The genius defines "inappropriate response"

The Onion

2008-11-28T12:00:00.006-05:00

As Peer Gynt says, I am an onion. Layers on top of layers, hiding a core.

Who am I?

Am I...

.../the things I like/the things I experience/the synthesizer of theory/the intertext/the death of the artist/the quest for meaning/...

?

Soon these layers just give way to more layers, though, and I have not found the center.

Who are you, Justin? I am but myself.

[310 Posts. 1 Year. End Blog.]

Three Lists in Three Media

2008-11-28T11:00:00.005-05:00

Some of my favourite things at this particular point in time, checks watch, and not necessarily the best:

Ten Books

the age of reason, jean-paul sartre
crime and punishment, fyodor dostoevsky
the crying of lot 49, thomas pynchon
the dead father, donald barthelme
the double hook, sheila watson
franny and zooey, j.d. salinger
nineteen eighty-four, george orwell
selected poems, t.s. eliot
the sun also rises, ernest hemingway
what we talk about when we talk about love, raymond carver

Ten Albums

come on pilgrim, pixies
enter the wu-tang (36 chambers), wu-tang clan
freak city soundtrack, material issue
a grand don't come for free, the streets
hunky dory, david bowie
in the aeroplane over the sea, neutral milk hotel
kala, m.i.a.
liquid swords, gza
london calling, the clash
odessey and oracle, the zombies

Ten Films

The Battle of Algiers (1966)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Chinatown (1974)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Dead Ringers (1988)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
The Searchers (1956)
Straw Dogs (1971)
Taxi Driver (1976)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

and 90 More for Fun in No Order

Ace in the Hole (1951)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
Alien (1979)
All the Real Girls (2003)
Akira (1988)
Annie Hall (1977)
The Apartment (1960)
Army of Darkness (1992)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Back to the Future (1985)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Beetle Juice (1988)
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Bottle Rocket (1996)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Brief Encounter (1946)
Casablanca (1942)
Children of Men (2006)
The Conversation (1974)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
The Dark Knight (2008)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Dazed and Confused (1993)
The Departed (2006)
Don't Look Now (1973)
Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Evil Dead II (1987)
Far from Heaven (2002)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Fight Club (1999)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The Fly (1986)
The French Connection (1971)
Get Carter (1971)
Ghost Busters (1984)
Ghost World (2001)
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
Goodfellas (1990)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
High Fidelity (2000)
A History of Violence (2005)
Hud (1963)
The Incredibles (2004)
Jarhead (2005)
Jaws (1975)
Jurassic Park (1993)
The King of Comedy (1982)
The Last Detail (1973)
The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
The Limey (1999)
Marathon Man (1976)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Mona Lisa (1986)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Office Space (1999)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Out of the Past (1947)
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
The Prestige (2006)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Ratatouille (2007)
The Red Shoes (1948)
Repo Man (1984)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Robocop (1987)
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Rushmore (1998)
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
Se7en (1995)
The Shining (1980)
Shivers (1975)
Solaris (1972)
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Star Wars (1977)
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
The Thin Man (1934)
The Thing (1982)
The Third Man (1948)
Three Kings (1999)
Unforgiven (1992)
Vertigo (1958)
Written on the Wind (1956)
Zodiac (2007)

Album Listen List: November 2008

2008-11-28T10:00:00.004-05:00

in listening order

live at the apollo, james brown
entertainment!, gang of four
this is england ost, various artists

God, do you think maybe I should listen to some new music? Good thing 'tis the season of best-of year-end music lists.

Film Watch List: November 2008

2008-11-28T09:00:00.004-05:00

*film has been seen previously/rewatching
†watched in theatre

in viewing order
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows (2008)
The Thing from Another World (1951)
'Breaker' Morant (1980)
Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953)
Mon oncle (1958)
Play Time (1967)
M. Butterfly (1993)
if.... (1968)
The Kite Runner (2007)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Night of the Lepus (1972)
This Is England (2006)
Factory Girl (2006)
The Hoax (2006)
In the Valley of Elah (2007)
The Last Mimzy (2007)
The Great McGinty (1940)
Atonement (2007)
The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Stats
Films watched: 20
Films previously seen: 0
Films watched in theatres: 0

Average # of films watched per day: 0.67

By Decade
1930s: 0
1940s: 2
1950s: 3
1960s: 2
1970s: 1
1980s: 1
1990s: 1
2000s: 10

Conclusion: November started to taper off, but there should be a renaissance of viewership come early to mid December when I have some time off. Just in time too, I need to rinse the terrible taste of haggis out of my mouth.

Children of the Atom

2008-11-27T09:00:00.004-05:00

Modern streamofconsciousness meets the postmodern signifying event, splitting the atom, nuclear fission, becomes reverse osmosis dialogue coition as one, the monologue:

Y'know, lately Ive been thinking about all of postmodernism, and even the beat movement etcetera that preceded it as just straight up a reaction to thermonuclear war like, just the very notion, the unthinkable idea that in seconds we could destroy our entire planet, everyone just completely threw the notion that things were important out the window and decided to live it up with the time we have left on this doomed planet and maybe even the contemporary environmental movement is the same sort of instinct of trying to preserve whats so delicate exactly, the trinity tests, life in a post-atomic world, everything changed but maybe that puts too fine a point on it though, to say its just a straight up cause and effect relationship, but maybe not, yeah, exactly when we saw ourselves from the moon, we realized how small we are but when we realized that we could just destroy ourselves, our accomplishments, our big fucking skyscrapers none of that mattered, was noticeable from space: this is it, this is where the postmodern condition comes from, even if we never use it like, so much just comes back to this idea, all of game theory, most of ethics, especailly contract ethics: it all comes back to the mushroom cloud, irreversible, hair-trigger responses to others actions, living life under the gun, mutually assured destruction, reasoning in situations of ignorance, risk, pure competition (zero-sum games i.e. we both are destoryed), mixed competition, co-operative games, it really was all invented after the bomb. Duck and cover. Talk about a pathetic resistence to your own futility: "you're not helpless!! Get under your desk, you're still in control, we promise!" It's the culture of fear, we have to scare our own people into submission: the commies will kill you, the terrorists will kill you, drugs will kill you-- and there is one person who can save you: me: "look just let me take all this money ear-marked for ummm medicine and education give it to my buddies...ahem the military industrial complex and we'll keep you safe, we'll go kill them over there!" Everything is kind of a result of this atomic moment-- what it really means that we can be destroyed in seconds. The phrase "atomic children" comes to mind, is too familiar, how this thing capable of blowing us all into stardust is really the key to great strength.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Metempsychosis

2008-11-26T18:00:00.000-05:00

Philosophy is the love of wisdom or often knowledge, but it is also very much concern for the soul. At times, it is a very obvious psychomachia or "battle for the soul." This is done through psychogogia or "a leading of the soul." That's what philosophy is, but frankly it's all Greek to me.

Metempsychosis, on the other hand, is the "transmigration of the soul." The soul aspires to freedom. The soul, like inspiration or the creative spirit, moves from one vessel to another. The soul is the text and the text is alive and produces new texts. Transmigration is intertextuality. Layers and layers, the palimpsest of the soul, like lives and lives. Thus the soul (the "text") miraculously returns to life, when it informs another.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Fifty-Two: Memory hole
Week Fifty-One: The Black Book
Week Fifty: Spear of Longinus
Week Forty-Nine: Moral panic
Week Forty-Eight: "The Move"
Week Forty-Seven: Cloaca
Week Forty-Six: Ship of fools
Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

The Duelists: Alexander Pushkin

2008-11-25T12:00:00.005-05:00

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin lived from seventeen ninety-nine until eighteen thirty-seven and was a poet of the Russian Empire. He was also a Romantic, a Freemason, a Greek revolutionary, social critic and Soviet forbearer, and the poet of Russia.

While in great debt and his wife a huge fucking slut, Alexander Pushkin's honour was offended by Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès, French émigré, lieutenant in the Knights Guards of the Empress and Pushkin's brother-in-law of one month having married the sister of Pushkin's wife and huge fucking whore, Natalya. Consequently, d'Anthès shot Pushkin, mortally wounding him in the stomach. Pushkin managed to rise for a return volley at d'Anthès but succeeded in only wounding him lightly in the arm. D'Anthès was with Pushkin's giant fucking slut-whore of a wife, Natalya, cuckolding Pushkin. Still, while on his deathbed, he would pardon d'Anthès of any wrongdoing. D'Anthès is said to have quipped, "Well, tell him that I forgive him, too." Alexander Pushkin died two days later.

The year was 1836.

