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February 25, 2002
Hey hey, kids! Here's an
Hey hey, kids! Here's an interesting bit on the sorry state of race relations and the utter lack of integrity in American Standard Media, Inc.
I'm always amused by these instances of blatant media bias because they make me think of good ol' Noam "You Are Being Propagandized" Chomsky. Just look at the story: a guy gets offered a ride, then dragged to death under a truck. But he's a white man killed by black men, so it doesn't warrant headlines. It was even in the same town: lovely Jasper, Texas. So: which side is putting out the propaganda? The side that asserts that being an American of African descent automatically confers a superior victim status, or the side that views all murder victims as equally newsworthy? The side that treats the historical victims of racial intolerance as a single martyred group, or the side that prizes human individuality? The side that wants to criminalize our very thoughts and more severely punish those who murder with "hate" inside their private minds, or the side that condemns all examples of extraordinary cruelty as equally deplorable and therefore equally subject to severe punishment in our courts?
Well Noam, what do you think? Is this a spectacular achievement of propaganda or what?
Tom Tomorrow on the idiocy
March 05, 2002
Oh, dear. It looks like
Oh, dear. It looks like the crematory in Lafayette, Georgia is working after all. Which means that Ray Brent Marsh may have had other reasons for keeping 300 corpses around. There's also the matter of the pictures of decomposing bodies he apparently kept on his computer.
A regular Necropolis! Who knows what "based on true events" films will be made of this. The terrible tale of Mr. Marsh, living alone at his crematory in rural Georgia, stacking corpses like cordwood, just to...have them around for company? Produce really great mulch for flowerbeds? Or...something else?
Calling Tom Savini!
March 09, 2002
So…the fellow who brought the
So…the fellow who brought the NYC nuke plot info to the Feds made it up. He claimed to have overheard it in a Las Vegas casino. Lovely.
Another Muslim with visions of black-eyed virgins sucking him off in Paradise walked into an Israeli café and killed lots of people. Swell.
The U.S. is working up its nuclear contingency plans. Another “secret report” that got leaked to the press, which means another message that the government wants sent. The message: do not fuck with us. Great.
Meanwhile, Alec Baldwin shoots his mouth off once again, having failed to keep his promise to leave the country. Another actor who thinks that exposure must mean that he has something intelligent to say. What “moratorium” on criticism of the Bush government, Alec? Folks like you, Sontag and Chomsky have reams of press plus hours of radio and TV time. Bush was bashed left and right for his steel tariff decision, something that I don’t pretend to understand and therefore don’t comment on. What do you understand, Alec? Judicial activism? Constitutional law? Political philosophy? Idiot.
March 15, 2002
Weird. My trusty information spies
Weird. My trusty information spies tell me that someone from the Weapons Division at the Naval Air Warfare Center has visited Astonished Head three times this month.
Perhaps my recent ranting about various weapons of mass destruction has gotten the site caught up in some sort of routine 'Net keyword sweep.
My tax dollars at work! Go, man, go!
Either that or some government employee is surfing when they ought to be working.
My tax dollars at work! Go, man, go!
March 18, 2002
D'oh! Horowitz retracts the "cheery
D'oh! Horowitz retracts the "cheery tidbit" I linked to in my 3/15 post. Perhaps I'm too ready to believe the Horowitzian line...on the other hand, I stick by my characterization of the soft pacifists who are incapable of seeing the moral difference between 9/11 and the unfortunate consequences of misguided American policy.
So there!
March 19, 2002
The Delphic oracle was huffing.
March 28, 2002
I sent this off to
I sent this off to frontpagemag.com in response to Jamie Glazov's "Andrea Yates Part II. A Reminder of the Need for Execution." Glazov's work is a continual disappointment.
"Dr. Glazov's arguments are incoherent.
Dr. Glazov’s seemingly interchangeable use of the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘moral’ indicate that he has little or no idea of what the terms mean. ‘Ethics’ refers to the discipline of studying that which is good and bad and what constitutes moral obligation. ‘Moral’ refers to the principles that actually determine what is good or bad. The presence or absence of the death penalty has nothing to do with the presence or absence of the ongoing ethical study of our human cruelty to each other. The existence of the moral principles that underlie such study are similarly unaffected. To claim that this is not so is naïve at best.
Dr. Glazov may also want to examine the meaning of the word ‘categorically.’ It means ‘absolute, unqualified.’ The fact that Dr. Glazov can demand an unqualified condemnation of the taking of human life as part of an argument for the necessity of taking human life does not reflect very well on his thought process.
Dr. Glazov’s characterization of the ‘fear of the innocent’s condemnation’ argument is, quite simply, logically and morally wrong. To casually claim that the imperfect nature of the state system intended to dole out death as a punishment has ‘absolutely no bearing’ on whether the death penalty ought to be implemented gives the lie to Dr. Glazov’s moral claim that he believes in the preciousness of human life. His claim that arguments against the death penalty imply that life imprisonment ought to be abolished because it is also unfair to sentence an innocent person to such punishment is similarly illogical and sloppy. A sentence of life in prison bears with it the possibility of revisiting the trial and conviction. A sentence of death, once carried out, is irrevocable. The two punishments do not exist on a continuum. One is categorically different from the other (and I use ‘categorically’ here in the way that it is supposed to be used).
Finally, Dr. Glazov seems to have forgotten that Andrea Yates committed her crimes in a state that enthusiastically embraces the death penalty. That didn’t seem to affect her decision to kill all of her children.
The final question Dr. Glazov asks is important, but his answers contribute nothing of substance to the debate."
[10:48PM. The letter's not up yet. I didn't much care for ex-editor Richard Poe's polemical and scattershot argumentation, but he did manage the FrontPage forums well. -IW]
May 03, 2002
And Now The first paragraph
And Now
The first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence translated into Chinese and then back into English:
"When in the person event travelling schedule, it changes essential is one person dissolves with in addition connects their politics belt, and the supposition inside the strength Earth, the natural law and natural God they separates for the power with the equal station, the honest respect requests them to the humanity viewpoint to be supposed to declare impels them to the cause which separates."
And into Japanese and then back again:
"It comes being human and cause should be declared in order the time to suppose between power, those were connected with another ones of the thing between thing, it becomes necessary, for 1 people to disassemble the political band, the earth, law of God of place character and the character which are equal to difference gives qualification to those, the suitable point to opinion of the mankind urges those to the separation which is required."
And finally, from English into German, from German into French, and from French back into English:
"If during human cases, it necessarily for people, it will dissolve political volumes with others to have attached, and under energies of the mass, the different station and to even accept, which the natural laws allow them and the god of nature, an acceptable respect requires them in the opinions of humanity that they should explain the causes, to separation impel."
Clearly, I have way too much time on my hands today.
May 06, 2002
For someone who's supposed to
For someone who's supposed to be so smart, George Will can be awfully sloppy with the facts when he wants to make some clever point. He writes:
"If you have an average-size dinner table, four feet by six feet, put a dime on the edge of it. Think of the surface of the table as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The dime is larger than the piece of the coastal plain that would have been opened to drilling for oil and natural gas."
That's a nice image, George. Except that the oil's not all in one place. It's spread throughout the 1.5-million acres of the refuge in roughly 30 small deposits. The roads, pipelines, gravel mines, and other various and sundry infrastructure-type items required to connect those 30 deposits are exempted from the 2,000 acre "dime" George imagines for us. So, instead of a small swatch of industrialized land, there could be dozens oil fields of various sizes, docks, and seawater treatment plants scattered throughout the refuge, all linked by roads cut through virgin forest. This doesn't even take into account the exploration trails and water-withdrawal sites that would be required by the operation. For more info, and a speculative oil-development plan that meets with the defeated law's criteria, go here.
I'm not particularly a "Bushwatch.net" fan, but I have respect for footnotes and research.
C'mon, George...can't you spring for a research assistant? No, wait--I get it! Facts would get in the way, wouldn't they? Why spend money for a research assistant when you wouldn't use what they found anyway? We must therefore commend George for his frugality.
Way to go!
May 23, 2002
Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
Meanwhile, back at the ranch: FBI agent Kenneth Williams marked his now-infamous "Phoenix memo" as "Routine," which insured that it would be at least 60 days before any decisions were made about it. Folks living in Washington D.C. feel more threatened by terror than the residents of other cities, while folks in New York are displaying that plucky New York Sensibility. Cheney says the "noise in the system" has increased, leading to this week’s threat warnings, and Rummy says that captured al-Qaeda operatives are feeding false information into that system to see how we'll react. Overseas, Bush says he's got no war plans for Iraq on his desk, which might mean they’re on that bookshelf over there, near the coffee table.
After indulging in the Big Big Panic for a few days, I find myself tired and sick to my stomach. The need for action, left unmet, eventually results in resignation and the realization that by and large the world is unmoved by one’s own wants and needs. Generally, that's a lesson learned somewhere around age two or three, but it's easily forgotten, and the older one gets the more psychologically disturbing the consequences of such forgetfulness become.
So I hunker down, and wait.
June 03, 2002
Alright alright alright. My legions
Alright alright alright. My legions of readers, their brains bloated with the hunger-gas of idea-lack, have not been pestering me to fill this space. Having (somewhat) given up on commenting in the world situation (always hovering between Bad and Sure To Get Worse) and having written (probably) most of what I want to say about Ground Zero (seeing as how it's all cleaned up now and whatnot) I suppose some brief blurt of verbiage regarding the Neurosis In My Head is in order.
I have indeed sort of thrown in the towel as far as politics on Astonished Head goes. It's just too goddamn depressing, for one thing. 'Politics' these days seems to be an endless parade of sterling examples of the worst in human nature: greed, cowardice, incompetence, prevarication, and, above all, thick-wittedness. We live in a system that guarantees representation to the greedy, the cowardly, the incompetent, the dishonest and the thick-witted. A noble idea, but the system failed to compensate for the fact that, inevitably, the worst of us rise to the top. People forget that cream floats because it's nothing but fat, and if you live on fat alone your arteries will clog up and you'll die, strangled by your own indulgence.
I can't play the game that is punditry (not very well, at least). It's all well and good to adopt this or that position...there's more than enough information floating around out there these days to serve any argument you care to make. It's all about research: finding the facts that back up the bits to which you've elected to lend the name of Truth, and then artfully arranging them in a convincing manner. Arguments fly back and forth like bacon grease at Springfield Elementary's first dance. But nothing really gets done, no fundamental changes are really made, and the political game continues on heedless of who plays what position; indeed, the game continues in flagrant spite of those who play it, ensuring that no one of sound, immovable principle can achieve any measure of real power. Arguing about it becomes an exercise in self-indulgence and a neuronal pissing contest. After trying that out, I've decided that I don't have a taste for it.
For another thing (the first 'thing' was mentioned way back there, in Paragraph Two) there are many, many people out there who do have a taste for it, and instead of scrambling after them and pretending like I'm a Clever Fellow Who Likes Punditing I'd rather be the Clever Fellow that I actually am, who is occasionally right about things but has the disturbing ability to sound much more right about things than he actually is, which is a Tremendous Power that must be Used For Good, Not Evil.
'Good,' in this case, will probably consist of bits that are quite a bit lighter than the bits that currently reside here.
The lie will be given to this bit the next time I get ticked off about something, I'm sure. But for now I'm going to sit inside my hollow tree stump and think about what I can write about that actually entertains me.
June 04, 2002
And what amuses me today?
And what amuses me today? First, I am amused that the New Improved Blogger Pro version replaces all of my " and ' characters with ? characters. I cannot quote anyone without seeming to be very very inquisitive, or an inverted Spaniard. Why are there " and ' characters in this post, you ask? Because I am using the old New Improved Blogger Pro version, which leaves my " and ' characters alone.
I am also amused by this fellow, because he doesn't know what he's talking about. Anyone who can define eschatology as "the spirituality of any religion" and then proceed to write an entire column about out-Islaming the Muslims can only be amusing, and nothing more. My learned response to this bit of nonsense can be found as a comment to this item at VodkaPundit, if you're interested. The thing that gets me about this guy is that he was a deputy undersecretary of Defense for George Bush I. It's a wonder we got out alive...although I suppose that as a mere deputy undersecretary he probably didn't get to make any of the big big decisions, and certainly didn't need to know much about religion.
I am also amused by this Drudge item: "Martha's Vineyard town reverses bar smoking ban." Seems that once the town banned smoking in bars, the smokers moved to the street corners. Says Health Board chairman Joe Alosso: "The (cigarette) butts are a major problem, and so is the language you hear. They've taken the bar atmosphere and put it in the street." So it's not the cigarettes that are the problem, it's the people who smoke them. Better to have those...people...in bars, out of sight, where they can give each other cancer and we won't be subjected to their presence.
Finally: Georges the Dolphin. Pity poor Georges. Not only is he unable get any Dolphin action, which has forced him to harass human females, he has also developed a fascination with spinning things. Namely, boat propellers. I've seen that happen: sexually frustrated drunken fratboys roaming the city, looking for revolving doors to play in. It never ends well, and it probably won't end well for poor Georges either.
June 15, 2002
These, of course, are the
These, of course, are the least of the problems a human can face. Look out! It's taking-too-long-to-wash-his-coffee-dingus-man! Duck! and Cover! from the wrath of the stale breakfast-style apple thing. And the watery soap of doom! Not nearly as worrisome as the problems faced by a fellow I saw this afternoon, buying a bunch-of-beef-on-a-stick from the bunch-of-beef-on-a-stick vendor who recently perched his brand-spanking-new cart on the corner outside my apartment building. For a while, everything about that beefstick vending cart was new. All shiny metal surfaces, bright plastic umbrellas...even the ketchup, mustard and Mysterious Hot Sauce squeeze bottles were bright and clean shiny plastic. I've never seen such a sparkling new bunch-of-beef-on-a-stick vending cart. I wish it was somewhere else, though. Not that it matters, because I'm moving soon.
Anyway--this afternoon thin strappy-tee-shirt man bought some beef on a stick, and stood eating it with the small group of people who always seem to hang about the vending cart, eating various foodstuffs. Not just bunch-of-beef-on-a-stick, there's also slices of Mighty Spinning Meat Cone to be had, along with bunch-of-chicken-on-a-stick, and some sort of falafel-style mash. All messily eaten in foil or direct from the stick or occasionally from a styrofoam box. The stuff that comes in the styrofoam box constitutes, I think, a full "meal."
Thin strappy-tee-shirt man had some problems, though...after consuming most of his bunch-of-beef-on-a-stick, he got a funny look on his face, and staggered around a bit. I passed by him on the way to the video store to see about some more Sopranos videos and a Klondike Oreo ice cream sandwich thing. When I came back up the street, everybody around the meat-vending cart was staring up into the air, which I did too, because that's what you do when you see a bunch of folks standing staring up into the air. Thin strappy-tee-shirt man was hanging onto the topmost wire strung along the telephone poles, wailing miserably, his feet towards the sky, as though being pulled upwards...which, it seemed, he was, because just as I set eyes on him he lost his grip. Still wailing, he flew upwards as fast as falling down a well, and was soon lost to sight. On the sidewalk under where he had been hanging onto the wire was a grease-stained stick with a couple of browned cubes of beef still skewered on it, next to a dollop of pigeon shit.
That's why I don't eat at carts like that. I mean, you just never know what you're getting.
June 24, 2002
And before I get slews
And before I get slews of "Paxil changed my life" type letters: yes, I know they can work wonders for folks but the one time I tried such a concoction I felt the chemicals changing in my brain.
The brain isn't an organ like your stomach, which you're aware of because it gurgles and twists around and suchlike. It's silent and mysterious and hidden...like your spleen, maybe, or your gall-bladder...but even that's not quite right, because if your spleen goes off you don't start hearing voices and shouting at demons and so forth. To suddenly become acutely aware of my brain in such a systemic and subtle way was quite disturbing.
Didn't like it! No sir.
So I stopped.
That was years ago, and I am now the fabulously well-adjusted and happy camper you all know and love today.
Now, where's that goddamn hammer...
July 02, 2002
Odd with the dreams in
Odd with the dreams in the sleeping head last night. I was camping with Ted Nugent. Now, I'd be hard pressed to name a single song of his. But I read an interview with him a couple of weeks back and it's clearly stuck him into my brain. I could tell I was dreaming, though: Ted wasn't saying anything. That, and we were camping indoors. I was trying to jam the tentstakes into a carpeted floor.
Next, we were sitting on a small rise overlooking a parking-lot type patch of asphalt, with a road on the far side and beyond that, a river gorge. There were children playing. A young black kid was flying a small black and white remote control helicopter...way too close to me for my taste, so I batted it out of the air, and smashed it into the dirt, and threw the wreckage down onto the asphalt near the kid. I got the sense that Ted didn't approve--he didn't say anything, of course, because this was the weird alternate universe of dreamworld--but he gave the kid some kind of Nintendo Gameboy device, to replace the smashed helicopter.
Feeling guilty, I decided to buy the helicopter-flying kid some inflatable rubber playground-type balls, so that he and the other children could play with them. Suddenly (using interDream Transport, I expect) I was at the front of a store that I knew sold such things. It was run by Orthodox Jews, and for awhile the one behind the register ignored me. Then he pulled a black ski mask on, covering up his locks and his beard, and directed me to the big wire basket of balls in the back. I had already paid for three of the balls at $2.99 each, but I also saw a big red Jumbo ball, two feet across, and I absconded with it.
Back to the playground, sitting with Ted. I tossed the balls down...one of them bounced across the road, and I tensed, waiting for the children to chase after it and get creamed by a speeding car. But it didn't happen...and then I faded into wakefulness.
What does it mean? Perhaps that a military helicopter will be shot down somewhere, that there will be an incident of Jewish terrorism, an oppressed people will be granted a boon, and will be put in danger as a result. And Ted Nugent will achieve silent enlightenment.
July 15, 2002
"Individual investors," writes William Safire,
"Individual investors," writes William Safire, "Even in an era of pension funds and expert money managers, have a responsibility to assess their risks and to resist the roar of the crowd."
To which I reply faintly, hear hear. Fortunately, finances kept me from dumping money into the Bubble, and I will most probably be entering the market post-bursting...I'm one of Safire's contrarians. That's a good thing. What I find fascinating about the whole debacle--and Safire paints the market's portrait quite well--is that it's a sterling example of what works in this system. Witness the market punishing the ethical lapses of Arthur Andersen. Sure, companies are deserting Andersen for entirely selfish reasons, to avoid guilt by association, but look at the net effect: you do wrong, you get caught, you are punished. Bad company! No profits.
For a supposedly soulless system of supplies and demands, that's a peculiarly moral correction. The same goes for all the other mega-corporations that are even now plotting the best way to come clean, and can see the Wrath of The Market bearing down upon them to punish them for their iniquities.
This is exactly what's supposed to happen. And it started happening before Bush made his speech, before Congress adopted its posture.
None of which, of course, is a comfort to those who got burned...but Safire's got it right. They didn't even have all their eggs in one basket: they only had one egg.
July 31, 2002
"I don't think we, as
"I don't think we, as a species, actually evolve at all. I think we're as cruel and as awful as we were 10,000 years ago."
Huh. The next time I see you, David, remind me to bash your skull in with a big rock, eat your liver, feast on your marrow, and drag Iman back to my cave so that I can impregnate her and propagate my DNA.
September 19, 2002
And now: the results of
And now: the results of a VodkaPundit/WorldWideRant mention: yesterday, traffic jumped from 58 hits the previous day to 879 hits. That's nearly what I've been doing in a month. Thanks Stephen! Thanks Andy! Hoo-hah.
So: welcome, new folks, thanks for stopping by. If any of you are inclined to poke around further, the Archives link is over there on the left. I'm out of coffee, though, and all I've got for snacks is a stale Krispy Kreme. Many apologies.
As someone who's at some
As someone who's at some risk for melanoma himself, I think this is a great development: they've created white blood cells in a lab, then injected them into cancer patients, with reportedly startling effectiveness. In one case, the amplified lymphocytes essentially gobbled up two pounds' worth of tumor.
But the AP headline--Cancer Cells Killed In Test Therapy--immediately conjured up in my mind's theater a group of scientists wearing white coats in their high-tech lab, enthusiastically smashing dozens of petri dishes with big hammers while a spokesperson explains: "We felt that a simple, basic approach would produce better results than more complicated therapies, so we went after the cancer cells with brute force."
September 24, 2002
The word for today is
The word for today is Yurch, which is onomatopoetic in that it perfectly describes my state of bodymind this morning. Persistent ear trouble has left me partially and hopefully temporarily deaf, the wrenchings of my new schedule have rendered my brain highly susceptible to cascading neuron failure, and the onset of fall allergies has further degraded my mental capacity. My sinuses are packed with cotton and glue. I need a haircut and a dehumidifier for the basement. My cat is much too fat and there's too much beer in the refrigerator. In addition, I think that the ghost of Howard Hughes is trying to contact me regarding a box of gold coins that he stashed somewhere in Utah. All of this makes it very...difficult...to...concentrate. That is why I'm wearing the tinfoil hat. I probably shouldn't have downed all of that cough syrup, though. It�s messed up the vertical hold on my eyeballs.
Inna gadda davida, baby...oh...yeah...sing...it...*hic*
October 01, 2002
Well, it's finally happened. Or
Well, it's finally happened. Or rather, happened again.
I've snapped.
Gone buggy!
Holy Psychological Disturbance, Batman!
Shut up, old chum! You'll disturb the leeches... in my tights.
I suspect I need a break from this mayhem of writing and ideas and putting myself in the Macy's window. Bit too far out there. Not prudent. Can't have that.
Just when you think you're starting to get over something...baff! comes the knock on the head, and you're down!
I think I need to spend some time in the old orgone collector, yes indeedy.
October 07, 2002
Today, I am functioning on
Today, I am functioning on 3 1/2 hours of sleep. I attended a fine, fine wedding yesterday, but somewhere after the fourth blue martini I decided that a cup of coffee would be a really good idea. Which it was, until I tried to get to sleep last night.
So now, everything looks like a Jim Henson production and my head is a big bale o' cotton. Oh, Lordy!
I did receive yet another excellent comment about last week's improperly and immorally politicized winery visit, which I will address when my other brain cell begins firing.
In the meantime, please feel free to recoil in inexpressible horror from the Plush Cthulhu.
Woo-hoo! I've been ripped off.
Woo-hoo! I've been ripped off.
Yes!
October 11, 2002
Astonished Head is a window
Astonished Head is a window pane that looks really, really good!
Who'da thunk it?
Try it yerself.
October 18, 2002
Getting Squashed
Go read about Deb and her maybe-Zumpkin. It's a cringe-counteragent.
October 21, 2002
"Bones, there's a...thing out there."
--Captain J. T. Kirk
October 25, 2002
So far this morning, a talking-head on CNN has wondered aloud about the lack of attention being paid to Muhammed's Nation of Islam connection. Then, via Our Friends at NPR, I heard a former associate of Muhammed's--with whom he opened a karate school--remarking in a telephone interview that Muhammed "was not happy with the government, I could tell that." Also noted was Muhammed's Gulf War service; he was described as a "good soldier," and had receieved a commendation.
Of course, he was trained as a combat engineer, and not a sniper. There's already information floating around (with a handy diagram provided by CNN) that he had converted the Chevy Caprice in which he and Malvo were found into a prone shooting position. He had two holes in the trunk, through which the rifle barrel and scope could protrude, and took his shots by folding down the rear seat and strecthing out in the trunk.
So: the sniper is a nomadic African American who converted to Islam 17-years ago, served in the Army from '85 to '94, served in the Gulf War, provided security at the '95 Million Man March in DC, and has been through a couple of nasty divorces. At one point, it was reported that the person the police were talking with via telephone was demanding millions in cash. The victims were of all ages and races.
I think what we've got here is a loon with a gun. A miserable, insane son-of-a-bitch who hated the world.
The thing that always struck me about Mohammed Atta, ringleader of the September 11 thugs, was his eyes. Have a look. There's something about them, isn't there? Creepy. Sort of dead-looking.
Below is the sniper suspect. Check out the eyes. This is an old photo, from his military service days. But there's something similar, there.
Perhaps it's the set of the face. Then again, maybe it's just that I know they're both murdering bastards.
Images are funny that way: a bunch of neutral pixels, arranged just so, can become a repository for the perceptions of the viewer. Would I think that either image was cold and creepy if I didn't already know that the person depicted therein was cold and creepy?
Reynolds and others are wondering what a homeless unemployed man was doing flitting off to Jamaica, and where he got the money for the trip, not to mention the rifle and Caprice.
Good question.
And, as if to accompany the recent slew of human evil, evil fate drops by to say hello: Senator Paul Wellstone, along with his wife, his daughter, and several staffers, died in a plane crash just a few hours ago.
I don't know a damn thing about his politics, really, but the death of any leader of our nation is occasion for pause, and grief.
October 28, 2002
OK...everything seems to be in order now. Except my head. Too late to pontificate, and so forth.
October 29, 2002
One morning, some proto-human staggered out from his cave, scratched his hairy evolving ass, looked up at the big big sky with an inquisitively squinted eye and said, “Mrrrrgh…” This was the beginning of religion and, eventually, science. Mrrrrgh is the primordial phoneme of human curiosity. It is also the noise of getting up much too early in the morning and being confronted with a world that seems not-quite-ready to be experienced or observed, which in turn necessitates the ingestion of vast amounts of water that has been filtered through a coarse powder made from the half-burnt berries of the Coffea arabica plant. Such is the state of my pancake-bloated brain and sleepy belly this morning, having wandered through Hoboken, crossed the river and plopped down before my computer monitor with little or no detectable electrical activity in my synapses.
Please, say it with me: mrrrrgh.
October 31, 2002
Today, I want to talk about coffee. Or rather, the un-coffee. The Budweiser-piss of coffees. I'm referring, of course, to the FLAVIA® Beverage System.
We used to have coffee grinders here at the office. Dump a pound of shiny oily beans into the big big bin. Pop a snow-white filter into the filter cup. Slide it into place under the grinder spout, and push the button. Wonderful crunchy mechanical noise ensues, and equally wonderful freshly-pulverized coffee pours into the paper filter, a beautiful fragrant bounty of stimulating goodness. Extra-tired this morning? Hit that button again! Then scoop about half of the extra grounds out, so that the resultant brew doesn't remove the lining of your esophagus. Save those leftover grounds for tomorrow. Grab a coffeepot full of water from the water cooler (Never make coffee from faucet water. Faucet water has chlorine and a billion other things in it that make for an evil brew). Pour that water into the shiny, three-burner Bunn brewer. Watch while pleasant gurglings and friendly steam ensue. I always stuck my cup under the spout, to catch the first, freshly-dark outpourings, then *fwip* swapped my cup for the coffee-pot, ultra quick-like. For all that, I only needed a half, or maybe three-quarters of a cup...four, maybe five ounces. But: Mmmm...caffeinated.
Compare that to:
"Every FLAVIA® beverage is brewed fresh on the spot - from fresh gourmet coffees...which have been sealed, free from oxygen, in our unique FLAVIA® Filterpacks."
Filterpacks? What modern horror is this? I'll tell you. A "filterpack" is an utterly non-recyclable flat pouch made from a layered plastic and mylar. At the top is a small plastic knob-nozzle device. An insufficient amount of preground coffee is hidden away inside. Select a coffee variety--say, French Roast--from a rack of dozens of these packets, each tray conveniently labelled with a "Strength/Force" rating, on a scale of 1 to 5, which I suppose is intended to convince us that there's some difference between "French Roast," "Columbian," and "Costa Rica." Then, approach the machine. It... sort of looks like a coffee-maker. There are three buttons: "Coffee or Tea," "Espresso-style Coffee," and "Choco." Warily push the "Espresso-style Coffee" button. Look out! A small hatch springs open with a Star Trek servo whir. Don't be alarmed: it wants the filterpack. Put it in. Close the hatch. There are various clunks, hisses and gurglings. Inside the machine, hot city-supplied water is injected into the filterpack through the small plastic knob-nozzle device. The filterpack expands, revealing the "filter" part of the technology: it's hidden in the bottom of the pack. The coffee is being brewed in the filterpack. Finally, an anemic, pale-brown fluid dribbles forth, slowly and first, then with a bit more energy, finally spluttering out, spent. A pause, then a mechanical crunching as the spent, bloated filterpack is sucked into the bowels of the machine. Repeat the process: the "Espresso-Style Coffee" button provides perhaps three ounces of somewhat drinkable coffee-style fluid, and more is required to achieve the requisite stimulant dosage. For an on-the-edge experience, mix French Roast Espresso-style coffee with a filterpack of Irish Creme Espresso-style coffee, or some Hazelnut Espresso-style coffee.
I don't know what the "Coffee or tea" button provides. It can't be good. And "Choco?" Mostly sugar, with some cocoa processed with alkali, a dash of dipotassium phosphate, some silicon dioxide. Good, European-style cocoa, just like Grandma Bloch used to make.
This entire mechanized industrial coffee delivery system was created in 1985 by Mars, the candybar folks. There is a "FLAVIA® Way," which, while not requiring me to learn levitation skills from a small green swamp-bound puppet, is apparently intended to "satisfy my thirst for individuality." Unfortunately, such thirst is not quenched by a selection of identically-styled plastico-metallic filterpacks filled with asphyxiated preground coffee from a factory in Philadelphia.
I repudiate the FLAVIA® Way! I turn to the dark-roasted side! I give in to my anger and hatred of the whole new method of approaching office beverage and coffee service!
But they took our grinders and Bunn machines away. Now I am forced to endure the FLAVIA® Way. FLAVIA® caffeine is different from fresh caffeine, I am certain. Too much of the old, fine coffee gave me pangs of anxiety and twitchiness. Too much FLAVIA® makes me sweaty and feel like I need to go out and get some crack before the stuff wears off.
I suppose I could buy a cup from one of the two Starbucks around here...or the two or three other, non-Starbucks-style coffee joints.
But the FLAVIA® is free.
Mmmm...complimentary low-quality caffeine...
November 01, 2002
Police in Louisiana have tied John Muhammad to a September 21 murder in Baton Rouge. The rifle was used to shoot a shopkeeper in the head, and witnesses place Malvo at the scene, stealing the woman's purse. So far, the rifle has been linked to murders in four states.
