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Oh My God I Hope This Is Not A Joke
Mrs. Whatsit covered her face with her hands as though she were embarassed, and nodded. "And you did - you did what that star just did?" With her face still covered, Mrs. Whatsit nodded again. Charles Wallace looked at her, very solmnly. "I should like to kiss you." - Madeline L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time. This is Why I Dropped Out of College The Weirdness Just Keeps on Coming There has been too much Barbie-related weirdness going on in my life this week. At least this Ken guy didn't chew Barbie feet when he was little. Or at least he doesn't mention it. Also on the pita menu tonight, Narissy points via her reflog to copkiller.org. Quote: "...As many victims of police brutality will attest, cooperation means nothing to thugs who are out to maim you in the first place. I fully advocate slashing the throat of any cop who uses undue or unlawful force against any citizen. Pick up your pride and strike back." There are a lot of links here to all kinds of pages, from resources to rants like this site. I'll leave it to you guys to decide if there's a parallel or connection here. Now please, just give me four hours of sleep before work tomorrow.
Yes. 1 1 3 Doppelganger More Chord-Planing Than You Can Shake Your Booty At
Or have you ever said a common word like "watermelon" so many times it doesn't seem like it could be a word anymore? Are there documented case studies for things like this? Mariko Mori For all that the Web is good for, it's hard to find nice wallpaper-quality images by contemporary artists. These are the best I could find for her. Some of her photos have musical accompaniment. The mp3 here is like some kind of bootleg from a gallery. The audio artifacts and messed up tape just make it sound cooler. lmnop My New Wallpaper New and Improved: 20 percent more readable Time Police All You Zombies by Robert A. Heinlein. All the Myraid Ways by Larry Niven. Time Police And then the next day I read it again and the line was "The anger and caring in your email was a jumble." And I swear I didn't mis-read it the first time. So what then - did some somebody travel back in time to edit the letter? It reminded me of the letter in A Swiftly Tilting Planet which subtly changes every time the heroes go back in time to battle evil. And wasn't there something in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" (you could tell the exact moment when Douglas Adams gave up drugs cold turkey couldn't you? It was when he was writing the interminable banquet scene in the beginning of that book.) about a guy trying to steal an answering machine tape out of somebody's house because of some message he'd left. And yeah, there was loads of time-travel in that book too. So that got me thinking - if I were given the power to travel back in time, but the only change I could make was to add 2 words to a letter, and one of them had to be an article or preposition - like 'and caring'- what 2 words would I add? What two words would you add? Blog Nicely Indeed I think Neale's right about a blogging Rubicon having been crossed recently. The copyright tagline (located at the bottom of the page in IE, and about six inches to the right of your monitor in Netscape) on my page is a pretty obvious parody of kottke.org's tagline. It bugged me more that somebody didn't get the Kottke joke than that she thought I was pretentious for copyrighting my content (and I think that's an interesting tangent for another time and place - where does blogging fall in terms of written content? Correspondence? Prose? Scribblings?). A weblogger who's never heard of Jason Kottke? That's like a sci-fi fan who's never heard of Isaac Asimov! Like somebody who sees a Beatles album at Tower and says "Paul Mcartney was in another band before Wings?" like somebody at a U2 concert who says "I've loved this band ever since their first album 'The Joshua Tree!!!'" The Web is crowded. That doesn't mean it has to become insular - the Web is also infinitely large. Communities are going to precipitate out of the mass - and nobody's in danger of being crowded out. --> Okay I worry alot about identity becoming homogenized - I worry about people who don't know the nature or origin of their own fears or desires. And I worry that in the future artists are going to be the few people not so ground down by routine that they can conceive and express any kind of emotion at all - and if we want to get apocalyptic I wonder if the wanking and bile coming from the legions of arriviste weblogging trolls is the rage of a generation of cornered animals (why kid myself?). Now here I am at 24yearsold calling kids in highschool the younger generation - somebody euthanize me. -->I'm sure there are mad unacknowledged social class issues at play here just like the barqoue clique systems in highschool that reflected the segregation of the adult world. And it's our last and greated taboo because it's the most divisive. My friend Tim, about five years ago, our freshman year of college - approximate quote - "You know. I realized something for the first time today - I'm not middle class. I'm _lower_ middle class. I looked at my home, my clothes, my school and career choice and family and said to myself - I Am Lower Middle Class. And it's a bigger weight off my chest than realizing that I really want to suck other guys' dicks." And since we can't see what people are wearing online that's why we judge them according to their design. Sartorial superego. I'm sure there are other issues to relating to the repression of private identities in public - that's going to be like the Emotion for a New Millenium. Fear of Being Deconstructed. I can't wait until I read an essay by a noted queer theorist that contains a line like "Because they symbolize an attempt to incorporate the Other in a construct of the Self it is evident that anybody who uses frames in a personal homepage must enjoy licking dick." Like Hitler would have enjoyed licking dick. There. Now I've closed this digression. For future thinking - materialist ethics in the online community, and syntactical similarities between weblogging and Usenet communication. (we're going to get destroyed by narcissism the way Usenet was destroyed by Spam.) I'll be happy when all of this trendy www bullshit blows over in 10 years and the Internet becomes a place for research and communication again. (Also, I stand corrected on the Ted Danson thing. I guess since Kae hasn't heard of Jason Kottke it's no surprise I haven't heard of Narcissistic. I mean fuck the Webby nomination and all that - they're just about whose clique is better. Take up the class war that we were trained for in school...) Yes...my precious pita is precious to me like the child I can never bear, and this is how much I have to intellectualize of the hurt somebody slandering my baby... I Have Been Flamed (and did this person actually flame me and then steal my link to Ted Danson Incorporated? These kids today. No manners...) Since I brought up the subject of Taschen (World's Finest Purveyor of Quality Smut)... Jan Saudek | (and) | (and) Nobuyoshi Araki | (and) | (and) | (texty) Sexy Robots! Taschen published a posterbook with six prints sometime in the last few years but I couldn't find it on their crazy site and it may be out of print - look for it at your favorite remainder bookshop.
Otherwise - there's an FTP motherlode here. A Real Doll Barbie Bloodsport! Found here - which is some dead links and otherwise creepy creepy. Say Hi to Lina, the propriatress of this portal of weirdness. Hello, Loobylu.
Thanks for the Schwag, Baby! Ruth Shalit Roolz This is Hilarious Is this Jorn Barger's Alter Ego? A well-known scholar in disguise? Rogue AI? Or just an alcoholic Lit major crashing and burning through his sophomore year at Dartmouth? The World Wonders. I'd Like to Buy a Vowel...
So I was thinking - I'm a non practicing Catholic. So is the free-floating guilt that I feel for doing random things that really aren't that bad caused because I just have a psycholoical need for absolution from some authority/higher power? It made me think of call-in radio shrinks and talk shows too - (I don't want to be a blog snob by separating myself too much from people who don't use the internet) - but I think these are kind of the confessional rituals for a culture that has been born to go through the motions of a religion but doesn't have the conviction. Can anybody relate similar experiences for other religions? Flying Machines with Tetrahedral Wings "While the Wright Brothers consciously chose unstable supporting surfaces that had to be controlled by the aviator to keep them flying, Bell worked on the problem of building in stability which in the long run contributed to the development of aircraft which were easy to fly. He set about developing a kite that was strong, light, and above all stable. He developed the regular tetrahedron as a basic cell for compound kites.Since each cell is triangular, it is inherently rigid and needs no additional bracing. Any number of such cells can be connected together without changing the surface-to-weight ratio. His standard cell was 10 inches on a side. In 1907 Bell built a tetrahedral structure consisting of 3393 such cells. On December 6, 1907, this multi-celled kite was launched by a steamer on Baddeck Bay, Nova Scotia. With a person onboard, the kite flew beautifully for 7 minutes and then was allowed to settle on the water. The Cygnet, as the kite was named, had risen to 50 m and descended so slowly that the passenger onboard, whose vision was obscured by the structure, did not realize that he was dropping until the kite reached the surface." (quoted here). Bell was into all kinds of things besides telephony (ideas which he got from teaching deaf children). He believed that photography was essential for education, was president of the National Geographic Society, and got his son-in-law to found National Geographic Magazine. What amazed me most was that Bell was an evangelist of tetrahedra decades before Buckminster Fuller made them famous with his geodesic geometry. I guess by the time Bell had built his prototype tetra-plane (1908) the Wright Brother's design, with it's Cartesian pitch-yaw-roll (X,Y,Z Axis)control system had become the standard model for flying machines - and so his model never caught on. R. Buckminster Fuller made the tetrahedron famous with his geodesic geometry decades after Bell's death. There's a great story here where Fuller describes permanenty wigging out his kindgergarten teacher by building a tetrahedronal house out of toothpicks. The discovery of fullerines (tetrahedronal carbon molecules) prove that Bell and Fuller had both independantly discovered a fundamental organizational principle of nature. You can play with tetrahedra here. Soap Opera
