This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.                             the guys: philogynist jaime tony - the gals:raymi raspil

        20061025   

Michael considered fate at 16:59   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
The A-to-Z of ways to make it as a stay-at-home telecommuter:

  • a) set a routine, allot certain times for internet surfing (like 9am to 9pm) and stick to it.

  • b) NEVER do work or anything else in bed other than sleep and sex. In fact if you can, don't work in your bedroom at all.

  • c) If you can, work in your dishwasher or clothes dryer - these are already the highest productivity areas of the house, are they not?

  • d) Complain about your commute to work and the need to save money. This way you can get your wife to come home and make you lunch, saving you more time to surf -er, I mean work.

  • e) Never start work until you've warmed your brain up with 150 to 200 soduku puzzles and one round of the second Zelda quest (using maps is cheating).

  • f) Check the weather every five minutes. Since you will never be leaving your apartment again, this is important information that you need to know.

  • g) Stay up late the night before to get an early jump on the day ahead. This should include catching up on news bits (gotta be able to chat with that looker who is always getting coffee by the toaster oven) and also watching Law and Order reruns that you have seen ten times before - you never know when that teeny sliver of corporate law that snuck into the episode will come in handy when negotiating a larger office with, um.. yourself.

  • h) Find yourself a solid Pentium machine. MMX if you can. These will run Windows 3.1 quite nicely and will help you be productive. Remember to use the "Hot Dog Stand" desktop theme as the high-contrast will ease eye strain over the day.

  • i) The more work you can do on the couch, floor, or under the kitchen table, the better. Practicing those odd angles, preztel postures, and kinked necks will help you fight repetitive stress injuris and other workplace hazards.

  • j) Sue yourself for not meeting OSHA standards. Might as well make a buck where yah can.

  • k) Work while you wash. This can including bringing your laptop, cellphone, pda, ipod, and electric nose-hair trimmer into the bath with you. The more electronics you have near water, the more productive you are.

  • l) Breath through one nostril at a time. Trust me.

  • m) End each day with a status meeting. This should include going over all work items and processing each as if they were their own meeting. If you feel you did not have a particularly productive day go ahead and have a meeting about that, too. Since it is the end of the day and we're all winding down anyway, feel free to have a beer. Or many.

  • n) Invite the mailman in for a peek at your operation. You'd be surprised how often an outside consultant can really point out the kinks in your business processes. Expense your lunch together at the strip club.

  • o) To be on time each day be sure to order a car or taxi service the night before.

  • p) If you need to leave for a dentist appointment or to pick up your car from the mechanic, just let yourself know. You can be very accomodating. Just don't let it happen to often.

  • q) Steal office supplies, you never know when that shit might come in handy at home.

  • r) When it is your birthday, be sure to purchase yourself a card and sign it. Don't forget to give it to yourself by the end of the day. Nobody likes to feel left out.

  • s) If you're feeling sick, by all means, go into the REAL office. Nobody wants yarfy all over your new rug.

  • t) Don't steal other people's lunches out of the fridge. This will just cause bad office mojo.

  • u) If you need help with something try paging yourself over the intercom. If that fails, leave yourself a voicemail.

  • v) Play flash games on the internet. The fast response times will help you become a better typist, making you more efficient.

  • w) If you feel you've set a unbearable deadline for yourself, consider sitting down face to face and calmly discussing the issues at hand. You'd be surprised how empathetic and caring you can be to yourself (A mirror comes in handy here).

  • x) X is for Xylophone!

  • y) What's Happening?.. Um, you're gonna have to go ahead and have yourself come in on Saturday, Mmmkay? So if you could be here around nine, that'd be great.

  • z) If you're feeling unproductive try making a list of positive things you could do to help make your at-home worklife more effective.

Michael considered fate at 11:35   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
In 2005 Connecticut was the state with the highest average income at $47,800, but they also gave the least in charity.



In fact, of the 10 poorest states 7 of them were the top 7 givers. Mississippi, the poorest, gives the most.

Guess which states don't have a minimum wage law?



Meanwhile, those same poorest states are the most obese.


