20050228 
I'm not sure anybody likes a mess - even those people with bedrooms that, as their mother would say, "look like a tornado went through". Those people, they're just more tolerant perhaps.. more easy going, less stressed out.. less neurotic? Maybe not. I'm just speculating on a hypothesis. Anyhow, I'm not one for messes either but I'm good at ignoring them. When I'm having a particularly busy month I come into my room and climb in the bed, stare at the computer screen, and generally keep my eyes above the ground so as not to notice the piles of clothes, the papers, the empty chip bags. Sometimes, however, it's just too much for me to handle and my skin starts to crawl like some many centipedes are roving around up and down my spine and I almost can't move. This is, essentially, mess depression. It's a special kind of depression - not one of lonliness or lack of self-worth or anything like that - it's a depression that embodies the very being of your mother sighing at you from the door as you stared at the tv as a little kid, not quite understand what the big problem with a mess really was. And really, what's the big deal?.. this is where I'm at a loss. It seems fairly obvious that, in general, a mess gives you a uncomfortable feeling; but why? At some point one has to ask: what is the evolutionary advantage of cleanliness (and I'm not talking hygiene here, I'm talking folded clothes and neatly stacked books)? I think, perhaps, the answer might lie in the fact that our species - society - has evolved as well and the result is a growing global culture of material wealth, newness, shiny things, and fantastic plastic machines. This is, roughly, the same thing that Neal Stephenson was talking about in his essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line". For example: Japanese - once a terribly fierce race - now in love with big-headed cartoon characters and pastel colours? What's this world coming to? What we're coming to is an epiphany only we're doing it collectively. This is not something that every person can understand on a personal level, but as a species we are evolving - without our complicit consent! - and it's a testament to the natural process. We are, roughly, all becoming soft in the middle. Killing isn't as easy as it used to be - for every person who lives on a cattle farm there are a million who buy their hamburger from McDonald's and are no longer exposed to the harsh realities of nature. We live indoors, with central heating, and more and more often these days we don't even spend some of our time in the real world - we call it the internet. So where does the mess come in? The mess comes in when we look at a polluted river or a closed factory rusting away or a landfill. The mess comes when we look at starving third world countries. The mess comes when we see inefficiency, waste, and misuse. The ultimate mess? Nuclear winter. It's inarguable at this day and age that almost everyone knows that a nuclear war would be a VBT (very bad thing) and not just for the losers - for everybody. I knew this subconsiously even when I was a small child. I would have nightmares of big dark things - blobs - filling every space but filling nothing all at once. A black darkness that you can't see. It took me a few years of repeats to finally figure out what those dreams were about but when I did it all made perfect sense. Don't nuke anyone. Human collective intuition or just obvious indoctrination? Does it matter? Isn't indoctrination really just the same thing? Humans have an almost innate fear of snakes and horned beasts in the dark and where do you suppose that came from? The epiphany? We're slowly realizing on a subconsious level that humans are our best resource. We owe it to ourselves to not kill eachother. We owe it to ourselves to not fuck up the environment. We owe it to ourselves to explore Mars. These are the things we are quietly whispering in eachothers ears at night in our sleep. This is complicated and I've obviously over-simplified a lot of things but this, basically, is why I don't share the same sort of dread that a lot of my more environmentalist-bent friends do. This is why I'm not too worried about where this world is headed. This is why I am not afraid of nuclear winter anymore. We're evolving whether we like it or not and nobody's crack pot doomsday theory is going to change that. Might as well start giving credit where the ideas come from: this one is from jaime, where I read about a girl and her hundreds of shoes, and if there is anything I hate more it's a big ass pile of shoes in a closet.. it gives me the messy-willies like you wouldn't believe.
20050226
20050224
The problem with blogging - or at least being "part of the community" of blogging - is that I tend to, you know, read blogs. This, in turn, puts ideas and thoughts into my head and they bounce around picking up dust in the lint trap that is my mind and eventually, they pop back out onto this blog, thinly veiled as "original" content. Sure, I put my spin on the topic but a lot of times - those times when I'm staring at the empty blog post and my fingers float around on the keyboard making lots of nonsense and I have absolutely nothing to write about - it's just an excercise of "Hey, take what X has written about Y and give your opinion of it." Basically grammar school practice. Boring? I guess I'm basically hoping that whoever reads this doesn't read the same posts that I read, or at least not in the same day, and therefore they find something interesting, thoughtful, or funny - and original - in my words. Some redeeming quality, is what I'm saying: something to grab onto and say "Hey, I didn't read this post in vain. There was something to gain. I'm not completely insane." Most of the time, probably, they are insane but on occassion, I hope, there someone out there who gets it. Last night's masterbation post was completely inspired by anti's one-liner "Wednesday is masterbation day" post, for example. I guess maybe that's far enough off from what I posted that it's "different" but my post, in the end, was basically saying "yah, I masterbate too". It's not the first bit that I mind.. I do masterbate.. it's the "too" part that gets me. That evil little word that, although it's only three letters, should be considered a swear as well. It's the tool of the attention-whores, the tool of the me-mes, the tool of the i-want-in-on-this-es,esss.ss.. fuck, however you'd try and pluralize that. Unlike most stereotypes (you know, "there's one in every group") there is, in fact, far more than one in every group. Most of the time there is a ton of them in every group and it's a bore, and a chore, and a snore to have them around buddying up to other people's news or anecdote telling you their own version of the same story (possibly made up) about whatever happened to them when such-and-so.. oh god, it's enough to make me fall asleep. But i'm being harsh here. I just meant to apologize for the redundancy here.. the uninspired drivel. I didn't mean to make you fall asleep. Truly, I'm the one I should be bring harsh to. Now I'm off to play some hockey.
One of my old roommates used to say he couldn't masterbate without porn. He'd gotten so used to the internet and all it's resources that he quite literally couldn't conjure up a babe, a badgurrrl, even a boob.. at least not enough to get him a good pudge on. For a long time I thought that was a real shame. One of my favourite passtimes is a game I like to play called picturebook in which, in your mind, you flip through all the real and imaginary people you've had in your life that really get you going. This was sort of a once a week excursion since it takes some time and patience, and it's a real tour-de-force.. not your everyday wank. At one point I had so many girls in there I didn't know what to do with them all. My head was a mumbo-jumbo pile of photos, polaroids, undeveloped negatives, and lightly-scented scarves and handkerchiefs left over from some meeting or another. It would take me a good hour to get through it all and by then I was too tired to get up and go to work/school the next day. Now, though, the picture book is pretty sparse. Like one of those sad little photo albums with lots of empty plastic windows just waiting to be filled with someone's memories.. I just don't have any. I walk down the street and people blur by like big streaks of paint in the corners of my eyes and when I do stop to smell the roses their season has past or just not yet come. People: it would seem I am picky. Used to be I'd throw just about anyone in the picture book, just in case yah know, and later on, during one of my marathon sessions, I'd weed through all the riff-raff and toss out the uglies. Sometimes there was just something about a girl on that particular day that I saw her which tickled my loins and later on, in retrospect, I'd toss her photo right out. Other times a girl might stick around in the book for weeks - months even - for no obviously correct or right reason, but just cause there was something there, something inexplicable, that spark my fat. I used to say I put my friend's girlfriend in the picture book - we all had picture books back then - and I'd tell him just to get a rise. It was a big joke. One summer out on the water hanging out on the sailboat we talked about it - had a sort of summit meeting on the state-of-the-girlfriends - we sort of agreed we'd never cross that line with eachother, bros before hos or something? It wasn't about the girls really, or about stepping on toes, but about solidarity with your brother and, well.. you probably know where this is going. Years later I slipped across the line one night under the cover of darkness. There I was, in enemy territory, taking so many goddamned pictures my book was going to be overflowing come morning. There is something about life - as much as it's one of the worst things I can ever recall doing, I think I learned a little something about myself, about people, and about what a quality person really is. And I learned that there is the slightest bit of desire in every photo taken, no matter how inconsequential it might seem. And I learned that I'm an asshole. Step one, remember: admitting you have a problem. So my picture book has been cleaned out a bit since the good 'ol high school days when every girl was a potential snapshot. The women, I think they're just as hot now as they were then probably, but my tastes are getting more fickle and my priorities have less to do with certain physical features now and more to do with certain mental stimulation. Sometimes, nowadays, it's just as easy to pick up the remote or type in sublimedirectory.com when you need a good fix rather than sift through the back of your mind for a dusty old book.. if all your really looking for, you know, is a quick fix.
