I have a growing number of notes piling up on my Treo, so in usual fashion I thought I'd post them all at once today. Enjoy.

--A recent disturbing thought, inspired by the disaster which has turned out to be Katrina: What if all this mess we're in right now, with Iraq and New Orleans and the economy and all the rest, is the result of some grand Machievellian tragedy within the Bush family? That is, what if Bush Sr. is in actuality one of those scheming white-male control freaks, who decided at the birth of each of his children what that child was eventually going to do as an adult, whether or not the kid actually wanted to do it? I mean, there are millions of such people around; almost all of us personally know at least one person like this, it seems.

And so Bush Sr decided that Bush Jr was eventually going to be in public service when he was older, a judge or an ambassador maybe, or even a politician or even someday maybe even President, even though Bush Jr in actuality is borderline-retarded, anti-social, and completely unequipped to function rationally while in a crisis. Because seriously, how can you look at the unending series of fuckups anymore from this administration, and not start thinking that Bush is maybe just simply borderline-retarded? Okay, Iraq, maybe - you could argue that conservatives maybe really did think things were going to go a lot more smoothly there than they have, that even a lot of smart people got fooled there into thinking that invading was a good idea. But how can you possibly watch Bush's reaction to Katrina and not at least partially think, "What, is this guy retarded? Seriously, is it that he just falls apart in a crisis situation, and stops thinking?" Which a strong argument can be made for, of course, when you string together the riches of embarrassments that mark his entire administration.

So, Bush Sr has decided, hell or highwater, that Bush Jr is going to be a politician when he grows up, and fuck you if you think you're going to do differently, Georgie boy, because I'm the father of this house, goddamnit, and you will do what your father says because the Bible demands it. So then Bush Jr keeps trying to passive-aggressively fuck up these plans when younger, like when he got arrested in his early twenties for driving under the influence of cocaine. But Bush Sr is such this out-of-control maniacal control freak, that he keeps doing things like covering up Bush Jr's arrest, so pervasively that 30 years later no one can prove that it actually happened. And come on, Bush was the director of the CIA during those years, so it's not like it would be difficult for him to destroy every piece of paper documenting such incidents.

And so this sick little game continues between son and father, with Bush Jr alternately self-sabotaging his efforts and also putting on a good show to please daddy, who has him under this enormous psychological thumb. And now here we are, with Bush actually now the President (after having party insiders, let's not forget, sabotage things in 2000 so that John McCain wouldn't get the nomination, and then hijacking the election itself so that Bush lost and still got elected). And all these things keep blowing up in Bush Jr's face now, and he's just wildly twisting his head around in the Oval Office these days, thinking, "How did I get here? What the hell happened? How could this little scheme of daddy's ever gotten this far?" And the world keeps falling apart, and Bush keeps reacting to it all like the borderline-retarded patsy he is, and all 400 million of us Americans have to suffer now for it, because of this sick little dysfunctional relationship between "Daddy" and "Junior" in some godforsaken Texas oil family, worthy more of a Lifetime movie than of two members of this family being past leaders of the free world.

I'm not saying that any of this is necessarily true. I'm just saying...what if it is?

--Okay, Flickr programming team, I have a suggestion for you, so here's hoping that a mutual friend of ours will point out this entry to you, or you come across it at Technorati or something. I want you guys to invent a special metatag that can be attached to JPGs uploaded at Flickr, containing the photographer's name, website, email address, photo name, photo year, photo description, and the like. Implementing this would consist of two parts, both of which would be incredibly easy - extra text input fields when someone uploads a new photo to their account, at the same place where they currently type in tags and descriptions; and then a standalone tag reader for Mac and Windows, that a person runs on their hard drive and that does nothing but read the info in that metatag.

It's already pretty easy to tack on proprietary information to a standard JPG image; that's why, for example, a Photoshopped image viewed in Photoshop will have a nice preview image and sometimes other information like a watermark, even though the image itself can be opened in lots of other applications besides just Photoshop. And that way you still have standard JPGs at Flickr, just like it is now, but simply with a little extra information attached just for fellow Flickr users. And that way, for example, I could sit there one day and download 10 or 20 Creative-Commons images I randomly find one day, and shuttle them all off into an "interestingimages" folder; then weeks or months later, I can revisit the folder, and if I decide to reprint one of the photos at my blog, or use it as cover art for a self-published eBook or whatever, I can immediately access the image's creation details, hooked permanently to the image itself so that there's never a chance of misplacing or accidentally erasing it.

Why yes, I have such a folder on my hard drive; and I was just looking through it the other day, in fact, and cursing the fact that I didn't write down the photographer's info for a lot of the images I now own, and now can't use the images because I don't know who to contact for permission. And I was thinking about how great such a metadata attachment would be for so many of us - to do just what I'm talking about, or to keep track of family members' sent photos, or to better organize your own photos, or to have the chance to permanently attach things like the photo's description. (How many of us Flickr people wish we could do this, exactly?) And it'd be so easy, too, something the immensely talented Flickr staff could kick out in a weekend; simply add some extra text input fields for originally creating the data, like I said, and then build a modified version of one of those open-source image viewers for retrieving the info, patched so to be able to access this proprietary metatag. And then you could even program this open-source viewer to display tags while in slideshow view, meaning that Flickr members could package slideshows in a downloadable format, for viewing by other Flickr members, complete with descriptions and dates and locations (and even Geotagging codes, if you wanted to add them). HOW DAMN USEFUL AND COOL WOULD THAT BE? How about it, Flickr? Or maybe one of the smarties over at Microformats.org would like to take this on, and then convince Flickr to eventually adopt the format?

