Category: Out there

Dreamed last night that I had put on an old-school beavertail wetsuit with twist grommets rather than velcro, like the one my dad used when I was a kid — before they started laminating the neoprene with nylon, and suits were rubbery-slick inside and out. Then a weight belt and booties, and I descended into shallow water (8 or 10 feet) beneath a pier. No flippers, no tank. Mask, no snorkel. The water was clear, and sunlight shone through as if it were air. Bright under water, not bluish, all the colors were vivid. Holding my breath, walked along the ocean floor until I found a dead fish — a 30 lb. snapper — and dug three fingers into the gills. Hauled it back to shore to have it mounted on a wooden plaque. We (whoever “we” were) intended to hang it on the wall of a seaside bistro we were building. The whole thing had the feeling of being on some kind of important mission, a sense of urgency.

You’re over 30. You were there. You may have worked hard not to remember that you remember, but you do remember. Visiting people’s homes while collecting on your paper route, stepping into the foyer only to be mesmerized by pointless wall hangings –tools from the shed and driftwood embedded in macrame, lamps fashioned from garden tools, dust embedded in the cheap paint, space-age acrylic tables and chairs through which you could more clearly see the hideously clashing colors of the hand-woven shag rug… And you remember sitting in the dentist’s office reading how-to manuals distributed by Sunset magazine…

I’m as much a fan of great 70s design as the next guy, but let us not forget how much craptastic home-spun junk littered people’s homes in the decade, and how it all finally piled up in garages (and ultimately at garage sales) in the 80s.

James Lileks, of The Gallery of Regrettable Food fame, has published a second volume, Interior Desecrations, chronicling the joyous garbage of DIY suburban 70s decor. Scrumptious.

Of course, it’s an old-timey meat-grinder painted avocado green, stuffed with fake vegetables, and mounted on a plaque you bought at Escutcheons ‘N’ Things. But, you may ask . . . how do I make it?

I’m starting a list of “Things to do before I die.” Skydiving was on the list before I learned that a childhood friend had had a terrible skydiving accident, broke his back badly, spent years in therapy, and is now a couple inches shorter.

The main item remaining on the list is to take a canopy tour: Strap into a harness and swing through the treelines of a rainforest, gliding on ziplines, rappelling down cliffs, climbing up through hollow trees, hanging out with monkeys and forest birds…

Canopy tours are offered all over the world — Mexico, South Africa, Jamaica, Costa Rica. Most of the tours advertised on the web are short — a few hours. But my father has a friend leading 7-day canopy tours in Costa Rica, where you pack in food, eat lala from the forest, sleep on platforms in the trees, seldom touch the ground.

For the record, this is my dream vacation.

Continue to hold bottomless fascination for found objects/found art (see Found Magazine if you haven’t already) – scraps of life that yield accidental glimpses into the inner lives of strangers. Like this poster by Terry, who lost his frog, desperate to find him again.

A band of Photoshoppers started re-working, re-hashing, recontextualizing the kid’s poster at lostfrog.org (click through main image for the series).

via Boing-Boing

Update: The true story behind Hopkin revealed.

Driving through the hills above El Cerrito yesterday, trying to get Miles to fall asleep. Mostly posh neighborhoods up there, great views, but every now and then you hit a trashy patch. Suddenly I found myself stopped in the middle of the street in front of a house with a half-rebuilt Mustang in the driveway, a washing machine rotting in the front yard. Staring at a 4′ x 6′ scrap of plywood propped up in the front yard, on which was painted (in a somewhat shaky hand):

WHOEVER IS THE BITCH OR BASTARD WHO LEFT THE PINK CROSS YOUR HEART BRA IN MY LIVING ROOM, YOU PROBABLY SHOT MY CAT.

One of those moments I curse myself for not keeping a camera on me at all times.

File under “Your body is your temple” :

Maybe it’s not news to anyone but me (this apparently hit in April), but it’s now possible to have tiny platinum hearts, stars, moons, circles and other Lucky Charms embedded directly in your eyeball, in case it turns out that that tongue piercing isn’t turning out to be the babe magnet you thought it would be. 15 minutes and 500 euros later, you’re the belle of the Face Sculpture Ball.

In 2002 the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery developed an implant that can be implanted within the superficial, interpalpebral conjunctiva. The implant does not interfere with the ocular functions, ie the visual performance and motility. The implant is made of a specially designed material that can be molded in all kinds of desired shapes and sizes.

Fine print: Only visible when you’re looking to the side. So you could, in theory, get all the way through a job interview without the CEO noticing… if you remember to maintain direct eye contact.

A University of Florida scientist has cultured 25,000 living rat brain neurons in a petri dish and hooked the resulting soup up to a grid of sensors that controls a computer. The neurons of the synthetic “brain” are interacting with each other and with the computer, forming neural patterns, and can now fly — sort of — an F22 fighter jet simulator.

When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. “You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out – and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who’s next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself,” he said. “(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it’s a live computation device.”

and…

“Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn’t know how to control the aircraft,” DeMarse said. “So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.”

This has astounding implications for understanding human brain development, for the future of artificial intelligence, and for the lowly philosopher contemplating ye olde Brain in a Vat problem. I wonder, is rat neuron soup doing battle with the Cartesian Demon?