accretion v1.0

Blog Crack, Blog Crack

2010-08-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

Angel

Is Your Consolidator Trusworthy? Make Sure Before It's Too Late.

2010-02-06T20:15:00.000-08:00

From Debt Relief Now! at www.edificerex.net

State of Texas Senator Jeff Wentworth (R-San Antonio)believes many consumers could be falling prey to fraudulent business practices when participating with debt consolidation companies. Senator Wentworth strongly urges caution when teaming up with debt relief organizations, and as a recent guest columnist in a San Antonio news magazine, Senator Wentworth described the potential for predatory activity in debt relief industries and offered resources to aid in consumer protection and awareness. (http://www.mysanantonio.com/community/opinion/83399297.html)

The Better Business Bureau typically awards most “debt relief” companies operating in Texas the lowest possible rating of “F” due to consumer complaints, industry concerns and questionable business practices. Texas, California and Florida have the highest concentration of debt settlement companies, according to one industry trade group.

A proliferation of debt management companies means that Texans searching for help in reducing and paying off their debt should do their homework before signing on with a credit counseling organization. Because the state does not currently license these organizations, the burden of choosing a company that won't result in more, rather than less, debt rests solely on the shoulder of the consumer.

During last year's legislative session, the Legislature considered bills that would have given the state more authority to regulate debt management and consumer credit counseling companies as well as property tax lenders.

Senate Bill 1620, which I authored, gives the consumer credit commissioner greater authority to regulate property tax lenders. While this bill passed and was signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry, bills relating to debt management and consumer credit counseling companies did not pass.

In light of these circumstances and at my request as chairman of the Senate Jurisprudence Committee, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst issued an interim charge to the committee. During the time between legislative sessions, the jurisprudence committee will study the effectiveness of current regulation and practices of debt management providers in Texas. In addition, the committee will assess the extent to which individuals' estates are protected in transactions with debt management providers.

The committee's recommendations will lay the groundwork for legislation to be considered in the 2011 legislative session. In the meantime, I urge Texans who are turning to debt management and credit counseling services to investigate carefully the services offered by the companies.

While many of the companies are reputable, others fail to disclose high fees that may result in even more debt, or they provide consumers with either misleading or completely false information about debt reduction. Because the Texas Legislature does not convene again until January 2011, Texans considering using the services of a credit counseling company or a debt management company should contact the Office of Consumer Credit Commission at www.occc.state.tx.us, the Finance Commission of Texas at www.fc.state.tx.us, or the Office of the Attorney General at www.oag.state.tx.us to learn more about the company.

There is no easy road to financial solvency, and any company that fails to emphasize how difficult it is to become debt free may be a company to avoid.

Senator Wentworth can be reached at jeff.wentworth@senate.state.tx.us.

As if mortgage fraud of the late 00's wasn't bad enough. It is clear that those whom are in debt will have good reason to pay attention to upcomming legislation regulating debt consolidation and counseling services.

2007-11-07T02:27:00.000-08:00

The set list from last Friday's concert in Saint Paul. I'll try to blow it up and re-post in in due glorious fashion.

Many great days, moments, well some scary actually (email if you want details), realizations, reconnections with youth, re-surgences of virility [sp], since Bruce was in town.

Fuck if U2 didn't copy Springsteen's entire mid-80's style during and after the Joshua Tree album. Watch, "Human Touch" on Youtube, then watch "With or Without You". Listen to the chords on "Living in the Future", then listen to "Angel of Harlem" off U2's Rattle and Hum album. Those are just a couple of the obvious parallels.

This will come as no suprise to those knowledgeable regarding such matters. I hadn't paid attention to anything other than Springsteen's Nebraska album until this week and as a long-time U2 fan, it comes as quite a shock to me.

Who can blame Bono, though? They're both meglomaniacs. Bruce has some Itallian in him, though. Bruce was defining and refining his sound after nearly 20 years of performing by the time Bono was naturalizing. Bono had balls, but he never authenticated the American grit he was trying to affect. So he borrowed some from The Boss.

Makes Sense. More to come.

A Blinding Light from Heaven

2007-09-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

Sunshine

The Only Summer Movie that Hasn't Sucked minus Knocked Up.

Remember the Beach, the movie with Leo? The book was way better and yes I did read it before the movie came out.

Or 28 Days Later?

Alex Garland wrote both the Beach novel and the screenplay for 28 Days Later and Danny Boyle directed the latter.

Garland and Boyle were the primary collaborators on the screenplay for this movie and Boyle directed.

