Travel month continues. I’m on a plane to Houston in a few hours, where I will visit with my parents, do tech support, and eat glorious tex-mex food.

Boulez-Stockhausen Beauty Parlor, self titled release.

I’m standing at Downtown Crossing, engrossed in people watching. The hum of activity is warm and wonderful; a fruit vendor is cheerfully trying to unload some overripe strawberries (”Yeah, they’re horrible aren’t they?” he readily admits to a shopper). Activists and salespeople, shoppers and businessfolk, all shifting through the intersection.

A cyclist wheels by, and before he passes me, he says to himself: “Even God can’t help but love sinners like us.” I catch his eye, and we smile at one another before he rides by.

First off, if you’re a Ruby developer with rails experience and looking for some contract work, I might be able to help you out. Get in touch.

I’ve been thinking today about how things end up in my house. The jeans I’m wearing, the people who sold it to me, the people who shipped it from the factory, the people who made it, the people who harvested the raw materials, and so on. Every single thing in this room has a story like this. The cost in energy, human and otherwise, just to support me as I live, is quite simply so vast that I can’t take it all in. And it is breathtakingly beautiful.

Back home and resting. Air travel feels even more dehumanizing than I remember it being in the past.

V’s got a spicy curry bubbling on the range, and life is good.

Should I ever open a nightclub, I’m going to call it Your Mom’s.

“Hey, I had a great time at Your Mom’s last night!” “We’re playing a set at Your Mom’s next Thursday. Don’t miss it.” “Your Mom’s is the place to see and be seen.”

Greetings from the land of Outkast and Coca-Cola. Travel was almost without incident, the exception being that the ever vigilant Delta baggage agent refused to let me take my guitar on the airplane. She told me I could either check it, buy a seat for it (which I couldn’t do anyway as the plane was overbooked), or not fly. Gate check? No way buster. So I loosened the strings, said a prayer, and sent my baby under the plane in its very soft case.

Through some combination of miracle and a fiberglass body, the guitar made it through alright. There was more than enough room in every single overhead compartment for the guitar, as a note. Additionally, the TSA inspected the guitar before it made it onto the plane, and they left the pre-amp on, draining it completely by the time we landed. Battery gets taken out before boarding from now on.

I’m composing a helpful message to Delta to let them know that it’s perhaps bad business practice, but I don’t know how much good it will do. It seems that Delta maintains something of a reputation for treating guitar players badly. I don’t know if I’ll fly them again.

It’s travel time again. One perk of working from home is that now and then I can work from someone else’s. So I’m spending a few days in Atlanta with Chava and family.

A consequence of the times, my well-honed packing routine has been rendered obsolete, and I’m going to have to put a bag under the plane to store my snakes toothpaste. I’m also bringing a guitar for the first time; while this might be irritating, I can’t imagine it being as bothersome as traveling with a french horn. Screening agents were befuddled by it years ago, I can only wonder how things would be now.

I’m excited about the new solar powered trashcan in Davis Square. It harnesses the energy of the sun to periodically squish the trash down, thus keeping the square cleaner and greener. Truly great times are upon us. Also, the phrase “solar powered trash can” is a heck of a lot of fun to say.

P.S. The Herald article about Mr. Davis is now up on their website and in today’s print edition.

Mr. Davis mania continues. I just did a phone interview with the Boston Herald, and am going out to get my picture taken a bit later this afternoon. It’s all a bit surreal.

How many times has my horrible rendition of “My Humps” been downloaded this month? 4137 times, that’s how many. I don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed.

I’m not a big fan of movies of the “what’s lurking in the closet/behind the stairs/in the basement” variety, which is why I’ll be taking a pass on Snakes on a Plane, even though I have nothing but reverence for the marketing team behind it. Like Nutrisweet, artificially induced terror leaves a strange and unpleasant aftertaste in my mouth.

I’m assuming that’s why I don’t enjoy cable news either; it’s injected full of lurking horror, insinuation, and half-truths. Not enough to let me truly understand anything, but enough to get me worried. A very special report I can’t afford to miss, coming right up.

Our most recent terror plot leaves a funny taste in mouth. Many of the alleged plotters were already on government watchlists. There were no tickets purchased; a lot of them didn’t have passports. We’ve known that liquids could be used to make a bomb for over a decade. Quite a lot of airplane cargo is still not screened at all. This is neither a new or particularly effective way to blow stuff up, and it as it turns out it probably wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, if at all, by this particular set of folks. But, they say, it could have happened, and boy wouldn’t that have been bad.

From observation, the timing of the popping out of closet/out of the overhead bin moment is crucial. Old television shows do this in spectacular formulaic fashion; practically every time in a Knight Rider episode when I think “poor Michael really ought to be hit on the head about now,” moments later – WHACK – the blow is struck. But it’s when it doesn’t, that’s when I get engaged, where the real suspense starts. I find myself waiting for the blow, wondering if it will ever come. If the writers are good, they’ll continually produce what I like to think of as whack-ops, places where Michael Knight could potentially get beaned. If they don’t put them in, eventually I’ll lose interest and start drooling over K.I.T.T.’s wax job.

I’m entirely aware that there are people who hate me for my freedom, and that want to blow me up, and no, I haven’t forgotten. But this whole event feels like a scripted whack-op to me, and that’s a little discouraging. In my dream world, a government that truly loved us would have handled this unobtrusively and let us all go on loving Freedom without going out of their way to set our teeth on edge.

Perhaps I’ll go see Snakes on a Plane after all, at least it’s got Samuel L. Jackson in it, and it’s not using my sense of dignity and love of country as plot devices.

Good news, everybody! The Davis Area Resident Business Initiative has contacted me about using Mr. Davis as their identity; we’ve talked a bit and I’ve accepted. Who better to be the face of Davis Square than Davis Square himself? Pending the contract being signed, you’ll see Mr. Davis’ smiling face more often. This also unfortunately means the end of the line for my Mr. Davis t-shirts. Once I hand him over, I can’t use him commercially; they’ve expressed interest in making their own, but that’s up to them. In other words, get them while they’re still here.

In other news, work is mighty taxing at present, but I’m surviving. So much to keep track of! Let me use this as a blanket apology for being overly spacey. Hopefully things will cool down in the next week or so.

I’m passing on some savings related news. The good folks at Spreadshirt, who make my shirts, are having a sale from August 14th to the 28th. 15% any purchase with coupon code SUMMERSALE06. I’ve got Mr. Davis, Duchampions, and the adorable Space Bunny up on the shop. Visit my online store if you are so inclined, and garb yourself.

For the Classically inclined I’m also offering the oh-so-very campy (and not in the ad castrum sense) “Salve Nauta” and the ultra obscure and slightly naughty sounding “I catch elk the Gallic German way” shirts.