Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Here's one for people who think dreams have a meaning. I tend not to remember my dreams but repeat them enough and I do… Almost every day for the last week I've had not the same dream over and over, but the same “moment” inserted into different dreams over and over. At some point in every dream I find myself standing on a beach with whoever else is in the dream, looking out over the water at massive clouds brewing on the horizon. We comment to each other about the gathering storm.

And then the dream goes on.

Steganography is the art of hiding one signal inside another signal (or inside noise) in order to hide the true nature of a message to all but those who know how to look for it. For example, you may remember the code I presented which allows one to hide secret messages inside Biblical text which uses predictable statistical anomalies to hide messages. Other people use a least-significant bit to contain data (hoping you won't notice), others use the difference (or similarity) between multiple pieces of data (for example, two audio files which produce only noise when played on their own, but become a message when played synchronously), and on and on.

Not that I'm saying that the same message repeating over and over in different dreams has a real meaning or anything like that. This morning I noticed the following email (“Fwd: Truly awesome pics before Katrina hits New Orleans”) in my inbox which mirrored the dream visually.

Oooh. Meh.

Anyway, perhaps to distract, George “I don't wanna be here” Bush has been talking about how his crony Harriet Miers, who he's nominated to the supreme court, has religion as an important part of her life. As far as I'm concerned, as soon as you say you're a religious Jew, Christian, Muslim, or any other religion that claims absolute moral authority comes from some supernatural creature, not from the wish of the people you lose the right to be a judge or take part in democratic government.

Buddhist: “There are many paths up the mountain.”

Not that it's a crime until you start taking away other peoples' rights… or lives…

Of course, as long as you've got Wal-Mart (who really suck… tips on dealing with Wal-Mart), egalitarian power-to-the-people is probably impossible. And of course thanks to outsource-happy employers like Wal-Mart, parts of America are as poor as the third world. Not that that's a big surprise with corporations so powerful and so greedy, with no apparent checks to stop them even when things go bad.

…and Iran keeps on winning.

So the news has been all over how the talk that Bush gave with “the troops” was staged (more) — as if that's any surprise… I'm sure everyone has noticed that every time things get politically rough for Bush they either pull some strange PR diversion (like Harriet Miers), or raise the terror level… even MSNBC is noticing; here's a video they broadcast showing the links:

18 MB WMV FILE

But don't complain too loudly, anti-Americanism costs money. Speaking of America, I guess people have been congratulating each other on how the budget deficit shrank 23% since last year. Now, if the US deficit had gone down, that would be a good thing, but this is about the budget deficit going down — so there's still a huge and growing deficit. So basically if you got a $300 tax refund, what actually happened is you got tricked into taking out a high-interest loan for three hundred dollars from your good friends in China that are bankrolling this economy.

Hey, did you ever just wish you were a tree?

Anyway… Rachel should be back from Cabo soon with another ex-pat that's joining us down here… Michael (Saira's husband) has arrived — he's the chef at Rachel's restaurant which should open in the next couple of months.