full by definition
What's made out of vinyl, is Commodore on one side and Atari on the other, can be loaded into an old PC, sounds pretty dope (mp3s 1,2), and is programmed entirely in 6502 Assembly Language? The 8-Bit Construction Set, evidently.
It's funny that the '70s broadsheet Radical Software, which deserves an entry all its own, doesn't have one because it was so far ahead of its time as to be beyond it. It's crazy to think that they were publishing only around 10 years after Guy Debord and the Situationists published their own proposals for radical (and playful) social experiments.
It's funny because you mix these two together -- and throw in a Burning Man or two -- and you arrive at headmap.org. I don't know yet quite how to summarize what we got here, but I think it's kind of valuable. Start with these two strange and beautiful PDFs (1, 2) and head out and up from there. There may not ever be peace again, but it's nice to know that humans may benefit by getting to play with the same toys that our Tomahawk missiles do.
While on the subject of a 6502 adolescence (since mine coincided with that of the machine), I was thinking recently about tags, and the ones I knew and the ones I didn't. I had a friend in high school who was fearless, a hardcore hardwire graffiti artist, long dead now though "they be scrubbin his name for the next hundred years."
Whether I took the express bus or the 1 train to school, I'd see his tag everywhere. It was routine landscape, almost invisible for that very reason. I knew his tag long before I knew him, and I saw it around long after I saw him last.
But then also, when I'd get home at the end of the day and boot up my Atari 800, there was this other landscape, all in pixels. A landscape of cracked video games on 5.25" diskettes, moving through the sneakernet. What I'd forgotten until just now is that these pirate worlds too were also signed, tagged, and painted. I forgot how every game had to get cracked somewhere, and how you sign what you crack, and how that flash and spark were an integral part of the boot-up commute.
I recalled all that just now while browsing through Low Level All-Stars, "the best cracker tags [e.g. AVIs 1, 2, and 3] selected from over 1000 games available for the Commodore 64 computer." I don't know what it would be like to watch these without the attendant nostalgia, but I find them very moving. Now that pixels are so cheap, now that everyone's name sits somewhere in pixel form, you can feel it low level: these guys were astronauts, pilgrims, and lest we forget, teenagers. All-Stars.
ALL triplets in North Korea are being forcibly removed from parents after their birth and dumped in bleak orphanages.
The policy is carried out on the orders of Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-il, who has an irrational belief that a triplet could one day topple his regime.
(Muad'dib!)
or, "hearts, minds, and entrails." Dispatch from the Times.
"We had a great day," Sergeant Schrumpf said. "We killed a lot of people."
...
"We dropped a few civilians," Sergeant Schrumpf said, "but what do you do?"
...
"I'm sorry," the sergeant said. "But the chick was in the way."
There were a few books that were really crucial to me as a teenager. I remember reading about how to distill explosive hydrogen from liquid-plumr, from the Anarchist's Cookbook. I remember learning about how to spec type to send out for phototypesetting, that was the Graphic Designer's Handbook.
But neither of these proved as valuable in the bubble 90s as the book that gave me the skills -- and the reasons -- to do hex-dec conversions quickly in my head. "Machine Language For Beginners" now online in its entirety, is like browsing the atomic structure of my own memory, but in 8-bit form. It's somehow amazing to see how it all comes down to nothing more than a dozen HTML pages. It's like a life that comes down to snapshots, but the snapshots ain't even personal.
I'm down to one typing hand for a while, btw, so there'll be a lot more I than O while the wrist heals. Mouse-based diversions welcome.
I am uglier outside of New York. Part of the morning in Utah. Afternoon in Seattle. After a while the rat-a-tat-tat of healthy complexions and bare midriffs and exposed thonglines and insouciant priviledge becomes totally overwhelming. I miss the pallor of my friends. I do.
On the other hand, outside of New York and Seattle, Americans are fucking humongous. SLC, case in point. You *cannot* buy a non-KingSize Snicker's at SLC airport.
Hersh in Monday's New Yorker, or, rather, an unnamed source in Hersh in Monday's New Yorker: "They've got no resources. [Rummy] was so focused on proving his point -- that the Iraqis were going to fall apart," the article, by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, cited an unnamed former high-level intelligence official as saying." (via Yahoo)
quagmire - c.1580, from obsolete quag "bog, marsh" + mire. Quag is a variant of M.E. quabbe "a marsh, bog," from O.E. *cwabba "shake, tremble." Extended sense of "difficult situation" is first recorded 1775.