How has it not been advertised? I think it might have only seen a major released in the U.K. and special featured at theaters like the Lagoon Theatre here in Minneapolis.

I love Science Fiction. Even SciFi that requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. But give me SciFi with an acceptable plot and remove adages and cliches from the diologue... this movie delivers.

http://www.sunshinedna.com/

Explore the site and see it in theaters if you can.

A Church of Stories

2007-07-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

Chuck Palahniuk submitted this narrative called "A Church of Stories" to Nerve.com in April of 2005. I loved it when I read it and it's stuck with me ever since.

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In 1998, while in Los Angeles for the filming of Fight Club, I went with friends to the Getty Museum. All those antiquities, the decorative objects, all the galleries of stuff being looked at by hushed tourists, my friends and me. That endless parade of masterpieces, it was too much. Grinding, the way a day of yard sales can be grinding as your eyes find a name for each object, a place in history, a story. Too many famous stories butted together on that hilltop above Los Angeles.

Of course, I turned that day into a story.

In the 1970s, during my childhood, museums were more hands-on. You went to galleries to destroy fine art. You took a sledgehammer and mashed the nose of the Pieta. Or you kissed a picture and left lipstick. You tried to spray paint the Mona Lisa, or planted a bomb that would trash some Miros. These days, of course, the Getty had guards and Plexiglas and motion detectors.

So wandering with my friends, I asked them: "Instead of stealing or attacking established art — what if some frustrated artist tried to sneak his paintings into the world's museums?" This artist would paint each picture, matte and frame it, put two-sided mounting tape on the back and wrap the picture inside his trench coat. He'd arrive like us, then open his coat and stick his work on a wall, right there among the Picassos and Renoirs.

This little yarn became a short story called "Ambition" and a screenplay. The story, about an artist desperate to find his place in history, I wrapped into a novel called Haunted.

This May, "Ambition" and Haunted will be published.

On March 13, the Metropolitan Museum of Art found a lovely, gold-framed portrait of a woman wearing a gas mask, stuck on the wall of their gallery. On March 16, the Brooklyn Museum found a portrait of an eighteenth-century military officer holding a can of spray paint. The Museum of Modern Art found a painting on March 17, depicting a can of cream-of-tomato soup. The Louvre and the Tate museums have found similar paintings stuck on their walls.

According to the New York Times, this is the work of a British graffiti artist named Banksy, who wears a trench coat and fake beard as he hangs his work among the masterpieces.

(http://www.banksy.co.uk/cuttings/newyorktimes.html)

A coincidence? Or, are we more the same person than we'd like to admit?

My thoughts are so much your thoughts that they hardly qualify as mine.

The darkest fantasy you keep buried, someone else will get rich, singing about on the radio.

Is it better to hide your dark idea and hope that all other people do the same, or to depict and share that dark idea?

While writing Fight Club, I talked to friends about the idea of a movie projectionist splicing porn into family films. One friend told me not to use the idea, saying it would prompt people to salt porn into everything. When the book was published, countless people wrote to tell me they'd already been splicing sex into Disney films, pissing into restaurant food, or starting fight clubs. For decades.

Still, do we do more damage when we share our dark fantasies – when we explore them through a story or song or picture? Or when we deny them?

Stories are how human beings digest their lives: by making events into something we can repeat and control, telling them until they're exhausted. Until they no longer get a laugh or gasp or teary eye. Until we can absorb, assimilate even those worst events. Our culture, it digests events by making lesser and lesser versions of the original. After a ship sinks or a bomb explodes — the Original Tragedy — then we have the news version, the television movie version, the talk radio versions, the blog versions, the video game, the Franklin Mint Commemorative Plate versions, the McDonalds Happy Meal version, the one-liner reference on The Simpsons. Echoes that fade.

Then, like the funny story you used to tell at parties, the story that would always get laughs, about how you took acid and ate half a fur coat one night, we stop telling that story. NOT because it stops making people laugh — but because we've digested the event. It's resolved, and telling that story in any form no longer serves the teller.

Maybe that is why Radiohead no longer plays "Creep" in concert.

Maybe it's why we dream — compulsively telling stories, processing our experience like the food in our guts, even while we sleep.

But the stories we're afraid to tell, to control, to craft — they never wear out, and they kill us.

At least this is what I tell my friends when they ask me to shut up. To not give people any new ideas. This is my story about telling stories about telling stories. My way to digest what I do.

I tell people: The sooner we can tell a story, the quicker we can wear it out and make it a cliché, then the less power the idea will have.

