And maybe today. I’m headed to Dallas for a meeting of TAPPA, the Texas Association of Planned Parenthood Affiliates. In theory, this is a very useful group, formed by the Texas affiliates at the behest of the national organization, to attend to the legislative program and public relations problems for Planned Parenthood, a [...]

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It’s actually very simple.
We talk to the immigrants and ask who hired them. We ask them to provide proof. Proof of residence. It may not be complete. Rent checks in the vicinity, maybe. Light bills. We ask them who they worked for. We ask them for proof–checks, payslips, receipts for job expensed items, written [...]

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A peculiar thing, Thursday, when I was taking my lap top in to Best Buy because the display screen was eating itself up. Best Buy has set up a queue for the technical support desk—the Geek Squad, they call it— and there I was, ten or fifteen minutes into the deal. I had chatted [...]

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It’s getting obsessive. Here’s two more of the beasts. I’m working on simplification here. Eliminating details, abstracting the essential parts, working, again, from the same model. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even bother to redraw the head. It’s a cut and paste world when you need it. Efficiency in art, you know? Kathy [...]

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Last night, not this one. I hope. Meantime, Kathy and I joined Tom at UTB and saw a hell of a concert by the Marimba Mandayapa from the state of Chiapas, Mexico, playing Mexican marimbas, which are different than the commercial marimbas usually played. I didn’t take a close a look as others did, [...]

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I received a letter from John Cornyn’s office today reporting that the Texas Department of Transportation has addressed my concerns about a highway in Texas being designated a Jeff Davis Highway.
Here’s the text of Cornyn’s letter:
Dear Mr. Raines:
After reviewing your concerns, the Texas Department of Transportation provided the enclosed response to my inquiry. I hope [...]

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The laptop crashes. Not like last time—a blown hard drive and everything a loss— this time, the screen is failing. It appears that a grove of trees is silhouetting themselves along the bottom of the screen so that I can’t see the taskbar when it pops up or the execute button on, say, the graphic [...]

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Paul Krugman’s column this morning warns against the stimulus package that the House of Representatives has passed on to the Senate. Professor Krugman’s grounds, principally, are that the current agreement will give most of the “rebates” to people who don’t necessarily need it all that much and what they will do is put it in [...]

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Visualizing cats. What a pass time. For reasons not quite utterable, I’m not asleep at closing in on four in the morning. Rather I’m up and scraping pixels around this way and that making cats. Here’s one. Small and pink. Not quite an icon, but headed that way. I use Image Composer 1.5, which used [...]

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Today was mainly work after I got started. That was late, no doubt about it. Up at the crack of ten, I believe is the phrase, then some mindless newspaper reading/CNBC watching (business news only–they never mention Britney!), web browsing and belly scratching before I sat down to watch the series I’ve been following, Homicide: [...]

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So says Jim Wallace, who was the guest on the Daily Show yesterday (and the rerun this evening). It’s an interesting idea, and I’ve held it as possible from time to time. It seems to drive astrologer Rob Brezney and his Free Will Astrology as well as his book, Pronoia: How the Universe Is Conspiring [...]

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Last night I nearly panicked when it appeared I had lost the entire contents of a chapbook* I’d put out a couple of years ago. So there I was, after midnight, wandering through directories on two computers and several memory sticks and digging through boxes of abandoned backup CD’s. Not a trace, it seems.
Then I [...]

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He first said don’t call me kitty
Don’t call me cat
Don’t call me.
Your eyes are not enough
Not as good as mine.
I see your dance before you do
And scuttle my way
To that position of power
At a distance.
Dancing I know:
Count everything.
The picture is She Does Not Sleep, one of my earlier efforts at electronic art, put together mainly [...]

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Here’s the press release announcing the demise of the improv class:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Valley Improv
Contact: Stan Raines
956-546-8288 Cell: xxx xxx xxxx

Valley Improv cancels class at the Yacht Club

Valley Improv regrets that it will not offer the class in improvisation at the Yacht Club in Port Isabel starting Jan. 22. Despite efforts to get the [...]

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Tests today. I used to tell my students that life was full of intelligence tests. Like what do you do when it rains? That’s a test of intelligence. They pooh-poohed me, of course, but after a couple of them nearly drowned while looking up during a storm, most agreed with my proposition. And I resisted [...]

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Swing low, little chariot.
Near enough the ground that we can see
Who pulls those reins
And swings behind the tree
That those engines pull.
I heard from a man about another land
I heard what it could be
If we’d go there, well, at last
We could be free
And we’d be full.

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What an idea. But I was just there and logged in. Wikipedia informed me that there was no page for User:Sraines902 and that such a page, were it to be written, ought to be written by UserSraines902 his/her/itself. So I clicked the edit button –I’m a real sucker for those, lately–and wrote. Here’s what I [...]

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I have no justification for setting up, as we say, yet another blog by yet another guy except that I’m a compulsive writer lately, and I’m mean to my cats if I don’t write something.
I am Stan Raines, sometimes actor or musician, parent, husband, shark with a set of darts, confirmed as a former smoker, [...]

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