Iraq ain't the marshiest place in the world, but interesting that there's a little "shock and awe" in the Old English cwabba. At least it got Rumsfeld's goat.
public service as only the web can provide: What is this pill? Or go straight to the Oxy.
An assessment of Sadaam's "bunker-buster"-proof bunker, by its architect, German Karl Esser.
Let's see, 3-ton Swiss-made doors, 2 escape tunnels, one leading to the Tigris river, a water tank, electricity generator, air filter, 30 square meter command center and so-called electromagnetic pulse protection system -- to shield electrical circuits from the impact of an explosion. Able to withstand a 230 kg bomb. Presumably the German Government has the blueprints.
THE MERITS OF WAR - Two Intellectuals and a Drunk Give the Final Word
CIA, making friend. "Mike came to the meetings in shorts and did not even bother to say hello to us. We did it for the money," the man said.
Great wrap-up of the handling of turkey, in yesterday's wash. post: ""Turkish support is assured" for a war with Iraq, Wolfowitz told reporters." via the essential Josh Marshall.
Rob Walker reports (for no one but himself and now you) about the global McBacklash: "a kind of brand blowback happening on a worldwide scale." Lots of pictures, too.
why can't one single piece of "coalition" propaganda be right? Now it turns out the iraqis have good clothes. "The Iraqi army seems to be better clothed than we are. We are supposed to look like professional soldiers, but we don't. I look like a tramp."
Hello,
i´m a new member in this group.
My name is O----- and i´m living in germany and i´m 37 years old.
My big love are steam-locomotives and arts, painting, writing,
nature,films, friends and many more.
Beginner in modelbuilding.
Talk and writing about friends.
Sorry about my english language mistakes, i do my best.
I found this group "nudists talk about their model trains" accidental,
i never know from it before, it makes me curious to learn about more.
Change mails with other members who interessted in railway and trains.
Guys and artists they have phantasies and inspiartions to build or
paint on a own world.
I´m searching for others, they life in an true love relationship with
machines, trains, steam-locomotives, models or other things.
I have a german yahoo-group for all objectsexual feel peoples
"http://de.groups.yahoo.com/group/objektojan"
I´m not interessted to have sex with other guys, i´m only interessted
to love steam-locomotives and all about this theme.
I´m happy anyone write me in english or germany
Now you feel free and write me about your special love for trains
take care
as soon
o-----
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/modelrailroadnudists/
want to win a prize?
encapsulate news events
in three simple lines
Take this military analysis with a grain of sand, but it does contain some interesting thoughts on just how difficult this war really is. For instance:
"The general Iraqi is not getting the word that these ["surgical strikes", "precision bombing" death by GPS] are to protect him and attacking the leadership. All he knows is that he and those around him are surviving the vaunted assaults from the U.S."
We're doing this for you don't you see?
from the guardian's brief squib about the language of GWII: "Open sources: Amid the fog, or sandstorm, of war the military often do not have a clue what is going on. This is the term used by military spokesmen when they have to rely on reports by journalists to tell them what is happening. With hundreds of journalists "embedded" with the military, many reports are unlikely to come as a great surprise, however."
It's not going to be ok, not at all. There's going to be a lot of civilian deaths, there's going to be a lot of dead American kids over there.
This may not be news per se, but it's just that it's becoming clear, it's not like the Iraqi people -- or their generals -- are idiots. Any more than the Viet Cong were. All of this much on my mind after reading, for example, this:
According to satellite reconnaissance it seems likely that the Iraqis had time to remove the captured Apache Longbow attack helicopter of the 11th Aviation Regiment. The pieces remaining at the landing site following a US bombing strike indicate that the bombs hit a crudely constructed mockup.
Every time I read about stuff like that the Iraqis pull off, I think, yes, well that's exactly what any of us would have done. That's not a good sign, because what the Iraqis do is working. Calculate the cost alone of that helicopter and two precision guided missiles. No tax rebate this year, count on that.
It's a grim view, and not the one on the news, in general. But that quote -- and this whole grimness in general, actually -- are from aeronautics.ru -- a russian site that seems to have a more direct line on the bad news as it rolls in. Bad news being, in this case, real news. Maybe.