20050223
I was rummaging through the attic the other day (read: sifting through google caches) when I came upon a copy of this site from WBW (way back when). It was the old design - the original design, I think - and it sort of struck me as clean, concise, and not too hard on the eyes. It was more typical, with links and quotes down the left-hand side and a big one-liner at the top, but it made me sort of nostalgic. Nostalgia, the vice of the aged, they say. Made out with a girl last night and I think she was younger than me. Yup. 80's. Freaks me out to no end every time I hear it even though I keep hearing it again and again and again. Saw a girl the other day, thought she was cute, she turns 19 soon. Her birthdate? 3/20/NINTEEN-EIGHTY-SIX. That's 1986. '86. That, quite literally, feels like yesterday.. or if not yesterday than at least last week, when I was enjoying Mr. Rogers and wondering how old you have to get before you're not allowed to watch Mr Rogers anymore. Turns out he just dies, and solves that problem for you. Age is a vice in and of itself, even in this time of fast-go-go, I saw a Dr. Phil the other day with a "cougar" - 50, 60 year old women who "prey" on hot strapping young 20-something men. I dunno, but the crowd couldn't stomach it. I'm not sure I can, but it's like gay marriage or political suicide - what you do in your own time ain't none of my business... unless the results are ending up on my lawn. Pig Fuckers. I read a blog the other day where someone said that watching the news was liking sleeping and breathing to them; it wasn't an option or something they did, it just happened. It made me feel a bit like a backwoods azorkian with bad teeth and a banjo. Quite frankly, I can't stand the news.  So luckily I have blogs, and I have over-heard conversations, and I generally keep up with the goings-ons of the world.. So I know that the venerable 'ol Hunter S. Thompson has pulled a Cobain on us, and I can't imagine writing a post after this event without at least giving a hat-tip to one of the best Americans I've ever had the pleasure of judging a good American. Notice I bothered to capitalize America there.. The dude liked booze, guns, and speed, and he wrote like he was alive and I can't think of much else you'd ask for out of someone like him. He did it, for 50 years, like I could only dream of doing it for even a week. I mean, christ, look what happens to me after just one bad valentine's day party.. I can't even remember my own name. Most of the time if you don't go looking for trouble then trouble doesn't bother come looking for you.. that's my motto a majority of the time and it basically works for me. I've told you time and again I live a very semi-charmed life.. sure, perhaps not (currently - knocking on wood) lucky in love and, I certainly haven't won the lottery, but to know my friends, my family, the people around me, and my generally good luck.. a wise man might say I did win the lottery. Metaphors aside, I just can't complain much, and I guess what I'm saying is that Hunter - although he may have gone looking for trouble on occasion - he lived a pretty semi-charmed life himself and maybe this last bit of trouble just came looking for him. If I was older and wiser and maybe watched the news more maybe I, too, would consider it a worthy time to shuffle off the mortal coil. If I was smarter and more wordly and understood better what those pig fuckers in the Oval Office are doing.. well, maybe I'd decide I couldn't take it any longer. And I guess what I'm saying is that if I did make that decision, I certainly hope I'd go the same way, with a good old .45 betwixt the eyes.. and I'm not trying to be morbid there. It's just that, like any true American, if you're gonna do something you should try and do it right.. God knows there are plenty of dumbass Americans out there assfucking pigs sideways and calling it "right" and the less of those the better. The more people that stand up in this country and just do the job they set out to do, and do it well, and the best they can do it.. well fuck, I'm rambling now. Let me just leave you with a short blurb I may have shared before by the one and only fearful and loathing man himself - A tribute to the Ducati: a nice, fast, visceral experience, just the way he liked his experiences: "Song of the Sausage Creature" by Hunter S. Thompson:There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright red, hunchback, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them -- but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.
Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack -- and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you....
There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on other, you get what you need.
When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said, "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."
"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."
The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5,000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess turn is quite another.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.
Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures.... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days -- and many nights for that matter -- and it is one of my finest addictions....
I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple.... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.
Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.
When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.
The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.
Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe racer. And include some license plates, so he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.
Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid.... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler, and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.
Some people will tell you that slow is good -- and it may be, on some days -- but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....
So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.
The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be first to help me evaluate my new toy.... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....
No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it.... For that we need fine Machinery.
Which we had -- no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for reasons of their own, to send me the 900SP for testing -- rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track racer. It was far too fast, they said -- and prohibitively expensive -- to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers. The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.
Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't find.... I am too tall for these New Age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Midsize Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.
I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed into the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, f-cked-up for the rest of its life.
We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time -- and there is always Pain in that.... But there is also Fun, in the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant takeoff, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.
No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill. On my first takeoff, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4,000 rpm....
And that's when it got its second wind. From 4,000 to 6,000 in third will take you from 75 to 95 in two seconds -- and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth.
Ho, ho. I never got into sixth, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.
When aimed in the right direciton at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desparate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.
It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evil Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry.... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....
But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a school bus on the right and then got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.
Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho.... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....
But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. If you go slow and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.
The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90 mph in fifth at 5,500 rpm -- and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.
Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you can do 90mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast -- it is extremely quick and responsive, and it will do amazing things....
It is a little like riding the original Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the takeoff runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new bred of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time. It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across railroad tracks on the 900SP. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot further.
Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE? That is the attitude of the New Age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."
20050222
Actually, it's American gossip, as told by the British. Oh Guardian how I love thee.
Apparently someone jacked the info on Paris Hilton's phone and made it available to the public via the wwweb. Frankly, I am shocked that scandal could surround such an innocent heiress. Can you imagine all the balding hackers getting their hands on Anna Kournikova's number? The fantansy that maybe she would answer their call just too hard to resist.
article link
Also, does anyone remember the threebrain song about Koko, the talking monkey? "Koko the talking monkey says 'Apple, nipple, hungry . . . Apple, nipple, hungry.'" I find this truly prescient, given the current lawsuit about Koko's nipple fetish. Coincidence, or did the threebrain guy do some serious investigative reporting?