In Media

D'Anthès is purportedly the namesake for the title character of Alexandre Dumas' novel The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès.

Common Misconceptions: The New Millennium

2008-11-25T09:00:00.004-05:00

Seven/eight years later and I'm still bitter about this.

There's no year zero. The calendar starts with year 1. Thus a grouping of one thousand years, a millennium, ends when the calendar changes to a year ending in 1.

Now the coming of the the "new" millennium in the late nineties was hot shit, acted like it owned the place, didn't take off its shoes, and put its cold, sweaty drink glasses directly on top of the wood surfaces of your furniture without a coaster intermediary. A factor in this was Y2K hysteria to be sure. The story broke ahead of time, because computers were going to think when the calendar switched from 1999 to 2000 that since they only had a two-digit year marker programmed in that the calendar was actually going from 1999 to 1900. And since all computers are in fact working time machines, computers were going to send the world itself back to 1900 and all the technological advances of the twentieth century would become anachronistic and subsequently disappear by way of self-fixing paradoxes.

Also, every digit in the year was going to change and there would be three zeros and that's really cool guys. Zeros be rolling over like on your analog display clock.

Now let me quote a bit of popular culture minutiae, "The Millennium" episode (820) of Seinfeld:

Jerry: Oh, that's interesting, because as everyone knows, since there was no year zero, the millennium doesn't begin until the year two-thousand and one. Which would make your party, one year late, and thus, quite lame.

Jerry is right and he's wrong here. Newman's party would be one year early, not late. Still since that is when everyone else is celebrating the new millennium, it would instead be lame to be the hipster douchebag who chooses to celebrate the new millennium on the night of December 31, 2000 when the general population ("normies") are asking, "Wasn't that last year?"

Ironically (irony: that's still a thing, right?) none of this matters as calendars are superfluous and based around arbitrary starting dates to begin with, and nations systematically changed from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian over the late middle centuries of the second millennium anyway. Plus when we talk of the decades, we talk about the eighties as being from 1980 to 1989, and not 1981 to 1990 because calling '90 a part of the eighties is retarded and counterfactual. All one really needs is an almanac to follow the phases of the moon.

Temporal Incongruities: Shakespeare and Cervantes

2008-11-24T12:00:00.001-05:00

William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died on the same date, 23 April 1616, but not on the same day.

Star Trek and the Future State of Health Care

2008-11-24T09:00:00.001-05:00

Space ships are like submarines in space. A typical nuclear submarine has a crew of over 80. Okay, in Star Trek's optimistic vision of the future, space ships have their luxuries and aren't the cramp, pressure capsules that submarines are. Since, these starfarers are not just explorers but military, one forgets the nature of medicine in the field. Submarines don't typically have room on board for medical centers and doctors and resort to using super-medics (this is a bit of an assumption as my limited research on the matter turned up no actually compelling statistics). But as stated Star Trek presents an optimistic vision of the future, and while getting in the occasional skirmish, there is typically always a doctor stationed.

Now one of the defining statistics for a high quality of life is the ratio of doctors to patients. According to the WHO, Cuba has a doctor for every 170 residents. Data as recent as 1999, suggested Cuba has a doctor to patient ratio of 58.2 to 10 000. Of course, Cuba's ratio is exceptionally high, but is a fair point of comparison because an optimistic future should have an exceptionally high ratio of something positive.

So I propose to look at the ratio of Doctors/Crew Members:

The USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) (a constitution-class ship) of The Original Series had a crew of 430. This Enterprise had a one Dr. Leonard McCoy (as well as at least two nurses, however rarely seen/mentioned).

The USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) (a galaxy-class ship) of The Next Generation had a crew of 1014, not including dolphins. This Enterprise had Dr. Crusher as its Chief Medical Officer which implies subordinates although the size of her sickbay is unclear.

The USS Voyager (NC-74656) (an intrepid-class ship) of Voyager has a crew of 150-200. To be fair, any doctors seemed to die when the ship became lost in space and they had to resort to a single emergency hologram doctor.

I'm not exactly sure what conclusions can be drawn from this. Will a doctor-to-patient ratio be important in the future or will its influence on the quality of life be superseded by the advance of technology. Can technology ever truly replace doctors? Or does the fact that it could make a doctor's job easier increase the number of patients that doctor could effectively serve?

These are the questions I think good/interesting sci-fi asks and I'd be more interested in people exploring those answers than how Kirk is going to avoid the giant styrofoam rock thrown by that giant lizard man. Sure, that's an important moral question, but let's not forget the more sociological questions too.

(Space Ship Data Source: Memory Alpha)

Words Are Our Friends: Friend

2008-11-21T12:00:00.005-05:00

Friend. Fuhrieeend. Frined. Friend. FRIEND. F-R-I-E-N-D. Sometimes when I see the word friend written out, I just don't recognize it. What is this word? I ponder to myself. Is that spelled right? "I before E except after C"--Isn't that the rule? What is this shit? It's got to be spelled right. But then I'm like no, friend, that's right, that's how it's spelled, I know it deep down. Instincts are wrong, conditioning is right. I don't know where this aphasia comes from, but suspect it must be psychological, right? And just like our language determines the manner in which we think, I believe it must be the manner in which I think that overdetermines my reaction to the word friend.

Top Five XI: Posts That Aren't About What They're About

2008-11-21T09:00:00.002-05:00

1. Music Review: Challengers
2. Weekly Wikipedia Find: Slattery Report
3. Top Five IX: J.D. Salinger Characters
4. Inspired Moments, Terrible Movies: Captain America
5. The Titular

Underappreciated Punctuation III: The Tilde

2008-11-20T09:00:00.005-05:00

Besides turning Lemonade into the Mexican Lemoñade, the tilde is useless I think we can all agree.

Oh, you wanted a encomium for the tilde? Fine, obliged.

Besides its diacritical usage, the tilde, when not being used as a swung dash, also has the punctilious use of abbreviation. However, such usage should be considered obs.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: The Black Book

2008-11-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

The Black Book is not your little, black book, you dog, you. No, the Black Book is English nomenclature for the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B., which was basically a 3000 name Adolf Milhous Hitler's enemies list. These names represent prominent British subjects and European exiles in Britain who were to be rounded up and presumably purged (executed) upon the successful completion of the Nazi invasion of Great Britain during World War II. Twenty thousand copies of the book were produced for the six paramilitary groups that were to follow the invasion forces. Two survive.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Fifty: Spear of Longinus
Week Forty-Nine: Moral panic
Week Forty-Eight: "The Move"
Week Forty-Seven: Cloaca
Week Forty-Six: Ship of fools
Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Longevity For Longevity's Sake

2008-11-18T14:00:00.000-05:00

Here are some phallic metaphors meant for a longer block of text that I never had the lust of life to actually write:

mushroom towering over the forest

morning dew

atrophied limb

phallic divinity rod twitching for yonus waters

six mighty inches for six mighty deities of the greek pantheon

tiny heroes of iwo jima erecting the flag
old glory
looking to win over asian soils

Common Misconceptions: Immaculate Conception

2008-11-18T09:00:00.002-05:00

I hate when the media continues to misconstrue the meaning of things and how it propagates the culture. And I'm not even Catholic. And barely Christian. Is Christian non-believer a denomination? Non-Catholic Christians aren't even supposed to believe or care about the immaculate conception according to doctrine. So why do they always get it wrong?

Immaculate conception is the conception of Mary, the mother of Jesus, through normal heterosexual vaginal intercourse, but without the stain of original sin, and not the virginal conception of Jesus by the said same Mary and the Holy Spirit. Original sin being the result of a certain garden, a certain fruit of knowledge and experience (likely a pomegranate), a certain fall; being the reason we're all going to hell if not for His sacrifice. Now only most of us are going to hell.

Now was that so hard to understand?

Star Trek and Race Relations

2008-11-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

Star Trek has an interesting place in the history of race relations. It gave prominent roles to minorities-- Lt. Uhura, a black woman working as a communication officer on the bridge, and Lt. Sulu, Japanese-American helmsman--and our current Cold War cultural enemies in the guise of Russian navigator Ensign Chekov. Hell, the show even featured the first interracial kiss in a fictional television program for what amounts as progress.

So does it come as any surprise that as these steps were being taken forward more were being taken back.

As example of this are the Klingons.

The Klingons of the original series are little more than brutes in blackface makeup propagating familiar themes of the other and the Noble Savage as well as recalling old minstrel acts and Jim Crows.

Of course, Jim Crows never seem to die in the culture. There will always be Short Circuits, and Ted Dansons, and Tyra Banks reality show experiments.