Michael considered fate at 10:44   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
There has been recent hub-bub about raising the gas tax. No, not anyone important, just talking heads. They're all for throwing around 'ol Pigou's name, that dead professor of economics across the pond. He's the one responsible for Pigouvian Taxation they tell me:
A Pigovian tax is a tax levied to correct the negative externalities of a market activity. For instance, a Pigovian tax may be levied on producers who pollute the environment to encourage them to reduce pollution, and to provide revenue which may be used to counteract the negative effects of the pollution. Certain types of Pigovian taxes are sometimes referred to as sin taxes, for example taxes on alcohol and cigarettes.
These Pigouvians argue a number of points: It'll help the environment. It'll provide monies for R&D into alternative energies. It'll reduce road congestion. It'll balance out cost between consumer and producer through "tax incidence" (bringing money into the country from the middle east or at least lessening how much we send their way). Certainly, it may.. or it may not. There is no guarantee that higher prices will reduce usage barring the discovery of a cheaper alternative and, sadly, there is no guarantee the taxes would be spent by our government on any sort of positive R&D. The telephone system is an excellent example of this. In the U.S. we continue to use and maintain the antiquated landline because we built the infrastructure, not because it is the most efficient. Is our relience on oil our Maginot Line, doomed to be considered the weakest link in our armour against the equalizing nature of global markets? I fear our troubles are much deeper and spread wider than any nations border..

I don't think a $1 per gallon rise in gas prices will do much, but it is an interesting and thought-provoking point. If I had time to sit and think all day I suspect I'd try and re-write economic theory (scratch that, I'd start anew).. I have this creepy itchy feeling that all those old guys in tweed have been staring at themselves in the mirror too long and they're trying to light a match (their great idea) in a vaccum. The only problem is bright ideas don't burn in space. In space, there is nothing but yourself. In a true vaccum you are your only point of reference. That is why we have the objects us and them; we are operating in a vaccum (think of the earth as a big hoover dust bag - we have some sense of the universe outside of the bag, but we really don't understand it or have any idea what's going on out there).

The result? Shit like "economic externalities". Certainly, it's a point of reference, but that is like holding onto a dead flashlight on a dark night. The reference gets you nowhere. Externalities are always internalities for somebody else and until the personalities can come together and accept our singular existentiality, well.. we're kinda fucked.

Michael considered fate at 10:39   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Hemingway wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") which he is said to have called his best work.

Some days, life feels like that.

Michael considered fate at 08:20   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Well that didn't take long at all. AllOfMp3's "DRM" has been hacked (which is to say someone has figured out a way to dump the raw mp3 data from memory after the AllOfMp3 music player has decrypted them). Illegal, well umm, if you buy the RIAA and the western world, AllOfMp3 was illegal in the first place so.. two wrongs make a right?

Nevertheless, the audio is only encoded at 128k.

        20061024   

Michael considered fate at 19:29   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Mother Jones How the Rich Get Richer:
ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION, the federal minimum wage has fallen 42% since its peak in 1968.

IF THE $5.15 HOURLY minimum wage had risen at the same rate as CEO compensation since 1990, it would now stand at $23.03.

A MINIMUM WAGE employee who works 40 hours a week for 51 weeks a year goes home with $10,506 before taxes.

SUCH A WORKER would take 7,000 years to earn Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s yearly compensation.

        20061020   

Michael considered fate at 19:13   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
I've been wary of Sony for some time now and I won't be surprised if the sink ships. Sony revises earnings projections way down:
While the sales and operating revenue projections remain unchanged, the company's operating income will plummet from ¥130 billion to ¥50 billion. That's a drop of 62 percent..

..The company does project a much stronger 2007, though, and is banking on a successful launch of the PS3 to boost income in the next year.
For those not up on the yen's current value, that drop is roughly from $1.1 billion to $421 million. These projections sort of back me up for now, but I also think their hope for the PS3 in 2007 is probably overrated.

Michael considered fate at 17:19   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Buckner was double-cursed? Wha? Shit, I guess you can't expect much when you marry the two oldest sports curses in baseball together as one:
Bill Buckner was wearing a Chicago Cubs batting glove under his first baseman's mitt.




Hard to believe that nobody noticed for twenty years.

        20061019   

Michael considered fate at 19:11   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
McGill was recently ranked 12th in North America and 21st in the world, by the Times Higher Education Supplement (login: mefier, password: metafilter - thanks, obviously, to the metafilter folks). It's nice to know I at least didn't choose a shithole to go to.

Newsweek's global top 100 puts McGill at #42 and Shanghai Jiao Tong University's rankings, which looks at Nobel Prizes and highly cited articles, puts us at #35.

But who believes top 100 ratings and rankings lists anyway?

Michael considered fate at 16:45   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
So if you've been keeping up with the AllOfMp3 debacle, you know the 'ol US of A, specifically the RIAA, is pretty unhappy with them. And now Visa has stopped processing charges from them:
Tuesday, the credit card company Visa International said that it had suspended card service to the site, citing concerns over copyright issues..

