Parents and GovernmentNow that the cat is out of the bag, privacy is a big issue for everyone. Someone may be listening to so many tiresome conversations that it’s amazing they would bother. With e-mails, snooping is much simpler, because you can feed all e-mail to a machine that analyses the contents and decides if it’s worth looking into (or keeping for later).What’s ridiculous with the current record-keeping and analysis, is that one could infer from looking at how many times you called a certain number that you are conducting business of interest, while, say, it could be an affair. They would arrest you, thinking it’s the latter, and since they can do that, they’ll keep you for a long time.They say it’s for your own good, and that otherwise they won’t catch the terrorists. Problem is, they’ve already shown that they could look the other way when they saw something suspicious. So now, even though they may not get anything from their domestic spying program, they could look the other way when someone serious …

Street SpiritAt Andronico’s in Berkeley tonight, I arrived on my bike, presented it to the door to see if the store was still open.  It was.  This man selling the “Street Spirit” shows me I could park it on one of the racks.  On my way out, I buy his sheet, and ask if he writes in it.  Puzzled by it, but made curious, he wonders if I would find out who would take his story, and I say he might want to ask whoever gave him the paper.Of course, I might have offered to write his story for him.  As I went home, I thought it would be a good idea to gather these people’s stories.  I also thought it could be another of those cool projects, to get the homeless a kind of occupation to write, to compose something…