So what is the legacy of Star Trek's progressive race politics? Hell, I can't decide. Even Sulu is meant to be just a pan-Asian analogue.

Object Fetishism: Fudge Mint Oreos

2008-11-14T16:00:00.001-05:00

Fudge Covered Mint OREO Cookies

I tried to write something that wasn't in anyway sacrilegious but I couldn't do it. These things are like manna from heaven.

Limited edition... November to December only.

What nutritional value?

Underappreciated Punctuation II: The Interrobang

2008-11-13T09:00:00.001-05:00

An portmanteau of interrogative point and bang, the interrobang is this cute, little fellow here, ?!

Now this punctuation mark has no standardized place on your typical qwerty scheme but rather is the typographical superimposition of your two familiars.

[It does however merit this ugly little sibling in Unicode: ‽]

And just like the two symbols are visually combined, so too do they coalesce functionally. It's not quite a question, and its not quite an incredulity, but it might be both and it might be a little rhetorical too?!

However, should an interrobang not be kosher, an exclamation mark (or a bang, if you will) shall prove sufficient.

Underappreciate that muthafuckers!

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Spear of Longinus

2008-11-12T09:00:00.002-05:00

The spear of Longinus is the holy lance which pierced the side of Him that is Jesus Christ as he was on the cross. This piercing was undertaken by a Roman soldier, ostensibly named Longinus, like a little doe-eyed child curiously poking the body of a dead drifter he found in the woods, washed up on a bankside, beside some train tracks. "Yeah, it turns out he's dead." "So that's was a dead body looks like. Poke. Poke. Poke.

The lance was a much sought after objet for its occult value. It was said that during World War II Adolf Hitler himself was in possession of the lance, wielding its magical power and preventing Superman's entrance into the European theatre alongside the Allied Forces and affecting a quick victory for the good guys.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Nine: Moral panic
Week Forty-Eight: "The Move"
Week Forty-Seven: Cloaca
Week Forty-Six: Ship of fools
Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Film Review: Eastern Promises

2008-11-11T09:00:00.000-05:00

Eastern Promises

Directed by David Cronenberg. Written by Stephen Knight.

Starring Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, and Armin Mueller-Stahl.

2007.

[NOTE: I don't want to give the feeling that I'm just burning old material without adding anything new (which I am), but I like the succinct minimalism of these notes. They say everything of real pertinence that I would have mentioned. I will just add one more thing: Eastern Promises functions as a piece of genre defamiliarization, as the gangster movie without a single gun. SPOILERS ahead]

Initial dissatisfaction of reveal that Viggo had been working undercover

but with ambiguous look on his face in the ending

a real companion piece with A History of Violence

the duality of man... both good and bad sides

who is he at the end?

but reversed from A History of Violence

Common Misconceptions: A.D.

2008-11-10T09:00:00.001-05:00

A.D. is the Latin "anno domini", not "after death". Anno domini stands for "in the year of our lord. After death stands for nothing. But if you, anybody, keeps on using "after death", the only solution is to propose a new calendar starting in the year 33 A.D. on the Gregorian calendar, otherwise thought to be the (most common of the disputed) traditional year of Jesus Christ's death. This will create a third calendar epoch: During Christ or D.C. Thus we have B.C., D.C., and A.D. Welcome to the year 1975 A.D.

Musemathematics

2008-11-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations : chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see any mourning. Callous : all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you it like : Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

--James Joyce, Ulysses

Ah, Joycean mathematics

2 x 2 ÷ ½ = 2(1)

1 + 2 + 6 = 7

7 x 9 - x = 35 000

where, x ≠ -34 937
since symmetry lies under a cemetery wall

Album Listen List: October 2008

2008-11-06T09:00:00.001-05:00

Here, now, is the October iteration, that opal-loving, eight-multiplying, rosary-devoting, autumnal month of months of my album aural experience list, otherwise known as the month where I listen to the remaining A Tribe Called Quest albums that I have at my disposal.

in listening order

midnight marauders, a tribe called quest
the love movement, a tribe called quest
beats, rhymes and life, a tribe called quest

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Moral panic

2008-11-05T14:00:00.001-05:00

What are moral panics? According to Jones and Jones, it can be defined as "the intensity of feeling expressed by a large number of people about a specific group of people who appear to threaten the social order at a given time." An intensity of feeling. I think I might suffer from that. But a dearth of emotion. It be complicated. But that's neither here nor there.

But if there is to be moral panics, there are certain roles needed to be cast. There is the moral entrepreneur, hocking his wares from here to Delaware. This value salesman feels the encroachment upon his entreprises from an increase in consumer demand brought upon the availability and quality of supplies. This results in the introduction of folk devils, who sneak into the gap left by the inadequacies of the moral marketplace. These folks devils offer new, often foreign-made, values at cheaper prices (The irony is this is purely capitalistic in its promotion of competition).

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Eight: "The Move"
Week Forty-Seven: Cloaca
Week Forty-Six: Ship of fools
Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Obamasaurus

2008-11-05T09:00:00.003-05:00

President-elect Barack Obama!

The music played over the loudspeakers at Grant Park after Obama's acceptance speech reminded me of (but it definitely was not) the score to Jurassic Park, which seemed somehow fitting.

Life Review: The Name Remains the Same

2008-11-04T09:00:00.001-05:00

It would seem vaguely incestuous to date someone with the same last name as me.

I'm just saying that, hypothetically speaking (yeah, yeah, hypothetically... that's it) I had the opportunity to hit on someone with the same last name as me.

Now I didn't actually do it, because god forbid, but I clearly had an opening. Like all openings, it began with squash. She was asking me about what activities I'm into at school, squash came up, she asked me who exactly it's played. It would have been so easy for me to just slip in a "I can show you sometime." However, I refrained. But god what if we're related. Even if we're not, which we're not, it would be so easy to just assume, amirite?

The Titular

2008-11-04T05:00:00.000-05:00

The title of your book is the Insomniad. It is an epic of sleeplessness. You're welcome.

Film Watch List: October 2008

2008-11-03T09:00:00.001-05:00

*film has been seen previously/rewatching
†watched in theatre

in viewing order
Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs (2008)
No Country for Old Men (2007)*
Bee Movie (2007)
The Naked City (1948)
Goya's Ghosts (2006)
Monte Walsh (1970)
Sharkwater (2007)
The Red Balloon (1956)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
Into the Wild (2007)
Gunga Din (1939)
Beowulf (2007)
Bad Company (1972)
Get Carter (1971)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Rendition (2007)
Washington Story (1952)
Posse (1975)
I'm Not There. (2007)
Revolver (2005)
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)
Adam's Rib (1949)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
High Plains Drifter (1973)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
A Night to Remember (1958)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
The Mist (2007)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)
The Golden Compass (2007)
Vampyr (1932)
I Am Legend (2007)
Cat People (1942)

Stats
Films watched: 36
Films previously seen: 1
Films watched in theatres: 0
Films made for direct-to-DVD: 1

Average # of films watched per day: 1.16

By Decade
1920s: 1
1930s: 4
1940s: 4
1950s: 5
1960s: 0
1970s: 5
1980s: 0
1990s: 0
2000s: 17

Conclusion: I've included short films in the past here, usually under special circumstances like when I caught one by the a legend like W.C. Fields. But I should also mention the early Donald Duck cartoons I've watched this month. I'm not one to let my love for Donald Duck go unnoticed. It is one unrepentant joy I have in life.

Hollow-een

2008-10-31T23:59:00.000-04:00

Why dress up as something I'm not for Halloween when I already dress up everyday?

Walden Two

2008-10-31T16:00:00.001-04:00

Huzzah!

Also, I guess the Merkin Election is on Tuesday. Interesting Stuff!

Modernism I: The Spatialization of Time I

2008-10-30T09:00:00.001-04:00

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.

--Revelation 8:1

Weekly Wikipedia Find: "The Move"

2008-10-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

Like all great things not limited to Ziggy and Horseface, this factoid comes to our attention because of The Wire Season 2.

Of all the things to secretly move in the middle of the night, a football team?

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Seven: Cloaca
Week Forty-Six: Ship of fools
Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

The Unexplained

2008-10-28T09:30:00.000-04:00

What is this unusual thumb pain? Where does it come from? There is no discoloration. The nail is not too short or too long. There is nothing, however small, lodged beneath the nail. I had that before. This is something else. Something else entirely.

And how do I get all these little scratches and scrapes and scars on my hands? They have to come from somewhere.

Audience Demographics

2008-10-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, we had "the talk."

But let's follow up, see how we're doing one day later.