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20050221
So, the other day, I get two friendster emails from two girls, both associated with my high school, and wondering if I remember them. I reply back in the negatorium, much to my chagrin. What can I say; my memory is sketch for yesterday, let alone years ago. But honesty is the best policy. Here's what one sent me this morning. I think [high school] was lonely for many of us. It's such a strange time. As I recall, many girls had a crush on you. I can think of a few, but perhaps you didn't know what an object of affection you were at that time. 
I remember one exchage with you... we didn't have many, but I often think of it. I was walking in the hallway toward the gym with a friend. We saw you and began talking. I remember you flashing a smile and saying what a 'serendipitous' thing it was to see us in the hall .... most high school boys could hardly string together a sentence, much less use a great word like that. That word forever reminds me of this guy I hardly knew in high school, but probably should have known better. Damn it. That just fucking makes my day (the cute quotient doesn't hurt much). Somehow, past the threshold for regret, it's nice to know that it WAS my fault, and that I COULD have had friends in high school. I just fucked it up. Why is that comforting? I don't know, it just is. Dude. Point of contention with your novel technology scenario. Don't you think people have had the same reaction to a knocking sound for a long time? True, that was invented sometime, but I'm just arguing that this reaction is nothing new to humans. I get the same 'get up and answer it' feeling each time I hear a knock.
20050220
check this dongle out: it's sorta nibbles, it's sorta post-modern art. or something.
> Luckily my higher powers of intelligent thought was (emphasis added) Anything funny about this utterance published in two separate, identical posts? I thought not. Dude. It is more frequently your emotional health that I worry about, but bruising/bleeding heavily often covaries with this little syndrome called " cirrhosis of the liver." Yeah. You might want to look into that. So the descriptive headlines on Guardian World are composed of the three most uplifting stories I've read for a while. Multiple suicide attacks fail to deter worshippers commemorating the festival of Ashura South Africa suffers 59% mortality jump in six years The threat of nuclear strikes now greater than during the Cold War and I went to hear Jarred Diamond talk about his new book Collapse. Actually, I snuck in like the sneaky bastard I am, because it was sold out. But the main point is, he made fun of you, almost directly. Talking about the guy who cut down the last tree tree on easter island, who's society collapsed mainly due to deforestation, he wondered what that guy could have been saying to himself and others around him. Maybe he was saying, "there's no scientific evidence that the current level of deforestation is irreversable," or "doomsaying enviromental predictions have been largely overblown." Anyway, the tome sounds really interesting, and I plan to read it when I have a month or two free. Let's play go online mofo. I'm having cumpulsive go-related ideation - solving little corner problems mostly.
20050218
The problem with technology now is that we are forever tethered to it, for the rest of time, whether we like it or not. It's become ingrained. It's part of us now as much as our little toe is a part of us - not entirely necessary but kinda nice to have around. Take, for example, the phone. Someone who grew up without a phone, someone who has no sense of the telephone system, someone who has never heard a ring.. well, they're pure. But the rest of us have developed neural impulses that fire immediately upon the ring of a nearby tele. Just now my roommate's phone rang and, because it has the same tone as my old phone from a year ago, I felt within me the very beginnings of a forced march. The troops were awoken, equipment was readied.. the commander was just about to give the order to rise. Luckily my higher powers of intelligent thought was quick enough to take over and keep me planted squarely in my chair, but it was a close call. All this, and I barely even have to answer a ring anymore - I use a cellphone on vibrate 90% of the time. Is this evolution, or is this conditioning? Clearly it's conditioning.. it's just that we grow up with it, and learn the proper response.. right? So, clearly.. ahem.. it won't ever become part of our evolution.. right? Arguable, in the same way that tree ants have saved themselves from the "big fall" by gliding back to their trunk will we not as a species, perhaps, favour those who are most adept at answering the phone?
The problem with technology now is that we are forever tethered to it, for the rest of time, whether we like it or not. It's become ingrained. It's part of us now as much as our little toe is a part of us - not entirely necessary but kinda nice to have around. Take, for example, the phone. Someone who grew up without a phone, someone who has no sense of the telephone system, someone who has never heard a ring.. well, they're pure. But the rest of us have developed neural impulses that fire immediately upon the ring of a nearby tele. Just now my roommate's phone rang and, because it has the same tone as my old phone from a year ago, I felt within me the very beginnings of a forced march. The troops were awoken, equipment was readied.. the commander was just about to give the order to rise. Luckily my higher powers of intelligent thought was quick enough to take over and keep me planted squarely in my chair, but it was a close call. All this, and I barely even have to answer a ring anymore - I use a cellphone on vibrate 90% of the time. Is this evolution, or is this conditioning? Clearly it's conditioning.. it's just that we grow up with it, and learn the proper response.. right? So, clearly.. ahem.. it won't ever become part of our evolution.. right? Arguable, in the same way that tree ants have saved themselves from the "big fall" by gliding back to their trunk will we not as a species, perhaps, favour those who are most adept at answering the phone?
Hey, look.. some ants can glide and, again, they think there might be life on mars. go figure. but what really got me excited today? The first trailer for the remake of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been released on amazon.com
Every year around late feb. there is a gathering of might and muscle alongside the grand kennebec river in south-central maine. Great men come from all reaches to fight the cold, ignore the wet, and fish for smelt. Smelt, you see, are these small foul little fish that swim up and down the river with the atlantic tide and as is with most creatures of this fine earth there exists a group of people who would like to kill and eat them.. or in this day and age, at least kill them. This, of course, is called "Smelting" and it is done in small shacks about 10' by 6' on the river that fit between six to eight persons a shack, with a small wood stove on which to burn yourself. Your seats, while you are in this veritable ritz carlton, are either blocks of wood or small wooden stools that sit about a foot off the ground. Your apparatus for catching these little weasels is a wooden beam running along the side of the shack at eye-height with lengths of fishing line wrapped on pegs stuck into this beam every 8 inches to a foot. The fishing line, of course, has a hook at the end of it. At the bottom, below this beam, there is a foot-wide strip of open water running the length of the shack. There is one on either side of the shack, with the crew in the middle. The crew's job is to chop up bloodworms and bait the hooks, set the lines anywhere from 3 to 10 feet down into the water ("depends on where the smelt ah' runnin', doncha see?") and then proceed to get absolutely annihilated with cheap american beer. This, of course, is a challenge but somehow, every year, we manage, and on occasion we catch a fish or two.  I bring this up because this year a t-shirt is in the works: SmeltFest 2005. It may or may not have some retarded logo on the back that says "no fish left swimming, no man left standing", but it will most likely have this logo which I've been working on for the last hour or so. Bravo for technology.. now wheres the bloodworms?