I'll say it again: a Muslim, yes. But not a terrorist, except in the broadest possible sense of the word. Sullivan has called his choice of the DC area "no accident," [his archives are broken, so no link] implying that Muhammad chose the nation's capital as a terrorist target. But before then, he was killing people just to rob them, and--given reports of the 10 million dollar extortion attempt--the DC killings were just robbery writ large.
The man is a murderous criminal jackass. That's all. Calling him an Islamic terrorist gives him credit for a sense of purpose that he doesn't possess.
November 03, 2002
And having said that, allow me the brief indulgence of claiming that my head is currently full of late-night, cold dark sky blurriness, topped with a light froth of verisimilitude and a sprinkle of powdered morning. I've got rainbows in between each of my toes, and my fingers have gotten long and spidery as they scratch the moon's face (see the marks, there!). My eyeballs are globular and bouncy like the big superballs you used to get for a quarter from the red-topped vending machine near the supermarket exit, and my heart is wrapped in tissue paper in a box in the closet under the stairs.
What...what's that...it's K-K-Ken c-c-come to k-k-kill me...? No! It's a bucket of botulism slung in the hand of a giant walking bassoon! No! Wait! It's a free set of steak knives, with oxygen-action! And a monkey! No, no, it's...it's!
Christ, is it time for bed. In the hissing words of Tom Cruise, Now More Than Ever.
Thank you! I'm here 'till Thursday.
November 04, 2002
Very innaresting. My IP elves tell me that--in addition to getting a burst of visits from Bombay last month, which looks like it will continue this month--in the past three days I've gotten three hits from Saudi Arabia. The Ripe WHOIS database entry for the IP addresses in question helpfully tells me that
"If you experience high volume of traffic from IP in this block it is because your site is very popular/famous of Saudi Arabia community."
Fortunately, three hits does not constitute high traffic. The three sequentially numbered IP addresses originate in Jeddah, in Western Saudia Arabia, and--like all IPs in the that country--are administered through the Saudi Network Information Center at the King Abdulaziz 'City' for Science and Technology in Riyadh.
So...uh, hi, I guess. Thanks for letting us use our bases.
Oh, wait.
I guess I meant thanks for letting us move our stuff the hell out so we can use our bases in Qatar, instead.
I'm fascinated. Is it a student, this Saudi reader? A government peruser of Western media? Maybe it's just a search-bot.
At any rate, I'm glad the IPs are in Western Saudi Arabia, because the North and South, apparently, are full of Jihadists-in-waiting ready to flood into Iraq for the sacred privilege of getting puffed into pink paste by our expensive laser-guided munitions.
November 06, 2002
Daft! Absolutely batty! Completely snockered!
And so forth.
Back in the pre-Internet days--the mid-80s--I spent quite a bit of time on the ham radio, using the unfortunate call-sign of KB2GBV (it was unfortunate because four out of the six letters rhymed, which is a problem when you're working a weak signal and can't be heard very well). I wasn't much for DX (long distance) because I was using a homebuilt 10-meter wire antenna, with a 50-watt transceiver. Nonetheless, I used that wire to reach Japan once, and regularly spoke with folks from the West Coast, Canada, and South America.
The median age of today's dwindling ham population is over fifty, and rising. There was a brief moment before the advent of the Internet when ham radio was at the cutting edge of communication technology, with innovations such as packet radio (sending computer data over the airwaves) and SSTV (slow-scan-television--essentially, amateur TV). Then the Internet exploded, and there was really nothing that ham radio could do that it couldn't do better, faster, and cheaper. Two decades' worth of lax FCC enforcement have turned the allocated amateur radio spectrums into a free-for-all. I set up my radio for a couple of weeks in Queens, and heard tons of LOUD chatter in Spanish that I could tell, from the lack of call signs and protocol, wasn't coming from licensed operators.
In short, amateur radio is dying. Technology has advanced to the point where being handy with a breadboard and a soldering iron isn't enough to build your own top-flight rig. Most 'netheads can't comprehend why the hell anyone would want to try and join in the static-laden fray of a dozen radio operators trying to make that rare contact with McMurdo Station in Antarctica when you can just dial up and jump in a chatroom, or send off an e-mail, or open a webcam page and see a live feed from just outside the station's front door. The idea of using a communication medium the effectiveness of which is subject to an eleven-year sunspot cycle seems quaint at best.
This technological nostalgia was brought on by a perusal of my website logs this morning. I've gotten the occasional hits from the UK, Germany, Italy and (yesterday) South Korea. For the most part, though, my regular readers are stateside, and a good many of them are from places in the Midwest. There are also many folks reading from New York, California, and the like. But back in my ham days, most of the people I talked to were in the Midwest, or rural areas--ham radio is not a hobby well-suited to cities. I got a certain picture of America from ragchewing with old-timers who had been radio operators in WWII, or with younger folks who lived well outside of the insular NorthEast corridor.
I suppose the point of all this rambling is that I'm very pleased with the scope of my readership, which has been growing steadily over the past month or so. There are folks from Davenport and Chicago, from Palo Alto and Littleton, as well as New York and London. It used to be that I could go for weeks and not talk to anybody more than 100 miles away on the radio. Now I can reach people in Bombay without even trying. That's very cool.
So: thanks, everybody. I appreciate your visits.
And a special thanks to my number one repeat visitor fan: a chap named "Google" in New York.
November 07, 2002
A bit addleheaded this morning...methinks I've upset the serotonin levels in me head with a couple of glasses of fine Porto Fino last night. Not a hangover, but...what?
My god!
418 Kit-Kats are eaten across the globe every second!!!
Sorry. I really shouldn't write with the television on.
More later. I've got molding to cut and paint, as my continued domination of all surfaces of the bedroom continues. Avast!
It's amusing that, after writing a bit about ham radio and speaking with distant, far-off Japan, I have managed to locate an old friend in China via the power of the Internet.
I last saw Nino back in 1994, shortly before I embarked on an ill-fated move to Mexico, and he headed off to China to teach English for awhile. I got a letter or two while in Mexico City, and then he vanished. He was part of a crew of four of us who used to hang out in a graveyard in Hopewell, NJ, sitting upon the homey grave of Amos Sked and his wife Mary Jane, who died in the early part of the 20th century. We'd...uh, "relax" a bit, then play our music...guitar, banjo, flute, and a small keyboard (that would be me, playing the Casio SK-1, battery-powered, with a good sampled piano sound, all tinkly and high-noted). Nino played the banjo, and he took it with him to China, where he planned to teach his students to sing "Home On The Range."
It's been awhile since the Oral Fixations--that's the band, y'see--played their odd, rambling versions of Dylan, Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, and Poison (long story) tunes. I had planned to put up a "Where's Nino?" page on this site at some point, but yesterday, after entering his name into Google for the 30th time, I got two hits, once of which had Chinese Unicode next to it. The website was for some sort of food-marketing company, based in China, and Nino was quoted on the homepage. Sort of a "satisfied customer" blurb. I sent a note to the site's webmaster, explaining that I suspected that this particular Nino might be an old friend of mine, and asked for an e-mail address.
Not knowing how well the recipient read English, I phrased the e-mail formally, requesting assistance with my quest. Judging by what little I know of Chinese poetry, the theme of long-lost friends and reunions seems to resonate within their culture. I was pleased to recieve a reply the next day from Funny Wang, the webmaster. (Really). Funny was very happy to be able to assist with the reunion of two old friends, and wished me success. I sent an e-mail to the address he provided and, after seven years, I found Nino.
It turns out that he's been married to a woman from Shanghai for most of those seven years, and has two kids. He's working for an Asian division of Mars, trying his "damnedest to get the Chinese consumer to realize the joy of eating M&M's." He had given a blurb to a friend in Beijing, who put that blurb on his website, which is what generated the Google hits.
After seven years of randomly searching: bam! There he is. The mind boggles.
This, of course, was foretold at a week ago when I wrote about the Flavia coffee system...invented by Mars, the company Nino works for. Synchronicity, anyone?
November 13, 2002
No soup today. Instead, I was going to send you to Saskatchewan to drive a miniature remote-controlled tank around for a few minutes, but the applet's busted. So solly.
Actually, there will be soup today, regularly scheduled soup, to be precise, but I was too lazy and tired to make it last night for posting this morning, so I will have to make it later today for posting tonight, which is typical, I guess, now that the staff has gone on strike, and is picketing the asphalt around the plant, while I sit alone at my hulking desk in the office above the factory floor, shadowy behind grime-opaqued windows, listening to the ruckus outside and smoking a cigar by the dim light of the single gooseneck lamp, leaning my waistcoatted-pocket-watched bulk back in the wooden rickety frame of the four-wheeled chair, trying to figure out how to get those damn anarchists off my payroll so that I can get back to the business of making celluloid collars for the people who need them, by god, what's this country coming too when a man can't run his business the way he sees fit...
Excuse me. I seem to have channeled an early 20th-century tycoon of some sort.
November 20, 2002
"Momma's got shortening! We like shortening! Shortening bread!"
--Edgar the Pathologically Charming
Man, I’ve got the big flaky be-Jeebuses this weird Wednesday-style day. My minions have abandoned me and gone back to perching upon cornices, waiting for the next thunderstorm so that they can once again spout rainwater onto the heads of unsuspecting passers-by. A tremendous amount of oatmeal knots my gut. I read that Sadaam Hussein thinks that he’s the man to “make life pulsate and fill hearts with happiness,” and said oatmeal threatens to fly free on a mission to the heavens.
It’s not the thought that counts, goddammit! It’s the act! *Bang!*
Then there’s the little warbly voice in the base of my skull that keeps telling me: Build the artificial creatures and set them free to do my bidding. That’s a scary one, but it’s pretty well under control now.
And now:
figs.
November 21, 2002
...boom boom boom-boom...
...boom boom boom-boom boom boom boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom!!!
Do you hear that?
Hear what?
Exactly. The drums...they've stopped.
I don't like it.
Neither do I. It's too quiet.
November 22, 2002
Huh. I seem to have picked up a bad case of inertia. I'm sure it will pass. I'm also supposed to put up episode three of "Theophany," which I'll do...at some point.
The holidays always screw things up...who thought of having them all at this time of year, anyway? I've got this whole Birthankschristyear's Day confluence thing that starts November 18 and doesn't end until January 2, and every year it rounds up all the excess serotonin receptors in my brain, takes them out back and shoots them.
If you're bored and have a decent broadband Internet connection that isn't behind a big nasty firewall, go here and drive this miniature tank for a few minutes. It's in Canada.
November 27, 2002
Dance, spidery mutant freak-boy! Dance!
That is all.
[From xeni.jardin via BoingBoing]
November 28, 2002
It is Turkey Day. I've got to go out back, catch one, and cut off its head. So, of course, I'm taking the day off, and I hope you are too.
December 05, 2002
We're snowed in! Food is running low. Bob the Cat is looking appetizing. God have mercy on our souls!!!
December 06, 2002
Apologies, folks--I seem to be pretty tapped out this week. Not sure why, but sometimes it happens.
In the meantime, I would urge any of you who are intrigued by the phrase "Remote controlled blimp" to go here. It's the home of Plantraco, creators of the aforementioned blimp and also of a very small remote controlled tank-like thing called the Desk Rover. I received a blimp for my birthday, and I think everyone should have one.
Plus, the company itself is very cool. For example, instead of an "On/Off" switch, the control for the blimp has a "Groove/Snooze" switch, and it's not just some stuck-on label...the "Groove" and "Snooze" words are molded into the plastic. That, to me, demonstrates a certain commitment to being slightly odd. You should buy something from them, so that they are encouraged in their oddness.
December 09, 2002
Mmgh. My malaise continues. I cannot be stirred to correct someone’s erroneous impression of the “Sixth Commandment,” or to weave a proper tale of the thrice-mentioned Decalogue in the book of Exodus. My energy levels are extremely low. I squeezed my big toe and my earlobe, and the thin yellow Power Strip that runs up my left side only rose up to just below my knee. I need to spend some time in the recharger; this is getting to be a habit.
December 10, 2002
Well. I've halved my dose: from 20 mg to 10 mg. I have, as recomended by various Kick The Slouching Paxil Junk Beast sites, kept the other 10 mg half of my pill with me, in case I get the screaming heebie-jeebies and the elves start popping out of the file cabinets. But I haven't, and they haven't (although I'm fairly certain I saw I giant ambulatory eyeball scoot into one of the hallway stairwells and close the door after it as I rounded the corner).
Most anecdotal accounts suggest that the real fun won't begin until three or four days after I've halved my dosage, so we'll see how well things are going on Thursday or Friday.
In the meantime, I still have no urge whatsoever to correct the large pile of erroneous, bad, and flat-out wrong religious half-truths that are rapidly accreting on the edges of the infoscape. Ignorant heretical dogs! Soon the fires of hell will toast your tootsies! 'Ware the wrath of the Jealous And Most Correct God, who will pound your misguided noggins into the mud of truth and then do a funny little dance on your upraised rumps, sort of like a Divine Hokie-Pokie, and man that's what it's really all about! Just you wait! Rrrrrghh...!
Huh.
Apparently, it's lunchtime.
Toodle-oo!
December 18, 2002
Wholly smoked!
Practically the entire day is gone and I haven't written a damned thing. Shame on me.
Actually, that's not entirely true. I've written a bunch of stuff about how to install Cisco's Virtual Private Network client software.
Fabulous!
But of no interest to my vast public, I'm quite sure.
In Astonished Chemical Dependency news, I've switched my dosage time: I now medicate with my 10mg of paroxetine hydrochloride at night, around 9PM or so. My reasoning? The stuff has a lifespan of about 20 hours in the bloodstream. That means that, taking it around 6AM as I have been, I was running out of luvly serotonin reuptake inhibiting chemicals at around 2AM, right in the middle of my sleep cycle. Since I'm running the risk of my brain leaping from my skull with a pistol and shouting, "Gimme more Paxil or the fat man gets it!" I thought that it might be helpful if my "dry" time was between the hours of 5-9PM, rather than first thing in the morning.
Result? I woke up feeling like crap this morning. But that's because I ate too much turkey meatloaf and peas last night. Right now, my brain is humming along and munching on a healthy supply of paroxetine. And chocolate crumb cake, but that's another issue altogether.
Soon I will leave Babylon and head back to my country estate, there to frolic with vinted grape and lighted bicycle. Woo!
Today, I walked into someone's office and said, "I have some ideas re: the color issue."
I think I'll take a week off. My brain is turning into a memo of some kind.
December 23, 2002
Awhile back, I wrote a semi-lamentation about the passing of ham radio into the annals of technological history.
Today, I read of a group of folks who are launching very high altitude balloons with rockets attached to them, and then firing those rockets into space when the balloons reach 100,000 feet or so (the balloon/rocket vehicle is called a 'rockoon'). The rockets carry on-board ATV (amateur television) cameras, which broadcast signals earthwards.
The article is from 1998, but here are some photos from a similar launch that took place in July of this year.
Nearly every single person involved in this effort is a ham radio operator. So, far from being left by the wayside, some hams are actually pioneering civilian space launches.
Very cool.
December 24, 2002
Well now. The holiday is nigh upon us. Remember:
Keep the X in Xmas!
Here at Peapod, we're anticipating around a foot of snow for Christmas Day. Yes! Can't beat that with a stick. Bob The Cat will soon be tossed into snow taller than she is, for the amusement of her cruel human masters. I may also attempt to ride my crazy bike through the blizzard, which is insane good fun if you've got the right gear. Schwwoop! That is the sound of my bike sliding out from under me and dumping me on my ass.
And of course, the true meaning of the season: Loot!
Cheers, everyone. I hope the jolly big fat shapeshifting master of the alien hybrid levitating deer-creatures is sufficiently kind to you and yours.
December 26, 2002
Woo hoo, hey-hey, ba-pwang badoof!
With strange inverted enthusiasm, an eggnog-induced headache is currently whaling upon my posterior, but despite this I am working on improving the site. Not that anyone will notice, what with all the holiday goings-on and suchlike.
But, if for some reason you're perusing A-head, the Subject Archives are working!
Or, a beta version of them, anyway. I'm currently wending my way through over 400 past entries and assigning them categories.
Thus, you can now browse through my ingenious expositions by their subject matter, explanations of which will be forthcoming sometime in early 2003.
Frankly, some of the stuff is a bit embarrassing. But I will not hide my incompetence and lunacy! No sir!
*hic*
December 28, 2002
"It is a constant wonder to me how many people today have never lived with clocks, do not know them, are not aware of what the presence of a clock in the home means. I speak of real clocks, rather than battery clocks or electric clocks that so often exhibit hideous designs, fake pretensions and vulgar proportions."
January 01, 2003
Statistical Mayhem!
Presented For The Stockholders
I launched Astonished Head on February 22, 2002. Since that date I have posted 439 entries, including this one. The graph above represents the number of Heads that have visited since I started the site, and is technically known as the Self-Satisfaction Index.
This includes a fair number of visits from bots and crawlers and indexers, which I can't filter out (or, at least, don't have the energy or motivation required to do so). But the disproportionate effect of these automated Heads is mostly upon accesses, rather than visits, which I've graphed here. Usually, if an IP address visits 3 times and has 2,417 accesses, it's not a human being.
The total number of visits for 2002 was 16,567. Approximately 1,500 of those visits were, um, me. Checking up on things and such. Of the total visits, a little over 5,000 were from unique addresses, so it seems that I do have many repeat customers.
That Big Big Spike around the beginning of October was the result of a mention on Vodkapundit. Unfortunately, Mr. Green is now of the opinion that I need to "Grow up," so I don't expect a repeat mention. I'm not really sure what the Not So Big Spikes in November and early December are, because my referral logs aren't working.
A typical visitor examined 7.15 documents before moving on. A typical visit supposedly lasts for .63 minutes, but I think that average is probably highly skewed by 'bot, crawler and spider visits. The longest visit was 58 minutes...which was probably me.
After myself, people who know me, and search engines, my biggest fan--with 110 visits and 812 accesses--is someone from Illinois. Hi!
I've had visitors from England, France, Italy, Australia, India and Saudi Arabia.
And that, it seems, is that. The trend of the number of daily visits is, slowly but steadily, upwards, which is gratifying, but I get hit by so many automated services that I can't quite tell if I've attracted more readers or more software.
So, as always: my appreciation and thanks to all of my human readers, and may each of you have a happy, healthy, prosperous, and astonishing New Year!
January 02, 2003
Even though I am at home, I am working. I have a Virtual Private Network: a secure IPSec tunnel, one end of which is plugged into the LAN at my office, the other end of which is plugged directly into my skull. Pretty cool.
But it also means that it's not as easy to switch back and forth between work and play (which A-head is), because the security features of the VPN prevent surfing to addresses outside my workplace domain, and that means I need to disconnect the VPN each time I want to get here.
In the meantime, go fly around. (You'll need Flash MX, but if you have it, it's good fun).
[via BoingBoing].
Oh! Such wacky craziness with the Internet, it hurts my head.
I started off the New Year with visits from Poland, India, China, Turkey, and Japan.
And I found that out by using this tool right here. It's very cool to watch the packets bounce around, and then discover that they originate from some far off place. My Turkish vistor, for example, saw the site via nodes in London and Amsterdam before the packets hit stateside in Virginia. All those little checksummed numbers, flittering about through fiber optics and copper wire and bouncing around the insides of machines across the globe. And while I sit here in New York State typing this, the site itself resides in a machine somewhere in Utah.
It makes me realize anew what all those Islamist pukes are afraid of: the more exposure via Western technology they get, the more glaring their evil idiocy will become. Best to smash all that stuff, and stay hidden away in the medieval dark.
Meanwhile, us infidel Western types are creating bicycle-powered WiFi networks and giving them away to Laotians.
January 08, 2003
Man, am I getting fat. As I contemplated with dismay the rolled-over waistband of yet another pair of almost-new pants, I thought: I should just get a sack, and wear that. A variety of sacks! A denim sack for housework, a flannel sack for lounging. I'll see what Land's End has in the way of sacks for the casual workplace. After lunch, I'll go to Men's Wearhouse and tell them I need to see their power sacks. For formal occasions I'll get a tuxedo-sack, and for parties I'll wear the trusty burlap drinking sack.
Of course, I could just start exercising again and stop eating crap! but we can't have simplicity and effectiveness, now can we?
Perhaps there's a way to massively increase my thyroid function, using common household cleansers and a pointed stick. Hmmm...
January 10, 2003
Due to an outbreak of humorless insularity, publication has been temporarily suspended. We regret any inconvenience.
--The Management
January 14, 2003
I have a peculiar magical skill that is best used when riding shotgun in a car cruising along darkened country roads, or staring out the window of a train as it hurtles through the evening.
January 17, 2003
Yesterday, I was starting to read Paul Tillich's Morality and Beyond, and I had a revelation. Not much of one, but it was one of those tiny "Well, duh!" realizations with consequences that spread throughout my mindscape like cracks running ahead of me on brittle ice.
Morality and Beyond is Tillich's attempt to relate the moral to the religious, but that's not what my little illumination was about. I read the beginning of paragraph six of chapter one:
"The moral act establishes man as a person, and as a bearer of the spirit. It is the unconditional character of the moral imperative that gives ultimate seriousness both to culture and religion. Without it culture would deteriorate into an aesthetic or utilitarian enterprise, and religion into an emotional distortion of mysticism."
My first thought was "Hey, cool!" and my second thought was, "Now wait a minute..." A flurry of "But"s and "I don't buy that"s and "That's not really a given, though, is it?"s tumbled through my brain as I unpacked those sentences, all these little objections. And then it dawned on me, bright sunlight upon thick dense mud: These things are givens. Not to me, perhaps, but Tillich developed a whole system of liberal Protestant theology (Systematic Theology), and this book post-dates that work. So as far as Tillich was concerned, there was a whole set of assumptions and theses and axioms that he had already developed to his satisfaction, and if I truly wanted to argue with what I found in Morality and Beyond, I would first have to understand how he had constructed those prior assumptions.
As I said: not much of a revelation. But it had immediate application to something that's been bothering me lately; namely, my cocooning. "Cocooning" is a phenomenon that happens when you read a lot of material on the Web: you find a site you like or find interesting, and you follow links out from that site, which are in all probability similar to it, and eventually you can be reading a dozen or more sites a day, all of which are speaking from roughly the same perspective. In my case, I've been running the circuit of neo- paleo- and plain old- conservative and Libertarian sites, with occasional forays into more liberal areas, which were usually involved with the arts and technology. I decided to break out of my cocoon a bit, and seek out the left and the liberal.
The trouble is, I kept finding infuriating idiocy everywhere, people taking positions and arguing for ideas that simply made no sense to me at all. I first noticed this phenomenon in the comments section at BoingBoing, which seems rife with people aho are convinced that we're all about to be tossed in an American gulag while Bush, Inc., sends our boys off to fight to secure his personal stash of oillll. Attempts to ask, "Um...how did you arrive at this conclusion?" are often met with a flurry of non-argumentative statements of How It Is.
So, I started my decocooning process at Warblogger Watch, which is an anti-war site apparently devoted to insult and and rhetoric rather than any actual argument. I ignored the various linked "Person-we-hate-very-much-watch.com" sites, which seem to be little hive-cults of obsessive anti-personality. I followed many links. I read many bits of verbiage. And I kept running into the same thing: So-and-so-is-wrong. So-and-so-must-be-mocked! So-and-so-is-wrong, mockable, and fascist! All without any serious attempt at real argument or a coherent statement of position. Although I am still in the early stages of the de-cocooning process, all of this was puzzling and disappointing.
Until, that is, Tillich opened my eyes. Like him, all of these folks, with their snarky put-downs and rhetoric, have--to some degree--developed a host of assumptions, axioms, and theses. It is upon these hidden "truths" that all of their verbiage is based. An image arose in my head, of an ocean, the surface of which is covered with fine, writhing seaweed like fronds, all tangling with each other and getting eaten by sea-otters and gulls and so forth. The surface of the water foams with activity, and much seaweed-sap glints in the sun, but the real action happens below the surface, where each frilly frond becomes a thicker tubule, which in turn joins to a trunk-like structure, which finally, deep in the dark, anchors to a rock or roots itself in thick mud. Each bit of minor frond on the surface is a part of a much larger anchored organism. This is, of course, as true of my fellow cocooners as it is of those outside of that wrapping, and it is also true of me.
What I suddenly realized, though, was the sheer futility of thrashing about on the ocean's surface with the gulls and otters. The Web is full of ideas and information, each frond-site the construct of a mind with its own roots. So much energy is put into arguing about whether Sheryl Crow is a vacuuous buffoon or not. It's pointless.
My first test-case after realizing this came when I found this article in the course of link-following: "Right-wing governments 'increase suicide rates.'" Great headline, huh? But look at the lead:
"Right-wing governments may sap some people's will to live and result in more suicides, conclude studies in Britain and Australia."
Then compare it with this 14th paragraph quote from Mary Shaw, the primary author of the study:
"Shaw admits that attempts to connect the differences [in suicide rates] to ideologies are pure speculation. 'But I'd be very interested to see if suicide rates are higher wherever there's a Right-wing government,' she says. 'I'd be particularly interested to see if the relationship holds in the US.'"
Did you catch that? We've gone from a headline which claims that all right-wing governments cause more suicides, to the author of the study admitting that such correlation is "pure speculation" and that the study doesn't even apply to the US.
But that's just the frothy, frondy surface. I went back to the page that had linked to the story, which is headlined "The hidden costs to society of 'right-wing' political governance." There, I found links to other stories: "Rejection massively reduces IQ;" "Social Exclusion Causes Self-Defeating Behavior;" "Exile groups should not be excluded from political dialogue;" "Social rejection has a host of behavioral consequences, none of them good;" and so on. The implication is clear: the author of this page, somewhere below the surface froth of his arguments, believes that "conservatism" is equal to rejection, social exclusion, segregation, psychological abuse, and anti-sexuality...not to mention loss of the will to live.
The site's author, one J.R. Mooneyham, writes that he is:
"...one of a new generation of futurists inspired by such notorious figures as Alvin and Heidi Toffler (Future Shock), Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog), Eric Drexler (Engines of Creation), and Gene Roddenberry (the visionary responsible for Star Trek), as well as a wealth of science fiction authors like Vernor Vinge, Larry Niven, David Brin, and others."
So what we've got here are the beginnings of the "roots" of the aburd assertion that right-wing governments cause people to kill themselves. It seems that Mooneyham's support for this idea is based, in large part, upon science fiction, particularly upon "Star Trek."
The thing that such community-oriented "futurists" tend to ignore about Roddenberry's Star Trek is that the only reason that it's such a happy place is because of the invention of replicators, which provide whatever anybody wants at any time with, seemingly, no cost and no effort. It's a really nice technology, and you can bet that without it Captains Picard and Kirk would be travelling the galaxy looking for more resources to exploit. The goal of human society, as Picard explained, is to better itself. Unfortunately, that's only possible when nobody has to focus on feeding themselves or heating their homes. In short, human communities can only focus on total support for the personal improvement of their individual members when such provision of resources has already been achieved. This utopia cannnot be brought about before that time.
Mooneyham himself admits as much:
"Note that Mooneyham is a USA citizen, which has been a lucky break for him (so far as futurism is concerned), as this has arguably allowed him to live his life deep inside one of the most advanced republics and high tech markets in the world, as well as provided him with sufficient time and other resources with which to create and publish the timeline up through today. With perhaps a third or more of the world's population still mired in grinding poverty and a struggle simply to survive as of the early 21st century, it's not likely Mooneyham could have written the timeline if born anywhere other than a developed nation like the USA."
Now then, because technology is the only way to achieve his "Star Trek" future, you'd think he'd be most focused on the best and fastest way to increase technological progress...which, as it turns out, is the free market. But he's not. He's focused on the goal, rather than the most practical means of getting there (hence, "futurist").
One of the deepest roots here, I think, is the idea that humans are fundamentally "good," community-oriented creatures. I put "good" in quotes because it's an ideal quality, and I don't really think it applies to all of us monkeys here in the muck. The problem is, history has amply demonstrated that as a group human beings are generally insular, selfish, devoted to their own communities, and quite nasty. This should not be the basis for general misanthropy--plenty of individual humans are quite pleasant--but it should form the foundation for devising methods of reaching the very admirable goal of universal peace for all humans and freedom from want, with lots of nifty starships and snazzy tight-fitting uniforms. You can't reach the goal by pretending that humans are what they're not, but you can work to develop a system that mitigates the nastiness to the extent that overall progress is made. Perhaps, when we finally do invent replicators or Shipstones, the latent benevolence and community-oriented compassion inherent in all humans will finally emerge.
So far Tillich, instead of teaching me about the conflict between reason- and faith-determined ethics, has taught me that most of what I get so exercised about, and much of what I've ranted about on these pages, is a waste of time. The proverbial sound and fury. Therefore, I must now seek out new arguments, and new foundations...and boldly go where I haven't quite been yet.
January 20, 2003
A piece of advice: never snooze on the couch with NPR on. It was okay at first in the early morning, but then they started taking phone calls. I swear that I heard the distinctive, menacing voice of guy who called Victor Davis Hanson a "Zionazi stooge" last week: he seemed upset about Martin Luther King Day being a holiday, because it meant that we, the taxpayers, pay government workers to do nothing today. He was very concerned about those government workers. Let's see: thinks that America is a "vassal state" of Israel...has problems with MLK Day...and problems with the Government. I think this long-time-listener-many-time-caller probably knows a thing or two about mixing fuel oil and fertilizer, too.
At any rate, I finally hurled myself off the couch when some breathless caller mentioned that the WaPo was reporting 500,000 people in D.C. for the anti-war protests this Saturday. "Enough!" I cried. "To the Head Cave!" I fired up the Astonished Head Information Appliance! (AHIA!)
What I found of course, was this: "Crowd Estimates: 30,000 to 500,000." It's an interesting bit about how the count varies depending on who you talk to. I like the D.C. District Police count: "an awful lot of people."