Until the past century, religions used to give us a place to tell even our worst stories. Depict our most-terrible intentions. Once each week, you could turn your sins into a story and tell them to your peers. Or to a leader, who'd forgive you and accept you back into your community. Each week, you confessed, you were forgiven, and you received communion. You never strayed too far outside the group because you had this regular release. Maybe the most important aspect of salvation is having this forum, this permission and audience, for expressing our lives as a story.

It would be a forum safe enough for you to look terrible.

But as church becomes a place where people go to look good — instead of being the one, safe place where they could risk looking bad — we're losing that regular storytelling forum. And the salvation, redemption and communion it allows.

Instead, now people go to therapy groups, twelve-step recovery groups, chat rooms, phone-sex hotlines, even writers workshops, to turn their lives and crimes into stories, express them, craft them, and in doing so be recognized by their peers. Brought back into the flock for another week. Accepted.

With this in mind: Our need to turn even the darkest parts of life — especially the darkest parts — into stories… our need to tell those stories to our peers… and our need to be heard, forgiven and accepted by our community . . . how about we start a new religion?

We could call this the "Church of Story." It would be a performance place where people could exhaust their stories, in words or music or sculpture. A school where people could learn craft skills that would give them more control over their story, and thus their life. This would be a place where people could step out of their lives and reflect, be detached enough to recognize a boring pattern or irrational fears or a weak character and begin to change that. To edit and rewrite their future. If nothing else, this could be a place where people would vent and be heard, and at that point maybe move forward.

It would be a forum safe enough for you to look terrible. Express terrible ideas.

In modern history, frustrated, powerless people have turned to churches. During the last years of segregation, people found each other in churches and recognized they weren't alone. Their personal problems were not only their own.

This "Church of Story" would give people a forum for connecting. Here, we'd have a regular time and place and permission to tell stories to each other. Instead of ignoring this need or fulfilling it at Starbucks in the window of time created by a cappuccino — or wearing a fake beard and gluing our story on the wall of an art gallery — we could give people the permission and structure they need to gather. To tell stories. To tell better stories. To tell great stories. To live great lives.
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To view this at Nerve.com paste the following link into your address bar.
http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/palahniuk/churchofstories

Every Artist is a Cannibal, Every Poet is a Thief

2007-07-12T23:19:00.000-07:00

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of 'Fight Club', ...

Little Steven's Underground Garage...Rock 'n' Roll Lives

2007-06-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

If any of you are not familiar with Little Steven's Underground Garage, hosted by Steven Van Zandt or Little Steven of Springsteen's E Street Band, you must check it out. It is a radio show...check out www.littlestevensundergroundgarage.com and click on the radio affiliates link to find out if your local radio station carries it. For all in Mpls/St.Paul, tune in to KQ92 at 10 p.m. on Sunday evenings. Or skip radio and listen to previous archived and live shows at the site.

This radio program is a proclaimed, garage rock station. Little Steven profiles the renegades of rock young and old. Bands of today who are still too rough or obscure to secure record deals and bands from decades past who became revolutionaries, many times after repeated failure or listener rejection, are celebrated here.

The first time I heard the underground garage, Little Steven played a Hollies tune, called it one of the greatest singles ever released, then played a song by Joan Jet and the Blackhearts and reminded listeners that Ms. Jet and her Blackhearts were turned away by 20 some labels before they were signed. He then instructed all garage bands to remember that they too should not be discouraged if A&R men 1-21 do not like their stuff, because #22 might hand them a contract. Steven then queued up a song by a garage band, from somewhere in the United States. Pretty awesome show. Check it out sometime. I love it.

This week's episode: #272 "Montery Pop '07".

Russian Ninja Cites Robin Hood as Inspiration

2007-06-14T08:12:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6746051.stm

The Power of Nightmares

2007-05-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1040.htm

A couple of friends of mine recommended I watch a documentary called The Power of Nightmares. It is hosted at the link above. Please check it out.

It is easily the most informative and eye-opening piece I have seen regarding the origins and the escalation of present-day conflitcs relating to perception of our government, and conflicts involving groups or individuals who stand in oposition to our government...groups and individuals whom are evidently both real and imagined.

This documentary has far less sensationalistic gloss than seems to accompany productions like these from more commonly known media outlets. It is about three hours long and the info presented is extensive, so you probably don't want to watch it in one sitting, but please do watch it in its entirety. I think you will find it to be worthwhile and valuable regardless of personal political stances and affiliations.