20050216
I finally got around to taking some pictures today so I could record some of the damage done over the weekend. I was reminded to get this done when my chin started hemorragin fluids this evening. and by fluids I mean blood. and blood I mean old dark nasty blood.  Like the drunkard that I am I can't quite remember what caused this nasty situation but I'm guessing it had something to do with falling down ala "look ma, no hands!". Anyhow, this evening it started letting blood so I'm guessing that maybe some was pooled up under the skin, which would explain part of the swelling. It's mostly down to normal size now, so that's good at least, but a large chunk of a roll of toilet paper took the brunt of the force.  If you recall I had a nasty fall down a set of stairs awhile back (which I insist was not so much alcohol induced) and I got a good knock on the knoggin then, too. Thanks to the advice of J-Mo I worked the scar tissue down over time by massaging it and it was almost completely gone.. until this weekend.  I haven't historically been much of one to black out, or one to lose motorcontrol in the way I have recently. If I knew what was going on I'd blame it all on some cosmic shift, the same thing that's causing me to lie awake all night for the last few months, the same thing that's making things in me change like my appetite and my brain chemistry. I'd like to blame the stars or the weather or the seasons or, well, anything really besides the most likely situation: irresponsible drinking. Yet I've been drinking irresponsibly for years..  For now I think I'll just sit back and wait for the healing process to run it's course, hang out and watch the lights flicker on and off in this great city, and maybe see what I can't come up with just sitting alone, with all the whirling spinning electricals turned off, the computers powered down, and the phone ringer disabled. See what pops out of this 'ol knoggin once it's left alone for awhile.. I mean who knows, maybe it'll be something useful besides old dried blood.
stuff, man.. stuff. vice. the things we try to make dreams out of like some sort of pack rat gone wild in a garbage heap. everything's a something and if it's not let's make it. what do you do when you check on the laundry machine only to find a sock escaped? there, lying bare on the floor like a p.o.w. shot down just over the fence. all slack and lifeless. a frozen body. do you toss it in anyway? even if it's on the rinse cycle? spin dry? what if it smells? stuff creeps on you everywhere and, as if there were no end to such obsessive behaviour, it's got it's creepy-crawlies into our digital universe to boot - like i was saying before. emails, site hits, mp3s, pdfs, you name it. if it's made up of little 1's and 0's then we want to collect it, and archive it, and store it, and move it over to better storage after saving it from an almost ill fate. we want to restore it, remaster it, refine it. we want to store things that were never meant to be anything but fleeting moments in the first place. my roommate sighed the other day. "I'm done." "Done?" I asked. "No more.." "No more what?" I demanded. "No more music. I'm out. No more space." Over the last few months he's been a virtual fiend on the run, snapping up files like they were social currency, grabbing mp3s like they defined his self-worth -> let's be honest, it may be self-worth, but it's truly a reflection back into the world.. it has no sense or meaning inside our own skulls for in there, anything goes. sit, as anti suggests, for a few moments completely alone with the lights and sounds and whirring motors turned off and you'll find crazed little demons lurking in the dark recesses of your little soul that you didn't think you could even muster. sit still long enough and you'll feel the oozing of these feelings and thoughts and emotions and odd little twitchy-twitch syndromatic flashes that make all of us "crazy". "So how much do you have now?" I inquired. "Well, I just finished getting the full works of The Cure and the Clash," he exclaimed proudly, "so I'm now up to 72 gigs." Seventy... two... gigabytes. Not so long ago that was an unheard of number of bytes. Not much more than ten years ago "A dollar a megabyte" was the catch phrase in hard drive sales and that means.. let's do the calculation.. back then it would cost him roughly $74,000 to house that sort of collection. Let's not even consider that they didn't even make drives like that back then. All told I see him listen to a few albums a day.. maybe 5. More often than not it's the same thing over and over that he's getting familiar with. Like most people. Normal.. but still a pack rat, nonetheless. I like to throw stuff away whenever I can. I'm admittedly part of the problem but on the rare occasion that I get the urge, I can throw absolutely anything away. It's a thrill, believe me. Like skydiving for someone afraid of heights.. that more exciting because of it. The whole time I'm shitting my pants, knowing that the first time I'm going to need this item - really need it - will be tomorrow (like, say for example someone mentions an old song that hit #5 on the charts in '83 for one week then disappeared completely.. I need to be able to reproduce that song then and there, immediately.. that's as close as I get to really needing). "I run my drives in RAID so I could have more space," he informed me, "but when I have time I'll pick up a couple 250 gigs and then I'll be off and running again." 250 gigs of music. Somewhere in the range of 150 straight days worth. 3500 hours plus. Clearly necessary. From his inflection alone I could tell the thought just tickled him pink.
bloggers and site counters are sort of like cellphone fanatics and text-messages. Anyone who tells you different is either lying or doesn't know the whole truth. Sure, my site statistics fluctuate about as much as the tide of a fresh water lake, but I check them regardless, and almost every day. Everyone else does too, they just don't want to admit it. It's sort of like checking your message machine or your voicemail or even like having a phone at all. How would you know friends stopped by if you didn't have a doorbell? Anyhow who tells you they are doing it all for themselves are.. well.. telling it about as honestly as they can: they are doing it for themselves and that's exactly why they're checking their hit counter everyday. Some even go so far as to check who is linking them, hitting up technorati on a hourly basis. You non-bloggers think you have it easy, out of the limelight and nowhere to be made fun of because it's almost as if you don't exist - not in here anyway, in the "ether" - but you do.. and it's called email. My roommate, an almost grown 30-something professional adult to boot, refreshes his yahoo account about once every five minutes. Somewhere along the line we need to get over the fact that we're social creatures and just get on with things. No point in being dishonest or embarrased about it. No point in trying to change it. No point in trying to convince yourself any different - nobody likes a lier, especially themselves. So numbers worry us. Numbers amuse us. We like to look at them and count them and see how many we can get. How many voicemails today? How many hours of productive work? How many instant messages? How many blog hits? I don't know that it matters much - one day I'll have 50 the next I'll have 8, it's almost as if it's as random as the lottery, with no ryme or reason. I'll get linked by the likes of tony pierce only to realize all of 4 hits from his site.. and then a month later I'll write three of the most snoozer posts you've ever read, followed by some wisecrack one-liners, and maybe am ugly picture of my gut, and voila - a traffic jam at my frontpage. I'm at a lose to explain it, I can't understand it, but that won't stop me from check everyday, just in case... Just in case of.. what? I'm not sure what, but like the astrologist looking up to the stars for the answers to life, I am staring down at my hits. Only I'm looking for more immediate and concrete answers. Inevitably I find that someone was looking for information on Flouridex and someone else liked my picture of lightening. I'll find out that someone wants to know about hard nipples on a dog (I never did figure that one out) and then.. then every once in awhile there is something meaningful in those numbers. A site hit that was longer than the rest, a 20 minute stay. 8 page views, someone interested.. intrigued? Someone who knows me? Someone who has no idea who I am yet finds me as fascinating as anything they might stumble across.. at least for 20 minutes. Bah. Most of the time it's someone I know. The daily-checkup hit, as it were.. a friend or a relative seeing what I've been up to today. Sometimes it's more occasional. Every week. Every month. I can understand the wait.. let a little build up grow, get some quality content.. some gems to find as you sift through the rubble. Occasionally, though, there is an anamoly. A giant spike. A clear sweep of the archives. A total immersion experience. Those.. I wonder about those. They intrigue me as much as (I gather) I intrigue them. Perhaps it's vain, in some convoluted way, but it's curious and wonderful and exciting and odd and sketchy all at the same time anyway. It's, almost, why I do it. In a way it sort of helps me understand the passion of SETI researchers, searching for the unknown.. knowing they might not see it even if it passes right in front of their faces.. and knowing that even if they do, it will likely be fleeting and enigmatic at best. I will never know most of the people that look at this website. Speaking of numbers, this one - hype or not - is a doosy: DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.
At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.
But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.