Specifically, there was mentioned on having a certain audience. Some of us would rather play to certain audiences. And this can be different from person to person. This reminds of something from "the dread" years a.k.a. high school.

So there's a bunch of us sitting in class. It's a small glass. And all guys. This is not technically true. As this class is actually two courses, and segregated as such. But this class, I speak of was this second year version of the other half of the class. Just the other half outnumbered this half by at least four hundred percent but not more. None of this is really important.

So we're talking to our teacher, maybe, or watching a video, or a teacher is trying to get us to be quiet and get back to work, or watching that video, but we're a bunch of guys and are belligerent as such. Now, we're seated in about two rows and I'm at the end of the row, farthest away from everything.

So with all this talk, or video or whatever, there is the opportunity to make light of, to take advantage of the material, to comic, often hi-larious (patent pending), effect.

But me, being me, am telling jokes, perhaps subtly, but definitely conversationally to the guy next to me.

And this guy, being this guy, is retelling the jokes, loudly and to everyone else in the class, literally word for word, and getting laughs from all.

Now I would call this guy my friend, but I was proud of who I was, and I did not envy him.

How to Tell Only Fifty Percent of Your Jokes

2008-10-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

How to Tell Only 50% of Your Jokes?

You have a set-up line designed to elicit a response. Like a knock, knock. Only not so obvious. This way there's no certainty you'll ever get your desired response. I do this all time. And am mostly disappointed.

Example 1: If I say "I think I fell down a hill," I don't want you to respond with "You fell down a hill?" Your response should be "You think?"

This method is mired in disappointment, though, and is only for the brave at heart. There will be rejection. There will be discarded punchlines. Do not fret, you will have to let them go. They belong to the ether, and the ether will reward you some other way.

Besides, they might not have elicited the laughs you might have thought. Which is kind of the point. I would rather tell the joke that makes the a couple of people in the room laugh than the one that makes the whole room laugh. That way I know who are the good people.

Example 2: If I say something gay, the response I'm looking for is along the lines of "your gay." This way I can tell my gay joke. Don't be all awkward and not respond at all.

Stories of a Prostitute

2008-10-24T17:00:00.000-04:00

NOTE: I wrote this about 8 months ago when I watched Monster's Ball for the second time in my life. I feel my rough outline requires no further addendum.

One of the most realistic depictions of what I imagine an encounter with a prostitute to be like is from the film Monster's Ball

quick, dull, sad, quiet, unerotic, rote

END NOTE: Kind of like my experience with strip clubs: boring, unerotic, rote

Top Five X: James Bond Films

2008-10-23T16:30:00.000-04:00

1. From Russia With Love
2. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
3. Casino Royale (2006)
4. The Spy Who Loved Me
5. Goldfinger

Unseen: Casino Royale (1967)

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Cloaca

2008-10-22T09:00:00.000-04:00

Birds. How do they do it? Sex. Bird sex. The cloacal kiss. It's how. What's a cloaca? A sewer organ. Shittin' and pissin' and fuckin' all in one. The cloacal kiss is the touching of cloacas together, however fleeting, to pass precious fluids.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Six: Ship of fools
Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Our Worlds at Word

2008-10-21T09:00:00.003-04:00

A letter to "Henry Flowers" Leopold Bloom:

I am sorry you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word.

--James Joyce, Ulysses

My oath to postmodernism:

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

--Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita

We knew the world would not be the same.

--J. Robert Oppenheimer

We knew the word would not be the same.

My Best of the Year in Film: 1956

2008-10-20T09:00:00.004-04:00

The Year: 1956

The Film: The Searchers

Directed by John Ford. Written by Frank S. Nugent based on a book by Alan Le May.

Starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, and Henry Brandon as Scar.

When we usually think of revisionist westerns, we usually think of the darker, cynicism of New Hollywood-era (1970s) westerns or the complete deconstructionism of 1992's Unforgiven. But The Searchers is as much a revisionist western as any of those films. John Wayne, here as our "hero" Ethan Edwards, is a harsh and violent man. As just one example of his unerring cruelty and capability for evil vengeance: "By what you preach... none. But, what that Comanche believes--ain't got no eyes... can't enter the spirit land... has to wander forever between the winds. You get it, Reverend." To shoot out the eyes of a dead man to spite his beliefs, not your own, is the harshest you get with this man, this very unlikable protagonist. The Searchers has a bit of a reputation as a racist film. And it's hard to argue with that. It certainly is a product of its time. But it's also a film focused so intensely on Ethan. This is Ethan's viewpoint; Ethan is a racist; the film's narrative is focalized through Ethan. It's important to not falling into intentional fallacy by assuming we know what (sorry to assume some auteur theory with these terms) the authorial intent was. We must not assume that the apparent message is something that the filmmakers agree with. There is also cynicism and the inherent message to consider.

I'd also like to address a bit of beautiful symbolism the film uses. Now this was an era where films were transitioning to widescreen aspects, and not all films were yet using these. The Searchers uses a process called Vistavision. The film begins and end with the framing from inside the homestead. That is the doorway seen from the inside looking out effectively darkens the sides of the frame, referencing a standard fullscreen aspect ratio. As the camera leaves this homestead doorway, it opens up the frame but also metaphorically, in reverse at the end, the framing kept the bad world out. And the bad world arrives with John Wayne and at the end when again the bad world is made separate, John Wayne must remain outside the homestead. His evils will forever separate him from the civility of the new era, as the frontier, and the west come to an end.

Book Covers: Inside the Abyss

2008-10-17T09:00:00.004-04:00

I'm an impulse buyer at times. I've come to realize that and accept that. It's a situational affliction. That's a great deal. Or that looks real good. One of these days, I could just see myself falling. Into. Addiction. The fix. It would just be too much.

The part of the side I see myself like this is in bookstores. So I just happened to go to the bookstore recently to buy a birthday present for a cousin. I knew exactly what to buy and where to find it. I went straight to it.

But I was already inside the abyss. What harm could it be to just look around a little?

What struck my eye that day was I Love Dollars by Wen Zhu. It was not so much because of an author I had heard of (I hadn't) or praise from sources I respected (I didn't), but the cover, the cover, the cover.

Of course, I shouldn't give the cover all the credit, I was after all also intrigued by the synopsis of "a hilarious send-up of China's love affair with capitalism." It goes on to namedrop both Franz Kafka and Larry David, in describing the story collection as a synthesis of "slangy swagger" with "the inanities of everyday life in contemporary China."

But that wasn't the first thing to strike my eye.

I saw those gorgeous James Bond hardcovers:

And there are these new edition series of adventure books:

I'm reminded by all of this, that the Penguin Blog is a great interwebian destination, often detailing the beautiful process that goes into their covers.

The Last Time I Fell in Love II

2008-10-16T09:00:00.004-04:00

In a dive club, the music loud, the people crowding, communication is a hurdle. She says something. "Yeah," I say in response. There is a disconnect. "You didn't hear what I just said, did you?"

You got me. "But you responded anyways." She calls my bullshit and that was the last time I fell in love.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Ship of fools

2008-10-15T19:00:00.003-04:00

I wish Wikipedia would make a list of for all of their long-been-a-fixtures for Western literature and art. It would make things a lot easier on me. Because here I am, sitting in my ship, being ignorant like some kind of... some kind... some kind of foolish person. Like an ass, or an idiot, or an imbecile. Or a mooncalf, or a moron, or a nincompoop. A ninny or a nitwit. A simpleton or a softhead. Like one of those things, but of a term that more accurately would describe me as a silly or stupid person lacking in judgment or sense. Whatever that term may be. And in this ship are like-minded individuals, and we are all ignorant of our direction. Foolish as we are.

Foucault would be able to see the symbolism in such a symbol. Ship of fools he could call it. If he weren't so busy and would just return my calls already. I didn't mean to hurt you, baby, I swear I love you, I just love you so much.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Words Are Our Friends: Bipartisan

2008-10-14T09:00:00.002-04:00

Bipartisan is a loaded word. We say it like it's a good thing, that it's a neutral concept. But that's a falsehood. The word is supposed to be the ultimate word in non-biased democracy. The word, however, is neither non-biased or democratic. Bi means two, twice, or both, or derivatives thereof, I think we can agree upon. There are two sides. It is a word that admits defeat in democracy. There are two sides. It is a two-party system.

"Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate."
"Go ahead, throw your vote away."

Third parties are often little more than a joke in today's politics. More so in the United States than in Canada, third parties are little more than wild cards, acting as spoilers by stealing votes from other parties on the same side of the political spectrum. When they actually garner enough support to garner a role of representation, they lapse into political alliances with those same like-minded parties. In the language of politics, bipartisanship is a lie. In the politics of language, bipartisan is a political, biased word.