Maybe.
The sandstorm reminds me of the crazy god-shit in the ark-opening scene in Indiana Jones. Wouldn't that be awesome? If God himself kept the Americans from rolling into Baghdad? I'd convert for that.
my kind of soldier, quoted in the times: "You went outside to smoke in this?" asked Sergeant Major Torres. "I would," interjected Sergeant Murray, handing along a piece of military wisdom given to him, "You've got to embrace the suck."'
soon, he may have to give it a big bear hug.
The "Axis of Evil" thing was no joke. Next up: Iran (2.0MB PDF). No wait, what? We haven't finished Iraq off yet?
And to top it all off, the Bush administration apparently knew for a fact that we were going to war as early as the first week of July 2002. (Other sources claim as early as autumn of 2001.
Welcome to The New American Century.
Reports that Cheney's (lesbian) daughter was heading to Baghdad from Jordan to be a human shield were officially denied.
"A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Amman, the Jordanian capital, also denied that Cheney was on his way to Jordan: 'The embassy has no information that the U.S. vice president will arrive in Jordan Tuesday to convince one of his daughters not to travel to Iraq to join human shields opposed to war,' he said."
Looking for the videos they wouldn't show on American TV? Here you are, along with a bunch of other snuff shit.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
"I got a letter from a general at the Pentagon when the name change went through and he says it was great to have the employ of the commander of the Autobots in the National Guard."
moving personal blog from baghdad. "we start counting the hours from the moment one of the news channels report that the B52s have left their airfield. It takes them around 6 hours to get to Iraq." via robotwisdom.
Better than I expected 32%
Not as well as I expected 19%
I wish it were over 49%
Russian Military Analyst, Vladimir Slipchenko, tells it like it probably is.
"I see the main purpose of the war as being the large-scale real-life testing by the United States of sophisticated models of precision weapons."
"It should be observed that the Pentagon buys from the military-industrial complex only those weapons that have been tested in conditions of real warfare and received a certificate of quality on the battlefield... the present suppliers of precision weapons to the Pentagon are also constantly developing new types of arms and they must also be tested. The US military-industrial complex demands testbed wars from its country's political leadership. And it gets them."
When asked to speculate on the cost of the war, he gives a startling answer: "We will never know the exact figure of expenditure, if only because the war will be partly funded by private companies offering the Pentagon their experimental models of precision weapons for free in the hope of future dividends. The program for rearming the US Armed Forces is about $600 billion. Therefore today the military-industrial complex need not stint, it can give weapons to the Army for free."
Sometimes it's the stuff at the margins of a war. I can't even determine the veracity of this one, let alone the morality of it. But sending pizza and soda to the Israeli Defense Forces wins for the least expected combinant dove-hawk DNA.
"Pepsi or Coca-Cola (Coke)," notes the site, "depending on the hechsher (kosher supervision) of the delivering pizzeria."
Roll your own courtesy of Ftrain.com's American Military Operation Name Generating Device.
Operation Bowel-loosening Supernova would make me want to go home to my family.
bright star steel box
bevel edge sharp edge
support hope, shining hope,
provide promise, silent promise.
sustain hope, continue
hope provide relief
provide refuge.
steady state ghost zone
blast furnace freedom train
stabilize safeguard hold the
line distant runner hold the line paul bunyan
hold the line rolling thunder
provide hope
provide comfort
provide comfort II
bright star steel box
bevel edge sharp edge
support hope, shining hope,
provide promise, silent promise.
sustain hope, continue
hope provide relief
provide refuge.
steady state ghost zone
blast furnace freedom train
stabilize safeguard hold the
line distant runner hold the line paul bunyan
hold the line rolling thunder
"I was like, nuh uh, infra dig, you know what I'm saying?"
I was riveted and quite grateful for this piece in the Times Magazine about the thinker behind the fundamentalist Islam against which we are waging war. A bold piece at a time like this.
"This is fun!" -- Walter Rodgers, a CNN embed riding with the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division reporting live tonight on CNN.
