much with, but that might be the right place to link if I choose to develop it further.

I also made a slight cleanup of the Links section. Again, the website has long had a Links section, which has almost as long been obsolete: another project desperately seeking time. But the real significance of these two changes is that they break out of the prison formed by the Serendipity blog software. Previously I used the "HTML Nugget" plugin for the links. Now I've created a brand new plugin which evals an arbitrary piece of PHP code. That code sucks in an external PHP file, which I can then program without having to hack through the Serendipity Admin interface. While this may not be a good idea in general, it will be a huge convenience for me. It means I can do development locally, then just blast the changed up.

Feels good to actually do a little programming for once.

It's proving impossible to keep up with blogging or much of anything else these days. In fact, I have trouble reading the few blogs I look at regularly. On rare occasions when I post almost daily I get little else done. Among the things that don't get done are: a redesign of my own website; a relaunch of Terminal Zone; a long list of project ideas, which as of today includes two more. I do manage to get my Recycled Goods and Jazz Consumer Guide columns done in a somewhat timely manner, but don't have enough surplus bandwidth to review much more music, and there's no way to economically justify myself as a music writer. My unrated list currently hovers around 950 records, which would take me at least nine months to drain if I got nothing new. I try to keep up a steady reading pace, but the books are piling up too -- not as fast as the records, but I read a lot slower.

The two new projects are:

• New Israel Peace Plan -- not a new project, but a new directory for the draft I wrote last month. I don't know how far I want to go with this, since activism isn't something I have any desire to get into. But the new directory will allow for collecting comments, producing refined drafts and supporting materials, etc. Like many of my project ideas, this is one waiting for someone to pick it up and run with it.

• The Case Against the Bush Republicans -- a starting place for formulating the 2006 elections argument that follows from my 2004 letter arguing for electing Kerry over Bush. This one should go back deeper into Republican history and the evolution of their cynical, demagogic, and ultimately dangerous system of politicking. This may actually turn out to be a practical approach to the book I've been thinking about for the last decade.

One of our two cats passed away last night, Laverne, survived by Shirley. We've had these two cats since late 2001 -- I don't have a date in the notebook, just a note that Laura's previous cat, Edna, died on April 4, 2001. We picked up Laverne and Shirley at a no-kill kennel, where they had been abandoned. I picked out Laverne because of her friendliness. She would come right up to complete strangers, hop onto a lap, and start kneading her declawed feet -- she was a lap-dancer. She was described as a "Siamese Flamepoint" -- white, with light tan markings on her face and tail. Lovely cat. Shirley is a slightly larger all black cat. They had lived together before the kennel, and were caged together when we got them. The kennel people prevailed on us to keep them together.

We always assumed that they were about a year old when we got them, which would make them five or so, but they could be older. (Don't know how to tell.) They were pretty frisky when we first got them. Less so now, although Shirley can move pretty fast. Laverne took ill several months ago: lost weight, became very dehydrated. We gave her antibiotics and fluids, and she bounced back a bit, but never regained her weight. Took her to the vet day before yesterday. She had abcesses in her gums, white cells in her urine. Doctor lanced and treated the abcesses, and gave us medicine. She seemed better that evening, but weakened a lot yesterday, and looked to be in bad shape last night. After we gave her medicine last night, she jumped down to the floor, then laid down, spreading out. We found her this morning where she was last night, quite stiff.

I bought Laura a digital camera this past Xmas, figuring it would mostly be used to take pictures of cats. She didn't take many, but we have a few. We haven't gotten the hang of this technology yet -- haven't managed to print any of the pictures, but I managed to get one picture scaled down and uploaded. In the future I'll get some more pictures up -- isn't that what websites are ultimately good for? So this picture is about six months old, before she got sick. Looks a little bleary-eyed, but all the pictures do, except the ones that show her eyes in weird reflections. She had faint blues eyes, but when the light hit her right they'd turn blood red.

Laverne spent much of the last few years sleeping on top of Laura's monitor. When Laura got a new computer with an LCD screen too narrow to sleep on, we bought the pedestal you see in the picture. But in the last couple of months Laverne discovered my CRT monitors and moved in with me. She bugged me a lot. Miss her already.