Today in Comparisons II

2008-10-13T09:00:00.001-04:00

John Milton's Paradise Lost is to justify the way of God to man
as Aeschylus' Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choephori, The Eumenides) is to justify the ways of gods to man.

The Kicker

2008-10-10T09:00:00.001-04:00

"Sorry, you must have me confused with someone you can relate to emotionally."

I have this recurring notion that we all experience colours differently. Their actual names mean very little, being nothing more than signifiers. But when that lights hit our rods and cones, are all of our brains processing it the same way? Does my green look like your purple?

The word bothered him

2008-10-09T21:00:00.000-04:00

He began then, bewilderingly, to talk about something called entropy. The word bothered him as much as "Trystero" bothered Oedipa. But it was too technical for her. She did gather that there were two distinct kinds of entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the '30's, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell's Demon. As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where.

--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Slattery Report

2008-10-08T16:00:00.002-04:00

The Slattery Report or the "Problem of Alaskan Development" was the proposal that following the Night of Broken Glass incident at a German pogrom just prior to the outbreak of World War II, Alaska, then a territory and not yet a state, be used as a Jewish refugee haven, but faced opposition from American Jews. Instead, Alaska remained an Okie backwater from the dustbowl migrations.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Making Our Own Maxims II

2008-10-07T09:00:00.001-04:00

Violence Changes a Man

But Revenge Ruins One

Also, file under book titles.

Album Listen List: September 2008

2008-10-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

I listened to nothing new in the month of September. I got nothing. Nothing! Nothing, I tells ya.

Try better next time.

Go to sleep, everything is alright.

2008-10-03T09:00:00.001-04:00

I'm finding it increasingly harder--harder and harder--to differentiate between reality and dreams. It's troubling in a non-crazy way. I swear, completely non-crazy. It just makes memory recall, a bitch. It must be the stress of my day-to-day life. Not stress, like stress, but stress as a static fluidity to my schedule. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. The constant media inputs do not help. They make all the dreams that much worse. It's like a repeat of my day. But the realization of this only comes at the dawn. Like two different versions of the same thing, a troubling rashomon of my past. There are the events as they really happened; there are the events as I remember them, and; there are the events as I dream them. The first two are to be expected. The object and the subject of everyday occurrence that all experience. But in the third--a terrifying simulacra exists. This unreal representation is standard discourse to start, the seams are visible, I can see the strings, but as I move farther away, I fall into this artifice of eternity. The line between the mirror and mirrored becomes increasingly blurred as certain details of the simulacrum attach themselves to eidetic. And frequently, as a result, I find myself asking, Did this really happen? or, Did I dream it? It's usually just the small things. I try not to fret the small things. But what if everything is small. And what if I like the dream version better? Its too bad all these things can only happen in my dreams, only in dreams, in beautiful dreams.

Film Watch List: September 2008

2008-10-02T09:00:00.002-04:00

*film has been seen previously/rewatching
†watched in theatre

in viewing order
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Across the Universe (2007)
The Boys from Brazil (1978)
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)
Enchanted (2007)
Out of the Past (1947)
The Naked Spur (1953)
The Desperate Hours (1955)
30 Days of Night (2007)
Sophie's Choice (1982)
The Black Dahlia (2006)
Paper Moon (1973)
The Nines (2007)
Rocket Science (2007)
Written on the Wind (1956)
Skidoo (1968)
We Own the Night (2007)
Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)
Lust, Caution (2007)
Short Cuts (1993)
Battlestar Galactica: Razor (2007)
Burn After Reading (2008)†

Stats
Films watched: 23
Films previously seen: 0
Films watched in theatres: 1
Films made for direct-to-DVD: 1

Average # of films watched per day: 0.77

By Decade
1930s: 0
1940s: 3
1950s: 3
1960s: 1
1970s: 2
1980s: 1
1990s: 1
2000s: 12

Conclusion: Films like Shadow of a Doubt and Miracle of Morgan's Creek can be propelled from 'good' to 'great' by the addition of some psychosexual intrigue. In Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow, this is the raging sexual tension between our young teenage heroine and her possibly-a-murderer uncle. In Preston Sturges' Miracle, this is exemplified when our heroine, in the night where she has a pregnancy-resulting, amnesiac one night stand, bumps her head on phallic mirror ball. Did I mention this was the 1940s?

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Isolationism

2008-10-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

It turns out there already is such a thing as isolationism. Damn you, complete world knowledge! Isn't there anything that escapes your neon claws?

Now if someone would just take this military/political policy and apply its basic principles to literary/social theory, then we'd be rolling.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

A Question of Aesthetics

2008-09-30T09:00:00.001-04:00

Note to Self: Door Light

2008-09-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

Note to Self: She doesn't like it when you open the car door while she's still pulling up her pants.

Surplus Here! Get Your Surplus!

2008-09-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

Damn, I should have gone to the university's surplus sale yesterday. Sure, they weren't advertising the overhead projectors I so desperately want this time around, but gosh, it's such a shit show slice-of-life. The greatest thing ever, there is a short story hiding in that place, waiting to be let out.

He wanted to sin with another of his kind

2008-09-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.

--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Foxy

2008-09-24T17:30:00.000-04:00

Foxy is a fox. Like Mickey is a mouse, and Oswald is a lucky rabbit, Foxy is a fox. But Foxy is not a mouse, nor a lucky rabbit, because Foxy is a fox and should not be confused for not a fox. Foxy had a girlfriend, who was also not a mouse, and also not named Minnie, because she was also not named. Later, unnamed fox became Roxy the fox, girlfriend to Foxy the fox.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Phantom Limb :: Paranoid Schizophrenic

2008-09-23T09:00:00.005-04:00

So we all know how when somebody loses a limb, they still sometimes have sensations from they missing limb as a result of some firing synapses connected to nerves that should be in the missing area? Phantom sensations, if you will.

And then there is the sensation among cell phone users, whose phones are set to vibrate, of there phone ringing, vibrating, when it is doing no such thing. The worst of these vibrations is when your phone is not even on you.

Then there was the feeling I experienced the other day. My phone was in my pocket. And it was hot. It was getting hotter. Oh god, what was this heat that was in my pocket threatening to burn a hole in my thigh? Why would my phone do such a thing? I thought you loved me. Then I pulled the phone out of my pocket, and the motherfucker was cooler than a fonzarelli.

Anti-Comedy I: How To Kill a Joke... With Results!

2008-09-22T09:00:00.000-04:00

You have a horse. We all laugh at the horse. It is so pretty. I kill the horse. I beat its corpse. I fuck the horse. Then I say, "Look at me! I beat-fuck this dead horse! I fuck-beat your BRAIN!"

Self-Aggrandizement

2008-09-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

Today's Homework:

A. Take the person that you are.

B. Exaggerate.

Self-Actualization

2008-09-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

Today's Homework:

A. Describe the person you want to be.

B. Become that person.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Young Woman with Unicorn

2008-09-17T09:00:00.001-04:00

There is a painting by the famed Italian Renaissance painter Raphael Sanzio, commonly known by the singular nom Raphael, painted circa 1506 which for the longest time was attributed to a contemporary and listed as St. Catherine until it was restored in 1935 and properly identified.

There is a vastly intriguing narrative and history contained within this Wikipedia entry. Just imagine, the young art history scholars and restorers in the 1930s cleaning this painting, only to discover what she holds within her arms. "You got to be shitting me?!" One exclaims. "Hey Larry, you gotta see this." One calls to another. "Fuckin' 'ell. Is that a unicorn?" High fives all around.

This has been the untold story of Portrait of Young Woman with Unicorn.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Eugenics

2008-09-16T09:00:00.011-04:00

I'd soon as not write this post. It would be some how fitting that way, this being the blog that it is. I first mentioned I would write this post back on Friday, August 8th, 2008. That's when I had all my inspiration and ideas. And I quickly wrote down the barest minimum of those ideas, and set it aside; I'll set the date for one week, I said, and save it as a draft. So here it is, one, nay, two, nay, three, nay, four, nay, five weeks later and here it is. Or the best I felt like writing so many days later.

The main problem with eugenics is that it has been associated in the public consciousness with "miscegenation" (what an ugly word-- clearly constructed to have negative connotations-- for such a beautiful thing) and racial cleansing/purity. I think this is another one we can blame on the Nazis.

But I subscribe to the Khan Noonien Singh theory of genetics, of which I derive the name from the character played by Ricardo Montalbán in the original Star Trek series episode "Space Seed" as well as the second Star Trek feature film The Wrath of Khan. I'll mostly focus on him as he appears in the television episode as no argument in favour of eugenics can be made with that awful hair he has in the movie.

