The madness never stops when it comes to Operation TIPS. Remember Operation TIPS?

To refresh your memory, it's a much-criticized nationwide network of citizen informants "who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity." Yes, apparently we were jealous of China's paranoia-inducing system of citizen informants.

Now, Salon and the ACLU are reporting that calls to the TIPS hotline are being forwarded to—get this—the hotline for the Fox television show America's Most Wanted.

Because, you know, in the current economic climate, trusting private corporations to do the right thing really seems like the best thing to do.

While we're at it, let's just put Hilary Rosen in charge of copyright legislation. Oh, wait! Shit! They already effectively did that!

What I love about the digital camera is the way it frees me to attempt things I would almost never have wasted a roll of film on. Mistakes on film cost a dollar or more per frame. Mistakes in digital are free—just delete and recompose.

Here's an example of the kind of crazy experiments that the digital image makes possible.

While in Princeton, I noticed that the television in my room has a rather extreme curvature in the picture tube. Due to the arrangement of the room, all of the typical viewing positions—bed, chair—were situated at an angle that made the distortion of the curved glass quite apparent.

Interesting.

Human figures, in particular, look quite unusual. You have to turn off your mental correction circuits and look a little closer, pay a little extra attention, but what you find is a fast-moving world of surreal elongations and magnifications.

I decided to try considering any human figure that appeared on the screen as my "model", and aim for some good pictures. It's not as easy as it might sound.

I set myself the limitation of avoiding anyone who was conspicuously famous, which ruled out almost everyone on the actual programs. That left me with commercials as my primary source of talent, and with the fast-paced editing en vogue in the commercial advertising world, capturing a subject requires very quick reflexes.

So, anyway, here are the results. I'm sure this infringes copyright in all kinds of ways, and it's nowhere near my finest artistic output. But I do think there are some interesting images.

Once upon a time, I played around Austin with a band called Trees Like These. They were easily one of my favorite bands I've ever played with, and a great bunch of people.

Eventually, a point came where everything fell apart—not in acrimony, but just in differing agendas. We had people who were engaged and people who weren't, people who wanted to move and people who didn't, people who wanted a bigger sound and people who wanted a smaller one, people who wanted a larger profile for the band and people who wanted a smaller one.

Not long after the band collapsed back into a duo, one of its two core members, Mark Couvillion, moved to Dallas with plans to eventually marry a high school classmate of mine. The classmate moved back to Austin recently, without Couv in tow, and I've been wondering ever since what might have happened to him.

Well, much to my surprise, I serendipitously discovered today that he's still in Dallas and keeping his own brand new weblog. It's young, but it's pretty. There's some very nice design and some damn fine photography, and already the beginnings of what looks to be a strong, thoughtful community.

So I just wanted to say: Way to go Couv, and welcome to the fray!