Discovery Mag's latest cover story, on genetic programs, is an interesting read. These are digital organisms-strings of commands-akin to computer viruses. Each organism can produce tens of thousands of copies of itself within a matter of minutes. Unlike computer viruses, however, they are made up of digital bits that can mutate in much the same way DNA mutates. A software program called Avida allows researchers to track the birth, life, and death of generation after generation of the digital organisms by scanning columns of numbers that pour down a computer screen like waterfalls.
After more than a decade of development, Avida's digital organisms are now getting close to fulfilling the definition of biological life. “More and more of the features that biologists have said were necessary for life we can check off,” says Robert Pennock, a philosopher at Michigan State and a member of the Avida team. “Does this, does that, does this. Metabolism? Maybe not quite yet, but getting pretty close.”
From: Lisa (self ascribed "Nancy-drewish International Businesslady of Mystery and Intrigue, just recently re-located in Osaka for a 3 year stint in a country where she neither knows anyone, or the language) so, it's kind of refreshing to know that even though some things change, the crucial elements of oneself stay the same. for me, one example is my knack of involving the police in most of my soirees.
i decided to buy a sofa, which i figured would greatly improve my quality of life. hooray! no more squatting on my yoga mat in the corner! i managed to purchase a sofa, and arrange a delivery, with a gentlemen who spoke less english than i do japanese. picture it. anyway, friday was a holiday here, and i was reasonably sure my couch would be arriving between 9 and 12 friday morning. with that in mind, i was remarkably restrained in my thursday night activities and came home at the responsible hour of three or so, even remembering to set my alarm for ten to nine so i would have time to run around and clean up a bit before they go there.
with this in mind, the phone frightening me awake at 815 was a surprise. a surprise that landed my head into the ceiling above the loft, but, rising above the pain i quickly went down my little ladder and fell flat on my face, still a foot away from the phone. at this point, i almost burst into tears due to the pain in my foot and ankle (we'll come back to that) and answer the phone (literally on the 15th ring or so...). the gentleman on the other end and i then have a five minute conversation that exists almost only of us screaming "hai! sofa!" back and forth at one another. he hangs up. or i hang up on him. it is unclear in my mind. and i go to the bathroom. and hear suspicious noises outside my front door. sure enough, the phone call was to indicate that my sofa had indeed arrived...slightly early. i answer the doorbell and manage to fulfill every image of slothenly gaijin they have in mind...my hair is about five feet tall, i'm wearing bunny pajamas, and my apartment is an absolute tip.
anyway, after taking three doors off their hinges, they (2 deliverymen) determine that the balcony might be the way to go, and proceed to hoist my three seater couch up and over my balcony (i took pictures...there were times they were both off the ground...). success eventually, i went back to bed on my new couch, and awoke some hours later.
i was filled with alarm over two things...my impending housewarming party, and the state of my foot. i speculate i have broken some of those wierd bones on the top from the bruising and swelling, but being the martha stewart that i am i go shopping for snacks, liquor, wine glasses, and clean the entire house.
people arrive (seven of us at one point) at we proceed to have a civilized evening of snacks and drinks. doorbell rings at 11:00 pm. on friday. i'm expecting my friend brad, who has promised to deliver vermouth. instead, it is two of osaka's finest, in full riot gear. seriously. helmets and bullet proof vests. the only japanese speaker has retired, so we get nowhere until a 6'4" australian man helps me interpret (read "intimidate") them. we are, apparently, being too noisy and told to settle down. sigh. crappy neighbors. and i've only been here a month.
20050215
1. Why is it that you can get something as ludicrous as green-tea kitkats but yet nabisco doesn't make record-sized wheat thins? I mean, honestly, if you were stuck on a desert island (and barring any storage issues here) what would you want an unlimited supply of? Green-tea kitkats or record-sized wheat thins? I mean, think about it.. wheat thins! Of course. 2. WHY is it that Quebec is so bass-ackwards that a) last call is 3am yet you can't buy alcohol in stores after 11pm, and b) BECAUSE you can't by alcohol in stores after 11pm you APPARENTLY also aren't allowed to bring bottle returns in after 11! Fack? On my way home tonight (you guessed it, after eleven) carrying my 12er of scud bottles along with my groceries a bum asked me for "a nickel or a dime, to get some food".. see, I like the ones that don't demand too much. Modesty goes a long way with me. This particular bum is a crafty fellow, though, and I've seen him around for years. Most of the time he is trying to sell subway tickets on the cheap, but hey - it's a living, right? I mean who knows how/where he gets 'em but they're legit and the dude just wants some food. Last time I saw him he was selling his hat. I knew it was his - or at least his for awhile - cause I'd seen him around in it. It was actually a pretty nice hat, sort of a leather Indiana Jones dealio with the braided wrap around the brim. He offered it to me outside the movie theatre a few months back for $15.. A reasonable price, I figure, even if he did steal it cause, after all.. a dude needs his hat. Anyhow, tonight I gave him the change out of my pocket since I had to use the plastic for the groceries anyway, cause the bastards weren't taking my empties. He walked with me a bit and saw me carrying the empties and he said "fuckers wouldn't take your empties, huh?" and I said "nah.. what is that, some sort of law?" and he said "ohh, I dunno.. I'm just on the streets here.. I know sometimes they won't take 'em back from me." I've even heard stories of stores that sell certain types of beer yet they won't take the returns, even though they take other returns. It's not like it's a big deal for the store owners, since the beer truck just comes around and collects during their deliveries. Fucking fascists.
20050214
To fill you in on the post below (re: Even later? Whatever shall the night bring? Who knows.) well, I know.. and I'm about to tell you. Basically, the 12 boreales were skank ass... but not before some skankyness in the form of pitchers are ler biffer, as I had postulated.. even later? how about black outs, stumbling drunkness, falling down, and where is my shoe? And of course, the week in which I realize I have lost my key to the front door of the building (and think to myself "hhmm. it's barely ever locked, I am in no rush to get a new copy) is the same week in which I stumble home around 4am and find the door locked. Whatever shall I do? Call in trusty cellphone, dial roommate, smile abashedly when said roommate stumbles (sleepy-eyed) down the stairs in his pjs. Make drunk stumbly apologies and attempt to explain rash, bruises, broken face. Fail. Enter self-guilt. Enter much rumination about substance abuse. Question myself: "am i an alcoholic?". Decide there is barely a thin line between disease and desire and it's not worth worrying about labels, or the stigma thereof, and therefore (ergo) I need to slow things down a bit. Realize that if not an alcoholic, then I am at least a social alcoholic. Realize that I probably replace dry wit and humour with asshole when I drink too much and therefore do not only a disservice to others, but to my reputation as well. Step #1: Admit you have a problem. Okay, no shakes, no shivers. Able to go months without a beer and only feel the urge in large social situations (i.e. like in a bar). Not diseased perhaps, then, but clearly disease != problem. Logically, we can state: all diseases are a problem but not all problems are a disease. I have a problem. Step #2: visit 12Step.org to find out what all those other steps are. Step #3: realize it's a bunch of hokey religious crap that makes me cringe more than a beer during a sunday morning hangover. Jump directly to step 8 and note the humility step in which inventory of those whom I have harmed is taken. Take inventory. Realize how short the list is, that is it's basically just me. Realize I am only hurting myself. Drink another beer.... but slowly.
20050212
Me. Ler Biffer. Now. Me and 12 skank ass boreale's in a variety pack later. Even later? Whatever shall the night bring? Who knows. Rock.