The administration's embedding policy is a stroke of genius, since apparently it takes the pesky objectivity problem out of journalism. Rodgers' reports from the frontline (and pretty much every other embed I've seen) are basically blowjobs to his new army buddies and his fellow CNN crewmembers. The only "balance" I've seen in the coverage so far was an Iraqi Parliament member who ABC somehow got on the phone with Peter Jennings and in his 2 minutes of airtime, answered Jennings' silly question about "are you happy or scared about the bombing that's going on around you?" with an incredulous laugh, and then proceeded to launch into the parallels with the British occupation pre-WWII, in which the Brits used Iraq as a huge gas station, after which he was abruptly cut off for a commercial break.
When truth itself parodies and throws its own stones, in the form of pre-roll dotgov satellite feeds, broadcast on the BBC.
It would be nice if there were legions of acerbic and brilliant critics of the war. (and all props to Sen. Byrd.) But at least there's David Rees. "All I have to say is, Once this is over, the Iraqi people better be the freest fucking people on the face of the earth. They better be freer than me. They better be so fucking free they can fly."
I Got Your Jingo Lingo Right Here Pal, some favorites (look 'em up, kids!) being
AD-V
APLA
CAS
CLADS
COE
D&V
GOTS
GVS
HERB
MCCM
PK
and
THEEP
My favorite, though, among them, is OC, which is a puzzle within a puzzle. It stands for "Oleoresin Capsicum," and how the acronym is fleshed out by that plaintext is unclear to me. But google knows, Oleoresin Capsicum is "used for processed meat, fish and vegetables, soups, sauces, seasonings and dressings, baked foods, confectionery, snacks and beverages, and just about any food product imaginable."
Oh, or people. You can use it also on people, which is why it's acronymmed over at usmc.mil. Because that's Why We Fight. Or How. How We Fight.
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." -- Hermann Goering
"I was disappointed to see Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's
comments ... they may not give comfort to our adversaries, but they come
mighty close." -- Dennis Hastert
quoth Donny Rumsfeld at Pentagon briefing just now.
Great.
Coalition of the Willing
Operation Iraqi Freedom (makes one nostalgic for Operation Desert Storm)
Junior Bush the Criminal
Shock and Awe
Heebie Jeebies
M.O.A.B.
EBomb
Hammertime
(please expand)
Ok, so I was trying to figure out what CNN might mean by saying that:
"When Bush's ultimatum expires, around 8 p.m. ET Wednesday, virtually the brightest moon of the month will be hanging over Iraq throughout the night, which is not considered ideal for the U.S. military which "owns the night."
I never really found out, but I did learn that "the sniping profession is misunderstood by many." And that there are "Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTP) for "Owning the Night!'"
Just in time for the Purim gift-giving season: USB toothbrush & USB hotpot. Stolen from Noah's blog.
dot gov, indeed: Former Vice President Al Gore Joins Apple’s Board of Directors
so the DoD will be taking back those GPS satellites for a while. (lifted from slashdot.)
Well, looks like it's dot gov day here on satorg, so here's my contribution, nestled deep underneath Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, itself nuzzling within the treasury department for no reasons I can quickly determine.
Deep in there is the ATF's "Kid's Page!" -- most of it pretty damn adult, but I'm quite fond of this little question, with its big answer:
Have you heard about the science fair project or school project where a student: Builds a homemade still? Lets leftover food scraps ferment and turn into alcohol?
Some people take a Boy Scout approach to fear, epitomized by the newfound popularity of the "Go Bag." The Office of Emergency Management can help you make one.
Not one to listen to the government? Then you might consult the "Martha Stewart of Emergency Home Preparedness." Or, one of our fellow citizens, who offers an illustrated guide. In fact he has more photos of his Go Bag contents than of, for example, his cats .
When the hour is upon us, do you think the cats go in the bag? Or in the river?
It was Islam, after all, that provided us with the notion of zero and the concept of algebra, so it's not surprising they're ahead of us on the SMS front. Specifically, our friends, the government of Kuwait, who will notify everyone about how the war is going via cell phone.
That seems benign, maybe even a good idea. By contrast, the thought of any direct contact between my government and my cell phone terrifies me. But my cell network protocol is different than Kuwait's.
I'm keeping my browser tuned to this CNN war correspondent's weblog for updates from the frontline in the coming days.
"Kevin Sites is a CNN correspondent, often working as a one man unit, using portable, digital technology to report, write, edit and transmit his stories from conflict areas around the world."
