Welcome to  gning.net  gning.org, the personal web site
of the lovely and talented Paul M. Kienitz.

If you are wondering what a gning is,
or wish to find out a bit more about me,
 you can check out  there used to be
a gning FAQ.  But there is really only
one important thing you need to know:

Paul Kienitz is cooler than you, because he lives in a DOME

(Boy, is this front page overdue for a redesign.)

This site is not about my personal life.  Its just a collection of stuff I wanted to present for public appreciation.  I am have organized the material into three broad categories: an Arts & Entertainment section, a Politics (& Entertainment) section, and a Geekery & Rantery section.
 

				the Arts & Entertainment section
			Here's a gallery, displaying the best of my photography.  It's mostly nature photos.  I finally added thumbnails.  (last updated 1/27/02) Some more photos... definitely not fine art in this case.  I got a digital camera and I had to try it out at the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade.  It's got everything you need in a Berkeley: costumed freaks, activists, nudists, ethnic wannabes, politicians... and eighty Art Cars.  Look here for the people in the parade, and look here for the Art Cars.  (9/26/00) You know those silly online personality quizzes that some people create?  Well, I threw together a few of them for giggle value, never intending to show them to more than a few people... they were: Which Classical Composer Are You? Which Science Fiction Writer Are You? Which House Paint Are You? Which Office Supply Are You? (New!)  Are You A Republican? To my surprise, the Science Fiction Writer quiz suddenly became popular among real science fiction writers.  Like, Jerry Pournelle took the test, and it told him he was not Jerry Pournelle, but Robert Heinlein.  So I figured I'd better let everyone see these, dumb though they are.  (Warning: crude language is used.)  The javascript code they're constructed with is readily adaptable by anyone wanting to make quizzes of their own. For some reason, I have put together a set of capsule reviews of almost 50 movies based on comic books, from Hulk to Howard the Duck, which is odd considering that I never read comics much.  But if you're looking at the recent wave of superhero movies and hoping for a clue to separate the mighty from the meek, this might be useful, or at least amusing.  And of course, some of these movies are so awful that you just can't afford to miss out on them...  (updated 7/23/04) I now have a bit of my own home-recorded music here.  Nothing shockingly original... just something that answers the question: What if Richard Berry's immortal rock classic "Louie, Louie" had been instead written by Peter Gabriel?  Download Shock_the_Louie.mp3 (2.5 MB) to find out.  (6/1/00) Every once in a while, you listen to a record expecting something ordinary and get blown away by something fantastically good that you never expected.  This is my list of great albums that have come at me from out of left field in that way, with a description of each.  Most of them are relatively unknown.  I'd love to hear your list of such albums.  (updated 12/30/01) And finally, the thing that first motivated me to put up a home page: a fan tribute to my favorite musician, Eric McFadden.  There is a separate page for his band Liar, which was my favorite band while it lasted.  (last updated 6/21/04)

 

				the Politics (& Entertainment) section
			Corruption watch!  (last updated 7/3/04) In 2001, I had a page about the evolving California electricity crisis, and the mounting evidence that power companies were creating an artificial shortage to drive prices sky-high.  Now it's about the Enron scandal and the others that came after it, and their revelations of corruption in the White House; it's called "Enron & Friends".  I've gradually come to cover more and more stories of corruption.  New material is sometimes added quite often. 2001's original electricity crisis page is here, cut off at a point just before the Enron collapse.  There is also a page of miscellaneous other energy-related topics here. Are you one of those who is itching to get rid of the obsolete and cantankerous apparatus known as the Electoral College?  Read this discussion of some of the many reform alternatives available.  If you're a defender of the old system, you might find options here that are more appealing than what you've heard previously.  (minor update 2/22/03) Take a trip back to those unforgettable fun-filled years of the Reagan administration, with a little software item called The Reagan Years.  Any day you run the The Reagan Years program, it will write out a screenful of news about various events that happened on the same calendar day during the nineteen eighties.  All the scandals, embarrassments, and fuckups, gathered into a single package organized by date.  Go to the The Reagan Years page to see if I have a version for your computer type yet... or if you have JavaScript, go directly to gning.org/reagan/ to see today's Reagan history right in your browser!  (Current version is release 3; further material for release 4 is being accumulated.) There's also a rant about economics here, as is natural in any discussion of Reagan.  If you have ever wondered why the economy has done so well in the Clinton administration compared to the Reagan years, here's my theory about why.  (updated 10/21/01 with new statistics) Here's a rant about why Republicans never seem to let the government get out of debt, which has become relevant again as Dubya is making a push for a further big tax cut for businesses and upper income individuals -- the same groups who are already receiving a large part of your tax bill as interest payments on the national debt.  (updated 4/15/03) If you're interested, you can view a copy, preserved for historical and archival value, of my pre-election screed on just how lame a candidate George W. Bush was in my view.  (updated 4/15/03 with a postscript: "How well did I guess?") And here is somebody else's rant explaining the Supreme Court actions that got Bush into office, which I am preserving a copy of because it's the clearest summary I've found of just what the court did.  (Did the court "steal" the election?  I wouldn't really say so -- they only did damage control after the original plan didn't quite work.  The actual theft occurred earlier, when Florida's voter roles were cleaned of alleged felons, some 90,000 of the names removed being people who were still legally eligible to vote.  Florida admitted this in court two years later, after it couldn't change anything... and postponed corrections until after Jeb Bush's re-election.) One other political piece I've written  is  was on Mike Huben's Critiques of Libertarianism page  instead of here .  He put it in his Liberal section.  The article is called I'm Still Not A Libertarian.  It's about 12000 words.

 

				the Geekery & Rantery section
			Do you still use an Amiga?  This page contains some software I wrote for the Amiga, including Q-Blue, the leading QWK and BlueWave offline BBS mail reader for the platform, various small freeware utilities, two games, and current versions of Amiga Zip and UnZip, which I help maintain.  All have source code available.  (last updated 1/20/01) Does your life revolve around your psychological/spiritual growth process?  Want to meet other geeks in the same condition?  Follow this link to learn about the Personal Growth Geek Code!  No, you won't meet anybody here, but now you and they will have a tool to know all about each other at a glance.  (current version is 0.4) A miscellaneous rant:  48 Reasons Not To Get A Boob Job.  For some reason this is the page that I get the most mail about.  (last updated 8/18/02) Another: Why Aren't We Fighting Spam In Traditional Media?  (small update 6/21/04) And finally... the Micro-Rants page!  Random opinions and notions that could have a full rant page written about them, but don't -- items important enough to mention, but not important enough to put any time or research into.  Something more than a static page and something less than a blog; check back from time to time.  (last updated 6/22/02) The miscellaneous energy topics page is a spinoff from this.  It contains all kinds of information and advocacy on subjects having to do with energy issues -- one major interest being electric cars.  (updated 11/3/02)

 

Before this page went up, the Personal Growth Geek Code was hosted by Thraam Transmissions, which was formerly known as Defenestration, and which has now become involution.org.  It's a place with lots more cool shit on it than I have here.  Check it out.  This is where The Rattler is hosted -- a joint blog in which Demitria Monde Thraam and I monitor the War on Terror.  There's also another blog there where I have been an occasional co-writer, called anodyne.

Oh, and if anyone really cares, here's a snapshot of my cat Vespertilio.  And here is a silly tune I wrote about him.
 

If you have any comments, send me mail.

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