20050211
Yesterday, it snowed. Luckily. Now the sidewalks are covered in a nice sprinkling of fluffy which warms me leetle heart, since the other option is bare wet pavement with flyers, receipts, paper plates, and other garbage littering the curb. The problem with winter - or winter in the M-to-the-On-Treal at least - is that garbage is not swept away in a flurry every other morning at 8am sharp unlike the beautiful summertime. Summertime, if you're not a section parker and therefore can avoid the irritating car-move 4 times a week, is grand and clean and fun and happy. No (or very little) garbage floating around on the breeze, and that makes for a clean and snazzy city in which to attract business, tourists, festivals, and the like. Good, right? Winter, however, is either snow and ice with blisteringly cold wind (which I quite frankly like, it keeps the riff-raff to a min and it makes one feel alive) or, as stated above, it's a mess of slush and grime and dirty entryways and it always involves lots and lots and lots of taking-on-and-taking-off-of-shoes-at-the-door-don't-track-mud-in-thank-you-very-much. Normally not so much a problem but in the low-income bracket of student housing comes very little foyer space, no bench on which to sit and remove boots, no amenities as those viewed on such monstrosities as The O.C. or Batman.. which is to say - no pool house, no batcave, and absolutely no Catwomen. During wintertime the women bundle up to a point that they are hardly recognizable as humans - in fact, the common puffy down jackets that come in white can lead to snowdrift misinterpretations. Otherwise it's trendy legwarmers and furred hoods and big plumpy attire that does nothing to turn one's head, causing - *sigh* - much drying out and cracking of one's rubberneck. April *always* contains at least one maintenance appointment: e.g. Sit in St. Louis park on the first fresh day of spring when 95% of the city's population, previously holed up in hibernation, hit the streets and cafes and bodegas and restuarants and bistros and bars and, halleluah, let freedom RING. This is the refresher course one needed and sure enough before one knows it things are back in full swing. Unfortunately, this situation is but a distant glimmer in Mother Nature's eye at the mom' and so we must sit tight for a few more months, struggling through the snow with wet feet, runny noses, and layers of clothing piled upon our beasts of burden backs. In the meantime we should do our best to enjoy what little happiness this season gives us in the form of hot toddies, eggnog, christmas lights forgotten, and snow: secret: we actually like the snow. tony called dave navarro the king of L.A. bloggers, and is excited to have received a response. jaime gets back to normal, whatever normal is. Sounds like Nika's got the same cold I have. Bummer.
So blogger finally gets with it? Pop-up comments. Fer sher. I will have to make a point of checking this out very soon. For now: heads down in the R&D lab, mixing up some program flow analysis, blech. p.s. word of comment popups care of Hit The JaG Spot!
20050209
My absolute all-time favourite video game character's accessory ever of all-time? It's gotta be from the original gold-pak Zelda: Link's .. uhmm.. well, Link's piece of meat. I know, that sounds dirty. What can I do.
Basically all you could do with Link's piece of meat was take it out of the sack and show it to people. Sometimes, if the "monsters" were feeling particularly feverish, they'd gather around and appear to, oh.. I dunno.. tread on it. Or, I suppose the action was intended to potray eating. Eating Link's piece of meat. The best part..
Ohhh no no, the best part of it all is that it was meat on the bone. Link would whip it out and drop it on the ground for all to see and sure enough, bone.
The drawing in the manual - ain't the world-wide-web grand?
Ultimately you have to give it up (I think?) on some level or another to get some dude to get the heck out of your way.. you gotta give your meat to the monster, so to speak. If that doesn't fit my life to a metaphorical tee.. well, I don't know what does.
In other news, I've learned of yet another advance of Google's as they strive for supreme control of everything 1's and 0's: Google Map's. Nifty, quick, painless (mostly), and a dandy interface to boot. Hook it up with Google Local and shazaam: insta pizza.
And finally?
My non-jewish roommate, on his way to isreal for a jewish-birthright trip tomorrow, got a tat last night - and by tat I mean he was bullied by his mates into getting Shit is real (his favourite nothingism) tattooed on the top of his foot. Bullocks.
20050208
AH!
HA! It's 2:30. I am unwell; I only work efficiently FAR after the plane is careening into the mountains. Tonight I had the confound of 75 grams of dark chocolate, RJD2 blasting, and a strong prior sense of worthlessness. So the work may be totally unrelated to the deadline.
But here we are, hanging on to that throttle . . . wind blasting into the cockpit. We may pull out yet. Fack.
So, do you know about thefacebook? Fack.
Wait, actually, let me not tell you about it, and instead prepare for the lab meeting which I am running (ruining?) tomorrow. Because, had I been playing GO on yahoogames for the last four hours, and not prepared at all, I'd likely be fucked right now. Oh, remember that time? Those were happy times.
"I fully understand that sometimes it's hard to eliminate a program that sounds good."
- GW
What like, EDUCATION? HMMMM? Like THAT program? Fack. It may be hard, buddy, but you just keep on truckin'. I have faith in you.
I miss you, buddy. You remember meeting in the gym one time, after not having seen each other for a while? I remember feeling that you had the psychological valence of kin. Yah. Good times.
By the way, I suggest taking your own advice and slowing that fire-engine down. Nobody likes the irony of seeing a fire-engine crash and burn.
20050207
and did you know they had green tea kitkats over in crazy jland? huh? did yah? wowser. and bums get free spitty hjs (via thighswideshut) [editor's note: beware use of the word lumpenproletariat]
and yes, i realize this might be how one begins to go crazy.
and yes, i realize that normal people get up, go about their day, smile, sigh, and go back to bed.
and yes, i realize the human epiphanal muscle is the very epitome of serendipity - as if serendipity actually existed, stepped down from cloud nine, and tap-tap-tapped one on the shoulder.
and yes, i realize that is nonetheless a farce, and i've overused the word farce these last few days.
and yes, i realize that there is no such thing as burning an even fire.
but i don't understand, for the life of me, sonic youth.
I'll be honest with you, I have been known, on occasion, to get a little jealous of some of the comraderie among bloggers that goes on sometimes (e.g. the jaime and anti visit). yah, it's a little gay, as anti so unceremoniously puts it, but fuck it.. i had a rough weekend, i could have certainly used a quiet few days in nyc eating shitty brunches and taking pictures instead of the hellraizer-birthday-superbowl extravaganza weekend I had instead. Well, it was fun of course. Don't get me wrong. But sometimes a quiet weekend is what you really want.
And so last night, laying in bed last night with a belly full of orange pekoe tea (for I was far too battered after the weekend for beer during the superbowl) I stared wide-eyed at the ceiling for some time, heart racing a million miles a minute on caffeine and the narcotics of amped-up sporting events. I thought about all the people I know who probably didn't even watch a minute of the superbowl, and I thought about all the people I know who barely know how to turn a computer on - and more importantly, don't mind.
It's a small world out there with a mere 6 billion people in it but when you start digging around and looking under rocks things get sort of interesting. We've spent years staring at the stars when right here under our feet is some craazzzy shit. I mean, come on - some dude who digs the superbowl on one side, and another who doesn't know how to turn on a computer on the other side. How much more interesting is that?