From the AP, via the handy OxBlog, I found:
Paris: 6,000
London: "about 200"
Goteborg: 5,000
Cologne and Bonn: "a few hundred"
Istanbul: 100
Cairo: 1,000
Beirut: 4,000
Moscow: "thousands"
Washington: 30,000
Portland: 20,000
Lansing: "several hundred"
Des Moines: "about 125"
Venice, FL: "about 400"
Tokyo: 5,000
Hong Kong: 60
Christchurch, New Zealand: "more than 400"
Ox also points out that in Venezuela, 100,000 marched against Chavez, supported by 50,000 in Miami. In this article, I also discovered that Venezuela is the fifth-largest exporter of petroleum in the world, and that production is down to 800,000 barrels a day because of the strike, from a high of 3 million. That's half a million barrels more a day than Iraq can muster at the moment.
Hmm...if we divide the total number of barrels by Saddam's mustache and add in cocoa exports, we can arrive at a means of achieving clean fusion power!
No, wait...
Ach, it's too hot today.
January 23, 2003
I had a friendship quietly collapse when I bluntly told my friend's new girlfriend that Noam Chomsky was full of shit. She asked for an example, and--having recently read all about the non-famine in Afghanistan and other Chomskyian lies--I trotted out three.
Here's another from Marc Cooper, tucked in at the end of his review of what he and Matt Welch call a "hagiographic" documentary on the Chomsker (bold-type Welch's):
"In one particularly off-the-wall moment, Chomsky argues that while we mourn the 3,000 who died in the twin towers, we pay no attention to the roughly equivalent number of civilians who perished when — he says — the U.S. bombed the Panamanian neighborhood of Chorillo during the American invasion of 1989. I was in that neighborhood mere days after it was razed, and Chomsky is just plain wrong: It wasn't bombed. It burned down after a firefight between U.S. and Panamanian troops. And as reprehensible as the U.S. invasion was, Panama's own human-rights commission claims that a total of maybe 400 people -- soldiers and civilians — died during the entire conflict."
See, now, that's what I'm talking about. Simple, easily verfiable facts do not matter to this man. And yet if you talk to any earnestly anti-American college student who graduated over the past decade, I guarantee you that a significant portion of his or her facts and arguments will prove to have come straight from the linguist's mouth. The words of a compulsively wrong chowderhead are treated as gospel in the hallowed halls of many of our universities.
Bad Noam, bad! No biscuit.
January 26, 2003
Top Three Odd Google Searches:
1. "insane cretin ham radio"
2. "chinese prognosticators diagram"
3. "parietal lobe jews"
They all ended up here, and I can easily figure out why Google kicked out Astonished Head as a result for each of them. What a strange little site I have wrought...
January 27, 2003
Rock 'em friggin' sock 'em!
*hic*
January 28, 2003
Whaddya know?
Here's what I wanted him to say:
I know what I'm doing, and when I'm done doing it we will be safer than we are today.
Here's what he said:
"Whatever action is required, whenever action is necessary, I will defend the freedom and security of the American people."
I paused a moment when I reread my words yesterday: it was the personal "I" that caught my attention. Was that what I wanted? I asked myself. The personal assurance of George W. Bush? But that is, in fact, what he gave to the American people this evening.
What I wanted:
We're going to get him. We're going to get him, and then we're going after the rest of our enemies, and when we're done there won't be a red cent flowing into the coffers of the barbarians.
What I got:
"We will work for a prosperity that is broadly shared … and we will answer every danger and every enemy that threatens the American people."
Close enough.
I wrote:
We're going to put them all down so thoroughly that they'll never, ever get up. The full might of the United States of America is going to be brought to bear...
He said:
"And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military—and we will prevail."
Wanted to hear:
...and we will drag their medieval culture kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and teach them to value human life far more than the poetry of a seventh-century merchant-warrior.
Actually heard:
"We also see Iranian citizens risking intimidation and death as they speak out for liberty, human rights, and democracy. Iranians, like all people, have a right to choose their own government, and determine their own destiny — and the United States supports their aspirations to live in freedom."
Again, close enough...not so much with the dragging, kicking, and screaming, but as the President said in the Best Bit of the evening, "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity."
Thought would be nice:
Our cause is just, and we will prevail, and you won't have to carry a folding bicycle to work with you anymore.
Am satisfied with:
"If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means — sparing, in every way we can, the innocent."
He didn't say anything about my bicycle, which was a disappointment. And there was all this domestic stuff he kept talking about, which will no doubt cause much frothing in the punditious sea. But he gave us the date we'll be making our case for war (February 5), reasonable assessments of the threat, and assurances that the threat will be dealt with.
I particularly appreciated the juxtaposition of the export of American compassion--in the form of an outreach to the desperately AIDS-ridden African continent--against the export of American strength and military power. I was also struck by the thought that all of the domestic issues he touched on--tax relief, generous reform of a sophisticated health care system, hydrogen-friggin'-powered cars, and programs to assist those in need--would have seemed like wondrous pipe-dreams to any Iraqi listening in. The things a country can focus on when its leadership doesn't shoot people in the head or strap them to a chair and apply high-voltage electrodes to their genitalia!
Those are just first impressions...more, perhaps, tomorrow.
January 31, 2003
Good God! I've been Den Bested!
February 01, 2003
In 1986, I was in ninth grade. I was in school on January 28, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. There was a group of kids in the library, watching the launch, and while I was not among them when it happened, when the word spread throughout the school I asked to be excused from class to go to the library and see for myself. Atypically, the teacher agreed, and I went, and I watched, twice.
At home, I had a very detailed model of the space shuttle, that I "overbuilt" with my inexperienced hands...a little too much glue, a little too much putty along the seams, lots and lots of paint. By the time it was done the thing weighed so much that it fell off of the ceiling a few days after I hung it up, and required still more putty to fix its hull where it split open. The model kit had come with name decals for all of the shuttles in the program: Columbia, Discovery, Challenger, Atlantis, and the Enterprise prototype. By prescience or coincidence, I had chosen the name Challenger. I had the "Space Shuttle Operator's Manual" on my bookshelf, a thin blue volume with fold-out pages depicting all of the shuttle's flight deck control panels, and nifty diagrams of various systems and mechanisms. This was the 1982 edition of the book, back before they replaced all of the cockpit avionics and dials and gauges with flat-panel LCD displays, so there was an abundance of knobs and switches and toggles, all very spaceship-like. I dug out the book this morning, and it's on my desk next to me, right now.
I remember a kid named Joe. Kinda dumb, would have been a bully if he had more focus, that kind of kid. In the lunchroom that day, he was enthusiastically recounting the Challenger explosion, making what he thought were funny comments. Now, I was not an imposing kid in any sense of the word, and I wasn't popular. But I looked at Joe, and I said to him, "What the hell is wrong with you? People are dead."
Such was my tone that not only did he shut up, he actually looked shamed.
And now, almost seventeen years to the day since the Challenger disaster, the Joes of the world have Internet access, and they work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
What the hell is wrong with you people?
February 02, 2003
February 04, 2003
PLEASE STAND BY...
...WHILE WE ADJUST OUR THINKING.
Thank You!
February 07, 2003
Back when I was spiritual and In Tune With Things and taking many drugs, I believed in omens. Ravens, sunrises, stray balloons, you name it, my pattern-making brain integrated it and, sometimes, I changed my plans or behavior because of it. As I got older and less intoxicated I stopped putting so much faith into such things, and as a result the number of synchronicities I observed in my daily life skyrocketed. Now hardly a week goes by without a handful of obscure coincidences tickling my fanciful notions of an ordered cosmos.
Occasionally, though, I observe something so peculiar that I stop for a moment to take note of how I'm thinking about things, and try to find some missed connection or a conclusion that I'm not drawing that I ought to be. Tarot works that way for me: I'm not dependent upon spooky New Agey spirits or occultic powers, but every so often it's helpful to focus on an issue in my life, lay out ten cards randomly drawn from a deck of seventy-eight, and see if the imagery knocks anything loose. Sometimes I'm able to perceive patterns that are eerily appropriate, and gain some insight. Other times it's just a bunch of pictures and I've wasted half an hour of my life.
Last night, though, driving home from the train station in the mostly-dark, over the low mountains, I caught sight of a shattered globe lying on the shoulder of a curve in the road. Most globes have a distinctive shade of blue for the ocean, and uniquely geographic colors for the various countries and states of the world, so there was really no mistaking the pieces as the headlights raked across them. One big piece, most of a hemisphere, a few smaller pieces, pale blue in the darkness, and then it was gone as we headed around the rest of the curve.
Now, that's something you just don't see very often. How does a globe end up smashed on the shoulder of a mountain road? Surely it was travelling by car. Hikers and cyclists almost always carry maps to find their way around, because globes don't fold well and they're the wrong scale. Was it some sort of ill-considered hood ornament? Behold! Now everyone will know that I am an eco-warrior, even if I am driving an Escalade! Was it the victim of some road-trip game gone awry? See, kids? Now nobody gets to tell daddy the names and capitals of the six countries that border Iraq. Was it thrown out the window by a would-be Evil Genius, frustrated because he had no hijacked space laser array, no secret lair, no henchmen, no money, no job, and no girlfriend? I'll show you! I'll show you all!
Doubtless, the true explanation for the globe's unfortunate end is stranger than I can imagine.
What struck me, though, was not so much the reason for its being there as the fact that it was. In this time of incipient war, with one side proclaiming disaster if we don't act, and the other side predicting apocalypse if we do, seeing a shattered globe on the side of the road has all the synchronous hallmarks of a bored and insouciant god sticking a thumb in my eyeball. Let's see what he makes of this! Ehhhhhh!
Of course--as with all oddities of this sort--it is what I make of it. I certainly don't fear the end of the earth any time soon, but I do think that the political globe, as we know it, will soon lie broken and discarded. The last whispers of World War II are fading even as its last soldiers die. The old divisions between Europe and America, and new ones between Western Europe and its Eastern neighbors who cherish the freedom so recently granted them, are increasingly apparent. The illusion of the inviolate borders of the United States has vanished in a cloud of smoke and sundered steel.
However trite the metaphor, it is true that all human history is an interwoven tapestry, and this 21st century conflict between Islamism and the West has threads that stretch back over thirteen hundred years. But humans are often creatures of limited chronology, and when momentous events occur we seek the obvious pattern. So the fall of Berlin Wall was part of the overall pattern of the Second World War, as was the entire Cold War. Now, though, we seem to have moved on to a new panel in the weave: the causes here are fine threads, lengthy and delicate, that have long been subsumed beneath the fury of our 20th century conflicts. As the cultural memory of those conflicts fades deeper into the distance of history, we allow ourselves the illusion of something new, something without precedent. In reaction to that perception, new political fault lines erupt, old alliances wither, and new ones are forged. It's a fresh image, yes, but it's woven from the same sorts of thread as the rest of humanity's great work.
That is one of the essential differences between the conservative and liberal worldviews. Liberalism is aware of the past, but seeks to create an entirely new human work, a revolutionary weave on a new loom, while the old tapestry hangs forgotten on the cold stone walls, fraying and fading with moth-eaten age. Conservatism holds that there is no new work, only new panels. It recognizes the fine quality of the old threads, and seeks to make significant use of them while advancing the human project.
And so, for me, the ominous serves as a point of peculiar interaction between the processes of my mind and the activities of the world outside of it. Were I still spiritual and In Tune With Things and taking many drugs, I would tell all of my magical friends to stock up on canned goods and make sure that they had plenty of fresh water stored, because I saw a sign and it told me that bad things were coming. These days, such a sign just makes me think that the truth probably lies somewhere between the extremes proposed by those on either side of the cause of war.
It's just a broken globe on the side of the road, after all.
February 13, 2003
Good God! I've been Vodkapunched!
February 17, 2003
Well. It's a holiday, Presidents' Day, to be precise, so I'm taking a break. No news, no blather, no nothin'.
I've got painting to do.
Plus there's over a foot of snow on the ground, with a similar amount still on the way. Bob the Cat is looking mighty appetizing.
For those who have been paying attention to "Theophany": yes, I know I promised a new episode (weeks ago), and I'm tricksy and wicked for deceiving. I've made two attempts at the next episode and they both suck. So I haven't forgotten...just having some difficulties with the old word-engine, is all.
February 19, 2003
Through the miracle of telepresence, I am both working in the office and painting walls a lovely shade of Calabash.
But I can only do so much, so posting will be light and airy today, like meringue.
In the meantime, if you've got a broadband connection, an appropriate version of Flash, some time to kill, and an appreciation for stoned animators with poor dialect skills, go here.
[I should probably also mention that portions of that site involve hamsters and various kitchen appliances. --IW]
February 20, 2003
Very busy today, so no soup; apologies. New visitors (and old ones, for that matter), please feel free to peruse the archives for recent wordish tomfoolery.
February 21, 2003
Hmmm...I'm not the only one having a bit of a lull. A small victory, VodkaPundit, Rachel Lucas...all have been experiencing a certain malaise. Den Beste has come up with a big bolus of verbiage today, but for the past couple of days there has been a spate of unusually short entries on his site. What gives?
To be honest, I think that many folks in this particular corner of the infoscape were fully expecting to be writing about the war by now. The actual war, with bombs going off and planes flying around and so forth, as opposed to the maybe-war, with diplomats akimbo and French persons being outraged. Instead, all we've been able to do is beat the UN's carcass (again), make fun of the French (some more), observe troop movements (they're headed thataway) and...wait. Code Orange turned out to be mostly about ass-Qaeda hijinks: Let's tell them that stuff that you and me and Hamid were taking about in the coffee shop that one time, won't that be a laff-riot? That, and a conspiracy among the three largest manufacturers of tape and tape-related-products, the so-called Sticky Trifecta.
But now that's kind of blown over, and so we're sitting around, saving up the Big Holy Words for the upcoming battle.
Or painting. Whichever.
Apparently, there's been some kind of massive explosion on or near Staten Island. I'm looking at a towering plume of smoke rising from the misty edge of the horizon. More as I find it...
OK...the NYT says it's a refinery fire.
Not good, but I'd rather have a towering plume of smoke at a refinery than, say, on an unknown freighter with unknown cargo...
And now: some pictures.
Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of Astonished Head.
I think I'll write something about that...
February 22, 2003
 As of today, I have been at this for one whole year. Over the course of that year I have made 516 entries, or an average of 1.4 entries a day. There were 26,358 visits to Astonished Head from 7,972 unique IP addresses, but I feel confident that at least 3,000 of those visits and 1,000 of those unique addresses belonged to non-human agents who may or may not have enjoyed the content presented here.
When I was an angry young sexually ambiguous lad in my early twenties, I made a foray into the incestuous, freaky world of poetry 'zines. These could be perfect-bound little paperback books, saddle-stapled tracts made at the local copy shop, or single pieces of paper bearing a single poem, stuffed into an envelope with a dozen of their fellows. I hung out with the beatnik impresarios of Alpha Beat Press, Dave & Ana Christy, and got to know their small cadre of Bukowski-loving, Ginsburg-worshipping, drunken junkie misfits who all knew each other, promoted each other, and guested in each other's publications. Bobby Star, eliot, Dale Russel...people that, in all probability, you've never heard of, who wrote works with titles like Chicken Fucking Is For Premature Ejaculators. Being unable to completely embrace the truly beat part of the scene--which involved poverty, lost teeth, and far too much vomit--I floated on its periphery for a couple of years, and then drifted away.
During my peripheral floating, I had the good fortune to be working in a copy shop in Princeton while doing summer theater. And so I produced a nice, 8 1/2" x 5 1/2" volume of about thirty pages or so, with a card-stock cover, laid out using Quark on a Mac and furtively run off in batches of five and ten when I was alone at the copy shop. It was titled Two Accounts of the Creation of a Pornographic Film, and it had two editions of about five hundred copies total. I can honestly say that, compared to the usual crop of poorly-photocopied 'zines, it was one of the best-produced volumes out there. Card stock cover, saddle-stapled using a gen-yew-ine saddle stapler. The content was...well...angry, young, and sexually ambiguous.
I mailed those off to anyone who asked. I think I may have actually sold two copies at three dollars each. I gave them away at poetry readings. I tucked them into bookshelves at local cafes and bookstores. I left them on subways. My distribution methods were erratic at best, but I've only got about fifteen copies left, so that means that there are four hundred and eighty-five copies out there somewhere. Fortunately, the contact information in the chapbooks is long-since obsolete, so no one can find me.
Unless, of course, they come across this.
In 1995, I was able to circulate five hundred copies of dead-tree media I had produced. In 2002, I've had somewhere around seven thousand readers of my online content. Based on the wunnerful statistics provided by the good folks at WestHost, I seem to have accumulated a group of around 130 regular readers, who--for some reason--find my word-spume sufficiently diverting, and keep coming back.
Blogger alone hosts a million users, and there are probably a like number using Movable Type and other self-hosted products. There is a galaxy of political sites. There are sites devoted to a single issue at which the author obsessively hammers away. There are sites by real journalists. There are sites by wanna-be journalists. There are sites by people who actually have writing careers, and sites by people who want writing careers. Left. Right. Gay. Straight. Atheist. Fundamentalist. Left gay atheist. Right straight fundamentalist. Right gay atheist with false teeth who prefers the company of large furry men on alternate Saturdays. And, somewhere in the midst of the millions of people with their hundreds of millions of words, is...me.
My first entry, on February 22, 2002, had to do with Israel, and what I found to be the peculiar and enviable ability of certain writers to establish their Positions. The Position, it seemed to me then, was everything. The smart political types simply adopted some core principles, and then applied those principles to every issue, constructing a consistent edifice of opinion and a body of written work. A year ago today, I wondered where I could get such a Position.
I'm still wondering.
I don't have a single issue to flog, here. For awhile, it was the Middle East, but there are plenty of folks who know more about it than I do and do a better job of commenting. I've tried the patented Snarky Approach, but that got old...I know I can be cynical and clever, but I just don't seem to have the need to demonstrate that to everyone else on a regular basis, and there are only so many shotguns I can unload at various fish in their barrels before I get bored. I've never wanted to adopt the People-I-Neither-Like-Nor-Agree-With-Watch.com method, because I find it petty, obsessive, and dull. Continuous commentary on world events becomes exhausting after awhile, especially these days, and such focus seems to deaden my spirit. I have posted my Fictional-Work-in-Progress, but having a self-imposed deadline for each chapter has not been the motivating force I'd hoped for. I haven't written an honest-to-goodness, edited-for-brevity-and-clarity Essay in over six months. My production of pedagogical bits about the modern relevance of the Ancient Near East and Biblical tradition has ceased, as I contemplate the Vast Depths of Unplumbed Knowledge on my bookshelves.
So, on this day, the one-year anniversary of Astonished Head, I wonder: what is it, exactly, that I'm doing here? I'm certainly not making any money. Not everyone can put out the call and make eighty thousand dollars, although, if you are so inclined, you can buy some books and CDs from Amazon over there to your left and generate a few bucks' worth of Amazon Gift Certificates for me. I'm not advancing my ideology, because I don't quite have one. I'm not advancing anyone else's, either. I haven't got a good gig with a syndicate to produce columns that I can rough out here on these pages.
What, exactly, am I doing here?
Short answer: I have no idea.
Which doesn't mean that I'm going to stop doing it. But I'm not terribly fond of pointless activity, so I should probably try to find some sort of motivation soon. Something engaging and interesting...because, if I'm bored, so are you.
Right?
Right.
And that, it would seem, is what I've got for you on Astonished Head's first birthday. Now, I must go see if the basement has more water in it, and if it does, I must vacuum it up with the Amazing Handy Shop-Vac, and then go dump the terrible murky muck out into the fast-melting snow.
February 24, 2003
I was working on a bit, see, but it got out of control and I had to beat it down with the spiked mallet. It's in pretty bad shape, coughing up blood and such...I'll see what I can do with it.
February 27, 2003
Excuse me for a moment while I choke on my coffee, flail about wildly, and fall over backwards in my desk chair.
February 28, 2003
By the way--if you're a somewhat new visitor and (like me) just crave stuff to read during the day, I encourage you to make use of either the monthly or the subject archives when I'm not pouring out fresh word-plumes. There's a year's worth of stuff there, and while it's not pure spun gold, some of it might prove to be diverting, at least.
Hoo-ha! A momentary break in the tedium, like the weird sliver of sun that bolted a beam of light through a hole the gray sky as I rode the ferry to the Island this morning.
A lot's been going on lately in the world outside of my cranium. An important policy statement on Iraq by the President, outlining for the first time the underlying "crack dat mofo wide open" strategy for the region.
A new design was chosen for the World Trade Center site. First reaction: Feh! Second reaction: Mmmm, OK...but only if the actual towers are built out of transparent lucite, so Superman can stay there when he's in town.
And other news, I'm sure. But: I am enjoying focusing on a) working on the house (Buckyness and dryer-smashing notwithstanding), and b) working out some philosophical issues in me 'ead, the results of which will show up on these pages forthwith. Well, not forthwith, but soon enough.
It really is amazing to me how constant focus on events out in the muck of the world can be so draining. I don't know how the hard-core pundit-types can stand it; it makes me sort of depressed and fearful and mentally run down. It must be a talent of some sort, like being able to pedal up Alpe D'Huez like a fiend because you have the VO2 max of a god. They've got a high VPundit max, and are able to utilize vast quantities of Punditene as the news of the world floods their brains.
Not so, me. I've discovered that if I focus too long and hard on such things, I eventually overreach, pull a brainstring or get a cramp in my ideation, and then I have to sit on the shoulder of the information highway massaging my cerebrum and feeling foolish. So I've learned to pace myself, a bit. The past couple of weeks have been an easy lope, with words about painting and kitchen applicance violence and such. I like that. It's restful, somehow.
If you're so inclined, please feel free to continue walking with me at an easy pace, with ample breaks for water and looking at amusing wildlife.
I'm sure things will get energetically weird again soon.
March 05, 2003
No particular inspiration today. Last night when I got home, though, I was feeling a little...transcendent. Another neurological spark that Paxil snuffed out with its wet chemical blanket.
Not that I actually did anything with my "transcendence," mind you. I managed to express a dinner preference: meat...loaf. That sort of knocked me off my pillar. Nothing like the prospect of a big lump of ground-up creature with some ketchup and green peas to remind you that you are also a creature, albeit with fewer condiments and side dishes.
March 06, 2003
 To understand evil, start with DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It's the building block of all life on this particular planet. Everything that you are physically, and a good deal of who you are as a personality, is determined by this molecule. DNA makes up genes, which make up chromosomes, and humans have 23 of those. DNA is a polymer, and it's made up of a repeating pattern of just four compounds, called nucleotides: Adenine, Guanine, Thymine, and Cytosine. Each nucelotide is in turn made up of varying arrangements of just three sorts of atoms: Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen. That's it. A particular arrangement of those four nucleotides contains every bit of information needed to make a bacterium, a clam, a tree, a gorilla, or a human being. Four compounds, arranged just so, mean that you got your father's nose and your mother's hips. Four compounds, arranged just so, determine the risk of disease, the propensity for certain behaviors, and the length of life. Four compounds, contained in genetic material exchanged between two people and then combined into a new arrangement, create a child--new life.
But that life wouldn't happen without another nifty property of this particular polymer: it can replicate itself. Hundreds of billions of times, with near perfect accuracy. It does this with the help of two other chemical compounds, called enzymes: a helicase, and two DNA polymerases. In today's world of cloned sheep, alien-human hybrids with bad teeth, and bio-tech company logos, the twisted-ladder "double helix" shape of the DNA molecule is familiar to us all. In actuality, the "twisted-ladder" is spiralled and coiled up in on itself, so picture the double-helix curled up into a kind of compact little wad, nestled within protective proteins called histones. In the middle of each rung of the curled-up ladder is a hydrogen bond, a weak electrical attraction that holds the molecules of the two sides together.
The weakness of that attraction is key: when DNA replicates, a helicase "unzips" the double helix, splitting it in two by breaking the hydrogen bond in the middle of each "rung" of the wadded-up twisted ladder. As this occurs, a DNA polymerase binds to one of the newly-unzipped half-strands and uses it as a template for re-creating the now-missing half of the double helix. Another DNA polymerase binds itself to the other half-strand and, with the help of yet another enzyme called DNA ligase, works to synthesize the missing half of the double helix and then stiches them together. When this molecular construction project is complete, there are two exact duplicates of the original DNA molecule, each composed of one new half-strand and one old half-strand.
It gets better. The average human chromosome contains 150 million nucleotide pairs, a nucleotide pair being, roughly, one "rung" of the ladder. If all of the unzipping and synthesizing and restitching had to start at one end of the double helix and proceed to the other, each replication would take a month. But it only takes an hour. Why? Because the unzipping and synthesizing and restitching can take place at many different places along the strand simultaneously. Different sections are taken apart, and come back together, all at the same time: molecules swimming around, atoms swapping electrons and realigning themselves, chaos! one would think. But no. The error rate is around ten to the negative tenth per base pair for each round of replication. That means that, each time a single nucleotide pair is replicated, it has around a one in 100 billion chance of replicating incorrectly. For reference, that's 4,000 times more unlikely than being killed by having an airplane fall on you.
The latest estimate is that this replication process has been going on here for somewhere around 3.85 billion years.
And that, my friends, is an amazing thing. For the moment, forget about seeking an explanation for this molecular dance. Don't be tempted to ascribe it to the powers of God or natural selection. Just contemplate the mere fact of it. The staggering elegance of 150 million nucleotides engaging in this near perfect pattern, the busy activity of the enzymes as they shuttle along the coiled double helix strands, working with machine-like precision as they dissassemble and reassemble infinitesimal structures at a rate of 50 base pairs a second. Call it elegant. Or even beautiful. But one thing that this process most certainly illustrates is creative order.
This process is at the fundamental base of all the created beauty you might care to appreciate. Bach's Trio Sonatas? DNA made them possible. The rose windows of the cathedral at Chartre? DNA girds every sparkling piece of glass. The elegant lines of well-written computer code? Impossible without the master molecular code of DNA. It drives every attempt to order the raw stuff of our world: sharpening a flint to stab at the heart of a bison; digging a ditch to bring water to our first crops; pressing mud and straw into brick molds baking in the noonday sun to form the walls of our towns; tearing iron ore from the depths of the earth and refining it into strong, lightweight beams that loft our gleaming towers toward the sky; transforming common silicon into circuitry pathways one one-thousandth the width of a human hair, to power our computers...all of this symmetry and beauty that we humans have wrought from the very stuff of the cosmos depends upon the sucessful and ordered completion of the molecular dance outlined above.
Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics aside, the tendency of the "stuff" on this planet and in the universe at large for the past twelve billion years or so has been an attempt to order itself, to achieve creative synthesis. Whenever we, as manipulators of the matter around us, creatively reshape the world, whenever we create that which is aesthetically pleasing because it suggests refinement and order to our senses, whenever we create new life, we are echoing that basic, fundamental tendency. When a flautist causes her breath to vibrate a column of air within a tube of refined metal as she plays the aria from Bach's Cantata number 208, she is participating in the very essence of creation. Likewise, when Bach dipped his quill made from the feather of a goose into an ink prepared from gum arabic, copperas, gall apples, and water, and then set the symbolic representations of each notes pitch and duration down upon parchment made from animal skin, he participated in that essence. When I hear those black blots transformed from static symbols into moving air, decoded from pits in a thin layer of aluminum by a tiny point of coherent laser light, I, too, am participating.
We are, each of us, surrounded by the essence of creation, which is creation, the continual ordering and reordering of the stuff of matter by human beings, who are in themselves made up of the most finely-ordered matter. Every building we raise, every object we make, every idea we refine and put down upon paper or preserve within the binary patterns of magnetic media...all of this is participation in creative order. Again: don't seek the soul, here, not just yet; instead, appreciate the mere fact of the human tendency to create, to order the world around us. Even our most destructive atomic endeavors spring from a desire to be able to organize the stuff of matter at its most elementary level. We are creatures who exist by virture of order on a monumental yet molecular scale, and this can be expressed by our behavioral tendencies. The more we resemble that cause of our very being, the more we approach a kind of harmony with our small world and with the cosmos at large.
Likewise, the less we resemble that cause, the more we approach disharmony. The more deliberately we seek destruction, the disordering and the unmaking of things, the ending of lives and the snuffing out of potential unfoldings, the farther away we are from the essence of creation. We then turn ourselves towards an unfathomable absence of being. We face the Ancient Kind, in an unknowable time before time, a place of no place, where there is no creation and no existence.
The farther away we are from the essential nature of creation, the closer we are to evil.
[First in a series.]
March 07, 2003
Taking a break today. Must paint molding, nail to wall, hop up and down. That sort of thing.
Hoo-boy! That sure quieted things down.
I suppose I should warn people before busting out the Big Big Thinking. Not that it's all my Big Thinking, mind you; a lot of it is courtesy of my good dead friend Plotinus.
By way of explanation: it seems to me that, despite certain right-thinking folks being all a-tizzied over Bush's flagrant use of the word "evil," and despite the attempt by certain sign-carrying right-thinking folks to turn the tables on Herr Bush by calling him evil--sort of an I'm-rubber-you're-glue thing--what's not happening is a serious consideration of what evil might be. Thus, you have people who can seriously compare Dubya to Hitler and think that it's a moral stance worthy of consideration.
At a superficial level, evil is a provocative word. It's so packed full of implication that its use in earnest provokes a reaction from the listener. Either you think that there might be something to this "evil" business, and you recognize that the speaker has taken some sort of moral stance, or you think that "evil" is for simple people who believe in a great white-bearded man in the sky and have not been paying enough attention to the development of Continental philosophy over the course of the past century and a half. For many of those who have not deliberately adopted the uber-sophistication of moral relativism--or absorbed it via osmosis while attending college--evil is somewhat like pornography: they can't quite describe it, but they know it when they see it.
I, for one, have difficulty taking anyone who claims that the Bush administration is composed of "evil" people seriously. I tend to suspect that people who point to the Bush-Cheney Axis of Oil as evidence for said evil lack a certain moral seriousness, and are unable to distinguish between greed or unethical fiscal behavior and true evil. In short, I find that such people need a good smack in the head and, when we start digging up mass graves in Iraq, they should be sent there in hip waders and rubber gloves with a shovel to help out.