Khan is a genetically-engineered übermensch bred free of mental and physical defects, as well as strong leadership abilities, from a pool of Latin and Indian stock. The key here is race diversity. From all accounts, while certainly ambitious (possibly wildly so), Khan was a benign ruler. Thus, I rule that Star Trek lands firmly on the pro-eugenics side. So just remove the dastardly moustache twirling and plans of world domination and we have a pretty good idea of the (theoretical) benefits of eugenics.

Then for an opposing viewpoint, we have the 1990s film Gattaca. I don't recall Gattaca ever addressing the race card, but apparently Blair Underwood was in the cast, so I think I can unequivocally declare the film not viewing genetics from an anti-miscegenation (grrrr) viewpoint. Gattaca's issue with eugenics is that it will inspire a new class system, one where the genetically-engineered will be earmarked for all the highest positions while any normal person (from now on referred to as "normies") will hit a glass ceiling. Further, these earmarks will be decided by probability calculator, so that any normies who exceed their station, any Ethan Hawkes if you will, will be put back in their place.

Of course, another real problem with eugenics is the same problem that surfaces any time one cultural group becomes assimilated into a bigger wider one. The death of the culture, language, heritage of the original group, and all the unique aspects that set it aside. See Modern China and the reason I was so politically offended by the movie Hero for more.

As a normie, among normies who have proceeded as a species for the past however many epochs, its hard to say if I am in support of any real form of eugenics, whether it be traditional or liberal, as it risks limiting genetic diversity. But I will say that I like to consider myself a Social Darwinist. Then again I consider myself a lot of things.

Top Five IX: J.D. Salinger Characters

2008-09-15T09:00:00.001-04:00

1. Zooey Glass
2. Buddy Glass
3. Seymour Glass
4. Franny Glass
5. Theodore McArdle, from "Teddy"

Unread: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction; Uncollected Work

Dedications: Franny and Zooey

2008-09-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most reasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.

--J.D. Salinger in the dedication to Franny and Zooey.

And to think, that one-year-old would grow up to be Captain America.

Star Trek and Teenage Heartthrobs

2008-09-11T09:00:00.001-04:00

Star Trek, and by extension Gene Roddenberry, had a peculiar world view. It's firmly stationed in the nineteen sixties. Indelible and unmoving.

Season one of the show we had our competent, and diversely multi-cultured, cast of naval spacemen. But there was something missing. You can't court everybody with short-skirted, dark-skinned honeys or green-blooded, logic-spouting romanesques. You have to bring in the teenage girl demographic too.

Season Two. Enter Chekov. Not Anton, but rather Ensign Pavel Chekov.

Although Roddenberry had attached an apocryphal origin of placating cold warriors, the Soviet Union, who were also at the time in a space race, he is instead Star Trek's idea of the teenybopper idol, with his mop-top, his foreign accent, and audience analogue youth: the heartthrob. Of course, he didn't talk like 'is, allo, allo, is Chekov 'ere, allo guvnor, but rather with a delightful "Russian" accent, (i.e. "nuclear wessel").

But the The Monkees-esque youth movement courting teenage heartthrob is all right there in the image.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Cosmicism

2008-09-10T10:00:00.000-04:00

Having just finished a collection of some of H.P. Lovecraft's works, this post is less a post on Cosmicism, than a tribute to the mini-cottage industry of Lovecraft wikis that are contained within all that is Wikipedia.

But more particular the cosmicism of the Cosmicism Wikipedia entry refers to Lovecraft's penchant for horror that was not based in the supernatural, but rather a universal, one of un-understandable scientific capabilities and biologies, and the earthbound cults built around this mighty astral beings.

But what Wikipedia doesn't mention, (and I did ctrl+f on the main Lovecraft page, so I'm taking full credit for this) is that Lovecraft's horror is an epistolary horror. All of his stories, or at least the better ones, seemed to be based around academics and scholars researching, delving, stumbling upon seem mysterious thing, place, history and getting involved, often perilously too close, as there story is recounted in letters and diaries.

I will give one brief shout-out to cosmicism though, and that is: cosmic indifference. The idea that God exists, gods in fact, and they don't care. They of course are only gods in that sense of supreme beings who obey a set of natural laws that are beyond all human understanding.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

The only thing that really worried me was the ether.

2008-09-09T09:00:00.001-04:00

Like a parasite, it latched onto my brain. And I just couldn't shake. My brain, goddammit. In particular my imagination. What does it mean? it asks. Why, why, why does it all depend. I speak of course of this post from Monday, August 25, 2008. While as the comments attest, the ether was working overtime that day. But there was something special about this one. Here is that of which I speak, the mysterious unsolicited text message, reprinted for your browsing convenience:

From:
281-[redacted]
Message:
I FORGOT TO
CHARGE THE
PHONE LASTNIGHT
WE WILL THINJ OF
SOMETHING ELSE
Received on:
Aug 23, 08 10:49am

There is something inspired about it.

The Text Message

so much depends
upon

a phone charged
last night

a day planned
ruined

something some-
thing else

...apologies to William Carlos Williams.

Reading List: Summer 2008

2008-09-08T09:00:00.001-04:00

I think I acquitted myself pretty well. Especially made a dent in my ever-growing pile of unread books that I've bought.

preacher book 8: all hell's a-coming*, garth ennis and steve dillon
preacher book 9: alamo*, garth ennis and steve dillon
i shall destroy all the civilized planets: the comics of fletcher hanks*
granta 97: the best of young american novelists 2
tracer, frederick barthelme
the double hook, sheila watson
the sound and the fury, william faulkner
ham on rye, charles bukowski
iliad, homer
mcsweeney's mammoth treasury of thrilling tales, edited by michael chabon (mass market reprint of issue 10 of mcsweeney's quarterly concern)
the starman omnibus vol. 1*, james robinson and tony harris
invisible man, ralph ellison
snow white, donald barthelme
robinson crusoe, daniel defoe
the king, donald barthelme
man in the holocene, max frisch
the catcher in the rye, j.d. salinger
nine stories, j.d. salinger
the call of cthulhu and other weird stories, h.p. lovecraft
franny and zooey, j.d. salinger

*comic books

Misogyny: You know, for kids III

2008-09-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

How is that a television show can having me cheering for our main character, as he commits what is at its core, essentially a sexual assault? (Does it help that the women in question probably just sees this as another stop in their business-sexual tête-à-tête?)

Don Draper: Believe me: I will ruin him. Do what I say.

-- Mad Men, "The Benefactor," Season 2

Get all Walden & shit

2008-09-04T09:00:00.000-04:00

I wish I went for hikes more.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Prisoner's dilemma

2008-09-03T09:00:00.001-04:00

So here we are, a thought experiment coming back on the scene and kicking incest to the curb. How utterly disappointing. And middlebrow. Seriously now, if someone out there sees the the incestuous deep sea monster thought experiment Wikipedia entry, forward it my way.

This thought experiment, the Prisoner's dilemma, is actually a problem in Game Theory as described by the RAND Corporation.

I'm not going to bother to try to do this one justice so you should probably just read it yourself if you're interested. I'll just mention the point that if two accomplices in a crime are brought in for their crime, and given the chance to betray the other (in separate interrogations, natch), then "rational choice leads the two players to both play defectly even though each player's individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperately."

But remember that movie about game theory Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr.--A Beautiful something-- and how it was only so-so, but it had the great scene where Nash and his faculty pals used game theory to pick up girls in a bar. (I believe they decided they shouldn't all go after the blonde--I'm not sure, I only saw it like once. It was so middlebrow.)

Wikipedia by Week

Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Album Listen List: August 2008

2008-09-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

in listening order

illmatic, nas
endtroducing....., dj shadow
we were dead before the ship even sank, modest mouse
perfect from now on, built to spill
"heroes", david bowie
station to station, david bowie
people's instinctive travels and the paths of rhythm, a tribe called quest
daylight, aesop rock
bazooka tooth, aesop rock
licensed to ill, beastie boys
check your head, beastie boys

Some of these felt overly familiar, but I had the sense that I had never listened to them start-to-finish before.