..Vadim Mamotin, director general of the site’s parent company, Mediaservices, spoke through a translator by telephone with the International Herald Tribune and then participated in an online chat with 59 journalists. Mr. Mamotin maintained that the company operated legally under Russian law.

"In six years of operation we have never been convicted by a Russian court or declared illegal,” Mr. Mamotin said in the telephone interview. “Under Russian law, we are 100 percent legal."
This is pretty huge, in a way, because who is Visa to tell me where I can spend my money? Are they some sort of governing body? Do they make copyright policy? No, no, and no. There are plenty of ways I can spend my money through Visa illegal and I don't see them stopping any of those avenues.

Meanwhile, AllOfMp3 has started a music for the masses download service which allows people to listen to all of their music free, through proprietary software (How long before that gets hacked?).

Personally I think this is something that needs to be taken up with the Russian government itself. I realize they have tried to some extent but I don't think you can start doing this sort of vigilante-justice styled shenanigans by going over or around world governments. It smacks of nasty conflicts to come. Frankly, there is a lot going on in Russia that is illegal in the eyes of most people. It's the stuff that loses money for the big companies in the west that is what becomes highlighted. Nothing new here, really.

        20061018   

Michael considered fate at 18:36   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

        20061017   

Michael considered fate at 11:33   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry thinks ye old species is gonna go off and split itself in two because of over-dependence on technology:
[Curry] of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge..

.. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.
I don't know about you but as far as I am concerned beer will save us all. To this day tall, slim, healthy, attractive (sometimes intelligent) men go off and bone squat goblin-like creatures all because of our favourite techno-gadget, the beer goggles. Plus, I even made out with a tall (6'2"!!) thin amazon woman once because of beer and I'm a height-challenged 5'8".

Hypothesis: beer is the ultimate genetic pool blender.

It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "let's go to the company mixer on friday".

Michael considered fate at 10:06   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Jesus

For an atheist I take the lord's name in vain an awful lot. God damnit, jesus chris, all those old guys. Somehow it sounds a little hollow if I stop to think about it since, obviously, I the weight of the curse comes from the sheer inappropriateness of it. For someone like me to utter jesus under his breath, well, it might as well be joe or jim.

I throw around my fair share of fucks and shits too, but even they fall flat when you can say them straight to your parents face with not a blink from either side.. even more so if it's common and accepted to speak like this with your friend's parents.

But by the age of 28 you're basically allowed to do whatever you want, even if that something is something destructive. Binge drinking, smoking cigarettes, refusing to eat for 24 hour periods, staying up wayyy past your bedtime - these are the joys of adulthood, right? Everything we covet as children is essentially the destructive nature of the human species. We desire these things that we see older siblings have - parties, free reign of the family car, and trips to fast food joints - we want what others have even though it may make them less whole.

Eventually we grow up and these things coming flooding in. Fuck, sweet, let's have another. Somewhere along the line a swear is no longer a swear and it falls dully even on your own ears. This is it; nothing stays the same, it all becomes more or less or farther or closer. The universe is nothing if not not static. Acceptance of this, in any sort of informative manner, almost seems impossible.

We also want material things. Excessive safety at the expensive of others. Conformity within community. Conservation just isn't very natural for us. Franklin warned us They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. Oh, verily! This applies not only to the civil liberties one would think but to slightly less tangibles ones - sustainable environments, sustainable economies (and I don't mean in the monetary sense), sustainable anything, really. But our eyes are blind and our ears are deaf, it is dumb that we never seem to suffer, chattering away just to hear ourselves talk. If we stopped to listen to ourselves all that would be heard was here and now, the past being just a series of stepping stones.

But where we stand atop this stony rubble is not the point of the sword we thought. While we pile stone upon stone in an attempt to build utopia we're really digging a grave almost as fast as the walls cave in. Utopia, as heaven and hell, is a human construct that has been built from people - the human mind - the one and same which thus far has been unable to accept reality, unable to address sustainability, and treats it's own bodily vessel as an escape pod, jettisoning itself into materialism, hedonism, and in front of bad television.

Utopias, it has been said, hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times. Which makes it an oxymoron; a farce. A parody of the idea that anything could ever be perfect, that the future is predictable and okay to rely on. If we of the United States truly believe we are building ourselves a secure utopic state in any way whatsoever then we should examine another famous phrase: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

And I've already seen a lot of tragedy..

