In addition to being a little bit more practical and up-to-date, this will also serve as some public documentation of my upcoming month in Berlin and other parts of Germany, so stay tuned for news and enjoy!

Last night, we were reviewing some sketches I’d been working on for the first comic in a series (hopefully) to be titled “The observed weakness of gravity,” and I can’t tell you how wild and complicated combining images (over which you have ultimate and complete control) and words (see previous parens) is. My sticking point at the moment is that I tend to draw absolutely everything — elements, frames, pages — on the perpendicular. Everything lines up neatly with everything else, which doesn’t necessarily make for a totally engaging visual.

It wasn’t until we were breaking each of the images apart that it hit me why I do this: graphic design. For years and years now, I’ve had it drilled into me that every element in every design, especially in web design, absolutely must make sense in its placement and line up on some sort of grid. Even if that grid is uneven in places, it almost always exists. I’m sure the creative director of the agency I used to work for is thrilled that he’s beaten my subconscious into submission, but I’m stymied.

How does one unlearn all of this training in order to set art and stories free? Onward to breaking off the grid…

• Over at Hightower Lowdown, we’ve launched a new weekly video series featuring America’s #1 Populist. What more could you ask for? 2 minutes of Jim talking to you every single week! You can also watch it on YouTube, or subscribe to the show in iTunes.
• And for AlterNet.org, we relaunched the front page to be snazzier and brighter. Design was done by Design About Town, engineering by the ever-smarty Shawn and project management and OCD tweaking by me. Whee!
• I redesigned and launched the website for best-selling author Amy Bloom, who has been an absolute riot to work with. I haven’t read her newest, but Come To Me was highly recommended to me by Bitch Magazine co-founder and feminista-extraordinare, Lisa Jervis. And it rocked.
• Lots of photosets from the last couple months.
• Um, I upgraded to Leopard last night, and so far so good. One thing that I called tech support about because I couldn’t find an answer anywhere else: yes, Time Machine will wipe your external drive the first time you use it, but then you can continue putting other things on it after. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated Time Machine drive, whew.

That’s pretty much it. Holidays are a-comin’ and I’ll be up in Bingotown for a while, hanging out with the fam, and then back in NYC for New Year’s. Hope all’s well in the land of not-my-apartment!

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George W is doing a heck of a job!

At least, that’s what he says. He reckons our economy is “steady and strong. Steady and strong.”

In the real world, dozens of researchers are keeping track and the Hightower Lowdown has put all their facts and figures into a HANDY DANDY POSTER that spells out what a whopper and a crock’o’ that Bush claim is!

Just a couple of highlights: Last year we bought more goods and services from other countries than they bought from us — $723 billion more, which is an all-time record trade deficit. Bush has cut taxes on people who make $10 million a year by half a million bucks a year each. Meanwhile, 37 million Americans are living in poverty.

Visit http://www.hightowerlowdown.org to see the ARE YOU BETTER OFF YET poster in the July issue on the EXCELLENT NEW Hightower Lowdown website.

Jim Hightower and all of us at the Lowdown, which has 140,000 subscribers, are thrilled to invite you to check out this hot-off-the-keyboards website which features:

* A crisp and clean redesign with our current issue and over seven years of archives online!
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And — wait, there’s more coming soon! –

* Daily blogs from Hightower and others in the Lowdown camp!
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So click out of this email and go check out the NEW ISSUE of the Lowdown on our NEW WEBSITE.

http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/

Best from Jim Hightower, Phillip Frazer, Matt Wuerker, Laura Ehrlich, Deanna Zandt, Karen Gifford, Sahu Barron, Gwenda Blair, John Ernst, Bob Siegel, Jackson Frazer, and the whole crew at CivicActions (www.civicactions.com) who built this mighty nifty website.

Oh, and the site looks real goofy in Internet Explorer for PC right now (only the browser that 90% of you are using). You should really be using Firefox anyways.

Fixed that problem. Only thing not really working is the flickr badge at the bottom of the sidebar in IE6.0 for PC; I’m getting a 404 inside the iframe. sigh. You all should really use Firefox. ;-)