--Hey, so, about 24 hours left now before my friend. Alamar gets into town from Germany - which means that I have to stop having fun when I get home later today, and spend the next 24 hours simply getting the final cleaning done in my apartment in anticipation of his visit. Here is how things are going to work with this website, by the way, for the twelve days Alamar is in town - because we'll obviously be going out a lot more often than I usually do, which means a lot more photos and audio reports from me than usual...

Once every 24 hours I'll be writing this usual journal entry, the one you're currently reading, simply about the various things going on in my day-to-day life. Then, whenever Alamar and I go out, I'll be posting cellphone-camera photos in real time to the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™; the next day I'll undoubtedly be referring to at least a couple of these photos in the main journal, and then they'll all be reposted as well at my Flickr account in late September. And then of course I'll also be recording lots of audio posts over the next twelve days as well, which are always more fun to do when you have someone to banter with; and those get converted to MP3s by Audioblogger and posted automatically to my podcast page. And then I'll be mentioning these audio posts at my main journal as well, the day after they're recorded, and linked to from here.

So if you're just a casual visitor, like the majority of readers are, you can just keep following this main journal to get most of the text I'll be writing, at least some of the photos, and all of the audio, albeit one link removed in this case. And then if you're already a user of podcast software, like Odeo, iPodder or iTunes, you can subscribe to the audio page's feed and have new posts delivered automatically to your MP3 player, as soon as they're recorded. And then if you want to check out all the photos I'm taking, before waiting a month to see them at Flickr, you can subscribe to the JPIL's feed as well, and have them delivered in real time too. And then those who are seriously into lifehacks can even create a "jasonpettus" uberfeed in their RSS reader, either through tags (as a place like Rojo does it) or a folder (like Bloglines does it), so that you can click one link and get all new entries from all my feeds to display on the screen at once.

And I know, I read that recent report too, about how only something like 8 percent of current internet users are actually adopting RSS feeds these days, and how it's not nearly as glorious an invention in many people's eyes as it is in mine. But I just don't understand why, which I guess is why I'm always pushing this option on you readers, because I seriously do think that you'll never go back to manually checking blogs once you get into the RSS habit. And it's just so easy to keep total and real-time check over all my websites at once that way, versus personally dealing with the highly irregular publishing schedules of some of my pages.

So anyway, that's the complete info on how to keep track of me over the next twelve days. And then after that I actually go straight to St. Louis, to help out my parents a little as my mom recovers from pretty major surgery. So once again I'll be keeping this kind of schedule, with the JPIL photos and the audio and the rest, but this time for only four or five days in the St. Louis metropolitan area. Whew!

--So speaking of Alamar, the other day I was doing a little favor for him (looking up what the longterm forecast is going to be for Chicago) and was reminded again of a subject I always find fascinating - of the difference between cognitive learning via "translation," versus cognitive learning via "getting it." See, when I myself travel, I'm very typical of most American/European cross-tourists - that is, I can't make heads or tails of a temperature reading in that other area, until I first translate it to the scale I'm used to (Fahrenheit in my case). And since this is so very, very typical of most humans, I thought I'd do Alamar a favor and translate the forecast into Celsius before emailing it to him, which got me thinking yet again about how weird this phenomenom is. I mean, it's just two numbers we're talking about, no different in nature or size from the other; the temperature this second in Chicago, for example, is 81 Fahrenheit and 27 Celsius. But for me, 27 still remains an arbitrary number in my head when I hear it, while hearing that it's 81 out makes me immediately feel 81-degree weather, know exactly what kinds of clothes I need to wear to feel the most comfortable.

We forget a lot, I think, just how much of the daily stimuli in our lives are things we had to teach ourselves to understand, versus just magically knowing it from birth like some genetic instinct. It's easy to forget, I think, because the activities in question are so easily accomplished, and accomplished so often and so regularly in our lives, that it really does eventually become like second nature to us. Tell me it's 81 out and I immediately know what kind of clothes to wear, without first having to translate the number into sensory-dependent memories; tell me that something is a mile away, and I immediately know exactly how tired my legs are going to feel after that mile-long bike ride or walk. But tell me that something is a kilometer away, that it weighs a kilogram, that it costs 20 euros, and I have to shrug my shoulders until first translating it into a scale I already have 36 years of experience using.

No point here; I just find it fascinating!

--Okay, and finally, a preview of some of the things coming here soon...

Tomorrow is a text and photo report from my latest bike adventure, done this weekend - from my place in Uptown to the northern tip of the lakefront park (Hollywood/Ardmore, or 5800N), where both Lakeshore Drive and the lakefront bike path officially end. It was a lot of fun!

Then also tomorrow or possibly the next day, the results of the penis survey I recently administered to the female readers of this journal - about whether there are certain types of erect penises that get women more turned on than other types. The results may surprise you! Or, er, maybe not!

Also this week, I'm hoping to talk more about a subject I mentioned here yesterday - of how it is that even a lot of our recent cultural history has become "lost" from public consciousness, even though we're more obsessive than ever with recording and documenting this historical data, and giving individuals more and more power at sorting and retrieving this data themselves. And this is a subject that can be directly applied to a bunch of stuff happening on the web these days (such as Google Print, citizen journalism, RSS feeds, blog aggregators and the like), so I thought I'd take a couple of days and talk about them and what I think.

Oh, and even more stuff already planned for this journal, but I'm almost out of space for today's entry. (Damn you, CMS client-application limitations! Damn you to HELL!) So it'll have to wait, I guess. Bye!