        20061013   

Michael considered fate at 20:10   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
For Your Consideration (trailer .mov) is Christopher Guest's newest. In the vein of Waiting for Guffman, it's about a low-budget movie with failing actors that gets a nod for an Oscar nomination, by the looks of the trailer. All the usual suspects show up - Levy, Posey, Willard, Lynch, etc. - so it definitely looks promising.

Michael considered fate at 10:10   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
I know that NPR is woefully funded and that the NEA is ever-dwindling and no, I don't personally support my member-support local station (I'm in another country for cripes sake) but come on come on come on, who thinks it is the right thing to do to charge for public radio show downloads on audible.com?

Thankfully, This American Life has finally given up on paid content and they're offering their show as a free podcast.. Or, just offering their show free for download. I guess they (and I) just feel obligating to use the shiny new lingo that gets forced on us.

By the way, American Public Media's A Prairie Home Companion has been doing this at least since I was a wee lad in my first year of univeristy so grandfather-kudos to them.. but I see now that their Marketplace morning report are free too (my favooourrriiite).

Now if Click and Clack would get their act together and offer more than lame real audio..

Michael considered fate at 07:08   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Canada troops battle 10-foot Afghan marijuana plants:
Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy -- almost impenetrable forests of marijuana plants 10 feet tall.

.."The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them"

.."A couple of brown plants on the edges .. did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action"

Michael considered fate at 01:05   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

Home sweet home? 

        20061012   

Michael considered fate at 22:36   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
The Java approach was called the sandbox model. The basic idea was that if you restrict access to a safe "box" within which a program (or applet in this case) can act, you severly limit the potential security concerns of said program. And indeed this is basically true; you'll hear very little about Java vulnerabilities in the wild because they never happen - either because nobody writes software that requires security with Java or because it is designed well enough to make up for us fallible programmers.

An eweek article was posted recently that talks about this sort of security model in the scope of the one-laptop-per-child $100 machines. It is funny to see some of these same ideas resurfacing, but it's happening probably because it is actually a good model:
"If [the One Laptop Per Child project] succeeds, we'll have created the largest monoculture in the computer industry. To answer whether that's scary or not is a nontrivial question. The security implications are deeply frightening," [said Ivan Krsti?, director of the security and information platform efforts for the OLPC project].

.. The laptops will force applications to run in a "walled garden" that isolates files from certain sensitive locations like the kernel.
I'm not saying it is going to be easy for them but I do believe in their approach and I think they'll be fairly successful with it.

However, the outcome of success could look very strange indeed. Consider an initiative to provide everyone in rural areas with a cheap vehicle.. except every vehicle shares the exact same key to unlock and start it. Would everyone give up on their attempts to secure their vehicle and just grab the closest one whenever they need a ride? Would the market for micro-purchases of gasoline skyrocket because nobody would want to put much gas in a vehicle they weren't going to hold on to?

Who knows. Regardless, Libya has signed on for 1.2 million laptops by mid-2008 and there are "tentative purchase agreements with four other developing nations."

        20061007   

Michael considered fate at 10:27   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

        20061005   

Michael considered fate at 17:38   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Google released a Code Search, new search tool today. It allows you to search through source code - open source of course - and there are approximately 17.2 million files.

Just for the fun of it.. Here are the number of results for files containing code comments with the word:


Bug - 3,162,000

Hack - 1,540,000

Kludge - 24,600

For words in general, I checked:

Llama - 15,100

Goat - 10,000

Jesus1 - 500


[1]Which included:

case AUDIO_AAC: return "AAC"; break;
case AUDIO_JESUS: return "Vorbis"; break;

--

* Jesus said, uh, what did he say...
* @param e the pramaaaaaaresrfgfljk

--

#define DEFAULT_SIGNOFF_REASON "Jesus Saves! (And Esposito scores on the rebound!)"

        20061004   

Michael considered fate at 14:44   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Okay, regular readers it is time to avert ye eyes.

I was working all night (and into today) with that damn ask-metafilter thread on my mind from two posts down. God knows what it is about and, by the looks of things, people have pretty much fleshed out what can be known for the time being. Nevertheless, there was much talk of squares, circles, diamonds, and them being one within the other:
Maybe the centre of the circle/diamond is what is of interest.

Do you get anything interesting if you superimpose the entire image (the diamond, the square, and the circle) on a map? Do the square points line up anywhere interesting?
It quickly occurred to me that the points might not actually be a perfect diamond.. or maybe the diamond was intended to be inside the circle, not the other way around (like the wacky scientology logo). So I went off and found this document (pdf) that describes a nice mathematical way to find the estimated center of a circle given a set of points - basically fitting the points to the best possible circle, regardless of whether they actually lie on the circle.