That being said, I also believe that one of the reasons such muddle-headed thinking about evil is even possible is because of the insular nature of our comfortable, wealthy society. For certain people, this nature has not led to the development of the higher, more nuanced ethical standard that they seem to believe they hold: instead, it has lowered the bar of evil. Evil used to mean starting a war that killed 60 million people and spending a large portion of that war deliberately attempting to turn an entire ethnicity into soot. These days, "evil" means practicing realpolitik, indulging in the same economic perquisites as the rest of the ruling class, and being insufficiently attentive to the executions of 140 death row inmates while you're a state governor. Are these issues to be ignored? No. Do they reflect poorly upon a person's character? Most assuredly. Do they indicate that a person is evil? Absolutely not.
I've been thinking about this issue for a long time, starting long before Bush ever took the oath of office. I believe that the assignation of evil to the realm of the the religiously daft and the unsophisticated is itself daft and unsophisticated. It does not serve our culture well. It certainly hasn't served European culture well at all: the birthplaces of mechanized warfare and industrialized execution are now strongholds of a shameful amorality that will not recognize the existence of evil and will countenance no meaningful effort to stop it.
So: over the next few weeks, I will be producing material that attempts to arrive at some kind of consideration of evil: what it is, how it works, how to recognize it, what to do about it...most of all, how to treat evil, as a moral concept, with the seriousness that it deserves.
There. Now I'm going to go have some wine that I am mildy ashamed I bought.
[Although...I suppose calling an old dishwasher "evil" sort of dumps a pile of wet socks on the whole "seriousness" thing...ah, fuggit. Waiter! More shameful vino! --IW]
March 10, 2003
In addition to my ability imaginatively project myself into forests and snow fields, I'm trying to develop a similar, temporal ability. Not to project myself into the future--we all do that, every second of every hour of every day. No, I'm trying to reach back into the past. My past, specifically.
Music--like scent--is a powerful conjurer of memory. Some of the music that I listen to I've been listening to for a long time, and some of it dates from my freaky early twenties, when I was insane. Well, not insane insane, that's far too dramatic, but I was a little, shall we say, "touched" in a way not entirely in keeping with the long-standing tradition of youthful flakiness. I was a maniacal melancholic. There were more than a few instances of the deepe blacke depression, the sort of fathomless mood that resulted in bizarre behavior. Sitting naked wrapped in a thin blanket during parties, that sort of thing. For I was an artiste! Do not attempt to understand my madness, it is my muse! I would laugh at your conventionality, but I am too wrapped with despair...it goes well with this shirt, don't you think? That sort of thing.
In addition to the oh-what-an-old-soul-I've-got routine, I also enjoyed a wunnerful magickal Head. I'm not quite sure, now, what that entailed exactly, because my sense of it has has faded as I've gotten older. But the magickal Head had something to do with possibility...a boundless sense of what-may-be that, I have recently noticed, has faded as I enter my third decade. Although I've recently done a bunch of Very New Things (moving in with Peapartner, buying a house, et cetera), I feel very much in a rut. All of my focus has been inward...and I'm starting to run out of things to look at.
Then again, it could just be the last vestiges of my Wintermind, which I never seem to notice until shortly before Spring. The landscape of my home has been white, with bursts of muddy brown and gravelly black, since late December, and the tendency has been to stay indoors and keep quiet. Nevertheless, when snippets of the twenty-something Head flash through the thirty-something Head, I've taken to grabbing them, holding them up for close examination like a piece of multicolored gauze fluttering by in the wind. What is the Head doing, back there in time? What is it feeling? What makes that Head so different from this Head? And, most importantly: what do I like about that Head?
I've long since come to the conclusion that one of the reasons that the Amazing Converting Christ! experience works so well for some people is because they cannot escape the clawing tendrils of their past. Like Augustine, obsessed by the stolen pears of his youth, they are unable to escape the terrible weight of conscience, not just for sins committed now, but for all sins they may have ever committed. They are unable to cut their past selves some slack. So, when the man with the bulletproof hair, the shiny suit and the Big Big Book tells them with authority that Christ heals all wounds...well, for some folks that's a pretty good offer. And for some folks, it even works. For me, the experience is not so much one of sin and guilt as it is...well, embarrassment, for want of a better word. It took me a long time to tell myself: well, look, you were young, and foolish, and doing too many drugs, and so the fact that you couldn't be bothered to put clothes on for the party--or got far too drunk at those weddings...or shaved your head when you were out of your head on those nifty pills--doesn't really have much to do with who you are now. This is because, for a long time, the recollections of other people were to be feared: what construct of my past self do they carry with them? What must they think of me? Now, I don't care so much about that.
Unfortunately, one of the ways I've managed to not care so much about that is by greatly reducing the number of people around me. After all, this "embarrassment" is a social function, by and large, so the equation works: reducing social contact equals a reduction in the chances for observable regrettable antics. But that equation ignores some important variables. It's simple math when something a bit more sophisticated and nonlinear is called for.
So now, when the gauzy snippets of my past float by, I try not to let them drift away, but take hold of them and stare into them, as though they were scrying mirrors. I forgive myself for whatever foolishness they depict, and try to inhabit the Head of the past, peering around from within the emerging personality. Sometimes, if I'm in the right mental place in the present, I can feel a ghostly touch of my past self: the burgeoning thought, the mania, the unresolved issues. But beneath that all are some of the things I've left behind: wonder, openness, magic.
And sometimes...if I'm very, very, careful...if I'm honest...I can bring small caresses of those things, the good things, back to the now with me.
March 12, 2003
Well, I'm just a wrung out washcloth today, after it's been hung up on the bar and it's gotten all dry and stiff and whatnot, so when you take it down it keeps the shape of the bar and it's all gross. Yeah, that's me today.
So: read something really innaresting (and longish), if'n you haven't already: Lee Harris on "Our World-Historical Gamble." I think the TCS site is being overwhelmed with hits on this document, so be patient with the loading; it's worth it.
Just how much like a grungy dried-out washcloth am I today? This much: I visited a bunch of sites and saw March 12, 2003 on all the top entries. The news looked familiar. I visited four sites in quick succession: duh! I thought. Blogger must be screwed up again. Some kind of archive problem, no doubt.
But no.
Today is March 12. Has been, all day. But through some quirk of ephemeral neurochemistry, reading that date gave me the immediate sense that March 12 was months ago. That this was some other month entirely.
When I realized the trick my brain had played upon me--bad, naughty neurons!--I was pleased to experience a moment of vertigo as I wheeled back through time to the present, from whatever imaginary future I thought I inhabited.
Wheeee! Who needs drugs? Look, ma! No sense of temporal location!
March 14, 2003
 Hey, man--I'm going to Woodstock!
You know that "expensive, delicate" toy I've been playing with that's "a bitch to maintain, but peerless?" (see left). Well, it done busted. Again. So now I have to haul its expensive, peerless, broke-down carcass up to my tech-guy in Woodstock. Road trip!
I don't have groovy wireless capability, though...bummer, man. So like, light posting today, if you can dig that.
Whoa...have you ever looked at your website? I mean like, really looked at it?
March 15, 2003
And in the freaky spirit of this aimless Saturday, for those Heads who pay attention even on the weekends, which is just too hep, please enjoy:
Blunderbuss Halagalo And The Freaks
"Hey man, you listen to me," Blunderbuss called out from his precarious perch on the piano stool. "I ain't got no truck no how with all of your mystic voodoo bullshit. So shove off." He bobbled his thick and burly eyebrows at the mud-painted and shell-rattling Doctor Voodoo. The Doctor fell into abrupt silence, his bright white eyes staring disbelievingly from the black-painted sockets of his skull-faced makeup. The others in the cafe fell momentarily silent. "And furthermore man, I can tell you that you've got that reek of politically correct liberal horeshit nonsense around you like a cloud. Doctor." The last was added witheringly, and Blunderbuss' round face contorted into an expression of pure contempt. Doctor Voodoo's jaw dropped and his shoulders slumped. His hand fell uselessly to his side, and the bone rattle rattled feebly. He turned and slinked off, shells and beads clacking, while Blunderbuss ordered another espresso and dumped a shot of scotch into it from a bronze hip flask. He had stolen the flask from a tomb in Crete. It was empty now, so he threw it after Doctor Voodoo. It cracked on the back of his head and knocked him to the floor unconscious and bleeding. "Yeh, where's your mojo now?" Blunderbuss mocked. He cackled, and the cafe broke up, everybody laughing at the unfortunate Doctor. Blunderbuss snapped his fingers with pleasure at the whole scene. "Too hep," he bubbled delightedly.
"Blunder, Blunder man," called Stiffy Jones. "You're too outta sight. Knocked that Voodoo freak right on his head." Stiffy always sucked up to Blunderbuss because Stiffy was a bad poet with no future and a very limited wardrobe.
"With a Cretan flask!" Blunderbuss added with gusto. He patted his broad belly with satisfaction. "Can't think of a more proper use for such a thing. Hep! Hep!" he began to chant, rocking back and forth. "Hep man doctor voodoo clocked in the nappy head with ancient artifact of Western culture," he intoned, and the others in the cafe leaned close. Each small round table held a flickering candle in a colored glass globe, casting shifting patterns of fluid shadows and tinted light onto the close brick walls. "Hep man doctor voodoo laid out in tribal splendor on cafe floor," Blunderbuss closed his eyes as he rocked. "Hep man doctor voodoo needing a good civilized enema, hep man doctor voodoo, hep man doctor, hep man... hep... hep..." he trailed off, and the crowd in the cafe smattered with applause.
"Man, ya'll got no taste," Blunderbuss said modestly, his broad face split by a grin. At that point, his brain squirted a good dose of tryptamines into his neural pathways, and Blunderbuss spent some time dealing with the molten elves that began crawling out of the walls. When he came to, the cafe was dark and closed and he was alone, prone on the floor. The good Doctor Voodoo was nowhere to be found. "Drag, man" he muttered. He let himself out of the cafe and walked home.
When he got there and stumbled through the front door, Jesus was sitting in the living room watching Nightline and eating a bowl of Fritos with Catalina dressing. Ted Koppel was talking about the sudden rise in guava prices. "Christ, man, you gotta chill with the television," Blunderbuss advised from the front hallway.
"Yeah, well,"Jesus said. "Since Dad died I don't get all that omnipotent gossip of His, so I gotta use the TV."
"Well, just remember it's bad for your eyes," Blunderbuss cautioned, heading for the kitchen for a peanut-butter and pickle sandwich.
"You got it," Jesus said. His eyes were scratched and puffy-red, and one of them seeped a straw-colored fluid into his long, loosely curled beard.
Shiva had been in the kitchen; he could tell because the place was absolutely wrecked. Now that he had lost his job as Destroyer of Worlds, Shiva settled for wrecking Blunderbuss' house. "Goddamn wog god," Blunderbuss muttered, broken glass crunching under his feet as he surveyed the damage. He would have to call that Roman guy up the street and have him whip up a new kitchen. In the meantime-- snacking! Blunderbuss opened the refrigerator to see if the peanut butter and pickle jars had survived. He yelped when most of a goat corpse slid out onto the floor, squirting a small stream of purplish blood. "Dammit!" he yelled, and stomped back into the living room. "Did you have those prophet-of-Baal freaks over while I was out?" he demanded of Jesus, who hunched his shoulders with embarrassment.
"Uh, yeah," he admitted. "It was just one goat, though... I'm sorry. I hope it's not too bad."
"I don't mind the fucking goat, man," Blunderbuss railed, "but every time they come over they use my knives and dull them up hacking through bone and stuff! At least those Aztec putzes use their own damn knives."
"I'm sorry," Jesus said again, cringing into the Barcalounger. On the television, Bob Dole was demonstrating the proper use of a condom.
"Dole knows to press the air out of the tip before rolling it onto the shaft of the penis," he intoned lifelessly into the camera. Jesus' eyes were black and clotted pools, dripping ichor onto his spotless white robe.
"Hey man, don't you have a fucking white horse to ride somewhere? Hosts to lead, Apocalypses to foment?" Blunderbuss said sarcastically, and went back into the kitchen. He angrily kicked the slaughtered goat out of the way and peered into the refrigerator. The only thing in it was half a case of econo-size blocks of Velveeta. "Just like cheeseloaf only without the bubbles," Blunderbuss was fond of saying. He shrugged and wolfed down half a block, crouching before the refrigerator so that his belly hung over his belt like a verge of thick cream just as it crests the edge of the pitcher. "Ah," he said, and farted.
The phone rang. Blunderbuss ponderously got to his feet, his knees cracking unpleasantly, and waddled across the kitchen to answer it. "Yellow?" he said.
"Blunderbuss man, you gotta come, man!" It was Stiffy Jones. "Man, you won't believe it!"
"That is evident," Blunderbuss replied dryly. "I don't believe anything." There was a mouse scuttling among the shattered bottles and spilled milk, eggnog, and Jell-O. He squashed it flat with his Doc Martens.
"No man, I mean you really won't believe this!" Stiffy pressed. "I've got Vishnu in my bathroom, man!" Blunderbuss rolled his eyes.
"Oooo, ahhhh!" he said in mock wonderment. "A multi-armed blue deity on your crapper. Ooo, ahhh, I think I'm dying from excitement." There was silence on the line. "Oooo," Blunderbuss droned.
"Well man," Stiffy managed at last, trying to stiffen his voice with some sort of indignation. "I suppose like you've got a god at your house every day." Blunderbuss grinned, thinking of Jesus watching TV in his living room.
"You suppose like right," he said harshly. "Now fuck off!" He slammed the phone down, and it immediately rang again. He snatched it back up "What!" He shrieked into it.
"Mr. Halagalo?" came a stern and official-sounding voice. "Mr. Blunderbuss Halagalo?"
"Maybe," Blunderbuss returned warily. "Who's asking?"
"Agent Johnson of the Gnarly Offenders Office of the Bureau of Reality Control, badge number seven-oh-two-three-nine," the voice recited crisply.
Oh dear, Blunderbuss thought. This might be problematic. "Look Agent... uh..."
"Johnson." clipped the voice.
"Johnson," Blunderbuss continued. His piggy eyes darted about the kitchen for possible escape routes. "This really isn't a good time--"
"This is to advise you that you are being charged with violations of the Perceptual Code including but not limited to Section one-two-eight-nine subsection D articles 1-b and 36-a:2," Agent Johnson barked. "And also with failure to register the pagan sacrifice you've got in the refrigerator behind you." There was a rapid series of thuds on the roof, and Blunderpass gasped, clutching the phone to his great, soft pillow of a chest. Window glass shattered upstairs.
"But I didn't make that sacrifice!" he cried out to the empty kitchen. He heard booted feet thudding down the stairs, and he dropped the phone, heading for the sliding glass door that led out into the backyard. It exploded into millions of tiny glass fragments, and a trio of black-uniformed men in body armor and facemasks burst though. "It was the prophets of Baal, not me!" Blunderbuss squealed and backpedaled furiously, but tripped over the goat and fell backwards, full length, onto the kitchen floor. He felt broken glass dig into his fat flesh. "Jesus!" he yelled. "Jesus, help me!"
"No way dude," came the voice. "Pauly Shore is having his skin peeled off on Saturday Night Live." The black-suited figures hefted Blunderbuss' considerable bulk to a standing position, and bending his tallow-soft arms behind him slapped on the cuffs.
"Hey man-- I've got rights!"
"No way-- what you've got is a problem," said one of the figures, and whipped off its mask.
"Allah!" Blunderbuss cried in fear, recognizing the features. "Not again!" Allah produced a blackjack and clipped Blunderbuss just below the ear with it, and he dropped like a sack of meal.
---
"Well, Halagala, you are really a piece of work." Blunderbuss opened his eyes. The owner of the voice was Doctor Voodoo, still wearing his flaking painted skull-face and with quills in his earlobes, but dressed in a midnight Nazi SS uniform. The death's head on his cap glared balefully at Blunderbuss, and the twin lightning bolts glimmered. Blunderbuss was strapped onto a cold, metal table, inclined at a thirty degree angle. He was naked, and by straining his eyes downward he could see that his body was thin and emaciated. There was something staining his right forearm-- it was a number. He rolled his eyes around, taking in the bright sterile whiteness of the tiled chamber, the steel and chrome of the overhead lights, the table of sharp, evilly glinting surgical steel instruments on a small rolling tray next to him. Shells clattered, and he looked over to see Doctor Voodoo crouching in his uniform and waving a rattle at him. "You no got cause to fear the Voodoo now," he canted, "because you are truly in a world of hurt."
"Look man, I'll put them all back where I found them," Blunderbuss sputtered nonsensically, beginning to panic. His head was strapped down with a wide, sweat-soaked leather strap. Behind him, he heard a door open. He rolled his eyes in fear like a cow in the final narrow passageway leading to the knives of the abattoir. Doctor Voodoo tossed his smart Nazi cap aside, shaking out his dreadlocked hair filled with bright feathers, beads and shells. He began crouching and dancing around at the foot of the table, his boots thumping on the floor as he waved his rattle and wiggled mystic fingers at Blunderbuss.
"The subject is a twenty-nine year old Jewish male from the Swabian region," a voice dictated from behind him. "Approximately one hundred twenty pounds, five foot six inches in height, slightly undernourished but otherwise healthy." A nurse, dressed in pure white with a protective cloth mask covering her mouth and nose, began rattling the instruments on the tray. At least, Blunderbuss thought she was a nurse-- when her face came into his field of view, he saw that it was completely featureless flesh, smooth and blank above the white mask like an egg.
"Get back!" he screeched. "I'm a member of the Valhalla Frequent Flyer Club, and I won't stand for this!"
"Oh, your travel perks no help you now, Halagala," Doctor Voodoo intoned, and rattled his beads and shells for emphasis.
"I demand that you get this freak out of here!" Blunderbuss shouted.
"We will begin with the removal of the scalp, and then we will gain access into the cranial cavity itself," continued the nameless voice behind him.
"Get back!" Blunderbuss continued. "I must get my medication!"
The first slice into the top of his head was cold, so shocking it wasn't even pain. That came after they began to peel the skin away from his skull. After that, he wasn't aware of much except the sting of blood in his eyes, and the whirring, all-encompassing sound of the bone saw as it burred into his skull with a smell like burning hair.
It took hours. He finally blacked out when the nameless and faceless doctor removed just one more little-fingertip sized chunk of his brain. "Subject expires after six cubic centimeters of tissue are removed," was the last thing he heard. "Interesting."
 Today I've got that too-much-wine-and-martini rubber-liver-on-the-head sort of feeling coupled with an overindulgence-in-weapons-of-chocolate-destruction kind of slooooow grind going on in the noggin, all wrapped up in the vertiginous timelessness of waiting for that SPECIAL BULLETIN with Dubya sitting at his desk looking Very Concerned and saying Well, I've given the order, and as of this moment the brave men and women of our armed forces have commenced combat operations in Iraq and I really should just start painting the doors downstairs so's I can have at least one part of the house that's nearly-almost-completely finished and there's taxes to do as well which I'm behind on and the place is a mess with boxes everywhere and I've gotten waaaay too fat this winter and I'm reading the same blogs over and over and over again and I really need to branch out and I think. That's. It.
March 18, 2003
Hmm. Probably little or no soup today, many apologies. I'd offer you a random link, an amusée, if you will, but I'm just too busy. Even Google is boring today.
March 19, 2003
OK...tap-tap...is this thing on? Can I have a little more in the monitors, please? Thanks...testing one-two-buckle-my-friggin' head...
March 22, 2003
I've had a weird, pulsing headache for a couple of days. Sort of like caffeine withdrawal.
Today, I discovered that I've been grinding Pea's satin-finished dark French Roast espresso decaf instead of my own genetically-engineered Satan's Heart roast, grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of Guatemalan insane asylum. So it was caffeine withdrawal.
That's like discovering you've been mistaking talcum powder for your China White, which explains the sweating, the puking and the convulsions.
March 24, 2003
 Right now, pretty much everything stresses me out. Pea's making us a Peazza, and I'm going to sit in front of the TV and eat it and watch multiple episodes of Stargate SG-1 and pretend that nothing is happening, anywhere, to anyone, for any reason.
March 25, 2003
Still taking a break. A hiatus of sorts, while I plot my next move. I'm pleased with how my troops are doing, and I've stocked up on locally-produced vino. The Head, it waits...and it thinks...it is on fire with the thinking...and the laughing and the falling over backwards, mustn't forget that...the information soup is unusually thick and chunky lately...and the screaming Idea-Petris are full to the bursting brim with memes...thick and pustulant, they are...in need of lancing...to deflate them, let the poison out...that's why Moore is so fat, you know...he's a Typhoid Michael of ideological pestilence...one big bubo, with an Oscar...have another biscuit, do...and this leg of mutton...mmm...mutton...but no...must wait...and think...mmm...
March 28, 2003
WE'RE SORRY
The Head you are trying to reach has lost consciousness.
Please try again later!
March 30, 2003
 It's raining softly on Peapod's roof today, and from my office window I can see the shorn and muddy bank where the creek has, finally, receded. For many days, the water table was at the level of our basement slab, and the little 9" by 9" not-quite-a-proper-sump hole filled with still water. A little utility pump, plugged into a basement light fixture so that it pumped whenever we turned on the lights, bravely sucked up the sump water and spat it out into the backyard through a length of cheap yellow hose. Whereupon the not-quite-a-proper-sump hole filled up again, and the cycle repeated. Yesterday the sump finally emptied, and stayed that way. I suppose this is what it means to live in a valley.
Modern anti-depressants must be true lifesavers for some. Now that I've stopped my own pharmaceutical regimen, I can appreciate what they can and can't do. First: they can't make you happy. Happiness is, I think, an additive quality, and by that I mean it comes from activity, and fulfillment of a personal, inner nature. If you sit on the couch and watch TV eighteen hours a day and drink beer and get fat and take anti-depressants, you won't be happy.
The positive action of anti-depressants, however, will keep you from killing yourself one day because you have realized that all you've done for fifteen years is sit on the couch and watch TV eighteen hours a day and drink beer and get fat. That positive action, I have discovered, is the muting of obsession and anxiety. The fat couch-sitter who suddenly contemplates the black hole of a wasted life can only do so if he retains a kind of conscience, which can instruct and admonish by preserving a set of standards for successful living. These standards are enforced by a wide range of internal psychological mechanisms, which include the aforementioned anxiety, but also guilt, fear, shame, and so forth.
Contrary to modern self-help dogma, anxiety, guilt, fear and shame do have their place in life. Sometimes they are signals from the deep soul, intended as motivation of sorts, an admonishment, or a corrective. These days, however, such signals are regarded as blasphemous by the cultic priests of self-esteem. Because You Are OK Just The Way You Are, these emotions and sensations have become a symptom of psychological ill health, and in keeping with our Western view of illness in general, we now have a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to quashing these symptoms in the most convenient manner possible. Thus, while you cannot truly achieve happiness sitting on the couch drinking beer and basking in the phosphorous glow of the television, you can avoid the creeping anxiety that comes from doing so...just by taking this little pill.
That's a generalization, of course...there are, no doubt, some people who aren't bothered by such inactivity, experience no anxiety as a result of it, and need no medicating beyond what they get from six- and twelve- packs or their equivalent. But I'm not one of those people.
Which is not to say that I don't have my own equivalent of couch-sitting and beer-swilling passivity...or that I haven't, in fact, spent a good deal of time doing exactly that. Unfortunately, such inactivity bothers me, and this, for a long time, provided the motivation for a great deal of self-medication. I have an excellent physiology for that sort of thing: every drug I've ever taken has done exactly what it was supposed to do. Good old dependable neurochemistry, trained from a very early Dexedrine-popping age to respond enthusiastically to whatever extra-fun chemicals are tossed into the soup.
Despite my blather about brain chemistry, I remain not entirely unconvinced of the reality of the human soul. For me this doesn't necessitate an eternal hierarchy of gods, angels, or places to put all of our souls between their uses here on earth. Of the soul, Aristotle said
. . . [it] does not exist without a body and yet is not itself a kind of body. For it is not a body, but something which belongs to a body, and for this reason exists in a body, and in a body of such-and-such a kind...
For him a soul is a causal agent, the capacity by which living things engage in the activities that are characteristic of living things. Furthermore, Aristotle's "soul" is intimately connected with potential and actuality. As analogies, consider the following: a child who does not speak English is an example of "first potentiality;" a silent adult who speaks English is an example of "second potentiality/first actuality;" and an adult speaking or actively understanding English is an example of "second actuality."
Aristotle defines a soul as
...the first actuality of a natural body that is potentially alive.
In other words, a soul is the capacity of a living thing to engage in the activities that are characteristic of its particular kind of living thing. Aristotle--being the sort of person who was keen on organization--further outlines three types of soul functions: growth and nutrition, (which includes reproduction); locomotion and perception; and intellect (or thought).
This, in turn, gives us three corresponding degrees of soul: the nutritive soul (plants); the sensitive soul (all animals); and the rational soul (human beings).
These degrees of soul are all nested, so that each higher level of soul contains the ones below it. Thus, a plant's soul fulfills its function by enabling the growth and reproduction of the plant; the animal's soul by this and physical motion from place to place and the perception of its surroundings; the human soul by all these things and engaging in all of those activities which are the product of the uniquely human capabilities of intellect and thought.
Elsewhere, Aristotle defines the ideal of happiness as
...a bringing of the soul to the act according to the habit of the best and most perfect virtue, that is, the virtue of the speculative intellect, borne out by easy surroundings and enduring to the length of days.
In other words, he felt that happiness was best achieved by pure, uninterrupted use of the unique faculties of humanity, that is, reason, or intellect. Which is very nice if you're Aristotle, who could afford to sit around all day thinking about things. Most humans, however, don't have that luxury, and for them Aristotle prescribes living in accordance with "the moral virtues" as a route to a less perfect but still acceptable sort of happiness. There is also the matter of having sufficient external prosperity--such as health, good birth, satisfactory children, food, shelter, and freedom from suffering--which is also very conducive to happiness.
All of that, along with the "moral virtues" (of which there are many, all very cleverly organized by The Philosopher), is beside my particular point, which is simply this: just as Aristotle felt that the human soul was the potential motivating force that leads to actual fulfillment, so, too, do I believe that thwarted potential has the capacity to produce actual misery in the individual.
What anti-depressants do, I believe, is short-circuit the mechanism by which the soul "tells" us that its potential activities are being thwarted. The problem is that our modern culture has very little room for this kind of self-communication, because our definitions of happiness have come to be based upon the things that Aristotle posited as mere prerequisites for happiness. Health, good birth, satisfactory children, food, shelter, and freedom from suffering may be necessary for happiness, but are not happiness itself. Therefore, when well-off, successful people are depressed, we posit a condition of ill-health called "depression," and treat the symptoms of soul communication--anxiety, guilt, shame--as symptoms of an illness. Instead of listening to the soul, we chemically gag it.
My generalized anxiety is almost entirely due to the persistent, undeniable feeling that my potential is not being actualized. My fear also comes from this knowledge, and shame follows close on its heels, in the form of a sense of failure, the feeling that I should be able to actualize myself more fully, and that I spend too much time wasting time that could be better spent.
This has been true for my entire life. And while I won't go so far as to suggest that every person suffering from "depression" suffers for the same reasons as I do, I suspect that large numbers of the diagnosed do. We have reached a level of technology unprecedented in human history. Until now, when society was sufficiently intolerable, society changed. A group of human souls can only be thwarted for so long before something gives, and that something has always been the constricting social structures or traditions that were impeding its natural activities.
No longer. Now we have the capacity to remove the unpleasant symptoms of a thwarted soul, to mute the internal clamor of oppression that expresses itself as obsession and anxiety. We have the capacity to allow people to tolerate the intolerable simply by taking a pill. Therefore: society forces its change upon the individual, instead of the other way around. We have soul-medications for all stages of life: stimulants for "hyperactive" children, so that they conform to the school system; anti-depressants for those of every other age group, allowing them to conform more fully to the demands of the workweek, information overload, and the other stresses that are now characteristic of modern life.
Obviously, I don't think that this is a good thing at all. The peculiar intersection of secularity, high technology, and capitalism has produced a new mechanism for dealing with the dissatisfactions of the soul by suppression, rather than motivated introspection. I fear that it will prove to be a poor substitute.
It's still raining...a slow, steady, light downpour that's somewhere between mist and real droplets, so that it almosts floats to the ground, gently soaking the leaves that got buried under snow in December before I could rake them. Soon leaf mold will sprout with humid enthusiasm, which is just fabulous for me and the overactive histamine factory on my face that I call a nose. I'm going to go into the basement now, and see if I need to plug the little utility pump back in. I must keep the water outside, where it belongs.
April 01, 2003
*sniff*
*sniffsniff*
Hmmm...I smell a site redesign. Must...wrangle...content.
Coming soon.
There will be some mucking about with categories and archives and such for the next few days, so don't fret. If it's broke, it will be fixed soon.
April 02, 2003
You know, I've written 572 entries over the past 13 months. Assuming a paltry average of 200 words per entry (could be more, could be less, who knows?), that's a little over 100,000 words.
Hell, that's a novel!
I've realized that this site has gotten me into the habit of writing nearly every day. The natural conclusion to draw is: if I can do that, why not make one of my half-dozen unfinished mansucripts the focus of my shiny new habit?
So that's what I've been doing this week, using my new toy (that would be the Jornada mentioned over there on the left). Train ride in and train ride out, I pop open the lid of the Very Small Machine and type away. That's at least an hour and a half of writing each day. That's a good thing. Me like.
But it does mean that my energy for other writing--namely, this--is being redirected a bit. I think I may only have a set amount of it. We'll see, who knows, who can tell? Not me.
So that's a roundabout way of saying that things may be a bit light here for awhile. Or not. But if they are and you're dreadfully bored, there's 571 other entries hiding out in the Monthly Archives section just waiting for you.
April 04, 2003
 A peculiar bubble: no news, the television is blank and silent. No linkage and furious words, I have not visited the infoscape today. No newspapers, magazines, or radio. No nothing! I...am...safe as houses in my house. Cold and damp out. Pea is across the hall in her office, wrestlings with freelance issues. I'm here in mine, cutting the crap out of an eight-year-old prototype novel. Bob the Cat is downstairs, being fat and having a good cat's life.
Gosh! I am reasonably content. I mean, except for the lack of several published novels and a Hugo Award.
Whodda thunk it?
And now: back to the grind...cut, rewrite, write anew, break for coffee, and so on. Onward and upwards!
