The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.”

There is a gallery of celebrity pictures from that trip below. (You can see who is in the pictures by holding your mouse pointer over the photo, or by clicking on it for more details. I have a complete gallery of all the fan photos and the celeb photos on my Star Wars site)

I’ll do another one at some point in the future with all the fans/events. That was really what made the event special—hanging out with hundreds of other people who shared my obsessions. There were lines for so many events, but the lines were where you found the most unlikely of comrades. This was the one place where you didn’t have to hide your crazy; you could wear it as a badge of honor. You could cheer along with the late-night screenings of the films, reciting the dialogue and laughing at inside jokes. And you wouldn’t even be close to the weirdest person there.

Here in Concord, Thoreau wrote Walden while living off the land around Walden Pond (pictured below) and he wrote Civil Disobedience while imprisoned in the Concord jail. The same Civil Disobedience that later Gandhi would read while crafting Satyagraha.

Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Alcott are buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

Yes we did.

Here’s a video I put together in November ‘08 with all the highlights of that heady campaign.

A couple of years ago, Second Life was all the rage. So, back then, I spent an evening in Second Life. It wasn’t the first time I was there, but it was the last. And it was the longest I had ever been. I brought back some pictures, which I’m sharing with you here, so that you never have to go.

I went to a concert, where someone gave me L$500 (Linden dollars) for being new to Second Life. That seemed like a lot of money, what did this person want in return? Nothing, it turned out. Because it wasn’t a lot of money. At the current exchange rate, it’s almost $2 (real US dollars). On the other hand, if someone gave me $2 at a concert in the real world for being “new”, I might run in the other direction. I kept flying around the concert, looking like an idiot, while all the cool kids seemed to be having a good time. Or at least their pretty digital avatars were smiling and self-assured.

I found a Bollywood area that was empty. A Hollywood movie area. That was empty. A political extravaganza starring the big flying head of Rudy Giuliani. That was empty too. In short, a lot of it was empty.

There were some truly beautiful parts of this virtual world. I wonder who created them and why. I flew over them for a few minutes, but like Ferris Bueller says about Cameron’s house, ”The place is like a museum. It’s very beautiful and very cold, and you’re not allowed to touch anything.”

After a little while, I left Second Life and returned to my first one. Second Life had potential, but it’s like any other club—if nobody goes, then nobody goes. And if you’re there without friends, what do you do?

Here’s the line outside (click for larger version):

Here are the tree creatures we found and the poster for Pan’s Labyrinth:

Happy Sunday!