The Population Chimney: How AIDS is changing the population structure in developing countries.
via mwo:
"I want my country back...I'm tired of listening to fundamentalist preachers."
- Howard Dean (3/15)
it ain't the seventh sign, but it apparently is no fun at all. Rare Health Alert Is Issued by W.H.O. for Mystery Illness
The Dilemma of Rapid Industrialization:
Streets designed for <10 mph transport (walking, cycling, and such) are suddenly overtaken by road-hogging, metal monsters travelling at 30-50 mph. Invariably, someone gets hit by these horseless carriages, and invariably the (well-to-do) owner of the vehicular weapon is mobbed (sometimes beaten to death) by otherwise normal, everyday working people. Welcome to life in the fast lane. From kuro5hin.org: "Please step out of your car while we take all your money and break most of your bones"
Down the Drain
Would you dive down into an open-pit latrine for, say $1000, to retrieve a high-tech communications device? 3 die in Nairobi, Kenya, after a man dropped his cellphone while "dropping some friends off at the pool," then offered 1,000 shillings ($13.09) to anyone who would recover it. (Well over half the Kenyan population of 30 million people lives on less than $1 a day.)
Ever wish someone was making a record of all the good graffiti & handbills & stickers? wooster's fotolog.
Sometimes it's just haiku, sometimes it's just a few syllables and it makes the day kind of okay.
Daniel Trotta poses on his bed, where he says Elizabeth Smart slept for nearly a week in October.
News, from CNN. "The Rev. Irvin Baxter ... told the Associated Press that he's "75 to 80 percent sure" this description from the ninth chapter of the New Testament's Book of Revelation is a description of the pending war in Iraq. ... Here are two clues from the Book of Revelation that lead some people to think this is the end-time..."
oh, sweet jesus, kill these people, please.
I knew about Mr. Pynchon's review of the Lotion CD, but had no idea that he -- like two or three among us on Saturation -- as copywriter, had also suckled at the teat of a major military aerospace engineering firm.
Le Bluff Continue was the Paris headline, August 1908, referring to the assemblage of wood glue and bike parts poised over Le Mans. That was the Flyer No. 3, from los bros. Wright. Of course the French thought the Americans were bluffing, and that's why even today we can't use their airspace when we're bombing other countries.
Now it's 95 years later, and in a way, very little has changed. It's all shuffled, natch, now it's unclear who's bluffing who, and with what, and still no one cares what France thinks. But if you look through the portfolio of glass negative prints of William and Orville Wright, you can get a sense of the quiet drama of day-to-day R&D. Some of the photos have the full drama of old and water damaged negatives. Some of the photos show nothing more than the landscape Wilbur looked out on, wondering how it might end, or begin.
There's plenty of other images in there, but that last one's notable because they're using the glider as a kite, trying to figure out how to control the thing. Which is of course, what drone technology is all about, as le bluff continue, 95 years later.
Someday, everything will be taped or shot; we will have pictures of everything.
Many, many reasons to never take part in a rock-n-roll band photo.
89 years ago.
3 hours ago.
I'm just saying. These are simple facts, in map form. Serbian map form. Roman alphabet, Serbian maps, Archdukes and Prime Ministers, whatever we've got at hand. Black hand. Whatever we've got at the time.
two observer pieces on bush. smug president has painted u.s. into a corner and bush eats the press. makes me convinced CNN stands for "Crawford News Network."
P. Diddy works the lyrical product placement tip, plus gets into the remix business -- that is "Diddy drinks".
No news is no news.
If you have to play the game of telephone (and you do), perhaps no better plaintext than a speech this evening from Slavoj Zizek. How to be happy, was how he started his speech, and it revolved around three axioms:
1. Have everything you want, but not all the time.
2. Live in a democracy, but don't participate in it.
3. Make sure the things you want are far from you, but not too far away.
I've no idea what he actually said, this is a couple of staticky generations down from the original. But I'll run with those three until instructed otherwise. In the meantime, at least now I know that happiness is inherently hypocritical, (real video) so at least there's one bad thing that I never have to fear.
Metal kicks ass: "A flying sheep's head hit a concertgoer and fractured his skull at a concert of metal band Mayhem."
