This just in:

Wyoming State Public Defender Ken Koski is missing, and a search is under way in the Bridger Wilderness near Pinedale after Koski failed to return from a solo backpacking trip Friday.

I’ve never met him but I’ve heard very good things. Here’s hoping he turns up ok, and soon.

UPDATE: Still no word but look for updates here.

I had every intention of writing something significant about the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Instead, I highly recommend this piece by Richard Powers about that day. It captures our difficulty grasping what happened, which may explain why we’ve had such difficulty responding to it w/anything approaching a satisfactory or helpful response.

I think of 9/11 and I think: Failure of imagination. We failed to imagine how much people could be driven to attack the U.S. and international capitalism, and we failed to imagine a response that might reduce some of that drive by making the world a more open, safe, and fair place. Today we are failing to imagine how our world could be different, better, so that we might truly start working toward that world.

Yesterday five years ago I was a graduate student working toward a PhD in English at the University of Illinois. I read critical theory, philosophy, and fiction, and thought very hard about how stories have changed and might in the future change the world. At the time, no amount of money could have made me consider going to law school and becoming a lawyer. I believe I am where I am today because of 9/11, or rather, because of the terrible and ongoing response to it. The events of that day did not make me feel helpless and frustrated and afraid for the future. Instead, the aftermath, the weeks and months and now years of ongoing and growing bloodshed, oppression, inequality and injusticeââ�¬â��all supposedly being perpetrated for my sake, in my name as an American citizenââ�¬â��that did make me feel helpless, frustrated, afraid, and angry, too. Grad school, “the ivory tower,” no longer seemed so important. I thought law school would put in me in a better position to do something more concrete to address the problems I saw in the world.

Now, five years on, it’s hard to say whether I made the right choice. The world is still apparently going to hell in a handbasket, and it’s hard to argue that I’m really doing much about that. I miss the life I left, but I find great value in the life I’m living now, too. And who knows where this current path may lead? Thinking of how much my life and the world have changed in just five years gives me a sort of perverse hope. Change is a constant. Five years from now everything could be completely different. Better.

What story would you like to be telling five years from now? Don’t allow your imagination to fail.

Sometime back I switched to Flock as my default web browser. It was new and fun w/all these supposed great goodies. But after a couple months of using it every day, I realized I didn’t use any of the little goodies that are all built in. The only one I occasionally used was the del.icio.us integration, but I never liked how it didn’t show you your existing tags when you wanted to tag a link, so I ended up using the regular javascript tagging method anyway. Conclusion: Firefox is just fine for me.

So I boot up Firefox for the first time in, oh, probably two months. As it’s starting up, it asks me if I’d like to resume my last session, so I say sure, why not? Well, I quickly discovered why not when this dastardly image of haunting evil popped up on my screen:

We’re talking scary stuff here people, scare-ee! And just when I was sort of getting to the point where I wasn’t so worried about it, too. The uncertainty will be over soon…. like, in a week. Yay? [tags]barbri[/tags]

Hmm. Hi. It seems I’m supposed to be posting something here or else you’ll all go away and never come back and that will make me sad. Don’t go away. I’ve been busy and uninspired and frankly, well, not being able to blog about work makes me feel seriously disabled. Gagged. Seriously uncomfortable. Cranky!

But there are other things. L. went to Paris and had a great time and brought back lots of pictures and chocolate. Look! It’s the Eiffel Tower! Sisu and I missed her mightily, but lest I drown in my self-pity and fear that I will never again be able to have such fun travel adventures, I simply went to work, spending 5-6 hours each day of the Labor Day weekend at the office. I felt important! Useful! At least until I got back to work on Tuesday and learned that most of what I’d spent all that time on was just busywork that I could have simply not done at all. Lesson learned.

Speaking of which, I’ve been learning tons and tons, none of which I can tell you about, except that there’s really nothing better than getting in your car and driving very carefully while shouting along with the Postal Service on “Sleeping In.” You simply have not heard this song until you’ve felt the bass shake your whole body while you’re belting out the two verses at the top of your lungs in the middle of traffic. It helps to have the windows open so people can hear you and turn and stare open-mouthed at your idiocy. But you won’t mind their stares because the song in that precise context is just that good. Trust me on this one.

What else? The weather has cooled here but the Derby Mountain fire continues to devastate southern Montana. I’m enjoying the transition into fall and looking forward to carving punkins soonââ�¬â��we have not one but two porches of our very own and maybe, just maybe, we’ll actually get trick-or-treaters this year! Of course, someone shot out the rear window of my dad’s car last night while it was parked on the street in front of our house so maybe, um, this isn’t really the prime trick-or-treating ‘hood. On the plus side, while we were outside being pissed about the shattered window a cop just happened to drive by and he was kind enough to take a report for insurance purposes. Gotta love those helpful men in blue!

Home ownership continues to be a joy. Our garage door no longer opens or closes from the outside and must be jammed shut with a pair of pliers to keep out intruders, so on my todo list is definitely a garage-door opener. I purchased one last week at the Sears Labor Day sale; while there I also got a garbage disposal. I know some people hate garbage disposals but I am firmly in the camp that would much prefer to just grind up the gunk rather than fish it out of the drain to prevent clogs. Where do you stand on the garbage disposal question? Vital home appliance, or smelly nuisance?

Regardless of where you stand, I can tell you that installation looks difficult. I will report back soon on whether that appearance actually matches with reality. If our house burns down or explodes, you’ll know why.

So yeah, garbage disposals and garage door openers and broken windows. Life moves pretty fast on the big city merry-go-round and I’m just trying to keep up. I’ll continue to try to wave occasionally as I fly by on my plastic horse.

Oh, and about this 911 anniversary: What Ze said (transcript). [tags]music, home ownership, paris[/tags]

“Don Rumsfeldââ�¬â�¢s plan from the beginning was the ââ�¬Å�cut-and-runââ�¬Â� that pro-administration commentators now falsely accuse their critics of supporting.” ââ�¡â��

“And doesn’t that lead to the conclusion that the Court bears some responsibility for bin Laden’s follow-up to those attacks?” ââ�¡â�� [via]

“Wow. So the real reason Bin Laden hates America is because of no-fault divorce?” ââ�¡â��

“To compare the struggle in Iraq — using any of the Administration’s varied, and often contradictory, musical-chair justifications — to the fight to rid this nation of longstanding chattel slavery borders on the unconscionable.” ââ�¡â��

“Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge . . . have found that the rapid rise in greenhouse gases over the past century is unprecedented in at least 800,000 years.” ââ�¡â��

Congratulations and best wishes to Andre Agassi now that he’s ended his pro tennis career. I’ve always been a pretty abstract and detached tennis fan ââ�¬â�� I don’t play and rarely watch, although I’m usually sort of mesmerized when I do watch ââ�¬â�� but I sort of grew up w/Agassi as the main force in men’s tennis so it does seem like the end of an era for him to retire. For a little look back the ATP offers a tribute to Agassi, including some good photos, and Wikipedia does its usual job of covering most of the bases.

If you’re not really that into tennis, try reading something about the game by David Foster Wallace. For example, he recently wrote a sort of “tribute” to Roger Federer for the NY Times that just might make you think of tennis as the most incredible and beautiful sport you’ve ever seen. (Thanks to TDQ for the link.) [tags]tennis, agassi, federer, sports, david foster wallace[/tags]