Film Watch List: August 2008

2008-09-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

*film has been seen previously/rewatching
†watched in theatre

in viewing order

The Dentist (1932)
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
The Killing Fields (1984)
The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
On Golden Pond (1981)
Rope (1948)
Ravenous (1999)*
Rounders (1998)
Sleuth (1972)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)*
The Apartment (1960)
A Shot in the Dark (1964)
Disturbia (2007)
Pineapple Express (2008)†
Stand by Me (1986)*
Night at the Museum (2006)
The Invasion (2007)
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Thelma & Louise (1991)
Urban Cowboy (1980)
Tropic Thunder (2008)†
A Night in Casablanca (1946)
The Thin Man (1934)
After the Thin Man (1936)
Another Thin Man (1939)
Shadow of the Thin Man (1941)
The Thin Man Goes Home (1944)
Madeleine (1950)
Becoming Jane (2007)
What's New Pussycat? (1965)
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
The Night Listener (2006)
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)*
The Red Shoes (1948)
The Miracle Worker (1962)
The Apple (1980)
Roma (1972)
Metropolitan (1990)
The Dark Knight (2008)*†
Black Book (2006)
Tom Jones (1963)
Miller's Crossing (1990)*
Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)
Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Stats
Films watched: 46
Films previously seen: 6
Films watched in theatres: 3

Average # of films watched per day: 1.48

By Decade
1930s: 5
1940s: 6
1950s: 2
1960s: 5
1970s: 4
1980s: 5
1990s: 6
2000s: 13

Conclusion: When I watch something like The Red Shoes, I am reminded why I love cinema. Then I follow it up with something like The Apple.

Dreamin' 2: Electric Boogaloo

2008-08-29T09:00:00.001-04:00

Dream last night was one huge disappointment.

Best Dream Ever

2008-08-28T20:00:00.000-04:00

I'd just like to state that I had the best dream ever last night. I can't quite piece it all together in a way that makes any sort of sense, since it was a drunken fever dream. And what a cast, seemed like every one I knew was there. And it was really a journey, a quest, but for what I can't recall. And the setting was familiar but also defamiliarized. And I'm not sure why I took off my pants every time I got in my car (without taking off my shoes!) but I guarantee the nudity was tasteful. And the jokes! My god, it was the best comedy I never wrote. Sleep tonight can be nothing but a disappointment.

Most Anticipated: The Road

2008-08-28T19:00:00.001-04:00

How can you have more than one most anticipated? Shut up, that's how!

Four reasons why I'm looking forward to The Road.

1) Viggo Mortensen. Look at him there, in that picture, all bearded and badass. Viggo has quickly become one of my favourite actors, mostly (entirely?) thanks to his work with David Cronenberg (esp. A History of Violence). Viggo also has Good and Appaloosa coming out this year, which look good and interesting, respectively.

2) Cormac McCarthy. The man wrote the source novel to No Country for Old Men, which I loved, as well as the source novel to this. And ummmm All the Pretty Horses, too I guess.

3) John Hillcoat. The man directed The Proposition, which was all kinds of grimy and gritty and violent and dirty realistic down under western, which would seemingly make it for this project as it's set in...

4) The Post-Apocalypse. How I love post-apocalyptic worlds. Maybe because they so often involve zombies. Not that this involves zombies. None that I am aware of, at least. But I can love them separately. I'm not sure what love came first. It's a chicken and the egg thing.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Demimonde

2008-08-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

The language, it is continually evolving, yet it stays the same. New words come up, yet our old words don't disappear. Some may label them archaic. They might not be gauche. But they still get the job done. And with style.

"Demimonde" was the "mistress" of the nineteenth century. That is, to say, mistress is the new demimonde.

But they are so much more than mere mistresses. While they enjoy the same kept-ness (captivity?) of the mistress, they also constitute their own social class.

Their decline is owed to ever rising tide of progress, time, feminism, and the middle class. Social mores are for the bourgeoisie; demimondes are for the wealthy.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

A Perfect Sequence I: Batman: The Animated Series

2008-08-26T09:00:00.005-04:00

Batman: The Animated Series
Episode 406532 "Robin's Reckoning Part 1"
Original Airdate: February 7, 1993

The sequence begins as Batman, in flashback (as signified by his different chest emblem), gathers information (using strongarm tactics) on the whereabouts of Tony Zucco, murderer of Robin's acrobat parents, The Flying Graysons.

Cut to Zucco's hideout at his uncle's homestead (armed guards included). After a brief musical cue, Batman enters the house and the soundtrack switches to only diegetic sound. Having received a denial from the uncle, Batman covertly bugs the house. Hiding out in the garden, he hears Zucco inside, but is forced to take out the armed guards given when his position is compromised.

Zucco, tipped off by the sound of gunshots, tries to run Batman over with his car as he escapes.

Thanks to some excellent animation that sets just the right tone and mood, filled with shadows and tension, this is a perfect sequence.

Privileged IV

2008-08-25T09:00:00.001-04:00

Text Message

From:
281-[redacted]
Message:
I FORGOT TO
CHARGE THE
PHONE LASTNIGHT
WE WILL THINJ OF
SOMETHING ELSE
Received on:
Aug 23, 08 10:49am

Text messages are the new poetry. And sometimes they just appear out of the ether from about 1500 miles away and delight your day.

Boy, was she crumby!

2008-08-22T09:00:00.002-04:00

I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes. Girls aren't too much help, either, when you start trying not to get too crumby, when you start trying not to spoil anything really good.

--J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Hulu

2008-08-21T12:30:00.002-04:00

So I've discovered the free video service Hulu.com (brought to us by the kind folks at NBC and FOX, apparently) has some awesome movies available to watch online. Recently, I watched The Taking of Pelham One Two Three on it (Thus reaching 2/3 of my 1970s Walter Matthau crime drama trifecta. Charley Varrick and The Laughing Policeman being the other two.) and it was all I ever hoped and dreamed for (especially since it's getting remade next year). Anyways I've put together a queue which amounts to films that should be good and mere curiosities and I've duplicated it here for your pleasure. Enjoy.

Good
Bedazzled
Blackula
Boomerang!
The Desert Rats
Eddie Murphy: Raw
Eight Men Out
Fiddler on the Roof
The Great Train Robbery
Hair
Hoop Dreams (it's in The Criterion Collection)
Kagemusha (it's in The Criterion Collection)
The Knack, and How to Get It
A Life Less Ordinary
Metropolitan (it's in The Criterion Collection)
Moonstruck
Nicholas Nickleby
Of Mice and Men (Malkovich-Sinise!)
Open Your Eyes (this was remade as Vanilla Sky)
Parents
Quest for Fire
Quills
Rob Roy
The Secret of NIMH
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Weird Science (John Hughes!)

Documentaries
Cosmic Voyage
Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia

Curiosities
Bulworth
Casino Royale (1967) (It's got Woody Allen... and Peter Sellers)
Frogs
Ghoulies II
Hercules in New York (Arnold Schwarzenegger's debut)
In the Mix (Usher!)
Killing Zoe (from Roger Avary hot off of Pulp Fiction)
Pumpkinhead
The Scorpion King
State Property
Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann
Troll 2 (this is at the top of my queue... OMGOMGOMG!!!1!1! I can't wait)
Underworld: Evolution
Undiscovered
When a Stranger Calls
Xanadu

The Rest (i.e. good stuff they have that I've already seen... there's still a lot more they have)
28 Days Later
Coffee and Cigarettes
Dressed to Kill
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Fifth Element
Ghostbusters
Groundhog Day
In the Heat of the Night
The Longest Day
Lost Highway
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Me, Myself & Irene
Men in Black
Naked Lunch
Near Dark
The Night of the Hunter
Raising Arizona
Requiem for a Dream
The Sand Pebbles
Sideways
Some Like It Hot
Spy Game
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Von Ryan's Express

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Haemophilia in European royalty

2008-08-20T09:00:00.003-04:00

Aristocratic inbreeding again, Justin? I know, I know. But its an awesome concept. Incest: an awesome concept? Yes. Yes! YES!!

The only problem with incest (yes the only problem) is that it tends to allow the propagation of undesirable traits such as a horrible underbite or excessive bleeding. Yes, today's focus of the royal intermarriage corner is haemophilia in European royalty.

Haemophilia, the inability of the body to control blood clotting, was passed among the houses of Europe by that nineteenth century queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland's Victorian era, Queen Victoria, who likely developed the condition through spontaneous gene mutation. From there, she passed this gene to her son Leopold, an inconsequential heir (fourth in line!) who would die from the excessive bleeding, and princesses Alice and Beatrice, consorts of Princes of Germany. And through their children, the disorder would reach the houses of Prussia, Russia, and Spain. Natural selection at its finest.

Of course, today it is sad to report that hemophilia is extinct in the Royal Houses of Europe, but there is still hope that it does in fact still reside, hidden, waiting, in the genes of a female descendant of Victoria.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Chemical History

2008-08-19T09:00:00.001-04:00

Am I the only one who would be interested in a complete chemical (i.e. medicinal) history of his entire life?

