Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Somebody’s psych notes, found crumpled in the bushes in our side yard. If you are the owner of this homework and want it back, please contact me via this web site. I am enamored of the choices you have made while highlighting phrases, such as “following the orders,” “grades rise,” and “decrease a particular behavior.”
In the first official instance of interplanetary graffiti, Mars rover Spirit pulled out its abrasion tools and left a little Mickey on a Martian rock.
Is it spring yet? Sure feels like it. Camelias are blooming like crazy, Amy planting up a storm, I fertilized the lawn with Scott’s Turf Builder (amazing stuff!).
For no particular reason, in the mood to celebrate with Jimmy Webb’s glorious lyrics to “MacArthur Park” (made famous by Richard Harris, Donna Summer, Frank Sinatra, take your pick). Who today writes lyrics this good?
I recall the yellow cotton dress
Foaming like a wave
On the ground around your knees
The birds, like tender babies in your hands
And the old men playing checkers by the trees
MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left a cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!
I think The Polyphonic Spree should cover MacArthur Park.
Friend from many-moons-ago Kabir Carter is helping to open Miami’s Subtropics music festival by performing a real-time moblogging project from New York.
Walking in the city (or elsewhere), sounds are heard and recorded without employing the subjective and limiting filter of conventional, transducer based sound recording technology.
So he’s describing sounds in text rather than laying them down magnetically, posting aural impressions from the field, without sound. For the opening, they set up a projector in a space in Miami and showed the posts. Sample results:
SFX #75
SFX: Folding Subway Seat RecoilingSFX #73
SFX: Over Twenty Trash Bags Buffeted by BreezeSFX #56
SFX: Sliced Potatoes Frying in Oil Filled VatSFX #40
SFX: Three Helium Filled Ballons Rubbing against Corrugated Metal Scaffolding
Fascinated by a new urban sport (perhaps sport is too controlled a word?) called Le Parkour, aka Park-Core, aka free running, aka Urban Freeflow. The idea is simply to move the human body through the environment as quickly and as fluidly as possible. There are good videos all over the net, although I’ve never seen so many 404s, slow servers and broken footage – must be something about the laissez faire atmosphere of the activity. Most of what you see is like skateboarders without the boards – 20-something men bouncing off walls, slithering under obstacles, doing hand plants from tall rails. I’m looking forward to seeing the art form mature, for Jackie Chan-like style and grace to become part of the improvisation. For someone to take it to a more Zen-like level, as opposed to the hardcore headspace of the skate crowd.
Update: See also House Gymnastics
Japanese screensaver Hotel Magritte, simply stunning if only because it’s so non-computer-y. 2-D woodcut images juxtaposed in some kind of orderly random fashion into black and white surrealist indoor landscapes. The point of view then transported through these as if entering hotel room doors into other people’s dreams. Difficult to describe.
Thanks Simon.
Yo, God! sells a mechanical God Detector which helps people to determine God’s immanence without relying on ambiguous signs such as the presence of Jesus’ face on a tortilla, or finding a turnip shaped like a cross. As this seemed like a potentially useful device, I was about to order one, when suddenly I realized the device has a fatal design problem. I’ve written the following question to the manufacturer, which I am hoping will soon be answered in their FAQ.
Dear Yo God! : The dial on your device has two extremes: Yes and No. On one of your pages you say that the detector can’t prove that God does not exist. So why is the default position of the dial “No?” Should the detector not register agnostic (i.e. flat, or in the middle) until it detects either God’s presence or, conversely, her absence? I guess this is really a user interface question: Why does the default reading imply God’s positive absence rather than simply the lack of any detection?
Update: I have received a carefully worded response from the manufacturer of the God Detector on this matter. Read More for details.
Continue reading “God Detector”
The crooks were trying to smuggle American-grown chicken into Ukraine territory, which is all well and good except it’s very illegal, given how the U.S. genetically modifies billions of its chickens and injects them with hormones and chemicals and toxins and feeds them ground-up chicken parts mixed with chicken feces and saws off their beaks and packs them by the tens of thousands into tiny nauseating disease-ridden cages in massive “Matrix”-like hellhole factory farms and treats them worse than you treat a skin boil. Ukraine refuses to take this crap. U.S. officials insist our factory-farmed chicken is safe to eat. Ukrainian officials look at U.S. officials like they are childish Neanderthal idiots who must take the Ukrainian officials to be simpletons and fools.
See also: Dick Cheney Kills Birds Dead
NASA’s been messing with an ephemeral substance called Aerogel: 99.98% air, and virtually impervious to heat. The pictures seem almost impossible. They’ll be using it to grab interstellar particles moving 6x faster than a bullet without damaging them via either impact or heat.
Via Thornography.
I like the spams where they use banal or left-field subject lines to fool you into reading the spew. I’ve been saving some of them up. In the past week:
“Are you a junky?” = Viagra
“Do you want a bagel?” = Get plump, sexy lips in under 30 days
“Monotheism” = A harder, longer man-thing
“The pre-storm darkness” = Free cable TV
Dyslexic tendencies, sometimes with humorous consequences. Just scanning the spam box and saw one that I was sure read “Get hair on your own back!” Upon closer look, turned out to be: “Get your own hair back.”