April 07, 2003
I am trying to immerse myself in creation. Despite the sound of the phrase, that is not a Helpful Hint from Mr. Bova (see far left, and down a bit), it's me being fed up with wanting to have written, but not doing any actual writing. So I've been focusing. Getting down with the craft: picking names that don't sound like soap-opera characters, hacking out the crap, killing the poodles. Researching the backgroundish bits: nanotechnology, neurochemistry, quantum computing, Romantic poets and Gothic cathedrals.
The little Puter (see left again, a bit lower) helps immensely. I snagged a 256 MB Compact Flash card for it off of eBay, so now it carries the manuscript plus the research.
Back in 1989, my first computer was a GRiDCase 1520. It had a blazing 80286 processor that ran at around 12MHz. It had 2 megabytes of RAM, a 20 megabyte hard drive, and a speedy-quick 2400 baud modem. My particular model featured a 4-color CGA gas plasma display, which was a very cool orange. The computer was sheathed in a black magnesium case, and it weighed twelve pounds. Its gas plasma display actually grew too hot to touch at times. The display had a dimmer switch: dimming it meant that you might get 15 minutes of battery life. With the screen in full-on egg-frying mode, battery life was five to ten minutes. Or, you could shell out $300 and get an eight-pound extended battery that gave you 50 minutes' worth of juice...maybe. I knew where the wall outlets were in every classroom I sat in.
The GRiD was built like a tank. You could knock it off your desk while it was running--like I did--and it wouldn't notice. Inside, it had a little g-shock meter, so the techs could tell if it had been subjected to more than eight gs' worth of impact force. It was such a fab-looking piece of hardware that it was used in the movie Aliens--the computer that the android, Ash, used to remote pilot the drop ship down to save Ripley and the Marines was a 1520. They also used 1520s to control the automatic perimeter guns...when you see the orange readouts counting down the ammo as the guns shatter screeching aliens into molecular acid goo, that's my machine. The perimeter gun peripherals, it turned out, were only available in Europe, so I made do with a groovy little Diconix 150, a portable, battery-powered dot-matrix printer made by Kodak. It was ingenius: the batteries went into a little hatch in the platten, which spun around them as the paper tractor-fed through the printer.
New, the GRiD cost around $3500. Today, I've got a computer that weighs 10 pounds less and runs at 15 times the speed, with more than ten times the storage capacity in a RAM cartridge the size of a matchbook. It also has well over ten times the battery life, plus a modem that is 24 times faster and a full-color screen. In 1998, this device cost less than two-thirds the price of the GRiD. Now that it's obsolete, I picked one up for one tenth the price of the GRiD.
Charitable fool that I am, I gave my GRiD and the little printer that went with it to my then-girlfriend's journalist roommate when I left Mexico. I've regretted it ever since, but at the time--when I had an urgent need to flee the situation immediately--lugging 15 pounds of hardware back to the States, in addition to my newer Packard Bell craptop, wasn't appealing. The craptop died a month after I got back, which was not entirely unexpected: I was in the appliance section of a Mexico City supermarket (they sell everything in suopermarkets down there), and I saw a stove with the exact same Packard Bell logo on it. Apparently, the company is one of those multi-armed international corporate monstrosities that makes everything they possibly can, including baby food and nuclear weapons.
Ysterday, while unpacking one of the ever-multiplying supply of unpacked boxes from September's move to Peapod, I came across two more bits of old technology, each dating from 1981: the Tomytronic Tron and the Coleco Galaxian tabletop arcade games. This was what kids whose parents wouldn't give them Colecovision did for fun when they couldn't hang out with their friends whose parents did give them Colecovision. I had forgotten about these little brightly-colored gameboxes.
I popped in some C-cells, and the tinny, monophonic beeping noises threw me back 22 years, when I used to play these games long into the night under my bedsheets, the beeps and blats muffled with a pillow. Both games use a multicolored LED display, and of the two, Tron is the most impressive. It's based on the movie, of course, and manages to present light cycles, discs, and that bit of the movie where Bruce Boxleitner has to bust up the Master Control Program. This is all done using the same LED technology that's used in digital clocks, only instead of number sections, the illuminated bits are tiny parts of light cycles, flying discs, little Trons and Sarks. The designers had a 1.5" by 2" space to work in, so each illuminated bit serves multiple purposes: the curved tops of the light cycles are also the zipping discs, and the little wheels and chassis also form the barriers that trail out behind the cycles as they zip around. It's all very clever, and it still works. The bright-blue of the LED display is perfect for a game about bright-blue heroes inside of a computer.
Galaxian uses the same LED technology to create both the original Galaxian arcade game and its progenitor, Space Invaders (which you can play, right now, here). But bright-blue isn't a Galaxian color, so they put red and yellow lenses over sections of the game screen.
Today, I can climb into a 60-ton mech and blow stuff up in 6.1 Dolby surround sound.
But it's not really the same. Twenty years from now, 30-year olds who use fully immersive holographic video displays will find a dusty box of video games, all stored on the old CD-ROM format and, if they're lucky, they'll have packratted a clunky 2-gigahertz machine away somewhere. They'll play a few rounds of flat-screen nostalgia, remembering how it provided a break from the war that summer, and how cool it was.
And twenty years from now, hopefully, I'll find the little Jornada 820 tucked away in a drawer somewhere, and remember how I wrote my first novel on it.
That won't happen unless I get back to it, but the snow (friggin' snow!) has put me into a bit of a winter mood, so I'll probably just waste more time, looking at online bits of my technological childhood, and finding out which parts of it are still available on eBay.
April 09, 2003
Man, I've got the big blue wobblies today.
I think it's the result of carbohydrate overindulgence. See, my ancestors lived on the heath and painted themselves blue, or somewhere in the Rhein valley, or just off the big bendy bit in the Thames, over by that pile of rocks. They ate moss and the occasional deer, and didn't have refined wheat products or white sugar or beer (well, maybe beer, but it was flat and warm and yeasty and gross). Then like civilization happened. Now my genes think that I'm having a Really Good Season and they're storing up the big big fat so that I don't have to eat my young when winter comes. But I've got a house and lots of vitamins and a cat that's plump like a Christmas goose but won't get eaten if I can possibly avoid it, so all this genetic machinery is just doing me wrong, see?
When I crash-landed at my mother's house after fleeing Mexico City, I noticed one day as I hiked up the street to hop on the bus to get to work at the copy shop that I was highly susceptible to the Sugar Blues. I put two and two together: stuffing the face with TastyHostKakes results in loooowww spirits for the next couple of days. So I stopped it with the face-stuffing TastyHostKakeness and took up theater, which worked well for a time. Now I'm older and a bit less dramatic, and while there's not much of the face-stuffing TastyHostKakeness going on--except for the odd bucket of ice cream covered with miniature pies--there is an awful lot of carbo loading, which consists of pancakes and syrup and oval fried-potato things and tortillas and pasta and the occasional spoonful of apricot jam. I think I'm discovering that it's not the Sugar Blues with which I am afflicted, but the Carbo Crappiness, which means a loooowww spirit for the next couple of days following the ingestion of too many carbolicious substances.
This morning I oooozed out of bed and didn't even wake up during the Pea-ride to the train station, and once on the train I cracked open the Jornada but couldn't put myself in the midst of the fantastic sparkly cathedral rave chapter. Yesterday: 1200 words. Today: nada-zip-bupkus.
So, as an experiment, I'm going to eat nothing but moss and deer for the next few days, and see what happens.
If that fails, I'm going to hit the boards again, I swear to god. Look for me in this summer's production of I Was A Fat Modern Man Who Couldn't Dance.
April 10, 2003
Deb--one of the first people, if not the first person, to link to A-Head--had her baby on Saturday: Bradley Vincent, 9lb 11 oz, 10 fingers and 10 somewhat-squished-but-fixable toes. Congratulations to mum and dad and siblings!
April 16, 2003
Man, I've had it. I should just admit it. People freak me out. All kinds of people, but especially smart people who use their powers to berate and abuse and belittle. The Web is stuffed with these sorts of people, and they come in all colors of the political spectrum. You know them, you've come across them time and again: the arguers. The sarcastic flippant commentators. The ideologues of all stripes, committed with a junkie's strength to the meme-load they're carrying around in their own particular skulls. I recognize them instantly, because I used to be one...quite recently, in fact. A perusal of this site's archives will turn up more than a few instances of The Head Holding Forth, with mockery and derision.
It's like crack, that method. Even though I've sworn off it, it still tempts: some yahoo somewhere will spout off about something, and I've just got to write a comment, can't let that one alone, no sir! Must... demonstrate... cleverness!
But what's the point? The Web is full of clever people being clever. I recall the two sorts of people I encountered while studying Philosophy. One sort wants to discover whether they can find truth by studying the methods that others have used to find truth. The other sort wants to learn how to argue so that they can be publicly clever or, failing that, can demonstrate how everyone else does not know how to argue and is not clever. In my experience, the latter sort were the loudest in class. They pursued the most irrelevant lines of questioning, which always seemed to demonstrate what the questioner knew--or thought that he knew--rather than leading anywhere new or revealing anything different.
Language is a funny thing. It tends to define, to a great degree, the ways in which we view the world, and in my experience, the less we think about what we believe, the more this is true. Paradoxically, well-considered language can also act as an epistemological salve, giving us the illusion of knowledge and truth when what we've really got is a bunch of nicely structured words and phrases. An intelligent person expert in the use of words can simply roll over another intelligent person with a more imposing argument, by virtue of the sheer volume and intricacy of the word-facade that he builds. In Plato's day, such people were called sophists. You can often recognize them online by the sheer volume of their production: there are so many if-therefores, embedded within such a profusion of ideas and claims and refutations, that there is simply nowhere for a dirty-footed pug-nosed peripatetic to interrupt and say, "Forgive me, but I do not understand...let us begin with this term, here. What do you mean by it?"
Back when I was laboring under the impression that going to Harvard Divinity School might resolve my insecurities about my own intelligence, I attended an open house there. I was surrounded by smart prospective Harvard Divinity School students. We talked about smart things. I remember one fellow, who was a keen admirer a philosopher whose name escapes me at the moment. A small group of us was talking about God, and the perspectives of various theologies, and this fellow said to me, "You should read so-and-so, and I'll watch you shake in your boots." What position does he hold, I wanted to know. "Oh, he can argue about anything."
"Interesting," I replied. "But it seems to me that so-and-so may lack a certain conviction, don't you think?" He didn't have any response that I can recall, but our brief exchange has stayed with me. It was so-and-so's facility with language that impressed this smart, prospective student of Harvard Divinity School. Not so-and-so's grasp of something resembling the truth, or even the resonance of so-and-so's original ideas within the prospective student's own ideology. Sheer argumentative ability was the admired quality here, and it was so impressive that the mere name of this philosopher was regarded as cause to cower.
That's not intelligence...that's a cudgel.
Facility with language is quite often an ability with an outward focus, particularly online. The written electronic word is usually directed at someone, or at an idea, or at an ideology. Although newsgroups and comment forums and the like present the facade of interaction, what happens there is a pale imitation of serious dialogue. Face-to-face conversation stops and starts, permits the interlocuter to interrupt, and allows for pauses in the argument to question assumptions and request the definitions of terms. Generally, this doesn't happen as easily on the Web. Regarding this difference between the written and the spoken word, Plato reports that Socrates had this to say:
I cannot help feeling [...] that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.
Socrates, of course, was speaking about the static words of books and manuscripts. It is quite true that modern electronic text is more interactive than a book of speeches. But consider: when you are in an online forum, and the local intelligent troll posts three dense paragraphs of argumentation explaining why he is correct and you are a fool, where do you begin? With his first premise? With the definitions of his key terms? There is in fact nowhere to begin: he has finished his argument without any interaction with you whatsoever. You've just been subjected to a speech, not a dialogue. Unlike the written words of Plato's day, modern text can be "protected and defended" by its author...misimpressions can be corrected, clarifications can be appended. But the very nature of the medium lends itself to the use of intelligence as a cudgel with which to defeat others, rather than a tool to use in co-operation with others to get at the truth of a thing. Furthermore, the illusion of interactivity gives modern sophists the mistaken idea that they are masters of dialectic, rather than of speechwriting.
Unfortunately for all of us, this is not a phenomenon that is restricted to the peculiar cultural bubble of online communities. Although as human animals we have become creatures of language, before that we were visual creatures. Just as a particular phrase becomes shorthand for an entire way of thinking, in modern times a photograph can become an entire argument, and is regarded as sufficient refutation. But an image isn't an argument. It does not constitute dialogue, nor does it reveal the truth of a thing. Like paintings, all of our modern media have the attitude of life, but preserve a solemn silence. Such imagery can only be the beginning of sincere dialogue. It can never be a conversation, and as such, can never reveal the truth.
Of genuine dialogue and the committed, truly interactive pursuit of truth, Socrates said:
...far nobler is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness.
The key words here are congenial soul. When confronted--online or in meatspace--by the raving rhetorician, building his impressive edifice of argument and imagery, I have started to ask myself some questions before I give in to temptation and respond in clever fashion. What sort of words is this person planting? What crop do I hope to reap? Does this person want to discover the truth with me, or is this person more interested in demonstrating my foolishness?
The answers to these questions help me determine whether this person's words are truly "intelligent word[s] graven in the soul of the learner," or whether they are mere cudgels, soulless images of knowledge. From that determination, I can decide how best to use my own time and energy. And it does take time and energy: to read carefully, to craft a response, to try to arrive at some sort of conclusion that makes sense. What point is there in making all of this investment, only to discover after several exchanges that your supposed partner in this venture really isn't interested in your words, really doesn't care about approaching any truth, and only wants to buttress ideas which he already believes to be true by using the rubble made from your own honest efforts? It's just not worth it.
Unfortunately, knowing all of this does not stop people from freaking me out. All of those minds out there, peering out at me from within their enclosing brainpans...none of them, really, possessing any greater apprehension of the real than I, but all of them so convinced, so passionate, so willing to pummel and crow and strut. Absolutely maddening!
If everyone would just agree with me, there'd be no problem.
May 15, 2003
"From the midst of that radiance, the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding, will come."
--Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead)
I...have been indulging myself in rest, and fetishized solipsism. This is an extension of my thoughts of nearly a month ago. It is much more comfortable and--all around--more pleasant within the confines of my own skull. This flies in the networked face of what passes for human interaction in the Information Age, which is all about linking, increasing the complexity of the 'sphere, achieving some sort of tipping-point where all the pages and sites and 'blogs collapse into fabulous higher order and we've all evolved somehow. All very Aquarian Conspiracy, really, and right now the notion seems to me to be worth about the same as a used copy of that book. Fifty cents!
Which is not to say that I've settled upon the Big Knowing, or finalized my own personal take on How It Is, or told the outside world to sod off while I set about acquiring a good couch, some tapestries, a hookah and some poppy by-product to smoke.
But Lord, I've come to see that there is no substitute for a good and sensible Head, and in a massive fit of misanthropy I have concluded that there are far too many bad and insensible Heads out there, each one seeking out others to share in its nasty insensibility. Oh, I've got them spotted! Nasty, bad, wicked Heads, so attached to Knowing, all wrapped up in their Big Big Truth, but unaware that their furious clinging is akin to a drowning man's slipping grasp on a fragile rope, and that once loose of it they will plunge down into fathomless, lightless depths.
A little knowledge is a terrible thing. A lot of Knowledge is a neurotic redoubt erected against eternity.
It's taken me...oh, 31 years to realize this, and it puts me in the precarious position of claiming knowledge, or at the very least of having a belief worthy of acting upon, and this is exactly the same sort of thing that all of the other bad insensible wicked Heads are doing. That's a problem, and--contrary to what seems to be popular practice--the obsessive production of clever words strung together in some semblance of logical order will not resolve it. I would rather cut to the chase and leap about the room shouting I'm right! I'm right! I'm right! and baring my teeth at passers-by.
People tend to believe in the things that most reinforce a positive self-image. Thus, if the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Axis of Oil is the tripartite embodiment of all that is petroleum-based and evil, then the constant decrying of that Axis and all of its nefarious schemes makes one, by corollary, righteous. Similarly, if the Clinton/Clinton/Gore triumvirate of Lewdness, Feminism and Earthy-Crunchy-College-Boy Amoralism is the fount of all devilry, then by standing in opposition to it one becomes pure. It's a simple equation that becomes algorithmically more complex as one leaves the realm of politics and enters the houses of theology, ethics, and sexuality. The fundamental principle, however, remains the same. Rare indeed is the creature that chooses to deliberately cause itself pure injury or pain, and this is as true of the human creature and its thinking activities as it is of a rat in an electrified cage.
Of course, what we believe is good for us and what is actually good for us are not necessarily the same things. This is where we, as a species, part company with Mr. Rat. Our language abilities are uniquely suited to the task of psychologically resolving conflicts between "believe" and "actually." You may, for example, believe that opposing the continued attempts of Jews and Negroes to rule America and pollute the white race is a character-building enterprise, but whether that effort is actually good for you is, I think, open to question. There are similar issues surrounding modern sybaritic excess and flaccid "spiritual" indulgence, neither of which is thought to be harmful by the people who engage in it. It is via internal dialogue--that is, through language--that we convince ourselves of the rightness of our thinking and our actions.
People who only hang about with other like-minded people rarely have occasion to fully develop the sort of pithy justifications often required by those who would disagree with them. This is called orthodoxy, and it is on raging display in any group of humans you care to point out. Nevertheless, even in the absence of external heretical challenge, people still must create their own justifications for their behaviors and beliefs, if only to provide sufficient motivation for behaving and believing. This explains why a rat will eventually stop going into the corner of the cage with the electrified floor to get the tasty food pellet, while a human will--say--continue to visit bath houses every weekend and the STD clinic once a month. The rat can't convince itself that the tasty food pellet is worth the pain. The human can.
Similarly, there are idea-sets that are painful to maintain, because the ideas conflict with each other, the external environment, or with subconscious perception. This is what is meant by the term "cognitive dissonance." This dissonance is psychologically unpleasant, like an electrified cage floor. The assumption here is that the bundle of ideation which makes up a given person's thinking is capable of achieving a certain harmony, and tends towards order. Ideas that are in conflict induce various neuroses and complexes, which can be resolved by eliminating the dissonance.
There are many ways to reduce dissonance. One way is to seek out, as best you can, the "actuality" of a belief about yourself or the external environment, and to change your thinking if you discover that it's in conflict with that actuality. This works very well for some things, and not so well for others. Empirical beliefs about your environment, for example, are easily checked. Fluffier beliefs about your personality, or your metaphysical nature, are not so easily checked.
Another way to reduce unpleasant dissonance is via the mechanism of social padding, whereby the process of individually approaching "actuality" is replaced by a process of seeking consensus. This has the advantage of working well for nearly everything. Whether you're a Jew-hating cross-burning Aryan knight, a leather-wearing big-mustached fister of men, a sincere Christian, or a committed atheist, you can find a group of like-minded folks who will surround you with comfortable affirmation and lessen the impact of whatever disharmony your particular ideation-package might be causing. In our Information Age, this is becoming easier and easier. If you believe in cold fusion and UFOs, there are people who will assure you that you're right, in return for a little reassurance from you. If you believe that Bill Clinton personally shot Vince Foster in the eyeball, there's a newsgroup for you. Countless websites await those who believe that Dick Cheney will pocket eighty million dollars in cash from our recent Iraqi adventures. And so forth.
The Big Funny is that no matter which method you use to achieve cognitive consonance, there remains a fundamental epistemological uncertainty that can never be harmonized. Far beneath the petty assertions of human politics and religious constructs yawns the ceaseless chasm of death, the great unknowable into which the most well-constructed, impregnable fortresses of faith and logic will inevitably crumble.
Now: this is the part where I sail off into the flaky frontiers of personal, inexplicable experience. Once, in the midst of focused contemplation of what death might be like, while trying to imagine my own non-existence, I encountered an uncanny, thunderous absence. It was like a billion Gyuto monks in full-throated chant, and it was utterly silent. No drugs were involved, oddly enough. But while drifting in that strange state I "glimpsed" the overwhelming noise. Over the next few years I occasionally "sensed" it again, but never with any clarity...it was as though I was separated from all those monks by a thin, double-glazed window of soundproof glass. Sometimes it felt like an explosion, just about to occur.
Years later I encountered the passage from the Bardo Thodol quoted above. The Bardo Thodol dates from the 8th century, and purports to be a guide to the visions encountered during and just after death. It is intended to be read aloud to the dying. This supposedly calms the fears of the recently deceased, so that they will not be drawn into further bodily incarnation and can thus achieve enlightenment. The description of "the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding" is found in the second part of the book, the Chonyid Bardo, which is supposed to describe the states that a newly-disembodied awareness will encounter immediately after death. When I read those words, I remembered the silent thunder I had encountered. It seemed a peculiarly apt description.
Think of it this way: our five senses are attuned to the small space of this particular planet, this precise atmospheric mix, these certain wavelengths of light. But we don't see the ultraviolet petals that the honeybee sees, or hear songs as the blue whale hears them. Imagine, for a moment, that you could perceive all that there is to perceive. You would experience the cacophony of the entire electromagnetic spectrum far beyond the tiny sliver of infrared through ultraviolet light, encompassing radio emissions, X-rays and gamma radiation. You would hear the roar of molecular collisions, the shout of sunlight impacting the earth, the whisper of neutrinos passing through matter. If you could perceive all that there is to perceive, without the organic, limiting filters of flesh, what would it be like?
A thousand thunders, perhaps...the ceaseless, terrifying, overwhelming crush of all that is.
My experience is my own, and there are plenty of people I could seek out for a little social padding. But this doesn't seem like the sort of thing that needs to be fixed in place with the illusion of certainty. The Tibetan interpretation of my experience requires many things...the existence of souls, the wheel of reincarnation, and so on. But the experience itself...ah, now that is evocative. I attach these eighth-century words to it because they resonate, both with the experience itself and with my sense of it.
In my younger, psychedelic days I hung out with people who believed all sorts of things--that a guy named Harold could teach them how to approach God, that they were personally in real-time mental communication with alien beings from the Pleiades, that hyperventilating could send you back in time to resolve your birth traumas. All of these people were very focused on community. They had to be: how else to quiet the raging dissonance in their heads?
For my own part, I have come to realize a third way: eliminating dissonance by loosely holding onto personal experience, and not attributing to it a certainty that it does not possess. Did I really hear the thousand thunders of true Reality? Maybe, maybe not. But when I read the foamings of those who are Certain, of those who Know...I smile.
Not because I know more than they do...but because I'm beginning to realize that I know nothing of importance.
May 16, 2003
OK, I've just returned from Matrix: Reloaded. No spoilers, but I must say the following.
One. DJ Paul Okenfold sucks ass. Wait, who's he? you ask. You will know him by his mind-numbing, intrusively bad film score, which attempts to be analog retro and ends up spawning thoughts like: I'd really like to enjoy this massively chaotic freeway-chase/fight/big explosion scene but I can't because that FUCKING DRUM MACHINE IS DESTROYING MY BRAIN.
Two. Watch for the part in the multi-monitored climactic scene where the Wachowski brothers compare Bush to Hitler (Bush briefly shows up on the right side of the video wall, shortly after Adolph and his flag-carrying minions show up on the left side). Ooo. So daring. Ahh.
Look, spare me, OK, Andy? Larry! Pay attention! Stick to CGI fight scenes, cut down on the pseudophilosophical bullshit speeches made by characters with bad French accents, and realize that--as science fiction goes--this whole premise is tired, tired, tired. Sort of like Sheryl Crowe's music, or Tim Robbins' acting.
So basically, Wachowskis, all you've got going for you is your looks. And I've played Serious Sam (both encounters), so fifty CGI Agent Smiths pouring into a courtyard doesn't impress me. Don't think that putting a copy of Simulacra and Simulations in a movie makes you deep; it doesn't. As my freshman poetry teacher once told me, don't out-clever yourselves.
That is all.
May 21, 2003
Ever get the feeling that life is a vast arid wasteland populated only by small, leathery, water-hoarding lizards that live under hot rocks and are just waiting for night to fall so that they can pounce on you and suck all your precious bodily fluids out through their hollow, needle-sharp teeth?
No?
Oh, well never mind then.
In other news, it is raining and gray, and the view from the 42nd floor of the Multinational Corporate Monstrosity Building is of a few shorter, nearby buildings against a blank screen of oqaque gray nothingness. But I know that this is just because they're overhauling the Matrix image processors for my sector this morning, so they've got to cut down on my view distance until they're back up.
Meanwhile, I'm sucking down the Terrible Flavia (and no, my office isn't the same, but I liked it the way it was, you European purveyors of evil mechanized pseudojava), trying vainly to get a caffeine buzz on so that I can rustle up even the vaguest semblance of motivation. I got nothin'. I'm tapped out. Fagged and fashed, as it were. Bedways is rightways, but it's barely lunchtime and I've spent all morning slaving over a hot laminating machine and working the infernal paper guillotine.
I am, essentially, doing the same sorts of things that I was doing eight years ago, only now I make six times as much for doing them. That's a good thing, although I have not yet expressed the frugality gene supposedly inherited from my mother, so I'm not sitting on the piles of cash that I should be. That's not such a good thing, but I'm working on it.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Confronted with the Amazing Expanding Waistline (courtesy of Paxil! Your fattening antidote to the Intolerable Futility of Modern Life! When you have the vague sense that your soul is dying, Paxil is there! Also available in grape and cherry flavor.), and the hairline heading ever-northwards (age, it seems, is a process of expansion and retreat), I feel the urge to do. To produce, to make, to create. This urge then runs headlong into the hard neuro-psychological wall of depression and falls unconscious to the ground. D'oh! Stupid personality.
All of which is a rather long, roundabout way of saying that I've really got nothing to say today, but that my fingers needed some limbering up, so I typed some stuff.
Have a nice day, buh-bye!
May 22, 2003
Wow! Deb--who's been reading this site pretty much since I've been writing it--has generated a graphic for Astonished Head's link on her site.
Now, that's just swell, in an geeky, 'nethead kind of way. Nobody's ever done that for A-Head before.
No mere text link for me from Deb, no sir! I've got a graphic. And an appropriate image, to boot. Too cool.
Go and visit and have a look at the paws on her newest, who is having his feet remade by Science.
Top Three Deviant Googlers Who Have Left This Site in Disappointment and Shame
(with appropriately-placed asterixes to prevent the further attraction of like-minded creatures)
1. "perverted daughter an*l frenzy"
2. "brown bunny gallo bl*wjob"
3. "T*m Brokaw shirtless"
You know who you are.
And, for future reference, this is strictly a Peter "Steaming Canuck" Jennings website.
May 27, 2003
I hate it here. This morning's ferry ride was a waterborne slouch towards a sunken pit of human folly, appropriately punctuated by a blast of stinking diesel smoke from the ferry's engines as we arrived at the Manhattan dock. Last night I had a desperate dream about needing to have some surgery re-done: there were unpleasant adhesions and so forth deep in my guts. I ran through the town, going up and down Main Street looking for the surgeon who had done the work. But the surgeon--who was Tony Shaloub, for some reason--had converted his practice into a cafe with dainty white wrought-iron tables set out on the sidewalk. He couldn't open me up again because his surgical theater now contained well-lit cases full of confections and various coffee shop-like pastries
I don't know how the situation resolved itself, but I woke up feeling like death awaited me in the city and I was stupidly doing everything in my power to go and meet it. First by car, then by train, then by boat I made my way towards it. On the water approaching the still oddly truncated skyline, the weight of monkey folly--all monkey folly, not just the folly of idiot mass murdering Koran-thumping apes in planes--settled on me. Every person I saw was another monkey on his or her way to do monkey business and, most likely, annoy me somehow in the process.
Then I got to my desk and had some coffee, and the feeling abated somewhat...but only somewhat. My attacks of misanthropy are getting worse.
Fortunately, I am not inclined to spend more than a few days at a time in my Unabomber-style shack. But this trend is disturbing. The last time I felt like this with any regularity I ended up naked under a blanket on the sofa, the house madman, fun for parties. Don't get too close; he might spit poetry on you.
June 03, 2003
"The city, she eats too much, and shits too much, and can't get up out of the pool of offal that surrounds her."
--Phil Shallot
Too true, especially today. The day began with the shuttling of my corpus from one enclosure to the other: from a car stuck behind other cars frightened of hills and curvy roads, into a stuffy train, sitting too close to a fat snoring man, and then onto the upper decks of a ferry, covered with a haze of sweat-stinking engine smoke. At either end of my river view, both bridges--the George Washington and the Verazano--were mostly obscured by a high wall of brown-yellow haze. The river beneath the ferry hull seemed a particularly lifeless shade of Hudson green. It teemed with wildlife, a mere two centuries ago, and now algae won't even grow on its muddied industrial shores. It's a toxic soup of long-named trace chemicals and asphalt runoff, traversed by unregulated ferries that belch black exhaust directly into its waters, and churn it up for good measure with their propellers. Just to make sure that the carbon monoxide in the smoke gets properly mixed in, so that the oxygen leaches out. Mmm...sterile!
So, I started off the day with an acute, in-the-nose sense of the environmental impact of a city of eight million plus. My nose being the font of misery that it is--think pollen!--once upon the dread island I was subjected to yet another marvelous assortment of city odors...dog urine and donut shops, auto exhaust and construction equipment effluvia. Such is my hyperolfactory curse that even the donut-scents were revolting...oily butter vapor and bleached sugar notes suspended in miasma of burnt coffee and whatever it is they use to clean their floors, all mixing together and wafting out of the open doors with the force of projectile vomit.
Have I mentioned that I'm not a fan of the city?
And, once at my desk, a numbing onslaught of paralytic, panic-attack laden, this-job-is-sucking-my-life-from-me tedium. The last time I was this out of my mind at my workplace I ended up curled into a little ball on the floor of the handicapped stall, and it was twenty minuted before I could even think of leaving the bathroom without my head threatening to crack open. It's ths sort of sensation, I think, that leads less functional people into moments of eye-twitching shotgun loading.
Functional people, though, take John Holland's Self-Directed Search, in a blindly grasping search for career change information. Non-functional people without immediate access to firearms can also take Mr. Holland's test, but I seriously doubt that paying $8.95 to determine their three-letter RIASEC summary code will do any more than postpone the bleeding and the screaming and the dying.