It was 15 minutes into programming it up that I realized the work was already done in Java here (java).. so then I just grabbed the code, and worked up some results. Note that this doesn't take the 'ol strangeness of that oblong spheroid we call earth into consideration - no great circle calculations or nothing. If it were a perfect sphere none of this would matter, of course, the center of the circle would still give you the center on the globe. Nevertheless, onwards and upwards..

The set of coords mentioned by Steven C. Den Beste was:

36.6266N 111.6691W Bitter Springs, AZ
36.4385N 99.39120W Woodward, OK
41.6649N 105.8069W Lookout, WY
31.2998N 103.8377W Ft. Hancock, TX

Which gave me an estimated center at:

036.33896600N 105.58903637W (google maps)

Which is basically IN TOWN Taos, NM, which was discussed heavily in the early parts of the metafilter thread. Given that the SWF file at thepurification.org that started this all had a variable in it tamed "countertaos", I'm gonna say that is truly the intended center.

Interestingly, ericb points out that Taos is known for its hum:
The Hum is a phenomenon involving a persistent and invasive low-frequency noise of a humming character and unknown origin, not audible to all people, reported in various geographical locations, including Taos, New Mexico, and thus it is sometimes called the Taos Hum: the lore of this phenomenon has become part of the appeal of Taos.(wikipedia page)
Furthermore, LobsterMitten says:
There's a movie called Taos in post-production now, scheduled for release in 2006. It's the story of one man's personal spiritual journey in the desert outside Taos.
Granted it seems to be a very small budget deal and nothing Hollywood-esque but then SWF isn't particularly hard to code, either. The film is shot/set in Taos and its close neighbour Tres Piedras (just north on Interstate 64), among others.

It does seem as though it is unrelated but the movie, "Taos", nevertheless hints at a little bit of mysticism when the main character is stranded in Taos:
John Wahlberg (RIB HILLIS) works round-the-clock trying to meet the needs of others while ignoring his own. When your life is out of balance and headed in the wrong direction, where do you stop to turn around? For young John Wahlberg, the unexpected detour of Taos became the rest stop that saved his life. John works as a corporate attorney in a large Washington D.C. law firm, trading his nights and weekends for extra cash and the promise of a secure future. Lyndsey Palmer (JULIE DORRIS), John's girlfriend, wants more. She's blue-blood, well-bred and has plans for John as soon as he accepts a job with her father's bank. Estranged from his own family since the untimely death of his father, John keeps his focus on the future as he heads to Aspen for the Christmas holidays to propose to Lyndsey and embrace her family's expectations. A work crisis on his way out forces John to miss his flight and lands him in Albuquerque, where he rents a car to make the drive north to Aspen. In the middle of the high desert, the car breaks down alongside the lonely highway. Exhausted and out of his element, John is stranded in Taos. Through a series of unexpected personal encounters and fateful events with the local residents, old wounds begin to surface and new perspectives emerge as John gets caught up in the events of the mystical town. Lost in the desert of Taos - where life finds its balance - John questions if dreams can truly become reality. A powerful personal journey, TAOS is about dealing with unexpected loss while forging a balance between competing family, work and personal interests.(imdb page)
The movie has a website with two frontpages here and here. The second link has a note: "Copyright 2000-2002" so it seems to have been in the works for quite awhile. There are no links on the front pages but Google gives me this links page which seems to be the site navigation center. Full plotline here.

Another completely unrelated site, Taos Communications Empire, has listings of a few movies and their front page says:
UFOs, cult authors, suppressed cancer cures and more. You'll find it all at Taos Communications Empire, a New Mexico-based video and film production company. Started by President Anthony DellaFlora and Vice President James Lujan in 1997, this independent movie company is committed to bringing intelligent, compelling, offbeat documentaries to the film-viewing public.
Lots of UFO stuff and weird spirituality goings-on, but all the movies have already been released or are not looking like they are coming out now or in the near future.

Sidetrack: A 1975 movie named "Moment to Moment" was also known as "Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos" and was apparently written by Robert Downey Sr. (screenplay by his wife L.C. Downey). The plotline is obviously not the same movie at all, this one is a comedy.

Meanwhile, try a webcam of the Taos Mountains. That's all I got.

Michael considered fate at 08:15   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
A friend of mine bought a checker board from a pawn shop the other day. I had to admire her thrift because not only did she buy the board used, she stole the checkers themselves! Granted, the board came with only single-sheet instructions so it is almost justifiable.