So most of my friends know how to turn a computer on, I'll give you that, but there is a fine line between a computer user and a computer.. how shall we say here without being too pejorative... computer savvy. How's that? When someone who accidentally turns off their toolbar in Microsoft word asks me "Hey, do you know what happened to the scissors? I need my little scissors to chop out some text".. well, I peg them as a computer user. Someone who is computer savvy, however, knows the cntrl-c keyboard shortcut. Someone who is computer savvy knows what an IP address is, and what it's for. Or maybe they don't, but they know how to write some HTML - real html, not using a WYSIWYG. Or maybe they write their own shell scripts to automate some tedious daily task. Or maybe they just use linux because it's free and they like being able to compile everything from scratch. Whatever.
These are different people. They aren't my friends - or if they are, we never talk about it. I don't know what it is that makes one person all about talking shop and the next guy not, but it happens. Whether it's kids in school yapping on about their professor or that nasty assignment or it's the dude in the cubicle next to you who just won't shut up about TPS reports - you know who they are. Seriously entrenched.
My friends aren't seriously entrenched, thank god, not in that irritating way, but they all have their little habits, their hobbies, that make them interesting for some odd reason. More often than not, though? They don't really share it much. Super secret little hobby-hobbies that they each do on their own time.. mostly. I'm not complaining, but it's interesting, really. What makes one crazy fucker want to share their irritating stamp-collecting hobby with every last person who crosses their path and yet and yet.. there is the occasional normal person out there.
If I didn't think it was such a farce maybe I would have gone into sociology. or psych. i dunno.
yah, and by the way - koolaid is ghetto.
20050205
one of my problems with life is my constant urge to stop whatever i am doing and go do something else. some people would try to tell you that's called ADD, but it's not. i know myself enough to know that i have some increduble powers of concentration. this, however, is a problem of a different sort. basically, it's the voice in my head that tells me whatever i am doing could be done later, and that there are more important things going on right now somewhere else.
take, for example, my trip up decarie this afternoon to purchase somosas. i drove out there to pick up a huge batch for the impending superbowl extravaganza i'm throwing tomorrow and the whole time i couldn't help but think that maybe my time would be better used in securing buffalo wings. or nachos. i dunno.... and then, sitting in this little indian restuarant, it occurred to me that there very well could be hundreds and hundreds of somosas in that very building with me, right then, and there. and then i thought maybe i was doing the right thing.
when i ordered up the 100 somosas i wanted the guy looked at me crooked and said
"100?!?"
"Sure, 100." I replied.
"For here?" he asked me incredulously.
"Uh, no. To go please."
I was confused because I was lead to believe that people normally walk into this place and order up large numbers of somosas. He was treating me like quite the oddball. In the end, they were running low on somosas so i was stuck with just 50 of them. or 40. whatever, so small number not exactly equal to 100.
maybe I should have been doing something else.
never is this feeling more so than when i am sitting and just relaxing. not talking to anyone, not watching tv, not reading, nothing. just sitting. i rather enjoy it, really, if i can get my head wrapped around it but most of the time it just wanders - my mind that is - and tries everything it possibly can to convince me that i should be doing something else. anything else. something productive. something responsible. something fun. something crazy. anything.
i think it's the tiny little ticking clock inside my brain that reminds me, with every tock, that life is fleeting, short, and you gotta make the most of it. spending an entire weekend watching the real world seasons 1, 2, 3, and 4 all in a row on re-runs, for example, makes me feel almost physically ill. not that i didn't enjoy the time, not that i didn't want to, but because i could have been doing something else.
the problem with this problem, of course, is it's recursive cyclic nature because, of course, no matter what you might do you could always be doing something else and, well, that's where the problem starts, ends, and re-connects to itself.
whether or not you experience the same problem, i dunno, but certainly you should have been doing something else besides read this drivel. think of the lost opportunity. think of the kids, man. think of the kids.
rock.
michael is trying desperately not to speak of himself in the third person in imitation of Px despite how fun it really is. in fact, michael has been enjoying Px's blog mucho grande lately, and is happy to have found yet another little corner of life in which to go, curl up, and suck his thumb.
probably not at all having to do with Px, michael has been feeling strange warmths in his innards lately - towards life, towards people, towards things - and quite frankly, he doesn't mind. in fact he is quite happy to be having these strange little epiphanies - like litte fireflies that hum along out of the darkness, land on your sleeve, blink twice, and then meander on their way.
case in point: life is short but certainly sweet, and entirely pleasant, says i - even sitting here with a bit of a hangover-headache. just for fun? yah, life.. not so sad really, if-un youz can see the beauty in the sorrow. everything dies. beautifully.
these things are the things that i am alright with. it's other stuff that i have real problems with. it's people's inability to be pleasant. bitterness. jealousy. these things, natural i suppose, but entirely horrid and basically boring human emotions. tedium. sadness is sweet but anger is just ugly, and though it may be a necessity in the evolutionary process, that doesn't mean i have to like it.
it struck me the other day how much of an un-angry person i am, in general. hardly angry at anything at all, really, and rarely a fighter - fists or otherwise - and i am entirely 100% pleased with that. pleased as punch. there is plenty of more important things to do than get angry, i just don't have the time.
so how do these things develop? why are some people angry? how do we allow ourselves to become so bitter? who enjoys being angry - cause i know they're out there, yes? i suppose you can always be unhappy with your position in life, and therefore take it out on everyone else, but i think that's a cop-out. and it's ugly. we're all, not a single one of us, where we want to be - this is built into our desire-engine. this gives us motivation and reason to try. the grass, greener and more plush, on the other side of the fence will always be always be always be better. fact. the sooner these things are accepted, the better. and the less angry.
and the happier.
or at least more accepting and in a better place in which to see fireflies in the darkness.
rock.
20050204
So, I believe this is the one you asked me to read.
I may not understand what you're saying. On the one hand, I feel like you're proposing that capitalism, once spread throughout the world will make people more accountable for their actions, because EVERYONE will be connected through a global economic system. If I start overcharging you, or underpaying you, you'll go somewhere else, work for someone else, and as an eventual result the distribution of resources will be more equal. Another way of putting this is, given similar human desires and similar economic sway, people will end up in similar economic situations all over the world. From there, people will not only want nature, but have the means to acquire and enjoy it: it will be preserved. Nothing is fucked, because it is us humans that are the most valuable and productive resource.
But I don't agree. I feel like human nature is not such that people will choose preserving nature over acquiring other resources, like symbols of power. The trees in my backyard are pretty, and make me happy. But if I can sell those trees to buy a mercedez, that would make me so much happier. At least in my head. So that's what I do. And that's what everyone all over the world is doing. Cashing in natural resources for psychological ones. Sugar. Status. Mates. Entertaining stories. These are all psychological resources you can but by exploiting the shit in your backyard.
Sadly, we don't really have mechanisms for valuing the natural world, per se. And given that there is finite space/natural resources, eventually, there will be an intense pressure between those desiring to cash those in, and those that fear the consequences of removing them.
I don't think the hippies are whining, exactly. They're saying, HEY! you guys are making the wrong choice . . . the trade off you're making is going to bite you, and inadvertently me, in the ass. As you know, I think it's already to late to change this trade off in the big picture. And thus I think the earth, and this fun loving species, is pretty fucked.
But maybe I misunderstood you, and that wasn't your point.
In a side note, interaction with unfarmiliar males is pretty tricky. Last night I went to a party, and there was much tension. Trying to interact with guys and communicate my non-desire to steal their girlfriends away. So much effort.