Only posting this on the long shot that I am not the last one to hear about the Langley Schools Music Project. I can't find words for this music except that it appears from the edges (canada) and the past (1977) and that it kind of hovers there even as you hold it in your hand. In your head.
The sixty voice chorus of children, working really hard to get it, to bring David Bowie from the inside out, the Beach Boys, the Eagles. And you can recognize them, the tunes, they are in there, like the image in a Ted Serios photograph, undeniably accurate and yet blurred out and burnt up. Or to be clear: accurate precisely for those same reasons.
The thing is, what advertising is good at is helping us to identify what's real and what's not.
This watermarked image, for example, is fake, but this motherfucker (similarly marked) is real, ready to run in European zines next month.
Before the invention of the blog, the great leveller was death. Like blog, it comes in so many different forms. And unlike everything else in the world, it even happens in Switzerland, ergo Boltanski's monster "Swiss Dead," 1990. Originally installed in the Museum fuer Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, it's gone now, though Switzerland stands yet.
"Jews and death," said Boltanski in an interview, "the two are too obviously interlinked. By contrast, the link between the Swiss and death is most tenuous, because there is no apparent reason why the Swiss should die."
As it turns out, it's not just Boltanski, though, and it's not just Switzerland. Everyone dies, a week at a time, and the web struggles to keep up. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of last week's dead, to catch the table that died and the Francis Bacon painting that died.
For those of you struggling with e.g., demographics, you might find more local information helpful, this week's dead broken out by markets. If we could only find a way to get the dead to buy shit, like we have with kids.
or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the mother of all bombs...
not sure exactly how it will know the difference between armed and un-armed iraqis, though.
Webster.com has added illustrations, or maybe I just noticed them. Afro is missing, but my 2nd-fave is there. But, you'll all notice, they look like shit compared to Webster's 10th.
There's a life-size snow globe in Grand Central Terminal, operated by some actual Swiss women. Free Polaroids. FYI.
Your president calls; his response during a White House press conference -- prefaced with "this is a scripted..." -- suggests that he has run out of words. Not friends, though. If you, dog, got to eat dog, best to stick to well behaved dog.
This is how they do protests in LA:
Coming down one side of Wilshire, you have the Raelians in their "birth"/incept-day suits exhorting us to "Imagine President Bush nude addressing the state of the union. Imagine Saddam Hussein nude."
Then, from the other side, a group of women led by Danny Glover, who informs us that "women are most affected by war. It is the real caregivers of this mother Earth who are most devastated."
The object of this poem is to report a theft
in progress, of everything
The top 25 Web destinations by 2002 consumer content revenue
The usual suspects (online dating, playboy, stock info, and genealogy) but a few surprises like ieee.org, and why was espn.go.com the only one actually linked?
Bush's second (first in 18 months!) prime-time news conference of his presidency was revealing in that his handlers' playbook was laid bare with every response:
1. If the reporter so much as mentions Saddam, Iraq, or war, launch into your "1441, 12 years to disarm, responsibility to protect Americans from the imminent threat, Saddam=terrorist, Iraq=terrorism" spiel. Repeat ad nauseum. They can't get enough of this.
2. If you don't unnerstand the question, or if the question is too long, run the September 11th play.
3. If the word "pray" is mentioned, you know what to do. Also, all that work you put into the State of the Union can be reused here, including the "Liberty is God's gift to each and every person" (America is God's gift to the universe) line.
4. Use the phrases "in the name of peace" and "I hope we don't have to go to war" and "protect innocent life" in every answer. The audience seems to love this.
5. If you get stuck, feel free to randomly remind any journalist at any time of what you said before, you know, the 1441, 911, 12 years thingies.
The Wolfritz doctrine, as digested, reconstituted and regurgitated by W:
"One of the things we love in America is freedom. If I may, I'd like to remind you what I said at the State of the Union: Liberty is not America's gift to the world. It is God's gift to each and every person. And that's what I believe.
I believe that when we see totalitarianism that we must deal with it. We don't have to do it always militarily, but this is a unique circumstance, because of 12 years of denial and defiance, because of terrorist connections, because of past history. I'm convinced that a liberated Iraq will be important for that troubled part of the world. The Iraqi people are plenty capable of governing themselves. Iraq's a sophisticated society. Iraq's got money. Iraq will provide a place where people can see that the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds can get along in a federation. Iraq will serve as a catalyst for change, positive change. "
Anybody who has been reading their WG Sebald lately may find this especially wrenching. One of our generals told CNN:
"This will be an overwhelming type air attack designed -- using the words of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- for shock and awe."