I, myself, am an ARI. I went to school with an Ari, actually. He was kind of a prick. But I am not a prick! No, ARI means that my interests are mostly a combination of Artistic, Realistic and Investigative tendencies. In the six-tendencied world of Robert Reardon, PhD. (who created Mr. Holland's test), I've got artistic skills, I enjoy creating original work, and I have a good imagination.
Gosh. Ya think?
To a lesser extent (six points lesser, actually), I have mechanical and athletic abilities, and I like to work outdoors and with tools and machines. Now, I can fix and build many things, it's true. Sometimes I fix and build things outside, if they're really big or there's a danger of fire, explosion, or fission. But my tremendous gut makes a liar out of you, Doctor Reardon! Bastard.
To an even lesser extent, I have math and science abilities, and I like to work alone and solve problems. A much lesser extent, apparently. My math SAT score was a third of my verbal. Or maybe it was a fifth. At any rate: I do like the bit about working alone.
The "described as" listings for each of my tendencies are mostly bunk...except for the Artistic (A): complicated, disorderly, emotional, expressive, idealistic, imaginative, impractical, impulsive, independent, introspective, inutitive, nonconforming, open, and original. Nicely done, Doctor Reardon. That about sums me up, especially the bits about being complicated, disorderly, and emotional.
The test selected 11 suitable occupations from the 12,000 listed in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Given my ARIish tendencies, my top jobs are: Model Maker, Costumer, or Modeler (Brick and Tile).
Uh-huh.
And down at the bottom of the list, the two least-suitable jobs that still involve my A-ness, R-ness, and I-ness: Surgeon. And: Veterinarian, Poultry.
Now, while Pea is often over in her office sewing Elisabethan corsets for herself, I have never made an article of clothing, and the last thing I sewed together was a leather pouch I made at Boy Scout camp to hold my D&D dice, which doesn't really count, because that was all awl-punching and thick stringy-lanyard slinging and involved the skins of dead things. "Costumer," it seems, is right out.
And, uh, I've made models of things. They came in boxes, and I put them together with glue, and hung them on my bedroom ceiling until they fell off and broke. Then I moved out of my mom's house.
So. Perhaps I can model brick and tile, however that works.
What do you think?
Oh no, that terra-cotta lapel has simply got to go, and the glaze is just appalling.
Fine. Can I sit down now? This jacket weighs a ton.
Perhaps not.
Should I take the evil, goateed mirror-image IRA job, reversing the point-order of my tendencies, and become Ian Wood: Chicken Doctor? Dramatic, late-night runs out to the farm? Thank God you're here, doc! Betty's egg's all sidewise!
Um...no.
In between these extremes there are vaguely interesting things like Architect, Landscape Architect, Concrete Sculptor, and Biologist. Every single one of them requires at least a technical degree, and a minimum of 1-2 years of specialized training to be any good at the task.
I'm not particularly inclined to cough up the dough to attend the Harvard School of Concrete Sculpting and Brick Modeling, though, ignoring for a moment that that program is just impossible to get into these days.
Maybe I can become a Purveyor Of Online Tests That Desperate Unfulfilled People Will Shell Out Nine Dollars For.
Sigh.
This is going to get worse before it gets better.
June 04, 2003
I watch TNN, but only because they've got lots of Star Trek: TNG on, which is good for watching or for background noise when you're doing something else. The news that they've been positioning themselves as The First Network For Men didn't concern me, because ST:TNG is the only thing I watch on TNN. I'd watch CSI re-runs, but their Mondays at 11:05PM timeslot is rather stupidly inconvenient for those of us with, you know, jobs. I must not be the sort of man that the First Network For Men caters to.
Or, as they want to be called, Spike TV. You know: spikes, men. Spiky masculinity. Manly pokey things. Get it?
Spike Lee doesn't, apparently. He's suing Viacom because he believes that the public "associates Spike with Lee."
Actually, Shelton, I associate "Spike" with excellently-cheekboned vampires. I associate you with mediocrity, ego-centrism, and chip-on-the-shoulder racism.
Shelton is armed with affidavits from Ed Norton (who has "almost forgotten what it's like" to be proud of his government), Ossie Davis (who? Oh, right--the voice of "Yar" in Disney's Dinosaur!) and Bill Bradley (didn't he play basketball for the Senators?), all of whom thought that he had somehow become affiliated with TNN.
Gosh, if Ed, Ossie and Bill were fooled...the public must surely be wallowing in confusion! TNN is clearly trying to lure in the countless legions of progressive Spike Lee fans, who will no doubt be even further confused by the fact that the only black characters routinely shown on the network are Warrick in CSI, Tubbs in Miami Vice, and Mr. T. (Worf doesn't count. He's a Klingon.)
Parent company Viacom has been "directed by the judge to explain why it should not be barred from using the name." Apparently the fact that Shelton is a dingbat has-been director wasn't sufficient.
I, for one, am appalled that Shelton thinks that he has the moral right to tell other people what to do. To say that Viacom has to fall in line is you-know-what. I hope more people will rise up.
June 06, 2003
I can confirm, without the slightest hesitation or reservation, that Dr. Neal Barnard is absolutely correct. I've been addicted to cheese all my life. It's true...even when I concluded that it was partially responsible for massive, mucous-in-the-braincase allergy attacks, I'd still eat it right off the big econo-block.
Dr. Barnard maintains that cheese contains minute traces of morphine produced in cows' livers, which accounts for its addictive nature. I don't know about the science, there, but it would certainly explain that time I woke up on the bathroom floor with a leather belt around my bicep and a syringe full of Cheez-Whiz stuck in my arm...
June 07, 2003
And now...
P R E S E N T I N G
Astonished Head's
FIRST ADVERTISEMENT
(600 KB, Flash Player required)
[This is, by the way, an ad for Astonished Head, not an ad for something I want you to buy so I can get a cut and kick back on my fat, juicy profits.]
June 16, 2003
I've...got mystification! I've got big bolshy clumps of puzzlement rolicking around in my noggin' It'sa not even' amazement it'sa sheer and utter befuddlement-a!
I'm talkin' skull-crackin', bone-breakin' monkey-violence! Great big heaps o' human brains-n'-guts in a big pile! Whole lotta killin' goin' on!
But it's all in a good cause! You betcha!
Just relax.
Man I am so sick of the all-fired fumigatin' supremacy assigned to the Great Big Gorilla Brain. Ever'body pretendin' we gots the Big Big Knowing, when all we gots is the big opposable thumb and the clever ways of makin' our enemies explode.
I...am in an epistemological void! Trust no one. Know nothing! It's safer that way.
This has been Incoherent Rage Minute.
Join me next week when I'll splutter about the zinc industry, pennies, and Lee Iacocca.
That's it. The nation is officially going to hell in a handbasket.
Or, at least, the New York State Supreme Court is.
Then again:
"State Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub ordered Lee to post a $500,000 bond to cover Viacom's losses in case the company wins."
It's possible that Judge Tolub knows that Viacom will win and wants to stick Shelton for a half million.
That would be acceptable...except that Shelton needs to lose a half million and then be beaten with a rubber truncheon by Ted Danson.
The judge wrote,
"In the age of mass communication, a celebrity can in fact establish a vested right in the use of only their first name or a surname."
Really.
Guess that puts the big kabosh my plans to change this site to Keanukeifferbaldwin.com. Damn.
Bill.com? Nope...Shatner would come down on me like a hammer.
Arthur.com! Who's famous and named Arthur? Carney's dead...wait, isn't there a goofy animated hydrocephalic hamster named Arthur?
Feh. Feh, I say!
An exact summation of why I blew out of the halls of academe, never to return: I don't dance. I said those words to the College President, then turned with a steely glare and marched out of his office.
Or maybe that was Harrison Ford.
At any rate, The reader responses to the post are illuminating, as well. There's just something iredeemably fake about the whole enterprise, and the more accounts I read from people within the institutions, the better I feel about derailing my academic career before it was too late.
Of course, maybe I could have stayed and been one of the young mavericks...bucking the system...reaching them, dammit! Standing on my desk! Making a difference.
Nah. I've always had a problem with jumping through hoops. I never would've survived intact.
June 18, 2003
Returning now, for a moment, to my epistemological void.
This site has become a blank page...the same sort of blank page that I confront when trying to write a story. A tractless open space...desert-dry, just waiting to suck whatever moisture it can from my brain.
But, lately, I haven't had much in the old wet head. I seem to have lost whatever quality allowed me to extensively comment on that about which I knew nothing...hmm. I think that sentence really needed a preposition dangled off its end.
Never mind that! People have paid good nickels to see you dance...so dance! Bang! Bangbang!
Actually, no one's paid me anything, my little Lunatic Inhead Voice, so I think you need to shut up.
Dance!
Sigh. Such is is the state of my neuronal soup. But ignoring the voices for a moment: there is indeed a shift of attitude, here, a certain word-malaise, if you would, a lazy, fat, furry, tuna-filled-cat-in-the-patch-of-sun-on-the-couch kind of reluctance to do...well, anything.
Witness: those buttons over there to the left. Still constructing, I am! It's been, what, a month? Six weeks?
Clearly, you must be beaten.
Shut up!
My point is that I've lost a bit of the spark, I think...but, then, that may be attributable to my recent bout of anxieto-neuroticalism. (That's a technical psychological term for loopy-depressive-batshitness). It happens from time to time, particularly in males who were tranked up as small children and/or keelhauled as pubescent eager wanna-be pirates.
Or did I dream that?
Never mind!
The aforementioned epistemological void plays into this, a bit...sometimes, the knowledge that I don't really know anything wrecks a bit of havoc in the old noggin. Live without a net! Or any completely verifiable metaphysical ideas grounded in sensory perception or experience! Watch out! If he makes it, it'll be a record! If he doesn't, he'll tumble into the first row and make you spill your popcorn!
Oh, please...stop pretending you're the Smartest Monkey and start acting like all the other primates, would you? Christ on a crutch.
I believe I suggested that you shut up.
You did.
So do it.
Perhaps it's a reaction to all of the There Are Things Worth Sending Troops And Tax Dollars To Die And Be Spent For fervor of a couple of months back. Not saying that that isn't so, of course...but I seem to have developed this problem with conviction. Not quite radical skepticism...that's the sort of sophomoric philosophical masturbation that results in getting a beer bottle smashed into your forehead after you drunkenly exclaim, "Yeah, but does it like really exist?"
I think it's an extention of my April 16 freakout. I just can't get over all these folks with their convictions and their principles, from Oh What Tremendous Insight I Lack O'Reilly to Orrin "Kill 'Em All And Let RIAA Sort 'Em Out" Hatch, to the myriad tiny stars in the blogging Bowl of Night, all out-clevering each other with the cleverness of their clever cleverness...
Wow. That's a keeper. I think it's time to have another glass of wine. Don't you?
Yes. And shut up.
Excuse me for a minute.
Anyway. I may have to rethink how this whole HTML-driven circus is organized...simply throwing all of the high-fashion essays in among the mindless blather like this is not satisfying my ego. Things should be so arranged so that those who want blather can get it, and those innarested in, you know, like deeper things can get that.
We're full service, here.
Shut up!
So...maybe I'll do something about that someday soon.
Or not.
Will you--!
Hell with it.
Goodnight, Gracie.
June 19, 2003
This afternoon, as part of a long, peculiar ritual, I disassembled my bicycle. Hauled it up onto the deck out back and just took it all apart: wheels off, cranks off, derailleurs and seatpost and brakes, off. All grotty cables and cable housings snipped and removed. This is the Raleigh M50 that I commuted to work with when I lived in New York, and it's the bike I was riding on September 11. I ground dust and ashes into its drivetrain as I rode through the darkened silence and away from the devastation. It's always been my City Bike, tricked out with aftermarket parts that, together, are worth more than I paid for the entire bike (I'm particularly fond of the Thudbuster and my Hal-built wheels from Bicycle Habitat on Lafayette Street). I carefully wrapped the frame with electrical tape the week I brought it home, which protected it from repeated encounters with locks and bike racks, and wiping out on the icy Queensboro Bridge in winter. This afternoon I peeled that tape off, along with accumulated grime and the various bike-power stickers I'd added to it over the past three years. Electrical tape, for those of you who don't know of its marvelous qualities, won't leave any residue behind if it's stuck to a smooth surface. So the black finish with the blue fade at the ends of the frame is almost as new as the day I bought it, which was the point. I wanted to protect my ride from the damage that New York wanted to inflict on it.
I disassembled it, and started the long process of cleaning it. This is the sort of cleaning that you do with an old toothbrush and alot of degreaser. The bike has been in the basement which, as it turns it, is damp enough to be unkind to it. Spiders nested in its spokes and red rust bloomed on anything that wasn't aluminum, like the water bottle cage bolts and, unfortunately, the chain. The chain is now soaking in a coffee can full of gasoline in the shed. It's nickel-plated, and will recover. The brakes need to be degunked and de-corroded. The derailleurs have been scrubbed and degreased; hopefully they'll work as well as they did before I took them apart (always a concern). Tomorrow I'll head over to Barry's Bikes for a new set of brake and shifter cables plus some cable housing. The rear cassette needs to be scrubbed, and the front shock lubed and filled with a load of new grease. When it's all cleaned and reassembled, there will be a four-week period while the cables stretch and I adjust the brakes and the shifting a hundred times each. Then, it'll be perfect. Smooth and bouncy and quick.
At which point, I'll probably start riding my Gordon instead.
One of the reasons I came to loathe the city--in addition to the exploding and the dying--was that it beat the love of riding out of me. Just wore me down, and down, until I couldn't face the eight-mile trek from Queens to Wall Street anymore. I would rather take the subway than deal with the jackasses in cars, the mindless pedestrians, the exhaust, the dirt. There was a time when I loved nothing more than hauling ass up the long incline of the east side of the Queensboro, then swooping down the steep west side, topping out at thirty MPH or so. Dodging traffic was fun, for awhile. And, of course, on the day that the buildings came down, my bike got me out of the area and into the arms of my Pea in short order. But after that, being out in the city, and so intimate with its asphalt and its gravel, its puddles and its citizens, eventually became too much. I just wanted to move from enclosed space to enclosed space, to spend as little time experiencing that place as possible.
So I quit riding, and looked longingly from the car at the shoulders of the roads in Orange County, which were so ripe for riding, for slipping and swooping along hills and through farmland. Then we moved here...and the bikes--all three of them--gathered dust, cobwebs and rust in the basement. Even from 70 miles away the city seemed to poison my ride. I couldn't get on the saddle again.
And I got fat! The twenty-five pounds shed as sweat onto the streets of New York returned, and they brought friends. There had been days when I could taste the fat in my sweat as my body burned it and turned it into forward motion...a faint, clean, buttery note. My brain--so in need of the endorphins produced by the ride--fattened up as well, becoming slow and thick and depressed.
Now, summer is a few days away. The county roads still beckon.
The ride needs the machine. So I've started the process of reclaiming the ride by reclaiming the machine, uncovering the taped-up City Bike, peeling off its ragged vinyl armor, scrubbing the urban grime from it, rebuilding it. It doesn't matter whether this is the bike that I will ride, here, along the roads of my new home. There's something about the process of maintenance, of care and assembly, that is meeting a need that I wasn't quite aware of. There's always that ritual, the care of the machine...but this is different. This is a cleansing. I'm taking back what was taken from me by the accumlated weight of a million tons of skyscraper hitting the streets combined with the endless noise and rat-maze intensity of a place that I don't live in anymore.
The ride is mine. It's mine.
June 23, 2003
It's multimedia time again!
Presented for your entertainment:
A new product from
H U G E
P H A R M A C E U T I C A L S
INC.
(899 KB, Flash Player required)
June 25, 2003
Bom-bom-bom-b'BOM-bom...bom-bom-bom-b'BOM-bom...bom-bom-bom-b'BOM-bom...
EeeeEEEEEEEEE---eeeeeeee-oooooo-oooo-ooooo....eeeeee, ooo-ooo-ooo...
I'm singin'!
It would probably help if there was, you know, sound to go with that, but life is full of disappointments, innit?
In News Of The Unimportant: Spike Jones, Jr., son of bandleader Spike "Yes, We Have No Bananas" Jones, is frightened by Shelton Lee's attempt to claim total ownership of all things Spike for all time, and has filed papers with the court expressing his concern. Joss Whedon, creator of yet another Spike, should get in on this. In the meantime: I saw last night that "SpikeTV" is now TNN: The Network for Men.
Doesn't have quite the same poke.
Moving on: soon, we will no longer be subjected to short, bald, and oily-voiced Jason Alexander encouraging us to try KFC's reasonably priced bucket-o'-bird-bits because of its joossy flavuh. PETA told him KFC maltreats its chickens. Surprised that a company that traffics in chicken corpses would do such a thing, Alexander encouraged KFC to put them up in avian Motel 6's instead of vast chicken Auschwitzes, and provide them all with cabbage-on-a-string. KFC fired him.
At long last, the lingering vestiges of the Show About Nothing That I Never Watched will be gone.
My joy is indescribable.
Actually, it's probably akin to the joy one feels when one gets through the entire day without being hit on the head by an onion.
Passing by the wall on the South side of Ground Zero, I've noticed a marginal increase in the amount of magic-markered naïveté:
DON'T FIGHT TERROR WITH TERROR
Damn. I guess we shouldn't have covered those three thousand Iraqi office workers with jet fuel and set them on fire.
TRY PEACE - TRY LOVE - TRY UNDERSTANDING
Will you love me or understand why I am peacefully knocking this building over onto you? I knew you would, because you have a firm grasp of the human condition.
In related news, there was a bit in the NYT about the bathtub--the seven-story remains of the retaining wall that surrounds what used to be the World Trade Center. There's talk of making it an integral part of Daniel Libeskind's winning design for whatever it is they're going to build there next...perhaps even putting a whole section of it under glass, like the preserved wall of some Egyptian tomb.
I, myself, would seriously consider topping it with a row of spikes. It could be our national city gates, topped with the heads of our enemies, carefully encased in acrylic to prevent rottage and flyblown-ness. Would serve 'em right, it would. You could buy small replica heads in little lucite blocks from the street vendors for ten bucks a pop, or two for fifteen. Collect 'em all! We could bring folks up from Guantanamo, and every Tuesday afternoon we could have public executions atop the wall. Yeah! And--hang on...
[whisperwhisperwhisper]
We don't?
[whisper whisper]
Really.
[whisper]
Are you sure about that?
[whisperwhisperwhisperwhisperwhisper]
Huh.
I have been informed by my aide that we don't do that sort of thing here.
That's a shame...the miniature lucite-encased head concession would've been a sweet, sweet plum.
July 03, 2003
Yikes. 1,882 hits yesterday--mostly from the Netherlands. It's so very odd...I mean, why there? I wish I could read Dutch. Then I could decipher comments like, "Wat een bullshit, geweldig!"
Ahh, the holiday. I've got a five-day stretch of at-homeness ahead, which will involve Margaritas and so forth. Sweeet.
The Fourth is not a tradition for me, not really. I went to see the Macy's Fireworks exactly once while I lived in the city, and swore that I would never again be packed into a sweltering mass of humanity on highway offramps watching explosions. I've kept to that vow. However, the roof of my apartment building in Queens did offer a fair-to-middling view of the show, in that out-of-sync flash..............boom kind of way.
Now, I've got a new-to-me house with a deck and some plastic deck furniture. I don't even know if there are fireworks in my new town. I've got a friend coming in from the city and some other friends stopping by from North Jersey and we'll sort it all out as necessary. There may or may not be a grill; we don't own one yet. It's all new. All good!
July 10, 2003
Back in 1995 I spent the summer in Princeton, acting in Much Ado About Nothing and The Real Inspector Hound. It was a dastardly hot summer that year, topping out at 102. I was sharing a third floor room at the theater company house with my girlfriend of the time, and all of the whirring fans we had running just made us cook faster and dry out, like beef jerky.
So the cast spent a lot of time outside, or in the theater, which had air-conditioning. A popular spot was the plaza out in front of the International Studies building on the Princeton University campus, because it had a great big honkin' fountain in front of it, long and rectangular with a bit of tangled modern sculpture in the middle, over and through which water splashed and burbled. Most of the fountain was about two feet deep, and illuminated, so that it glowed blue and inviting in the stifling evenings.
One night, as a group of us sat along the marble benches along one side, I saw a fellow in a business suit approach the far edge of the fountain. He carefully stepped in, one leather-shoed foot at a time. He sat on the edge of the fountain for a moment, his dark pants swirling in the water, and then lowered himself the rest of the way in, up to his neck, stretching his legs out. His tie floated atop the water, pointing straight out from his chin, undulating like a very flat, striped sea snake. I nudged whoever was next to me and pointed him out, just to confirm that I was, in fact, seeing what I was seeing.
I decided that I simply had to know why this fellow had just dunked his business-suited self into the fountain. I got up from the bench and walked over to him, but by the time I got around to his side of the fountain he had already emerged soaking from the water, and headed rapidly off into the shadows of the modern-columned facade of the International Relations building, leaving a trail of sopping shoe prints. I decided against pursuit, reasoning--quite logically, I felt--that there was every possibility that he was insane. Besides, it was too hot for a chase.
Later that same night, an acquaintance from my old Boy Scout troop showed up on the plaza; I hadn't seen him in years. He was tripping on acid. So when he saw me from across the plaza, he shouted "Ian! Holy shit!" and ran in great circles around me going "Whooooa!" I told this wide-pupiled fellow the story of the Fountain Businessman. He couldn't figure it out, either.
That evening has always stayed with me. I was freshly returned from Mexico, I was onstage, in a houseful of loopy actors I hardly knew, and I was 100 pounds thinner, to boot (it's amazing what amoebic dysentery will do for your waistline). It was a good time, a good time to be me. I should figure out a way to arrange the thirty-something equivalent of that summer in my life, now...
For Nostalgia Corner, I'm Ian Wood...thanks for watching.
Brought to you by a grant from:
Allen's House of Figs
and
Viewers Like You
July 19, 2003
Kazoo
Can you kazoo?
Kazoo? Can do!
I kazoo with the best of kazooers
Kazoo with flappers and chewers
of cocoa leaves...
No, wait, that's all wrong. Wait a tit...
Kazoo
Can you Kazoo?
Kazoo? Me do!
Kazoo with floozies and jews...
Cut!
Ever have one of those days where nothing goes right? The sort of day where you start your car in the morning only to discover that some thug nitwit has mistaken your auto for that of the mob boss up the street, and--noticing the grinding engine and the oddly blinking digital dashboard clock--you get out just before it explodes in a cotton-ball puff of gasoline-dynamite flame and blackened Detroit steel? The sort of day where you brush yourself off and miss the next bus but catch the second, which is then commandeered by a cyborg robot from the future who takes all 65 passengers on a raging Bruckherimer-fest through downtown, finally running the bus off of a pier into the bay, where it sinks and then explodes, just after you struggle to the surface? The kind of day where you stagger onto the beach in shredded business-wear and catch a cab on the boardwalk, only to have the cabbie turn out to be a blackglass-eyed Rastafarian from the Nth-dimension who takes you a zany sparkling interstellar ride through universes full of jelly lifeforms and giant amoebas before dropping you off in London, an ocean away from where you started? The kind of day where you barely manage to catch the Conorde to back to LA to make your meeting only to have the supersonic 60s jet plunge flaming into a Paris vegetable market, leaving you oddly unscathed but quite shaken and very, very late? The kind of day where at that very moment aliens descend upon the Earth and pry back its tectonic plates to get at the juicy magma center, leaving you stranded eight miles up on a looming mountain that used to be France? The kind of day where Sherpas parachute from the sky and lead you back down using faster-than-light yaks but leave you stranded on the yurt-spotted plains of Outer Mongolia? The kind of day where you get taken in by slant-eyed herdsman but all they've got to eat is goat-jerky and comise (the famous alcoholic beverage made from fermented goat's milk)?
No?
Oh. Never mind then.
July 21, 2003
As a Person of Rotundity, I am alternately amused and dismayed by the various theories, methods, fads and metabolically Machiavellian weight loss methods purveyed by our dysmorphic popular culture. A couple of recent articles over at TCS made me shake my head once more.
The formula is simple, people:
Total Caloric Intake > Total Caloric Expenditure = Weight Gain
Total Caloric Intake < Total Caloric Expenditure = Weight Loss
Decreasing caloric intake without increasing physical activity will result in temporary weight loss and a subsequently increased tendency towards weight gain. Increasing physical activity while maintaining current caloric intake or decreasing that intake will result in metabolic increase and weight reduction.
It's a cultural pathology, I think: we want results without actually having to do anything. In the early 80s my father lost quite a lot of weight because his physician put him on thyroid medication, artifically revving up his metabolism. Short version: medication stopped, waistline expanded. Our pill-philic society loves the idea of a "skinny pill" the same way it loves the idea of a "happy pill." It suits our technological bent, in that a pill is a small, compact device that can be used to Improve Our Quality Of Life, like a microwave or an iPod or a kitchen sink margarita dispenser.
Often, the Skinny Pill proves to be Bad. Fen-Phen--a combination of fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine--worked wonders, but tended to gunk up heart valves with thick, waxy crap, requiring cardiac valve-replacement in about one-quarter of those affected.
The other technologically shiny methods are so-called "meal replacements" like Ensure, Slim-fast, and so forth. These are much better than Astronaut Ice Cream for sheer sci-fi cachet. Why eat a meal when you can have a "nutritionally complete" meal-in-a-can/bar/pouch? Mmm, satisfyin'!
But they're not. Millions of years of human evolution were geared towards walking from place to place, running down our meals, and generally moving about much more than we do now. We have machines that move us thousands of miles without any physical effort on our part beyond the exertion of ripping open a package of peanuts and unscrewing the cap of a miniature wine bottle. We're supposed to be loping about on the plains or dragging sharp sticks through the dirt and poking at it with seed drills.
The length of my belt, of course, is a testament to the notion that knowing and doing are not the same thing. But there was a time, before the city beat me into the asphalt, that I used the noblest of moving machines to haul my carcass from place to place. And now I'm on the verge of making regular two-wheeled forays into the countryside...soon as I get new cleats for my new bike shoes...provided that I'm sufficiently motivated... and the weather's nice... and... ooo... cheeseburger...
July 22, 2003
In '98 or '99--so long ago, when we were young and life was an open book--I bought a computer from these folks. Well, not these folks, exactly...as it turns out, the Texans that I bought my iDot from all leapt to their deaths from tall buildings during the .com crash, and iDot's assets were acquired by a California-based company called Medialand Systems, Inc. Or, as the website now states, they "acquired the remaining of iDOT computers, hoping to revitalize online business by integrating the expertise and experiences that Medialand has had over the years."
Which doesn't instill a great deal of confidence. But then, the fact that the original iDot team shipped my computer with the wrong frickin' motherboard installed in it didn't exactly convince me of their Gatesian techno-savvy, either. But never mind that. It was a cheap computer, and--once tech support cottoned to the fact that Hey! That motherboard doesn't support Celeron chips! and swapped it for the right one--it ran fine.
Until yesterday. The machine's long-suffering power supply, the fan of which ceased spinning last year, the hot components of which were thickly sheathed in gray-brown cobwebs of dust and cat fur, finally pushed its last electron, farted once, and then headed off to the great swap-meet in the sky.
So, for now, I'm computerless, until my replacement power supply arrives. It should be four or five days to get the part and an hour to make the repairs...if that's the actual source of the problem. Until then, we'll be running on minimal life support and rations. No holodeck, necessary replicator use only, and we'll just have to hope that no one comes across us and tries to take advantage of us while we're adrift. You're a fine crew--the best in the fleet. And I know we'll come out of this--
Whoops. Bit of a delusion, there.
Must be the Paxil.
July 28, 2003
"You dedicate all your talents, all your efforts. You're loyal to your employer, this case being the U.S. Navy, and what do you get in return? A kick in the you-know-what."
--Ana Angelet,
Puerto Rican Chapter,
American Federation of Government Employees
Color me Highly Amused.
Apparently some Puerto Ricans, after their fellow citizens agitated long and hard to close the live-fire naval base at Vieques, are now upset that the Navy is pulling out of the island altogether. This will cost the Puerto Rican economy $300 million a year.
Yeah, it's all about the Evil, Imperialist, Exploitative American Empire...until they start missing those sweet, sweet dollars.
Good job, folks! You eliminated the largest employer on an island with a 50% unemployment rate.
July 29, 2003
 Mmm. Mell-oh.
Had meself a fine sunset bike ride this evening...not too long, half an hour, about six miles. Breaking in the new Cannondale mountain shoes--the ones that don't turn my feet into those of a Chinese woman, like my too-big overnarrow carbon-soled Lake road shoes--and enjoying the new cleats for my Frog pedals. Nothing like having your feet firmly fixed to the pedals in a nice pair of shoes. Ommm...I am one with my BLT.
So much more pleasant than the city...rolling hills with fresh green almost-produce...earthy smells...water scents rolling along under culverts as I roll over above...nobody honking. Nobody stepping dead-eyed off the curb directly in front of me, as though 250 pounds of bike and rider won't knock them to the ground and break their bones. None of that. Just a large population of fat dumb groundhogs living in roadside condos and a breed of mosquito that is, apparently, fast and strong enough to bite a rider's legs while they're in motion.
I'm a bit sunburnt. Tired in the kind of way that means I won't have to shave off a sliver of Benadrool to give the Big Sleep Assist.
And I get to do it again tomorrow.
July 30, 2003
Now, you too can own Rebecca Romijn-Stamos' breasts. And her hair.
Bidding starts at $250.00.
Or, you can have Arnold's chest...sort of. That's pricier, though--$3000.00 and up.
July 31, 2003
A pair of economists' take on the recently nixed so-called "Terrorism Futures Market":
Financial markets are incredibly powerful aggregators of information, and are often better predictors than traditional methods. The examples are numerous. The futures market in orange juice concentrate is a better predictor of Florida weather than the National Weather Service. The Iowa Electronic Markets outperform the opinion polls in predicting presidential election vote shares. Hewlett Packard ran a market forecasting printer sales that outpredicted any of its analysts. The Defense Department should be applauded for admitting to its own limitations. Last winter we studied a market in "Saddam Securities" that proved to be a good predictor of the probability of war in Iraq.