I've been thinking about this blog. The idea here was to write more frequently and more varied notes -- shorter ones. But thus far this blog has been taken over by political rants, which is supposed to be the purpose of my Notes on Everyday Life site. I think the thing to do is to go back and copy the political stuff here to Notes, and in the future just put the pieces there, with notices and links from here. Will take a while to do that, but that's the new operational plan.

A change here is that I'll add categories for News and Media. I'm thinking that News will be a series of short comments on the days news stories, without breaking them down into topics. Media will comment on newspapers, magazines, television, things like that -- radio, I suppose, not that I ever listen to radio. Don't watch much TV either. I already have separate categories for Books, Music, and Movies, so they're excluded from Media.

Also working on recasting this website to use a common design layout -- this one, perhaps unfortunately -- and tools. This has dragged on for weeks, and I haven't posted what I've done. In the long run "ocston" will go away, but I continue to do most of my work there. Just broke smooth jazz out from the regular jazz listings. I don't mean to be a snob there, but it really is a distinct form of music, and the breakout makes it easier to gauge.

As I've added entries to this blog, I've noticed that my original classification scheme was breaking down. Or, to be more precise, Politics was overwhelming everything else, so some subdivision already proves necessary. I added three subcategories:

• Health/Welfare: Political and economic issues regarding health care and welfare (including Social Security). Thought about including education, but haven't written anything there so don't have to decide yet. I see "welfare" as a generally good thing -- something we should have more of -- and Social Security is an example of a pretty good welfare program.
• Israel: I usually try to specify this as Israel/Palestine, but space in the links table is short, and Israel is in the driver's seat. A lot of early entries in this category -- mostly a coincidence of the timing when I launched this blog.
• War/Terror: A slight contraction of "War on Terror," which is a Bushism for pre-emptive wars against supposed terrorists. For now, Iraq comments are filed here. Some people support the idea of a War on Terror but not the U.S. war in Iraq, so it may seem like I'm conceding something to Bush here. I think that war is terror, so Bush's use of war as an anti-terror tool is inherently evil.

The current categorization still breaks out Books and Movies, which are formats rather than content descriptions. That may turn out to be a problem -- we'll see when I get some entries filed. The blog software doesn't allow for an entry to be linked to more than one category. The proper fix to that is probably to fix the software, but we'll cross that bridge when the time comes. Meanwhile, the previous Politics entries have been divvied up accordingly, with plain "Politics" for entries that don't split evenly, such as the one on Condeleezza Rice.

The evolution of this website has been driven by two major goals:

1. To simplify the writing process, making it easier both for me to write and to make that writing available to the small audience interested in it.
2. To organize the accumulation of writing in a useful way.

At first I added static webpages whenever the notion occurred to me. Those pages grew into an ungainly sprawl, each one adding to the overhead of organization. Then I decided I needed a simpler framework for writing -- at least to get rough ideas down before attempting to form them into finished pieces. This led to the "notebook" -- a file that I kept open on my home system, adding dated entries as they occurred to me. The notebook would then be compiled and uploaded, making a delayed appearance on the web. Aside from the delays, one problem with this was that I tended to file things in the notebook just to keep track of them, regardless of possible public interest.

Among those entries were a number of relatively polished political essays -- things that I did want more people to read, as opposed to the bulk of the notebook, which is mostly for me and only occasionally of interest to others. So I created a new website, Notes on Everyday Life, and backported almost four years of such pieces to the blog there. However, that particular software toolset turns out not to work very well as a blog. It's really a news system, with synopses of articles on the front page, rather than letting the entries just spool out. It also has a narrow focus and a rather impersonal design. One sign that neither the notebook nor NOEL were working as a blog is that none of my friends ever bothered linking to either. That's when I came up with the idea of finding a relatively conventional piece of blog software and using it as the homepage for tomhull.com. That's what this is, or soon will be.

My plan here is to write more/less informal public-oriented messages and notices into the blog here, where they will appear immediately. I'll still keep the notebook going, but just for notes. Not sure what the status of NOEL will be, but it could become a more collaborative tool, with others contributing pieces. I also hope to do a major reorganization of the other things on the website, which will be accessible through the links and a sitemap (to be done). So this is the first entry, with more to follow.