I'm bored and instead of throwing up links to flying machines with tetrahedral wings, I thought I'd mention the feud brewing between Andy and Andrea. The bile on Andy's part seems a little too contrived to be genuine - I think they're faking an intra-blogger fight to get more popular. Math Without Tears baby-thinker-helmet Lots of Thinking, No Time for Linking Templog Client : Superior Coffee Vision : "To be the leading coffee authority offering the best coffee solutions and systems." Goal : To become a billion dollar company by 2005. Doing : Answering Phones, Making Copies National Accounts Advantages : Free fully-stocked institutional-grade coffee bar. My own cubicle. Internet Access. Disadvantages : Institutional-grade coffee. Lack of work causes guilt and paranoia for blogging. Some historical background for the Corporate Parent. Palmyra = Private Nature Preserve? It may not be a welcome tourist destination, as one couple who sailed there in 1974 was murdered and had their boat stolen - leading some to believe the island is cursed. The funniest thing about this for me (and me alone) is this guy Henry Cooper who claims to own the island. My 99-yearold landlord in Florida was named Henry Cooper and the 'house' I lived in was such a cabana with a telephone jack that I wouldn't be surprised if this guy had been living on some remote pacific atoll for the last 90 years or so... The Virtual Acid Trip This guy claims that Paul Simon is suing him, probably for unauthorized use of a song in one of the animations on this site. A month ago I wouldn't have believed it, but after seeing what Metallica did to Napster today, (50,000 names? Stalin would be proud - you've become the snarling dogs to the RIAA's corrupt pigs. Four Legs Good, Metallica Sucks. That's my new motto. I'm burning my Metallica mp3's in protest.) I'm starting to believe that all rockstars become assholes eventually. Oh, yeah. It's probably a felony now for me to have linked this page. It's probably a crime for you to view this page. Acid is Groovy. Kill the Pigs. The Pieman's Homepage In French He's Called Le Gloupier 'His mission in life is to attack the"self-esteem and arrogance" of the famous and self-important. This is nothing new. Satire and caricature has been used for centuries to tease the rich and famous. The originality of his activities lies in the organisation required. In his memoirs, entitled Crème et Châtiment ("Cream and Punishment"), he tells of his many victims. These include the novelist and film director, Marguerite Duras (chocolate cake) and Philippe Douste-Blazy, French minister of culture (custard pie). To cover such high-profile figures with pâtisseries is, for Godin, the highest form of art. ' (actually this quote is from here. Here's a movie of Bill Gates getting pied. And some decadent action links. HREX - The Human Radiation Experiment Information Management System It includes a handy tutorial:
Chicago's Mayor, the lesser Richard Daley, has done everything short of declaring ComEd Public Enemy No. 1 for it's imcompetence. A big chunk of Chicago was without power during the hottest weekend of the year last year - which actually caused homebound and elderly people to die from things like heatstroke. This is a company that's had three of it's nuclear reactors on the NRC's watch list (and could only get one of those plants removed from the list by shutting it down). So - ComEd: Sucks hard. Mayor Daley the Lesser: Still sucks, because he's an Illinois politician. Right. Illinois Governor Hit in Face with Pie On the Naming Convetions of Computer Companies in the 1980's Take one of these techie-sounding prefixes: uni- And add to it one of these futuristic suffixes:
Voila, you've got: Could we make a convincing case that these naming conventions are a telling way of interpreting how businesses see their actions and intentions in relation to their own view of the future? From 'Unity' (incorporation/consolidation of power) to 'Accuracy' and 'Computation' (indexing, taxonomy, panopticism, and all those other Foucauldian goodies) and leading to the current business=net=life eternal-present 'e'phemeralization of institutions and 'i'onization of identity? Probably - but for the sake of a good academic cop-out I'll Leave that To a Later Discussion. Youth Gone Wild WNUR CSS Drives the Van And speaking of dumb hacks - I thought I'd figured out a way to make links for individual entries by putting an A NAME %%date%%-%%time%% into the entry format function in the Pita control center- but it doesn't seem to work. Anyway, that's all. Some Fun Derivative Content Referred via mod pitas. New Month, New Design |
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Eat your heart out, 