The reason markets work so well is that they reflect our collective wisdom. And your opinion will be reflected only to the extent that you are willing to put your money where your mouth is.
When I first heard of the idea (persuasively and intelligently criticized as "unbelieveably bad, stupid, and just really bad...or something," by Some Important Person in Congress), I thought that it was a creative, outside-the-box sort of concept. We've been presented with a complex intel problem, and such a marketplace might serve as a kind of "parallel processor" made up of multiple human intelligences, all doing what humans do best: gather, evaluate, and act upon information.
But if someone has a sneaking suspicion (or an overt belief) that markets--i.e., "Capitalism"--are massive engines of exploitation with inhuman gears that crush the disadvantaged of the world into a fine paste for eventual bottling as Uncka Sam's Po' Peeple Sammich Spread, they may have some difficulty accepting this as an interesting possibility that might save lives.
The rest is at the Washington Post (simple, non-invasive registration is required to get in--I read the article as a 99-year old woman from Wisconsin).
August 02, 2003
 I have a problem.
On March 6 of this year, I wrote the following, concerning Evil:
The more we resemble that cause of our very being, the more we approach a kind of harmony with our small world and with the cosmos at large.
Likewise, the less we resemble that cause, the more we approach disharmony. The more deliberately we seek destruction, the disordering and the unmaking of things, the ending of lives and the snuffing out of potential unfoldings, the farther away we are from the essence of creation. We then turn ourselves towards an unfathomable absence of being. We face the Ancient Kind, in an unknowable time before time, a place of no place, where there is no creation and no existence.
The farther away we are from the essential nature of creation, the closer we are to evil.
By "cause of our very being," I meant the "order on a monumental yet molecular scale" by which we and everything we know exists.
This isn't a new idea--in fact, it's a very old one. In the third century, Plotinus wrote
Some conception of it [Evil] would be reached by thinking of measurelessness as opposed to measure, of the unbounded against bound, the unshaped against a principle of shape, the ever-needy against the self-sufficing: think of the ever undefined, the never at rest, the all-accepting but never sated, utter dearth; and make all this character not mere accident in it but its equivalent for essential-being, so that, whatsoever fragment of it be taken, that part is all lawless void, while whatever participates in it and resembles it becomes evil, though not of course to the point of being, as itself is, Evil-Absolute. [Enneads, 4.8.3]
Although Plotinus and those who studied and proclaimed his teachings are now called Neo-Platonists, they regarded themselves simply as Platonists, and treated Plotinus' works as accurate representations of Plato's teachings. The notion of "participation" is a Platonic idea, and describes the mechanism whereby we--and everything that we experience in the world--are reflections of perfect ideas. We and the things of the world strive towards these singular ideals, and to a certain extent partake of them. The more an object or act approaches the ideal of that particular kind of object or act, the "better" it is. This is true for individuals as well; both Plato and Aristotle spend a good deal of time trying to define what the ideal Individual or Man ought to be. Although something of an oversimplification, what we today call Christianity can be regarded as the melding of this idea of Platonic participation with Judaic notions of ethical behavior.
Plotinus formulated his idea of Evil-Absolute as a kind of ideal of non-existence, and he did so to support his theory that all matter, being corruptible, tends more towards the Evil than the Good. I don't hold with that, much. One of the most essential things we do as humans is order and organize the stuff around us on scales both vast and atomic, and I generally reject suggestions that humans and all their activities are by nature evil. I prefer instead to focus on the marvelous organization which makes consciousness possible and which allows us to do the meticulous ordering and organization which is so characteristic of our intelligence.
Thus, if I am honest, I must admit that my metaphysics presents me with an ethical problem.
August 14, 2003
So...I logged on to my website, for to re-start the Astonished Head engine, you know?
And then the power went out in six states and a province in Canada.
Someone is very afraid of me, I think. I'm talking to you, Yahweh!
But He can't stop me! No way I'm backing down before a goat-blood sucking burnt-fat schlupping has-been desert deity.
I'll be back, soon.
August 16, 2003
No real entries yet--must go slowly, lest I destroy the entire power infrastructure of the country.
While I was taking a writing break, I finished up some site housekeeping. The Headage section is now complete, and includes the Religiosity sub-archive. Long-time viewers will recognize much of the material from the now-defunct Biblical Pedantry section.
I removed much excess fileage that was no longer needed, which apparently had the effect of increasing the site's size by one MB. It's the "new computing," I think. I eliminated the last vestiges of Blogger Pro. I've also converted all excess .GIFs into smaller .JPGs...there have been over 20,000 views of the Proloxil ad this month, which puts me way over my bandwidth limit, so every byte I can shave off of ordinary page loads will help.
In other news, I am well on the way to losing fifty pounds and becoming the Fastest Head Alive.
Well...not quite. But I am engaging in serious bikeage and dietage and soon you will be seeing a lot less of me. Ba-dum-bum!
That is all. Soon: Evil, Part 2.
Now: a small ride in preparation for a mini-tour of 25 miles on the morrow.
August 21, 2003
File this under Strange Ways Of The Net.
While searching for reviews of the Bruce Gordon BLT (sometimes I look for reviews of things I already own, so I can be reminded of how cool my stuff is), I came across a link for Astonished Head's Verbiage Archives...in the Miami Business Directory, under "Listings For 'Miami Adhesive and Glue Manufacturers.'"
I have no idea why. None at all.
August 23, 2003
August 26, 2003
Heh.
I lost four pounds last week.
How'd I do it?
Mathematics.
It takes a deficit of roughly 3,500 calories to burn off a pound of fat. As a Person of Rotundity I burn 2,500 calories a day just being alive. So, over the course of the past week, I would have had to create a calorie deficit of around 14,000 calories to lose those four pounds. Which, apparently, I did.
This involved (forgive the profusion of bullet points, lately--I just re-learned the HTML for it, so I'm a'gonna use it):
- 1,200 calories' worth of food a day. This means whole grains for breakfast (not All-Bran--its number two ingredient is sugar); mucho vegetable-laden salad with a can of tuna and a half a chicken breast and balsamic vinegar without oil for lunch (very filling and good for the brain, you know), some variety of grillish meatage and still more vegetables for supper. Nothing that's got a three-digit per tablespoon calorie count (like oils and peanut butter). Very little in the way of bread. No fruit juices. No soda. Very little alcohol (I did have some red wine and locally-produced peach brandy on Sunday, my day off). My day off from what, you ask? From the next component:
- Exercise. Lots of it. That means bicycling. Last week, it was a 45-minute ride at a rough average of 12.6 miles per hour on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with two 40-minute rides (one in the morning and one in the evening) on Friday, and one 45-minute ride with a big honkin' hill at the end of it on Saturday.
- Lots of water. Good multivitamins, plus a calcium supplement which helps with fat transport (as does the water).
Now then, here's the math. At around 1,200 calories per day for six days plus a splurge on Sunday, I took in around 9,400 calories. My daily activities--you know, breathing, blinking my eyes, thinking, that sort of thing--for those days burned about 17,500 calories. At my weight, height, and age, I burned a minimum of 689 calories on each ride at that average speed, and probably a bit more than that because my rides involve hills.
So: 9,400 calories (food intake) minus 22,400 calories (daily living plus exercise) equals a deficit, on paper, of 13,000 calories, which is pretty damn close to the 3,500 calories-per-pound-of-fat total deficit I would need to create to burn off four pounds.
Crazy, huh?
And that, dear readers, is how you lose weight. No all-meat Atkins no-diet diet. No shakes. No Bowflex Antique Flying Machine. No Karate-Bo. No epehedra-based supplements that make you jump around and twitch like Robert Downey Jr. on a bad day.
Expend more than you take in. Math.
I intend to lose fifty pounds before the end of the year, and will continue to keep you informed of all the fascinating details.
August 28, 2003
James Miller's proposal for dealing with ELF and other eco-terrorists:
I propose that the government fully compensate individuals and businesses for all losses caused by eco-terrorists. The money for this compensation should come from the Environmental Protection Agency's business oversight budget or from selling federal land to mining companies. Under either financing plan, eco-terrorism wouldn't increase the price of goods the terrorists dislike, but rather would cause the government to act in ways they detest.
While I'm not too keen on the government getting even more involved in the workings of markets, I'm amused by this suggestion.
Blow up an SUV, kill a spotted owl!
Another problem with this idea is that the government already acts in ways that ELF and its fellow-travellers detest, so this would be, to them, just one more instance of the Opressive Jackboot Of The Man Coming Down On Mother Earth. Miller is expecting a logical thought process from a group notably short on rationality.
September 01, 2003
And, in Atkins diet news (related to comments in response to this post):
“U.S. hospitals would be wise to emulate Britain’s Norfolk and Norwich Hospital and protect their patients from the dangerous Atkins Diet,” says PCRM [Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine] nutrition director Amy Joy Lanou, Ph.D. “Hospitals that serve meat-heavy, fatty foods might be good at keeping their beds filled, but they’re doing little to improve patient health. Research has clearly shown that high-protein, meat-heavy diets increase the risk of osteoporosis and kidney disorders and that low-fat vegetarian diets help prevent heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, and other health problems.”
"Research" has shown lots of things, Doc. Until it shows something else.
If I thought that the PCRM's concern was just for hospital patients, I wouldn't object. If you're in hospital, you're sick, and there's no reason to get all nuts with the diet. Eat the bland food, get better, leave hospital, return to Atkins when you've healed up.
But I suspect that the PCRM's motive has more to do with nutritional orthodoxy than anything else. Just read the letter they've created. During the course of what length of hospital stay, exactly, and for what condition, should doctors be concerned with their patients developing colorectal cancer, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis? These are lifetime concerns, not daily, weekly, or even monthly concerns. It's as though the PCRM fears those on Atkins will turn into suppurating tumorous lumps right there in the ward.
The PCRM is clearly using the excuse of hospitilization as an opportunity to evangelize against the Atkins diet, and that's patently disingenuous. They even admit as much:
Hospitals play a vital role in helping consumers understand the importance of food and nutrition to individual health.
So, it's not about science, is it? It's about marketing!
When in hospital, you're under the doctor's care. You do what they say. If you're on Atkins and you demand protein and fat while you're in hospital for kidney stones or a bowel resection, you're being stupid.
But the PCRM is trying to establish anti-Akins practice in the hospital as a forced means of influencing patient behavior outside the hospital.
I say, do the research, do it properly, and present it to people when they're sitting on the couch watching TV or reading a magazine, not lying in the hospital with tubes in every orifice.
September 16, 2003
Via Drezner by way of Reynolds comes this interview with Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
Now, Krugman's focus is that the Right Wing Is A Revolutionary Movement That Will Destroy America. Really. I'm Serious. Watch Out!
Which I've heard him go on about before, at several 750-word lengths.
But, his expertise is economics, so I paid a more attention to the Krugman Plan To Fix The Economy, But Good:
A phased elimination of all the Bush tax cuts, plus some additional taxes. I'd probably look first at some way to make the corporate profits tax actually effective again — the nominal rate is 35% but the effective rate is only 15% or so. Look at some cuts, maybe you start to talk about retirement age, and possibly some means testing of Medicare, and that's enough to bring the budget under control. And meanwhile you have to manage the economy, you have to talk about what we can do to actually get demand going faster, and there are lots of things you can do…
I'm all for taxing corporate profits at a healthier rate. But I think there's a bigger problem, here, and Krugman tends to ignore it, muttering something about "some cuts" in spending.
I have a friend who's a new hire at the INS, screening incoming airline passengers, spotting document fraud, that sort of thing.
She tells me stories about the cynical old-timers. About how people sign-in for a day's worth of overtime, and then just disappear, collecting $1000 of taxpayer money for the day. About how she's brought in for 14-hour days, four hours of which she spends as the extra hand on a screening team that doesn't need her. The INS is rife with this, as are, I suspect, all other Federal agencies.
And what's the "Krugman plan?"
"A phased elimination of all the Bush tax cuts, plus some additional taxes."
How about some f*cking fiscal discipline on the part of the Federal Government, first? Krugman's solution always seems to be to take in more money and give it to a profligate government.
I think I know what the problem is, here. In the interview, Krugman relates how the people who did the illustration work for his Time magazine piece on fiscal inequality
...had this big picture of what they thought was a mansion. But it wasn't a mansion, it wasn't what the really rich are building now, it was a roughly $3 million house of about 7,000 square feet, and there are a few of those in Princeton just down the road from me. The people doing the Times magazine artwork just don't realize how rich the rich are these days, what the real excesses look like, and I think that's the general thing.
There's something wrong with someone who lives in Princeton and can claim that a $3 million 7,000-square foot home isn't really rich. I lived in the town next to Princeton for over a decade, and had no trouble identifying the owners of those 7,000-square foot homes as rich.
I live in a 940-square foot home. That must mean I'm the working poor.
Krugman's problem seems to be that the rich are...well, just too rich. But just who are these people, to whom a $3 million dollar house isn't a mansion? How many of them are there? Where are they all? Are there enough of them so that, if we tax all of them them at 35% or 45%, my taxes will drop to 15% or 10%?
And just where in the income brackets does Krugman sit, that $3 million will buy a modest home? My God, his heart must truly bleed for me, forced as I am to pay a mortgage in a nice Hudson Valley town, trundling about with only one car to my name, eating out at the local swell pub only twice a month, at most, and swilling meager $15-a-bottle wines.
In 1901, Andrew Carnegie sold Carnegie Steel and became the richest man in the world, worth about $4.5 billion in modern dollars. Today, he would be number 32 on the Forbes 400 richest people in America, a list which bottoms out at $500 million.
So, Mr. Krugman: are these the really rich? These 400 people with net worth over $500 million? What about those between, say $20 million and $499 million? How many of those are there? 1,000? 2,000? According to an ad placed in the New York Times by TomPaine.com, the richest in America make "$200,000 or more." But, according to Krugman, these 16,000 would more properly be called middle class.
September 18, 2003
Actually, I misspoke. I have not been laid low.
I have been hammered eight inches beneath the surface of the asphalt by a pile driver as big as my entire body. The very meat of the front of my head is in utter rebellion. If you were to measure the Discomfort Zone, it would extend from the tip of my nose to a point a full six inches inside my skull.
I've got snotness
I've got mucous
I've got my nose
Who could ask for anything more?
Who could ask for anything more?
I've got Orlando Bloom (score!) on tap for the lead and a well-repaired Bebe Neuwirth for the love interest: An Allergist in Baghdad.
This is Baghdad. And I'm an American who lives here. My name Jerry Mulligan. And I'm an ex-GI. In 2004, when the Army told me to find my own job, I stayed on and I'll tell you why. I'm an allergist. All my life, that's all I've ever wanted to do.
If anyone at all gets that, I'll be duly impressed.
Allergies, for those who are fortunate enough not to be subject to them, are like being stoned without the actual stoned-ness. There are red eyes involved, and the munchies, believe it or not...cravings for things like Krispy Kremes and boxes of rock salt and loaves of bread and so forth. For the unstoned, allergies are like having dryer-lint stuffed into all of your rhinoid cavities followed by an application of thick water, which makes the lint swell until your eyes pink up and bulge out. This is accompanied by bleariness and general misery.
Histamine, the principle evildoer in allergic reactions, isn't just involved in swollen eyeballs and sneezing--it rates an entire chapter in basic neurochemistry texts. It's a neurotransmitter that's utilized throughout the body, both inside and outside of the central nervous system. That's why Benadryl, the famous allergy drug, got its start as a psychiatric medication. Drugs that target the histamine receptors in the brain are being developed to treat obesity, sleep disturbances, epilepsy, various cognitive disorders, and chronic pain.
Thus, allergies--the big, nasty kind, not just occasional "hay fever"--affect not only the nose and eyes, but the entire body, producing all manner of ill effects.
Hence: the body-sized pile driver.
And now, to bed.
*snort*
September 19, 2003
This morning, I braved eighty-mile and hour winds and torrential, Biblical rain to get to my Stamford office. I saw a flying cow. I was slapped by bucketloads of airborne fish! I--
No, that's all wrong.
This morning, I drove at eighty miles an hour to get to my Stamford office, saw a cartoon cow on the side of a refrigerated beef truck, thought about having fish for dinner, and stepped in a puddle.
As Easterbrook wrote this morning, CATEGORY 2 STORM, CATEGORY 5 HYPE. [via Reynolds]
On the plus side, the winds at Peapod Manor were significant enough to knock over the tomato plants on the deck, so we stashed them in the stable with the horses. The plants and their bountiful crop of very green tomatos are safe.
Now: into the lab!
September 22, 2003
Ah, the eco-fascists have struck again.
Well, not really again...they're just sorta confirming that yeah, some ELF activists did, in fact, burn down a $50 million apartment complex a couple of weeks ago, and left a banner behind that read, "If you build it, we will burn it."
Hmmm....ELF activists. Sounds so harmless, doesn't it? As though they're a group of wispy, fair-haired beings, campaigning for the right to wear ethereal garb and live among the treetops in well-crafted wooden cities.
Gives all the other Mythical Creatures' Rights groups a bad name, it does.
Man, I got nothin'.
Actually, that's not entirely true. I've got something on the futility of attempting serious debate online, based on Plato's Phaedrus; I've got Evil: Part Deux cooking, with liberal spoonfuls of the Enneads...but I haven't got the brain-juice to pursue any of it to completion and subsequent posting.
Ah well. Chalk it up to...something.
See?
No juice.
September 24, 2003
First [Hephaistos] shaped the shield so great and strong, adorning it all over and binding it round with a gleaming circuit in three layers; and the baldric was made of silver. He made the shield in five thicknesses, and with many a wonder did his cunning hand enrich it.
He wrought the earth, the heavens, and the sea; the moon also at her full and the untiring sun, with all the signs that glorify the face of heaven - the Pleiads, the Hyads, huge Orion, and the Bear, which men also call the Wain and which turns round ever in one place, facing. Orion, and alone never dips into the stream of Okeanos.
He wrought also two cities, fair to see and busy with the hum of men. In the one were weddings and wedding-feasts, and they were going about the city with brides whom they were escorting by torchlight from their chambers. Loud rose the cry of Hymen, and the youths danced to the music of flute and lyre, while the women stood each at her house door to see them...
This morning, I listened to Derek Jacobi read from the Fagels translation of the Iliad. The passages above are not from the Fagels, unfortunately, but it is from the same scroll I heard this morning. This portion partly describes the shield made for Achilles by the bandy-legged blacksmith of the gods, Hephaistos, at the behest of Thetis, Achilles' mother. Achilles, who until now has raged against the Argive king Agamemnon, sulking by his beached hollow ships and withholding his godlike arm from aiding the king's cause, has been brought around by the death in battle of his noble friend Patroklos. Achilles' mother, a sea nymph, hears his grief from the depths of the ocean, and commissions the new shield and armor to replace Achilles' old battle gear. Patroklos had worn Achilles' gear into battle in his stead, and it was stripped from his corpse by Hektor, the Trojan hero who killed him.
The shield that Hephaistos forges is a wondrous thing, depicting in worked bronze, tin, and silver the entire civic life of the Greek civilization that was, to the Iliad's dark age heroes, the future. It is a microcosm in metal, containing two cities, their citizens, their fields, their conflicts and their judges. The workmanship is so fine that the light glinting off the furrows in the golden wheatfields makes it seem as though they are being harvested, right before our eyes. The stars wheel in the forged sky, the sun and moon circle the shield's shining rim.
And while I listened to Jacobi's sonorous rendition of Homer's description, I sped along in my metal box towards the train station. I drove down from the mountains and onto the faster highway on the valley floor, and before me the rising sun conspired with trees and morning mist to send shafts of white light through the upper branches and across the road. It was a perfect moment: a few minutes later and the sun would have crested the trees, drowning the mist with its light; a few minutes earlier and the light would have been lost behind the crest of the hill and among the thick dark trunks of the shrouded forest.
A commute of two and a half hours via car, train, and ferry, with this as its start, far surpasses forty minutes in the subway.
It's mornings like this that make me love my life.
And now...to work.
October 07, 2003
 nce there was a long-haired, overfair leaping gnome, who had a synthesizer, a 12-string electric-acoustic guitar, some freaky effects pedals and a four-speaker stereo system. He holed up in a stolen room in a New Jersey suburb with a bong, some bong-stuffing, and a couple of sheets of ant-acid (no, really--the blotter paper had a little ant on each square, all on a spiral march towards the center of the sheet). He played psychedelic quadraphonic guitar and far-out New Age electronic tuneage. He put the Major Arcanas of four different Tarot decks up on the baseboard heater-grimed walls. He made a pagan altar out of the thick cross-section of a pine tree that had been growing in a cemetery, burning a cardinal circle and the phases of the moon into its smooth-sanded top, and finishing it off with a dark stain from Minwax. He slept on a mattress on the floor and, later, on a much more comfortable massage table. He hung out with people who believed in energy and light and the power of pendulums. He sat in circle with these people and mispronounced Lakota Sioux words. He smoked a peace pipe. He sweated in sweat lodges, learned reflexology, and went to massage school. He was going to be a healer.
That leaping gnome was me, of course.
Lately, I've wondered where he's gone off to.
I have made a map of the geography of my dreams, and I carry it in my head. I plot new locations on it as I come across them while I sleep. It resembles a map from the front pages of any one of a dozen fantasy paperbacks, all emulating Tolkien's maps of Middle Earth: thickly-lined, with trackless empty spaces and blunt iconography for mountains, rivers, and cities. My dreamscape map is colorful, a bit cartoonish. Each individual place on it is represented by a little caricature, with tiny structures or natural features. Towards the bottom are the fields and forests that I've been to in my sleep, each reminding me of some location near my childhood home. Off to one side is the strange house I visited twice several years ago, dark on the inside, with the coruscating neon walls and the strange, feminine essence in the closed room at the top of the stairs. A bit to the right is another odd house I've visited, the Frankenstein-Victorian up on stilts with the oddly tacked-on additions and the cats in the windows. There are many other places...landscapes, strange vistas, towns, or sometimes just a nebulous area that appears different each time I visit, but occupies the same space on the map. Real places--like my house, or my old apartment--usually don't merit a place on the map. It's the symbolic places, the deep and mythic locations made up from my own self and mind, that end up there.
I've been adding to the map for many years, now, and I can usually take it with me while I sleep. There are only certain types of dreams in which I can consult the map--resonant dreams, in which I'm partially aware that I'm dreaming. Often in those dreams I'm able to plot a given location in relation to the other places I've been. My map is incomplete, like an early eighteenth-century cartographer's depiction of the East coast of America, where the Western shores of China are just beyond the narrow, imagined shore of the ocean that has replaced the rest of the continent. But my dreamscape map's incompleteness conveys a sense of progression, a journey that my sleeping self undertakes continuously, even while I am awake.
I find that there's a new place on the map, now, towards the top...a city of broad avenues and sprawling plazas, bounded by water, and dominated by either two shimmering towers or a vast, ruined crater in the ground. I visited that place again a few nights ago...wandering along the impossibly wide, pale-bricked plaza that surrounds those towers, looking up at their sheer-walled height and knowing that I needed to get away from them, quickly, now, before It happened. And then, transported by winged dreamfeet, I watched from a distance as the first tower, no bigger than my outstretched thumb, crumbled in isolation, surrounded by no other buildings. I watched it reassemble, a film run in reverse, then crumble and reassemble again, the shattered walls rising and reknitting, the plume of smoke sucking itself back into the tower like the inhalation of a Sophisticated Smoker. It was as though someone was jogging the shuttle on a video editor, back and forth, back and forth. Moving on dreamfeet once more I found myself among the wreckage with the recovery workers, walking along unsteady piles of ruined beams and shattered desks. The wreckage tumbled away from beneath me, and I was hanging from the side of the pit, which was made of cinderblock. The blocks offered a good grip, and so I hung there above the ruins, my feet dangling over empty space...frightened, but not overly so, because the rough surface provided such a strong handhold.
It's a truism that our idealism fades as we grow older...or, at least, it's supposed to, as the rough edges of the world bang up against us and wear us down. Many of those in my parent's generation tried to buck that trend and failed, but many others succeeded, and managed to transform idealism for idealism's sake into a worthy pursuit in our culture. As a result, there are many shouting in our public square today who are crippled by a privileged inability to apprehend the base, evil parts of human nature, and are at such a loss when truly confronted by that darker nature that their idealism becomes a deaf, dumb, and blind shield raised against unpleasant reality.
Recently, I purchased an acoustic-electric six-string guitar (see left), and a nice amp to go with it (see left again). I've played guitar since 1991, but for the past five years or so I've concentrated on playing with sophisticated electronic instruments of one kind or another, and also dabbled a bit with trumpets. But I could never sing while playing the keyboard. I could make cool noise--with a beat, even--but nothing that made me want to make my own noise, with my own throat. I purchased my trumpets on the strength of dreams, wherein music flowed from my breath and sounded out loud and vibrant. But the reality of the trumpet was an aching diaphragm and buzzing lips, with the silver tones of Chet, Miles and Louis far out of reach. But the guitar...man, I can bang on that. I can strum and chuff-chukka-chuff! and I can sing while I'm doing it.
I used to sing alot of songs with lyrics like
For the children and the flowers
are my sisters and my brothers
their laughter and their loveliness
could clear a cloudy day
And the song that I am singing
is a prayer for nonbelievers
Come and stand beside us now
we can find a better way
I wrote that down from memory, because it's a song I grew up with. So, when I wrote my own songs, they contained lyrics like
As a child
I dreamed of a place so fair
There were rocks and streams and animals
sweet fruit grew on every tree
There were lovely flowers growing there
strange and wondrous things to see
but the dearest sight of all to me
was the face of the Earth Mother
When I strummed my new Martin guitar, rediscovering the instrument, I played the songs I grew up with, and the songs I had written. I discovered a peculiar thing. Not only did my soft uncalloused fingers hurt, but my voice wouldn't reach the notes I used to be able to reach, full-throat. I've got a good voice. I've got excellent pitch, I know how to breathe, how to set my vocal cords spinning, how to project my tones to the walls and fill whatever space I'm in. But time and again, I couldn't hit the notes, because my throat would close and tremble, and my eyes would well. It wasn't because I was out of practice. And it wasn't only happening with the old songs I grew up with--it was happening with the songs I wrote in my early twenties, when I had hair down to the middle of my back, participated in ceremonial observances of the new and full moon alike, and owned an athame.
I started creating my dream-map when I realized that I was visiting places more than once in my dreams. It seemed a natural thing to do: to keep track of where you are, you need a map, or a GPS. GPSs weren't readily available to consumers in the early Nineties, and too complex to tote about in the dreamscape. A simple parchment map, rolled up, and tied with a strip of leather, is what I needed, so that's what I created. Likewise, the songs I wrote were simple things, words of little moment that carried the melodies that were meaningful to me, and felt good to power with my breath and my throat.
One night last week, as I struggled to sing the familiar songs inherited from my mother (such a fan that she has a cat named John Denver) and to sing the songs I had derived from that inheritance...it hit me. Struck me dumb. The realization--as so many insights are, in my life--was assisted by liberal draughts of wine. But I stomped down the steps, and plomped onto the couch, and tried to explain to Pea--faithful companion and all-around understanding soul--what was wrong. Later, she told me she saw it on my face: I wore such an odd expression as I came down the stairs, she said.
I began by trying to talk about Homer's account of Troy, and of battles fought more than three thousand years ago. About war, and the continual, senseless violence of men, and the differences between the City of War and the City of Peace that Hephaistos had forged into the new shield of Achilles. About how humanity has learned nothing, in all that time since the Argives tumbled into the dust of the plains of Ilium.
But then, with choked words that tumbled forth--words that I cannot remember, now--it spilled from my guts: what I was actually upset about. How could they do that? How could they kill to take control of those jetliners? How could they pilot them with such cold intent? Knowing that they would kill thousands...hoping that they would kill tens of thousands? I dissolved into a drunken, shuddering mass of tears: They broke me. They broke me.
It felt as though all within me that reached the high notes, all of me that sang of flowers and of peace and of the sappy, simple things of my youth, had been crushed out of me on that day, tumbling down with the towering columns of dust, mixing with the smoke of burning metal and the persistent scent of taffy-twisted corpses.
And, most heinous of all: those fuckers put Mordor on the map of my dreams. Right there at the top, a place that I didn't create...a place of fire and smoke, of charred steel and death, a place that I know I will occasionally visit for the rest of my life.
I feel as though I have gained a better understanding of those who cling so fiercely to ideas like there is no way to peace: peace is the way, and who believe so desperately in the mystical notion that somehow, thinking good thoughts and visualizing white light can change the world, and those who can't wrap their minds around the notion that war is often a necessary precursor to peace. I understand why there are so few actors, artists, and singers who support the campaign in Iraq. Certain forms of creative expression--whether they happen on stage, in front of a canvas, or behind a guitar and a microphone--are intimately linked with innocence. They come from a childlike place within us, where the world rarely intrudes. They fill us up, and lend us power. It's magic, almost by definition: the art of causing change in accordance with Will. The change that is created is the creation itself; a melody in the air, an image, or a set of words that wasn't there before, something that is newly-existent through our efforts. The rush I sometimes feel when reaching for the good melody is the same rush I used to feel when grabbing for the Holy Spirit in my old church, or when I sat in circle banging on a drum to bring in the four directions or draw down the moon. That sense of connection to what is outside myself, that soul-deep belief that I can effect change in the world, is also what drives many of the creative idealists who speak so loudly for peace, love and understanding.
The nineteen men who killed three thousand Americans on September 11 believed that, too. They, too, sought to effect change in accordance with their wills, and their sacrificial magic spilled thousands of gallons of human blood onto an altar that was 1,000 feet high and sixteen acres in area.
That kind of magic doesn't respond to good thoughts. It can't be countered by peace. Its practitioners aren't swayed by drawing down the moon, banging on drums, or reciting angry, righteous poems.
It's Black Magic, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. It sweeps away all notions of personal creative impact. It strips the individual self bare, and exposes its futility.