And at the same time, maybe their girlfriends were flirting with me. Last night driving down DP a girl yells into my car "I love you!" Is this not all about making insecure the boy that's invested his evening hitting on her, or what?
20050203
In an age of electric ear and nose hair trimmers, it blows my fucking mind that there is no such thing as a "home teeth cleaning kit". I mean, come on - who doesn't, on occasion, really want to pick at their teeth? Right now I have a sharp edge on one of my canines that keeps catching and it's driving me batty. Normaly this sort of urge occurs in front of the mirror when I'm brushing my teeth and I just want to do a better job. Sure, scratching your teeth with metal every day is probably not the best for them but then again I'm not so sure bleaching them white with lasers is that great an idea either. I hear it makes your teeth sensitive to the ice-cream headache which obviously means there is something happening in there besides simple yellow-to- white, yah know?
Still, it's a free goddamned country so if I want to scratch my teeth down to tiny bloody stumps I should be aloud, right? I mean people slit their wrists every day. People puke up lunch and people even pierce their, well, you know. If I want to poke at my teeth with a metal toothpick shouldn't that be my perogative?
I think the real roadblock here is how to develop a quality mirror system. I mean, you can't be just scratching willy-nilly in there, you need to know what you're scratching at. The question is how do you extend those little dental mirror things so that you, the patient, can also be you the dentist all at the same time. Hmm? I envision an instrument with two mirrors, one that reflects back towards the second mirror, the second one which reflects the image to your eye. Or maybe a webcam-mirror? You could plug it into your USB port and, voila, insta-dentist on your computer monitor. Rock.
Alright, I'ma go scratch away with a bent paperclip. Don't wait up for me.
This particular party was a cd-release party for some assholes with big paul-bunyan outfits and a slant for the political right but in this city, if you were in the music scene then you were in the scene, thick or thin, cause there just wasn't that much of it to go around. Dj came to the city to be in the scene, so here he was.
20050202
I just got an IM. "Guess who is getting married?!?!" it said. I guessed, based on the excitment, that it was probably the person sending me the IM. Last week I got an email from a friend that said "I need your mailing address, NO questions asked!" which can only be yet another wedding invitation. I also got an email today instructing me to get a tuxedo fitted for another wedding, as I am a groomsman. I also received airfare information about another wedding, this one in jamaica of all places.
Shits getting expensive. If I count up all the fucking weddings I should go to this summer I'm looking at 5, maybe 6.. can't even tell anymore. Way too many, anyhow.
There has been a big rush lately. It's probably my age. Luckily, despite all the weddings in the last few years, I've never been tapped on the shoulder and put into duty. I've never had to throw the tux on and strut around, never had to go to a rehearsal dinner, never had to make a speech.
All the dude ever had to do was get drunk.. which we all know I'm an expert at. Especially wedding drunk - the kind where you can barely remember your name and you're pissing in the middle of the parking lot in front of everyone.. at least they're all your friends so they can forgive you a few minor transgressions.. at least for the night. The next morning is always a different story.
This summer, however, things are getting complicated. I have to participate. I have to pay attention and march down the aisle and crazy shite like that. What a pain in the ass. Wish me luck.
anti heads to nyc this weekend to hang with jaime and maybe pogey and trueboy.
Anti sent this to me today
I don't know if that's a peace offering or what, but mickey looks pretty happy about it regardless.
20050201
dear apple computer company,
why haven't you contacted me about that super fancy happy job you have reserved for me in your design and interface department yet? what are you waiting for, Q1 is almost over. do you think you can ride this wave forever?
why haven't you listened to my suggestions? just because you didn't hire me doesn't mean you can't steal my ideas.. this is 2005 - technology and intellectual property is all about stealing property. you should know, remember xerox and all those funky next boxes? plus, you've been microsoft's bitch so long i'm surprised you managed to sneak out of the house and do something on your own for once (mach kernel). so why haven't you picked up on my "multiple albums" idea yet? isn't it obvious that people don't want to have a gazillion copies of a song, one each for every tv, movie, and album it shows up on? I understand maybe there are different versions but what if there aren't? what if they're all the same goddamned version? what then apple? why can't I have a list of albums for each song?
why can't I have a list of artists? why do I have to resort to stuff like X feat. Y when labeling the artists of my tracks? what do I do when there is a whole slew of performers up on stage? X feat. Y feat. Z? what if I'm a jazz fanatic and I like to record who was playing those shnazzy drums and who was strummin that cool bass? what if what if what if I want to know who produced the song, as opposed to who wrote it?
apple, why can't I read the news headlines on my ipod as I sit, bored, in class or in a meeting? why isn't doesn't my ipod automatically sync all sorts of crazy content to it whenever I plug it into my computer? why can't I receive satellite radio on my ipod and automatically tivo - ahem - *ipod* it? why aren't you creating your own buzzwords?
didn't you realize you had something when grown men in suits were walking through central park plugging their earphones into eachother's 'pods? don't you realize that when you create a wave you can either ride the front of it or be left behind in the backwash? aren't you going to strike?
I don't even mind that you haven't gotten around to telling me about the job you have waiting for me. I'm more upset that you're just wasting time treading water while you create the next big wave when you could, in fact, be just making the last wave bigger.. cause you know wave theory, right? I don't have to tell you what happens when two waves come together at the right time, right? they get bigger you assholes so why aren't you paying attention? why'd I have to yell there?
why can't i read ebooks on my clear, clean, crisp, ipod screen that is not smaller but bigger? why can't i automatically download art covers for all of my music into itunes? why can't i see that artwork on my ipod? why shouldn't i be able to own the text of every album cover i buy off your itunes store? why isn't that appended to the songs as extra information? why can't I search for a song in my ipod using a nice, quick, easy voice interface? why can't i adjust the equalizer on the fly, while a song is playing? why can't you guys pull your heads out of your asses?
why can't you make a randomized player that doesn't play the same band twice in a row out of 4000+ songs of other artists or play the same song I heard yesterday? why can't you make a ratings system that takes into account how much of a song I listen to, not just whether I listened to the entire thing? why can't you make smart playlists that have randomness levels based on this, based on how random I'm feeling on a given day?
why doesn't itunes have a solid remove-duplicates module that allows me to search for all songs that have similar or same id tags, similar lengths, and even similar acoustic signatures? why doesn't itunes allow me to mass-replace certain characters, symbols, or strings in id tags? why do i have to rely on a market of consumer-written apple scripts and hacks that, ultimately, fuck my music collection up more than it fixes things?
if you can't admit that you desperately want - nay need - me for the head of your smart idea department then at least admit that iLife should include a backup module that safely, securely, and seemlessly copies all my files to a server of yours on the off chance my computer - your hardware - fails. admit that an encrypted network backup of my data - a backup in which you sign the user-license agreement to never release nor examine the files - is an excellent idea in this broadband world.
apple, i'm alright with the job snub, i'll get over it. not everyone can see the genius for what it is and i can accept that. but not being able to see a plainly obvious and simple good idea when you see one.. not seizing the opportunity now cause you think you got something cool coming later.. that's almost criminal. if there was a court against corporate mismanagement, you might be on trial.
thank you very much for your time and consideration,
yours,
mikey.
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the guys: philogynist jaime tony - the gals:raymi raspil
