I dream. I dream I'm floating on the surface of my own life.
Watching it unfold. Observing it. I'm the outsider looking in.

I saw this "ANIMATR" License Plate on my drive home from work tonight and I thought it was pretty cool so I snapped a shot with my camera-phone.

I've noticed how they usually pixelate / blur out license plates on TV so I figured I should run a mosaic filter on the rest of the car to remove any other identifying features. I figure I could've posted it uncensored, cuz I think license plates are considered public record and Google Street View doesn't blur any of the thousands of clearly visible plates currently on-line, but I like the mosaic effect draws better attention to the plate.

Kurt sent me a link to this Daily Mail article about cartograms of the world map redrawen with each country's size proportionate to demographic statistics like wealth, alcohol consumption, HIV, military spending, etc.

[Military Spending Cartogram]

After finding myself surrounded by banks and bars the last 3 months, I'm not at all surprised to see that Luxembourg, a country so tiny it's barely a speck on a global geo-political map, is relatively large on the Wealth and Alcohol Consumption cartograms because Lux is #1 in GDP per capita and #2 in boozin' it up.

It's also fascinating to see that Military Spending and Toy Imports are virtually identical while War / Death is the inverse of the two. "1st World" countries like the US build bombs and play with toys while the people of "3rd World" Countries die of war, famine and disease.

Tonight I shaved my head and left a mohawk. It was hard because there is only one mirror in my hotel room here in Luxembourg. I video taped it and made my own little Sports Racer intro for the show with ze frank. I wonder if Ze will actually use my intro, and even if he doesn't, I think it was the perfect way to spend the night before my birthday.

This is Joshua Mwangi, a Kenyan farmer, who needs $1,200 to buy a dairy cow.

I just "loaned" $50 Joshua Mwangi to buy that cow. Actually, I shouldn't've put quotes around "loaned" because it implies that it's not a real loan, but it is, in fact, a loan from me to Joshua Mwangi, via a non-profit organization called Kiva.org. I also probably shouldn't've used a double-contracted word like "shouldn't've." But I have no regrets about loaning the money to Joshua Mwangi because I know $50 means a lot more to him than it does to me. Besides, half of the money was initially a gift to me from Greg, who gave me a $25 gift-certificate to Kiva.org for Valentine's Day (or maybe for my birthday) and I simply decided to match his gift.

I know it's silly, but ultimately the reason I decided to loan the money to Joshua Mwangi instead of the other entrepreneurs in need is because I spotted a fellow "Joshua M." among the list.

I sincerely hope Joshua Mwangi will be able to repay my tiny portion of his loan from Kiva.org because it means that he and his farm are successfully self-sustaining and because I'll be able to re-loan the money to other entrepreneurs.

I've added a banner to my "affiliates" section at the bottom of the left menu sidebar to track the total funds of Mwangi's loan, which is currently at 52%. (If you can't see the banner, then it means you're probably a Firefox user like me and you've got Adblock and/or NoScript extensions enabled so I recommend adding Kiva.org to your exclusions white-list).

Oh ya, and here's a Frontline/World story about Kiva.org:
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/uganda601/

CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN
February 12, 1809 to April 19, 1882

Finally, a holiday I can endorse...

Happy Birthday Charles and Happy Darwin Day 2007!!!

I was brain-dead, locked out, numb, not up to speed
I thought I'd pegged you an idiot's dream
Tunnel vision from the outsider's screen

Kaiserthermen: Roman Baths in Trier, Germany

Sam got me a flickr Pro account last night so I uploaded all of the photos I've taken so far on my new Canon and my cell phone.

You can view the pics here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshmorgan/

I'll add descriptions later, but I should note that the more recent pics (the first 200 pics) are NOT Luxembourg, but rather, they're the Roman ruins in Trier, Germany.

And I'll eventually post a proper blog (I swear)...

Whatever happened to protesting nothing in particular, just
protesting cause it's Saturday and there's nothing else to do