This is what drives the rage of the reflexively anti-war. What to do when practitioners of the evil arts expose your impotence? You can either reassess your role in the order of things, or you can scream out loud and shudder with denial, seeking to have an impact on something...anything. Anything to protect your fragile, childlike self from the reality of a savage world. Anything to prevent evil from making its own place in your dreams.
I don't blame them, not one bit. The death of innocence--real innocence, deep innocence, the kind that is blissfully unaware of true, vicious evil--is painful and frightening. Trust me; I know. So do many, many thousands of others, who abruptly learned it with far greater clarity and force than I.
This, then, is my great challenge. I must find a way to bring forth anew the creative soul within me, the one that sings the high melodies, and I must find a way to do so within the context of a world populated by evil sorcerers who would kill me, set me on fire, and dance around my smoking corpse singing Allahu akbar.
This is also my great fear...because I haven't got the slightest idea of how to begin.
October 10, 2003
This morning, I read the following from Cory Doctorow:
"Little did I suspect, when I slipped my pal Nelson a sheet-metal Bill of Rights, that it would be the source of a flash of horrible realization that we're in deep crap..."
Nelson is wondering how he's going to bring this little trinket home on his flight. After quoting the Fourth Amendment, he is stunned--stunned!--to realize that he is
"...stressing about what people would think about me having a copy of the Bill of Rights! It's a terrible thing we've done to ourselves."
To which, I reply: we live in a time when jetliners are hijacked with box cutters and bombs can fit into shoes. If you've got a 2.5" by 3.5" piece of metal on your person or in your luggage that's deliberately designed to attract the attention of security screeners, the issue is no longer "unreasonable search and seizure." The issue is, "What is that piece of metal that my wand scanner just detected?"
If you had a copy of the Bill of rights on a 2.5" by 3.5" piece of of card stock, would there be a problem? No. If you had it printed on a T-shirt, would there be a problem? No. If you shaved your head and tattooed it on your skull, would it be a problem? No. Or, at least, not much of a problem beyond simple aesthetics.
Via e-mail, Nelson told me that his concern was not so much being "found with a piece of metal," but being "found with a piece of metal designed to remind people about the Bill of Rights."
Really. Imagine this, for a moment:
You've got the thankless task of screening thousands of passengers a day. People get pissed off at you routinely for doing your job; the media is constantly telling you and everyone else that you're not doing your job, and your job, basically, sucks. It's boring and people are constantly annoyed by your presence.
Now, imagine you've just had to yank a passenger out of the line because your wand went off, or opened up a bag and search all through it it because something odd showed up on the X-ray.
And that "something" turns out to be some clever political statement on a piece of sheet metal.
How would you feel? Would you feel "reminded" about the Bill of Rights? I doubt it. Unless, of course, you're a bright progressive who just happens to work as a security screener. Then you'd get it. Because you're smart. You will so appreciate the irony that you won't at all mind wasting your time.
There's not much metal in a 79-cent plastic box cutter. Much less metal, in fact, than what's in a 2.5" by 3.5" piece of sheet metal that is unidentifiable until inspected.
This isn't about "unreasonable search and seizure." It's about the consequences of adolescent provocation and not, as Doctorow would have it, evidence of the "deep crap" we're in.
October 15, 2003
Who knows what proceeds, in the mind of a Cat? Thus spoke Flavius bar Knuckel on the occasion of his tabby Algernon's leap from a fourth floor balcony in pursuit of a wayward moth.
Yesterday, for reasons probably involving the savage pursuit of a strange cat that wandered into the general vicinity of her food dish, Bob the Cat vanished from the gated deck. This would have involved squeezing her considerable bulk through the small space between the bottom of the railing and the deck itself, and then a five-foot leap to ground. Once, shortly after we moved to the Manor, I saw her undertake such a leap in pursuit of another cat, and she was only brought to heel by my startled yelp. Yesterday, no one was around, and so she took off around 1PM.
Which was cause for great concern, for, being Fat and Domesticated, Bob is not wise in the ways of forest, skunk and motorcar.
Eventually, a downpour and merciless hunger brought her back around five AM, none the worse for wear.
Which was, honestly, a great way to wake up. Bob has been my boon companion for six years, now, ever since the night she wobbled out of the church graveyard like a witch's familiar and demanded that I take her home. I had resigned myself to the idea that she might exit my life as mysteriously as she had entered it, and was pleased that she decided that a warm dry house, a cat-shaped dent on the futon, and a regular supply of kibble--even Iams Diet Kibble--was preferable to a life of rain, mud, and strange creatures.
And then, this morning: driving winds along the river as I rode the ferry. The good, back-stiffening, blustery kind, that seem to blow through me and energetically cleanse me, as though my head is some sort of shiny Van de Graaf generator charged by the swift movement of the air.
(In case you haven't gathered by now, nothing of substance will be offered in this post)
And so, because of a missing Bob and a windy day, I feel somewhat lightened, today. No real reason, just as there was no real reason for several weeks' worth of heavy brooding and out-of-sorts-ness.
Hmmm...if I could put a missing pet and wind into a pill, I'd make a fortune...or, alternately, if I could restrain myself, I'd make more sense.
Avast!
To the oars!
October 17, 2003
Today, Wired offers an interesting article about the increased use of technology by the oppressed of the world. Taliban executions of women and the mutilations of men are recorded by brave women concealing cameras under their burqas. Phillippino natives use cameras as shields against sugar company workers trying to forcibly relocate them. Camcorder evidence convicted some of those responsible for the slaughter of 7,000 male Muslims Srebrenica.
But woven throughout Wired's technological account is an attempt to link the struggles of some of our own American "activists" with those of the truly oppressed. From the Video Activist Network's web site:
The San Francisco Video Activists' Network presents the story you won't see on Fox News: an unflinching look at the Bay Area's radical resistance to an illegal and horrific war.
"We Interrupt This Empire..." is a collaborative work by many of the Bay Area's independent video activists which documents the direct actions that shut down the financial district of San Francisco in the weeks following the United States' invasion of Iraq. With the audio backdrop including the live broadcasts of SF Indymedia's Enemy Combatant Radio and the SFPD's tactical communications that were picked up by police scanners, the documentary takes a look at the diverse show of resistance from the streets of San Francisco as well as providing a critique of the coporate [sic] media coverage of the war and exploring such issues as the Military Industrial Complex, attacks on civil liberties, and the United States' current imperialist drive.
Do these people really care about anything but their own sense of moral worth, or their own public righteousness?
Did they actually watch the footage of the anonymous figure in the flowing blue burqa, kneeling in a soccer field somewhere in Afghanistan? Did they notice the bullet puff into the dirt in front of her after it passed through her skull?
The "United States' current imperialist drive" put a stop to that.
Craig Baldwin, Bay-area producer of "unusual and experimental film," called "We Interrupt This Empire"
...a clear picture of what's left of an American conscience in the midst of this national horror-show--this is the best damn doc I've seen on the local face of what might have been the largest anti-war movement in world history.
Again, I am forced to ask a question: what constitutes "an American conscience" to people such as Mr. Baldwin?
I find a profound disconnect between such professions of conscience and the atrocities we know have taken place in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Does this disconnect exist because there has been no footage of Iraqis going feet-first into the plastic shredder? Is it because there haven't been enough photographs of the mass graves in the desert, or of the men without tongues and ears?
Clearly not. The severed hands and bloodied dust of Afghanistan are well-represented by images both moving and still, and there is no acknowledgement by these "activists" that American action there was warranted for any reason. So, it must be something else. Perhaps it is some high moral standard--that if we act in the world, it must be selfless. Perhaps the "activist" ideology holds that where our national interests and the human interests of others intersect, we must avoid taking any action that would benefit us as well as those in need, and can thereby achieve some sort of societal moral purity.
I have realized, however, that even that twisted ethic doesn't quite explain the disconnect between professions of conscience and real-world atrocity that I perceive. I came to that realization while listening to Martin "Duct Tape" Sheen talk about himself on television recently.
I saw Sheen on Bravo's Inside The Actor's Studio. He is a well-known "activist," with somewhere around 40 protest-related arrests on his record. Being in an auditorium full of Incipient Thespians, this facet of his life was of course brought up for discussion. While describing his spirituality--a self-styled "Catholicism" that apparently involves "becoming heaven" when you die--he said something that I found to be one of the most self-involved, blinkered examples of the "activist" mentality I've ever come across.
I'll have to paraphrase it, because Bravo offers no transcripts. When discussing his protest activism, he said that although he was aware that he, himself, could effect no change in the world, he couldn't "not do it [i.e. protest] and still be [him]self."
Actually effecting real change is no goal of his, because he thinks it's impossible.
Now, one interpretation of this is that he views himself as "one voice among many." But he made no mention of that, and never alluded to the necessity of the involvement of others. It was all about him. All the protesting, all the public declarations of righteous indignation, all the labeling of America as the "land of the lunatics"...all of it is rooted in his self-definition. In his sense of who he is. In his conception of his spirituality. It is an expression of his rights. Of his desire to "improve America."
When describing a film that portrays a bound man's throat being brutally slashed apart by Islamofascists, the author of the Wired article writes that it
...is one of many such clips that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan published online to document atrocities committed by Islamic fundamentalists long before extremists flew airplanes into buildings Sept. 11, 2001.
But where does actually stopping these atrocities fall within the set of some Bay area "activists'" priorities?
Apparently far below depicting the "diverse show of resistance from the streets of San Francisco," or achieving self-congratulatory coverage of "the largest anti-war movement in world history." A movement, it should be noted, that not only failed to stop the war, but failed to do anything at all to ease the suffering of the people with which the movement was ostensibly concerned.
For twelve years, Peter Gabriel's Witness organization has been providing the means to capture evidence of atrocities ranging from the systematic rape of children in Africa to the oppression of indigenous people by oil companies in the Amazonian basin. Mental Disability Rights International used imaging technology to close psychiatric clinics in Mexico that were rife with abuse. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan showed the world what the Taliban mullahs were really all about.
And what do groups like Video Activist Network do?
Record themselves being righteous in public.
They don't belong in the same article as organizations like Witness, the MDRI, and RAWA.
Shame on Wired, for conflating the naïve, privileged ethics of spoiled Americans with the ethics of those in the world who are truly suffering. And shame on those Americans who, because of their irrational hatred of a single man and their neurotic opposition to the very concept of an American national interest, would let thousands suffer and die in perpetuity so that they can better serve their own moral satisfaction.
So, Dubya--you're landing on aircraft carriers and congratulating troops on a job well done with a sock stuffed in your flightsuit...and you're allowing this bullshit to go on?
Hundreds of sick and wounded U.S. soldiers including many who served in the Iraq war are languishing in hot cement barracks here while they wait -- sometimes for months -- to see doctors.
The National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers' living conditions are so substandard, and the medical care so poor, that many of them believe the Army is trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. One document shown to UPI states that no more doctor appointments are available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 -- Veterans Day.
Paging Doctor Frickin' Winkenwerder! [See the Doc's contact info below--IAW]
Reservists and National Guard members are covered under the military's regionally managed health care service, called TRICARE. According to the literature,
When on military duty you are covered for any injury, illness or disease incurred or aggravated in the line of duty. This includes traveling directly to or from the place where you perform your military duty. When on active duty for more than 30 days, you have comprehensive health care coverage under TRICARE Prime.
According to the UPI article,
Another Army Reservist with the 149th Infantry Battalion said he has had real trouble seeing doctors about his crushed foot he suffered in Iraq. "There are not enough doctors. They are overcrowded and they can't perform the surgeries that have to be done," that soldier said. "Look at these mattresses. It hurts just to sit on them," he said, gesturing to the bunks. "There are people here who got back in April but did not get their surgeries until July. It is putting a lot on these families."
This doesn't sound like "comprehensive health care coverage" to me.
The office of the Lead Agent for distribution of medical care in the Southeast (Region 3) is located at the Eisenhower Army Medical Center at Fort Gordon in Georgia. If this doesn't sound like comprehensive health care coverage to you, either, you can reach that office at the following numbers:
Director: 706-787-9537
Deputy Director: 706-787-2105
Secretary: 706-787-7533
FAX: 706-787-8030/1709/3024
Or:
Office of the Director
TRICARE Health Services Region 3 (Southeast)
ATTN: LASE Bldg 38801
Fort Gordon, GA 30905-5650
The entire directory for the Region 3 office can be found here.
If you're antsy about calling up the Army on the phone, I recommend a faxed or written letter.
If you contact anyone associated with the Lead Agent's office, be polite. But let them know that if the UPI account is accurate, such treatment of our fighting men and women is absolutely unacceptable.
---
An even better bet is to drop a line to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, who's in charge of the whole mess:
william.winkenwerder@ha.osd.mil
Dr. William Winkenwerder, Jr., M.D.
Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs
Office of the Secretary of Defense
1200 Defense Pentagon
Room 3E1082
Washington, D.C. 20301
And, as Reynolds reminds us, the story is subject to verification. But: it's always a good idea to let the Powers That Be know they're being watched by their bosses...that is, the citizenry.
October 20, 2003
I'm sure you've all heard about the junior at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C. who snuck a L'il Terrorist Helper Kit onto two planes.
Aside from the fact that any yahoo who would try to hijack a plane with a boxcutter would immediately be pummeled into submission by everyone on board...I think that Nathaniel Heatwole deserves our thanks.
For instance:
Although Heatwole sent an e-mail to federal authorities saying he had placed the items aboard two specific Southwest Airlines flights, it took authorities nearly five weeks to find them.
Five weeks. Imagine if Heatwole had sent e-mails saying "I've planted bombs n board two planes." How long would US air travel have been disrupted?
Furthermore,
Deputy TSA Administrator Stephen McHale said Monday's court action ``makes clear that renegade acts to probe airport security for whatever reason will not be tolerated, pure and simple.''
``Amateur testing of our systems do not show us in any way our flaws,'' McHale said. ``We know where the vulnerabilities are and we are testing them ... This does not help.''
Yeah, well this "amateur" snuck enough kits about for a repeat of the New York portion of 9/11, bud.
Don't want to tolerate that? Then button up, jackass!
Not to mention the fact that Heatwole
breached security at Raleigh-Durham airport on Sept. 12 - the day after the two-year anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. He did it again Sept. 15 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, the affidavit said.
October 21, 2003
Today, more web-based terrorism. You may or may not be aware that Hosting Matters, a hosting service that provides a home for InstaPundit, Little Green Footballs, Spleenville, and others, has been subject to yet another DOS attack. [A denial of service attack floods the host servers with so many page requests that legitimate requests cannot be fulfilled, thus shutting down the website]. The actual target, apparently, was a pro-Israeli site hosted by Hosting matters.
But DOS attack also takes down all the other sites hosted on a particular server.
It's the mentality I would expect, really. If your opponent is the Israeli government, blow up a cafe and kill as many Jews as possible, whether they agree with the government's policies or not. If your opponent is a website that supports Israel, crash the whole server, whether the other sites on that server support Israel or not.
What we need now is the hacking equivalent of the US Marines, to go in, find the DOS enemy, and take them out.
The Gematriculator is a service that uses the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is.
Basically, Gematria is searching for different patterns through the text, such as the amount of words beginning with a vowel. If the amount of these matches is divisible by a certain number, such as 7 (which is said to be God's number), there is an incontestable argument that the Spirit of God is ever present in the text. Another important aspect in gematria are the numerical values of letters: A=1, B=2 ... I=9, J=10, K=20 and so on. The Gematriculator uses Finnish alphabet, in which Y is a vowel.
Experts consider the mathematical patterns in the text of the Holy Bible as God's watermark of authenticity. Thus, the Gematriculator provides only results that are absolutely correct.
And, thus, the absolutely correct gooditude quotient of Astonished Head is 71%.
God and numerology be praised!
October 24, 2003
Man, every so often I just get the OVERWHELMING URGE to like leap around the place tearing off my shirt and going B-B-B-BO-GABANJII-HOOO-WABEEEE!!! And there would be lots of pancakes involved and bottles of vodka and small explosive devices and crates of mangos and the occasional monkey, plus an assortment of colorful party favors and flying vegetables that would startle the cat and alarm the neighbors. By GOD, it's time to get the autogyro out of the shed and wing spinning naked through the sky, because I'm damned if I'm going to let the Governor forget that he owes me a weekend in the guest wing at the North Fork estate, and if I show up with a boxcar full of booze and trollops then it's his own damned fault!!! Yes! Yes! Bring it on! Unintelligible manna from the heavens is the next best thing to having a really well-groomed rose bush at the center of your hedge maze, and if there's one thing I've learned from three decades in the service and four wars it's that no one...no one turns down a stiff belt in a muddy foxhole filled with the bits and pieces of your buddies-in-arms!
By god, let's make this an election year to remember!!!
And your little dog tooooo!
October 26, 2003
I like him.
But this week's made-up word goes to classicist raisin-farmer Victor Davis Hanson, for gloomfy.
I know what he meant.
You know what he meant.
We all know what the typographers missed.
But Christ almighty, a pillar ought to show some damn respect for the language.
[Note: I am not a pillar, nor a classicist raisin-farmer. Therefore, the language is but taffy in my hands. And gloomfy is pretty cool.]
October 27, 2003
Every so often I will ignore the advice of my freshman Poetry professor and "out-clever" myself. Or it seems that I do...perhaps I am actually heeding his advice, and not doing so, by being well-attuned to the possibility. Or not.
Whether I am doing so (or not), the psychological symptoms are the same: anxiety, a dread feeling of overexposure, and an acute sense of the utter futility of my contribution towards a solution to any of the world's problems.
It's all neurosis, I'm sure, but that doesn't stop me from being surly and combative, or surly and withdrawn, or just surly.
At times like this, news and events pile up and collapse into total disorder. The ostensibly anti-war organization ANSWER offered unconditional support to the "the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance," which means that ANSWER is all for blowing up the Red Cross and killing Iraqis, as long as it's done in the name of resistance. President-cum-czar Vladimir Putin might be systematically expropriating Jewish property on a scale unseen since 1930s Germany. Krugman's half-a-good-point is once again lost in the midst of his jerking knees. Meanwhile, significant portions of the West and massive portions of the East lend credence to the idea that the Joooos Run The World, those who rushed to put "human shields" in front of Sadaam are nowhere to be found while the Red Cross gets car-bombed, and Ted Rall just hates Dubya because that's what's really important...and all this is just one minor part of the Big Slog of crap! that the monkeys are doing and saying and jumping around the jungle about today.
Right now all I feel absolutely justified in saying is *PFBTHBFTH!*
And there you have it.
October 29, 2003
UC Berkely linguistics professor George Lakoff, author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," has a theory to explain the current bafflement within the Democratic party. Lakoff's interviewer sums up for us:
Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff.
The work has paid off: by dictating the terms of national debate, conservatives have put progressives firmly on the defensive.
Of course, there's more to this than conservatives "dictating" the terminology used in the national debate, just as there's more to the interviewer's use of the word "dictating" to summarize what Lakoff actually said. When asked why progressives haven't been able to match the conservatives' long-term linguistic and language-framing strategies, Lakoff answers
There's a systematic reason for that. You can see it in the way that conservative foundations and progressive foundations work. Conservative foundations give large block grants year after year to their think tanks. They say, 'Here's several million dollars, do what you need to do.' And basically, they build infrastructure, they build TV studios, hire intellectuals, set aside money to buy a lot of books to get them on the best-seller lists, hire research assistants for their intellectuals so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV. They do all of that. Why? Because the conservative moral system, which I analyzed in "Moral Politics," has as its highest value preserving and defending the "strict father" system itself. And that means building infrastructure. As businessmen, they know how to do this very well.
Meanwhile, liberals' conceptual system of the "nurturant parent" has as its highest value helping individuals who need help. The progressive foundations and donors give their money to a variety of grassroots organizations. They say, 'We're giving you $25,000, but don't waste a penny of it. Make sure it all goes to the cause, don't use it for administration, communication, infrastructure, or career development.' So there's actually a structural reason built into the worldviews that explains why conservatives have done better.
Two things need definition, here, and I'll let Lakoff do that:
...the progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible.
And:
The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline.
Got that? "Progressive" equals "nurturing empathy." "Conservative" equals "physical punishment." Progressives love children. Conservatives think children are bad and need to be beaten. Keep in mind that this is part of the worldview that informs Lakoff's "nonpartisan" think-tank, the Rockridge Institute.
Lakoff's foundation in linguistics informs his political thinking. As seen in the passages above, and elsewhere in the interview, he believes that the conservatives have trumped the progressives because of the highly effective methodology they use in framing language. "Over the last 30 years," Lakoff says, "[the conservatives'] think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and language."
It's obvious from his own choice of terms--not to mention his place of employment--where his sympathies lie. And--like Noam Chomsky, another linguist who has moved somewhat beyond his expertise--Lakoff's politics are based on the assumption that ordinary people, lacking his expertise in language and what words really mean, are easily duped. In his linguist's mind, the reason that conservatives are ascendant is not because of the quality or appeal of their ideas, but because of their wizard-like mastery of the incantations of language. Only such massive manipulation of the public debate can account for the failure of an obviously morally superior ideology to catch fire with people who are, after all, naturally good.
However, by Lakoff's own admission, the conservatives have made a systematic and highly effective effort to define their intellectual and moral positions, to refine the ways in which those positions are expressed, to educate and support those who represent their ideas, and to submit their ideas to the public square for absorption and debate. Furthermore, Lakoff maintains that this success, and the progressives' subsequent befuddlement, has its foundation in the very essence of each respective ideology.
To be fair: Lakoff, hopefully, develops his ideas with more detail and subtlety in his longer written works. But it is often in spoken comments that a person reveals what comes most easily to his or her mind. And, while Lakoff has made ample terminological choices which indicate that he finds conservative ideology to be less than desirable (i.e., "strict," "painful," "punishment," etc.), there is no acknowledgement whatsoever that there is any value at all in discipline or in the deliberate assumption of moral authority. Both the "discipline" and the "moral authority" that Lakoff invokes are caricatures, intended to resonate with the progressives' fear of patriarchy, misogyny, and abuse of power.
The irony is that it is a lack of discipline and authority at the core of what Lakoff calls progressive ideology that accounts for the failure of that ideology to be persuasive in the public debate. According to him, progressives failed in this crucial task due to their overwhelming devotion to "the cause," which is "helping individuals who need help." The progressives' focus on "the cause" instead of the improvement of individuals who might best promote that cause has combined with their neglect of those who seek to be convinced by argument rather than by a demonstrated devotion to some supposedly self-evident morality. The end result? Progressives are actually failing to serve their own cause, by minimizing both the persuasiveness and pervasiveness of their ideas.
As Lakoff has said, this failure has its roots in the very core of the progressive ideology. He also maintains that the propagation of a worldview is the conservatives' only goal, and that this goal comes at the expense of the true and proper morality that is the object of the progressives' devotion.
The problem is, by placing their idealism above the practical realties of political interaction and intellectual ferment, those who profess what Lakoff calls a progressive ideology are merely satisfying their own moral sensibilities, rather than effecting real cultural and political change.
I am neither a "progressive" or a "conservative," in any of the senses stated or implied by Lakoff. His definitions are theoretical constructs, with few connections to the real world outside of his university campus. In that world, people want their leadership to be able to effect change. They don't want leaders who are burdened by an ideology that is so internally crippled that it cannot even promote itself, let alone run the country.
That's why the Democratic party is floundering, and until it reconnects with the practical realities of this culture and this nation, it will continue to do so.
---
AS I WAS SAYING...
"The conservative movement has really built up an infrastructure of not just ideas, but the ability to kind of get out there and do the kind of hard communications work to sell to the American public."
So says John Podesta, former Clinton chief of staff and founder of--you guessed it--another new progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress.
That's twice in two days.
I think there's some strategizin' going on here.
I wonder what they'll say in 30 years if, after all the think-tanking, infrastructure building, and so forth, the American polity still rejects the "progressive" platform? We'll see when we get there, I suppose.
Via cut on the bias.
October 30, 2003
Bwaa-ha-ha-haaaa! Folks are maybe getting a bit of a clue about Mr. Moore: he's an actor, not an activist.
From Sullivan.
October 31, 2003
I drove home from Connecticut, facing into a wall of orange sky the whole way, a towering, California ash-fed spectacle pierced by the highway ribbon in front of me and bordered by the trees to either side. Hypnotic and time-rending, it carried me back ten years or so, and I felt my head nod to one side as the Cocteau Twins on the tape deck orchestrated the mood.
Which is not so good when you're barrelling down the Thruway at 80+ miles per hour. Every time the ephemeral toot-toot flutes of drifty time-neutral sensation would buoy me, I'd come to and realize that I'd gone up a slight grade and slowed down by 15 mph or so, and that people in the fast lane were riding my ass, and that if someone ahead of me had thrown a tire or something I'd be chewing an airbag.
This was hammered home when I passed by a left-lane three-car pileup involving a minivan that had become one with the guardrail and two other well-smahsed cars that had spun around and were facing me from the shoulder amid glittering bits of themselves. Everyone was out and walking around and cell-phoning, but it was enough to make me snap-to, for awhile.
Then the towering colored atmospherics would kick in again, offering acute sensations of looking across the surface of a planet through a thick layer of its atmosphere and then out into space where the sun's photons shower. I felt youthful, and even though I was hurtling along in my Honda o'doom I puffed the feeling up, trying to loft it like a lung-filled balloon, to keep it from vanishing and bringing me back down to earth.
Because that feeling, whatever it was, the sheer sensation of hey, look at that! reminded me of a drastic void in my life, something that I lost along the way, something that I put down in the haste of the past five years or so, and left behind in a small box in a closet somewhere. I wanted more of it, I needed more of it, and so I traded several minutes' worth of 80-mile per hour safety to experience it, to hold it gently, to get into it, so that I would know what it felt like, and could find those things in my life that would create more of it.
I kept it up until the sun sank behind a black hill speeding by, leaving a patch of pumpkin-colored sky behind it.
Must search that feeling out.
Must find the things in my life that bring it forth.
Must...
must...
must.
November 07, 2003
There are a number of discussions and posts and whatnot that I've come across this week, in various places that I'm not going to link to because I'm a lazy, lazy man. Or a bored man or a depressed man or both or all three. The Tripartite Man O' Disaffection, that is I, I, Donkey Hotay.
These discussions and posts and whatnot were about matters that in other times would fire up the blood in my brain...topics like the place and value of religion in the history of humanity and so forth. But there is no heat left in my brain...I see the posts and the discussion threads and I just...don't...care. It's not that I don't have an opinion, necessarily, it's that I'm not motivated to package it up and post it here for the enjoyment or to the consternation of My Public.
Dunno why. But this week has been a dry brainsponge sort of week, and a drier heart sort of week, with little passion for much of anything, and certainly no motivation to taptaptap at the keyboard and Be Interesting.
Fortunately, the weekend is nigh, and maybe after the completion of some household tasks and other activities I'll rebound and feel like regaling you all with Tales Of The New Window or the Gutter That Ate My Ass or what have you. Or not. Who knows, not me!
Sometimes, I feel like Robocop. You know, like in the second movie, after the OCP goons have reprogrammed his brain so that he spouts proverbs instead of kicks ass? "I'm...having trouble," he admits in his stilted RoboVoice, and twitches and whirrs a bit.
Just you wait. Soon I'll be slinging my automatic pistol from its special niche in my mechanical thigh and blowing up bad guys.
Or something.
Grrr.
I'm often amused by the sheer myopic obsession of certain segments of the polity, who have dedicated themselves to the Bush Is Bad philosophy so thoroughly that the tiniest detail becomes an occasion to celebrate their faith.
Take, for example, this breathless expostulation from Web Presence Cory Doctorow:
IRS has a $1MM tax-refund form
How much is Dubya's tax-break worth to the hyperrich? Enough that the IRS has a new form for the electronic deposit of a tax refund of $1 million or more. 28k PDF Link. [emphasis in original]
Trouble is, that form--Form 8302, to be exact--has been in use for awhile.
For example, this older version of the Instructions for IRS Form 1039 document was last revised in May 1995...five years before Bush took office. It refers to "Form 8302, Application for Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) of Tax Refund of $1 Million or More." So do other pre-Bush tax documents.
This means, of course, that the "hyperrich" were getting mammoth tax refunds long before Bush was in office enacting his Tax Breaks For The Wealthy(TM). Imagine that.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go beat my servants.
---
UPDATE:
After receiving a note from me containing the above information (minus the editorializing), Cory revised his post...by crossing out the word "new."
I think he may have missed the point.
November 11, 2003
Several years ago I temped for a summer at a mortgage company in New Jersey. My job was to make copies of mortgage files. If you've ever gone through the process, you know that a mortgage application and its related paperwork are a chaotic mélange of legal-size paper, standard-size paper, checks, check-stubs, receipts, and oddly sized forms, all stapled and paper-clipped together in an unwieldy mass that can be several inches thick. Copying these brown-foldered monstrosities was a real pleasure, as you might imagine. I performed this task during a sudden rate-plunge, much like the one we've been seeing recently. While I was at the company, there were so many refinances and new mortgage applications that mortgage folders were piled two feet high on top of all the file cabinets that hulked along all the walls. Two employees left on disability due to mental stress. And I tried to blow up a vending machine in the office kitchen with a bomb.
I'm still unclear about the exact chain of thought that led me to conclude that yes, it is meet that I blow up this vending machine. I know it didn't have anything to do with the stress that sent two mortgage processors home gibbering and drooling--all I did was copy the applications. This lack of clarity may have something to do with a certain red plastic bubbling smoking device that I had inherited from my good long-haired friend Johnny A., and was using frequently at that stage of my life.
The vending machine in question was an older sort that isn't very common these days. It had a revolving, lazy-Susan style circular column, made up of several round trays, and divided into compartments. A row of clear plastic doors fronted the thing, and you got your item by pushing a button that rotated the circular column. When your item was lined up with one of the little plastic doors, you put in your money, slid the door aside, and got your plastic-wrapped stale-bread and questionable tuna sandwich, or your package of Ritz mini pseudo-cheese cracker things, or your Grandma's Homestyle Molasses N' Monosodium Glutamate cookies. All very Automat.
One day, I pushed the button, spun the column, lined up my food item with the plastic door, and put in my money. But something went wrong. Either the door didn't open, or the item compartment was misaligned, or some other terrible thing. I can't recall. Again, thi |