The board, purchased in Montreal, Quebec, had clearly been around for some time but it wasn't obvious whether the wording was translated or originally english. The faded cardboard box that the board came in did proclaim the game to be called "Dames!" suggesting that perhaps some french mid-seventies feminist were trying to ingratiate not only gender-equality into the hearts and minds of young gals but problem-solving as well? Go grandma1.

But it was the sentences themselves, the grammar and word choice, that truly struck me. It hinted of eastern ways, asian thought, not français. As checkers probably originated in India or there abouts (and, in fact, homer even mentions them in the Odssey, this wouldn't be surprising. What is interesting is that almost every sentence of the instructions could have stood on its own as a proverb of sorts. Step back, move your mind into abstract thought, and then proceed to a few examples:

  • A king may capture moving forward or backwards, it does not matter.

  • A man may only move diagonally forward, never straight ahead.

  • Only when a man jumps over another man can he capture him.

  • If a man is in a position to jump another man he is obligated to do so.
[1] They still referred to the pieces as "men" and the doubling, or "knighting", of pieces as "being kinged", thereby retaining some masculinity. Perhaps the instructions weren't the original set that came with that board.

Michael considered fate at 05:07   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
If you want to waste some time, this interesting puzzler should to it. It worked for me.

And if that tickled your fancy, certainly check out the much longer running May Day Mystery.

        20061002   

Michael considered fate at 23:35   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Aha! That laze, like yesterday's leftovers there you are, a slight stink about you as you sit staring blankly at me. A look on your face like I should know what you're talking about, like I should know why you're hear, like I should know what I owe you. Like I should know.

The sheet, pulled up and wrinkled into a ball, is folded over itself. Half the mattress is exposed, discolouring in the sunlight while the cold of winter creeps around in the background, a vulture waiting for the carrion. I can't fix it. It might as well be foreign to me, the stretch bands, the strips of pastel mexico-pattern, the mis-matched pillow cases.

Cooking instead, for hours, stewing curry like it defines a reason, a purpose - as if filling the day with stovework implies meaning. Salty pre-prepared food still resonating regardless of the homemade smells, the bubbling concoction, the sweet spicy hot smooth reductions. Into my mouth - pop - pre-prepared, pre-enjoyed even, as I walk down the road; zombie.

Swaying, weaving to one side of the sidewalk and back to the other, stopping mid-stride. The stream of people passing by are people, I know, I've measured, they're real, I however, am not.

Somebody walks by with purpose, with pride. This one I notice. He looks as though he has just gotten up, like he is going somewhere he wants to go, there is meaning in his step, there is purpose in his pose. I want to be him, just quick like, for a moment, to see where he is going. I'm swaying, I'm weaving.

Inside it's more of the same. That old lady, in front of me, she came in the store behind me. Even the grandmother's shop faster than me, those old nags. I can't tell what aisle I am in, no, I can, it's what I am hear for; I can't tell what I'm hear for. No. It's in my hand.

Green Bell Peppers. $.99/lbs.

Wow, it is that simple. Shut your eyes, move about. When you open them again I'm standing somewhere else and you're in the same place. It's a long story and you don't even want to hear it, which is a complete sham - I listened to yours. Where is the equity, where is the pomp that is meaningful exchange. Exchange means back and forth, fuck. I'm looking back there, at the wrinkled sheet, I'm there on top and sort of grappling half-heartedly with another person. Tickle-fighting, maybe, or just play-acting as if someone else were in the room to watch. My heart isn't in it, I don't care.

From over here I look half asleep but when I look straight at myself in the eyes I can see I'm only half awake, fighting laze with as much as fifty percent will give me.

Michael considered fate at 11:29   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

oh please...a "simulated image of the universe"? i could simulate it to look like a giant clam if i wanted.

(that's a direct reference to a birthday card i made for brian some years ago, doctoring a quote from einstein like so:

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the {mysterious} GIANT CLAM. It is the source of all true art and science."

it was made by cutting and pasting two ads on opposite pages in a catalogue at the lab, and made me pee my pants) 
Brain = Universe? Yah, probably.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

Michael considered fate at 05:58   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 are now corporations and 49 are countries. Well, that's interesting.

The first five are:

23 General Motors
25 Wal-Mart
26 Exxon Mobil
27 Ford Motor
28 DaimlerChrysler


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Check out heroecs, the robotics team competition website of my old supervisor's daughter. Fun stuff!
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