Whole damn story here.
Why I'm the Coolest Stud at MIT
This mofo addressed the problem of looking like a raving lunatic when talking on a cellphone headset and fricking dealt with it. (Also, note the D&D die on the table.)
How many door knobs did you touch today?
Fluxus Research: Opening and Closing Doors and Drawers
learned something new today. Which wasn't a sure thing.
"What does LD50 mean?
LD stands for "Lethal Dose". LD50 is the amount of a material, given all at once, which causes the death of 50% (one half) of a group of test animals. The LD50 is one way to measure the short-term poisoning potential (acute toxicity) of a material."
jargon watchers make note. Fifty american cents for ID'ing the source of this knowledge, and I don't mean the link above.
Not quite meta-tags: This white-on-white text on the NYPress's website shows up with just the faintest thought of highlighting (plus some more). It's a nice story, if you're a search engine.
"It was up to spiderman and shakira to stop that rotten scoundrel osama bin laden and his taliban.. First he brought down the world trade center, then he created napster‹what evil would be next? Studying the works of nostradamus, they figured the best place to catch him would either be at the world cup or the winter olympics, where he planned to unleash an envelope full of anthrax on the unsuspecting crowd. CNN caught morrowind of the plot, and predicted there would be neverwinter nights for years to come. It would be a dungeon siege when these forces came together. It would be like a battlefield 1942.
"Each man involved is an american idol," eminem told avril levigne in front of the pink gareth gates of their local Ikea. "All your base are belong to us," bin laden said in a taped message. "The battlefield will run red with los ketchup. It will be star wars. A trillian bodies will litter the sand!" Natalie Portman of the FBI had heard enough. She contacted the Pentagon and ordered operation flashpoint, which involved crashing the mir space station into Afghanistan, which soon thereafter would resemble the Planet of the Apes. Segway to Angelina Jolie, who shouted to her comrade and fellow tomb raider loana, "Hurry! We must return to castle wolfenstein! Don?t they realize that all this is designed to lead to big brother 2?"
They fled on foot, together into the night."
fela kuti said music was the weapon of the future. if that's the case, i think these bands are its weapons of mass destruction.
James Joyce, from a letter to his wife, via Esquire: "Tell me the smallest things about yourself so long as they are obscene and secret and filthy. Let every sentence be full of dirty, immodest words and sounds. . . . I am happy now, because my little whore tell me she wants me to roger her arse-ways. . . . More and dirtier than this she wants to do, my little naked fucker, my naughty wriggling little frigger, my sweet dirty little farter."
Who knows? Perhaps the next great work of literature will be written in SMS on a cellphone.
Or not.
Sometimes it's just kind of strange to find that the ether has human hands behind it. If you look up at the clouds and their shape suggests a thing, for example, it would spook you to find out the thing is really actually there, underneath.
But there it is, then, that the Nigerian Scam really has Nigerians working it. And that you can wind them up like any other machine, that you can get them to show up at a hotel, dressed in yellow. Sous les paves, la plage, yes, but sous la plage, what exactly?
A family in Nacogdoches, Tex. has put online a photo gallery of debris from the recent Space Shuttle accident.
1. 71 degrees and nothing but blue sky all day long. What the fuck are we thinking?
2. What do these people fucking *do* out here?
2a. Or, What do these fucking people *do* out here?
3. Finally saw the Gursky show, at sfmoma, and was elevated and transformed. It's something about the combination of intimacy and monumentality, of looking down as God and also being able to step into it. Maybe: This is our world. Here it is. But that's probably far too humanist a reading.
3a. Now everyone is doing the saturated-print-behind-plexiglass thing. Resistance is futile.
4. also: Rauschenberg's erased de Kooning.
5. also: Matta-Clark's Splitting: Four Corners. Saw it first about 13 years ago. Was it sagging so much then? It smells of pitch. Someone lived there.
6. Blake: "Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to endless night."
Former President Bill Clinton has been tapped for jury duty.
Stupid is a disease, says Watson (as in Crick), and so is ugly. So take some gene therapy and call me in the morning.
