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Geostationary Banana

A team of artists and engineers is preparing to float a 300-meter banana between the high atmosphere and Earth’s low orbit (30-50 km). Sounds fantastical, but the engineering is apparently all there; the banana is set to launch August 2008. The team claims there are no legal aspects for them to deal with at all – there are no rulings for air traffic at over 25,000 feet. Which is fun for art, but has scary implications – we’ve been hearing for a decade now about the possibility of large companies floating enormous billboards in space, visible from earth. If the banana succeeds, it’s easy to imagine sunset skies dotted with honkin’ Lexus and Pepsi ads not long after.

Thanks baald

Music: Lennie Tristano/Lee Konitz/Warne Marsh :: 317 E, 32nd
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Environmentalism: Satan’s Work

Q: What’s worse, ignorance or apathy?
A: I don’t know and I don’t care.

Treehugger:

Jerry Falwell is decrying global warming as “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” from evangelism to environmentalism. “Naive Christian leaders,” in fact, have been duped—DUPED, I say—by dirty hippies like Al Gore.

Meanwhile, Mark Morford has an entertaining piece on the 13% of Americans who claim never to have heard of global warming. Think about that. Tens of millions of Americans. Never heard of it.

Reality is just crushing sometimes.

Music: Ry Cooder :: Good Morning Mr. Railroad Man
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The Shocking Final Word

Dylan points to a dust-up amongst librarians sparked by a paragraph in the latest Newbery award-winning children’s novel:

“The Higher Power of Lucky” is the story of a 10-year-old girl in rural California and her quest for “Higher Power.” The opening chapter includes a passage about a man “who had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ‘62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.” Librarians have been debating whether “scrotum” was an appropriate word for young readers, especially from a book with the Newbery seal.

The librarian was apparently not perturbed by the fact that the story covers a dude drinking half a bottle of rum — in his car — but by the inclusion of the medically correct term “scrotum.” Which made him think his readers could probably craft even better examples of inappropriate-for-kids content trailed by a “shocking” last word. He’s offering a copy of a Roald Dahl book to the weener, so jump in. I made a quick attempt on his site, but could have done better*. Bring it on, before I win that book.

* The idea of course is that the offensive content would not trigger prude radars, while the innocent word at the end would – my attempt fails the first part of that test.

Music: Richard Hell And The Voidoids :: Betrayal Takes Two
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Anna Nicole Smith

Beatdeadhorse

Literalbarrage on Anna Nicole and the media choking on its own vomit.

It’s unseemly, it’s barbaric and it borders on a near stalker/sexual obsession with a dead woman. Thus, I feel that current words to express the depths to which the media have sunk are insufficient, yet I struggle to find the right word or combination of words to best describe the flogging of a dead woman’s corpse. The closest I’ve come has been “necromediaphilia“, although I think it’s a bit too long and slightly misses the point.

Now, I will confess to being one of those people who had not heard the name Anna Nicole Smith before she died. In fact, I still haven’t seen any actual coverage of her life or death, even though this frenzy is apparently going on under my nose. But I have seen plenty of coverage about how much coverage her death has received. Which, in a way, seems like par for the course for me — I always seem to get more of the meta-story than of the story itself. But it does make me wonder: Would she be getting this much over-play if people hadn’t been lapping up her life/style all along? Have the people made her important, or has the media? I guess that’s, like, the oldest question in the book, but if the coverage about the coverage is getting tiresome, I can only image what life must be like for mainstream news viewers right about now.

Tip: You can turn it off with your mind.

Music: Iggy Pop :: Five Foot One
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Daddy’s Flu Bug

Miles-Germ It’s been a light week on Birdhouse – very stressful work week, which by Thursday afternoon had combined itself with sleep deprivation and morphed into some killer mutant flu/sinus hybrid strain of je ne c’est pas, but whatever it was, I was laid out flat until Sunday afternoon, sweating, starving, hallucinerating, and watching a lot of bad TV (and also Genesis and Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus – both excellent in their own rights and “excellent-when-you’re-sick,” if you know what I mean). Just sort of checked out and was grateful to let Amy run the show. Slept almost 24 hours at one stretch, then started to emerge from the cocoon this morning. Still a bit woozy. Just enough personal horsepower remaining to digest some pre-masticated Oscars proceedings tonight.

Miles apparently digested my illness in his own way by reproducing the many types of viruses and germs in his bookshelf with ZOOBs and foam letters. Amy: “There’s the throw-up bug, the cold bug, the flu bug, the ear hurts bug, the sore throat bug, the sneezing bug, etc. No doubt he got the idea after his preschool teacher read them all a story about various germs and how to keep them away from you by eating healthy food and washing your hands.” The tall one in the middle is “Daddy’s flu bug.”

Music: Hassell & Eno :: Ba-Benzele
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Nose Flute

Rolandkirk Showing Miles images last night of Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing two and three saxophones at once, and the nose flute to boot. Miles was quite taken with this, and started explaining that he add extra, invisible nostrils placed at strategic locations around his head (specifically, three on his head, one in his chin, and two in his nose – an arrangement which provided opportunity for some interesting mathematical word problems: “And if you had five nostrils in your head and three in your chin, then how many nose flutes could you play?”).

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This morning he started rummaging through spare parts left over from a recent bathroom remodel and pulled out some plumbing. Stuck one piece in his mouth and another in his nose, claimed he was Roland Kirk, and performed a full half-hour set.

Was Kirk the Hendrix of the police whistle? (see last 60 seconds of Volunteered Slavery)

Quote: “I didn’t ask my mother to buy me a trumpet or violin. I started right on the water hose.”

Music: Nino Rota :: Valzer – La Dolce Vita
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Ad-Free WordPress.com

John Lebkowsky takes umbrage at the fact that wordpress.com doesn’t allow advertising on its free blogs, saying “I’m enough of a libertarian to see this as excessive control.” I disagree. First, I’d think the libertarian view would be that wordpress.com is free to run their service however they see fit. Second, it’s a free service, so who can look a gift horse in the mouth? Third, people wanting to run ads are free to install their own blogging software and run all the ads they like. And fourth, without a policy like that, wordpress.com could become the ultimate splog magnet. I totally respect that Mullenweg and crew have stuck to their guns on this one.

Music: Holy Modal Rounders :: Mole in the Ground
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Unhappy Meals

J-School professor Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and others, boils it down for the New York Times. Just what can we eat, anyway?

Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

The piece is very long, and very good. All about the rise of “nutritionism” and big science in food. Amazing the way he ties it all together. If you haven’t got time, cheat and skip to the bottom, where you’ll find his nine rules of thumb, tthe most concise of which is embedded in #1: “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Easier said than done.

Music: Velvet Underground :: Venus In Furs