Top Five VIII: Dustin Hoffman Performances in Film

2008-08-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

1. Straw Dogs (1971)
2. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
3. Marathon Man (1976)
4. The Graduate (1967)
5. Hook (1991)

Unseen: Mr. Magorium's Wonderful Emporium, Kramer vs. Kramer, a shitload of others

Fridays

2008-08-15T17:00:00.000-04:00

Ughhh Fridays sometime catch up to me.

Especially when I spend a not insignificant amount of time looking for a picture of Myrna Loy doing her oh-so-cute and oh-so-fuckable (even if she would be 103 if alive today) face scrunching thing in the first Thin Man film (as Nora, Mrs. Nick Charles).

Semantics: Kind v. Sort

2008-08-14T09:30:00.000-04:00

A turn of phrase was stuck in my head? But I was missing some of the words. I knew what to do: a Google phrase search.

In goes "of motherfuckery is this." Out comes 7 results.

Six use "what kind of motherfuckery is this?"

One uses "what sort of motherfuckery is this?"

Sort or kind? Kind seems to be the consensus favourite. But what say you?

The Travolta Touch

2008-08-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

There is something about the fact that Travolta hits his women in a few of his early classics. See: Saturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Library of America

2008-08-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

I think my book fetish is well documented on this here site. But only once I have taken you into the very psyche of said fetish, and lovingly photographed the object, let you feel the pages, crisply turning, had you breath in the cover, the soft cloth that binds the hardcover.

One would think I would know about the Library of America. About there many, many fine editions. Sure, I think I've seen one of two in the store before, but seeing this list is overwhelming. Half-mast minimum. It's like you've created one fine edition, that's fantastic, but moving on. Then there's creating a whole series of fine editions and that's just transcendent.

Library of America, publisher and not a library mind you, has created a whole series of fine, and comprehensive, editions.

Wikipedia currently lists one hundred and eighty-two editions in their main series ranging from the first volume of three Herman Melville novellas to their one hundred and eighty-second volume collecting five Philip K. Dick novels.

Library of America is a non-profit relying on the patronage of well-endowed patrons to bring us classics in acid-free paper, durable binding cloth, and flexible, but firm binding boards, as well as keeping said classics in print.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Routine

2008-08-12T09:00:00.001-04:00

Warm-up. Eight pull-ups. Fifty jumping jacks. Stretch. Eight chin-ups. Pull-ups and chin-ups both use the chin-up bar. Pull-ups use a pronated grip, palms out. Chin-ups use a supinated grip, palms in. Treadmill. Start machine. On-speed is 1.6 kilometres per hour. Or 1 mile per hour. The machine is calibrated to the imperial system but the display output is in metrics. Increase speed to 3.5 kilometres per hour within ten seconds. Move onto tread, begin walk. Use MP3 player to divert boredom. Insert right earbud, increase speed to 3.7 kilometres per hour. Insert left earbud, increase speed to 3.8 kilometres per hour. Hitch tie player to treadmill handbar. Increase speed to 4.0 kilometres per hour. Tighten hitch, increase speed to 4.2 kilometres per hour. Release player's manual slide lock, increase speed to 4.3 kilometres per hour. Turn on player, increase speed to 4.5 kilometres per hour. Press play, shuffle begins as player previous set to random playback. Increase speed to 4.7 kilometres per hour. Plug in earphones, increase speed to 4.8 kilometres per hour. Less than one minute into walk. Crack water bottle seal. Remember to keep hydrated. Read. Read a page, increase speed. Read a page. Increase speed to 5.0 kilometres per hour. Read a page. Increase speed to 5.2 kilometres per hour. Read a page. Increase speed to 5.3 kilometres per hour. Read a page. Increase speed to 5.5 kilometres per hour. Read a page. Increase speed to 5.6 kilometres per hour. Read a page. Increase speed to 5.8 kilometres per hour. Read a page, increase speed to 6.0 kilometres per hour. Read a page. Increase speed to 6.1 kilometres per hour. Read a page. Increase speed to 6.3 kilometres per hour. Read a page, increase speed to 6.4 kilometres. Less than ten minutes into walk. Walking speed has been reached. Tread can be inclined. Angle is measured in degrees. Degrees are measured positively in relation to the plane of the floor. Incline can be raised in increments of 0.5 degrees. Read a page, increase incline to 0.5 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 1.0 degree. Read a page. Increase incline to 1.5 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 2.0 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 2.5 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 3.0 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 3.5 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 4.0 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 4.5 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 5.0 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 5.5 degrees. Read a page. Increase incline to 6.0 degrees. Incline is satisfactory, continue reading. 30:00. Increase speed to 8.5 kilometres per hour, jogging speed. Increase incrementally, but as quickly as possible. Jog. 31:00. Use pre-set button to resume walking speed, 6.4 kilometres per hour. Walk. Read. 40:00. Increase speed to 8.5 kilometres per hour. Jog. 42:00. Return to walking speed, 6.4 kilometres per hour. Walk. Read. 50:00. Increase speed to 8.5 kilometres per hour. Jog. 53:00. Return to walking speed, 6.4 kilometres per hour. Walk. Read. 60:00. Increase speed to 8.5 kilometres per hour. Jog. 65:00. Return to walking speed, 6.4 kilometres per hour. Walk. 66:20. Decrease incline to 5.0 degrees. Treadmill contains limited number of displays. Time and pace share a single display cyclically. Pace is minutes per kilometre. Cycle runs in approximately 20 second intervals. Use cycle to synchronise slowdown pace. 66:40. Decrease incline to 4.0 degrees. 67:00. Decrease incline to 3.0 degrees. 67:20. Decrease incline to 2.0 degrees. 67:40. Decrease incline to 1.0 degree. 68:00. Decrease incline to 0.0 degrees. 69:00. Decrease speed, incrementally, to 6.0 kilometres per hour. 69:20. Decrease speed, incrementally, to 5.5 kilometres per hour. 69:40. Decrease speed, incrementally, to 5.0 kilometres per hour. Display returns to clock. Decrease speed, incrementally, with each second until... 70:00. Dead stop. Machine calculations: 19+ laps. 7.6+ kilometres. 820+ calories. 260+ fat. Towel down self, machine. Don't forget to bring a towel. Eight pull-ups. Twenty-five push-ups. Twenty-five crunches. Eight chin-ups. Twenty-five push-ups.

Dear Death, I don't have the time to personally respond to all my fan mail, but...

2008-08-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

Dear Samuel L. Jackson,

Watch yo'self.

Sincerely,

Death

Man in the Mirror: Charm

2008-08-08T17:15:00.001-04:00

My charm turns on and off like a switch, I'm just not sure who's flicking it.

Olivia Munn

2008-08-08T17:00:00.001-04:00

I don't watch much TV these days (of the non-PVRed variety) but when I do, it's often Attack of the Show. Now sure the show is dipped into geek culture of which I likely belong, but my patronage probably has more to do with Olivia Munn.

I just wish I could have found a photo to use where she is wearing glasses (and not while dressed up as the Baroness).

I Do Wonder I

2008-08-08T16:45:00.001-04:00

I do wonder how I could possibly be considered to be interesting enough to be a topic of other people's conversations?

Like I get how I'm interesting but not how it can be considered since how I'm interesting is mostly internal. Like a submerged iceberg would be a better metaphor.

Our Patron Saint on Plays

2008-08-08T16:30:00.001-04:00

Donald Barthelme, our patron of patrons and saint of saints on Plays, Bombs, Operas, Politics.

"Sir Percy Plangent has writ a new opera attacking Arthur!"

"It is called The Grail, and in it the Grail is a bomb that will make everyone happy forever!"

"A bomb that will make everyone happy forever! Is this the same bomb that the Blue Knight was speaking of, some time ago?"

"In the opera the device does not use cobalt, as the Blue Knight projected, but bold euphonium!"

"What is euphonium?"

"It's a compound of europium and eurekium. In Act One, it is discovered. In Act Two, it is refined. In Act Three, it explodes!"

"In the first act, everybody denounces Arthur for not having a wonderful bomb like this. In the second act, everybody decides that something must be done. In the third act, the bomb goes off!"

"A powerful parable of political praxis!"

"Precisely! The bomb is a metaphor for the unhappiness of those groaning under the yoke!"

"Who is groaning under the yoke?"

"The folk are groaning under the yoke!"

-- Donald Barthelme, The King

Eugenics: Such a Bad Thing?

2008-08-08T15:00:00.000-04:00

Eugenics: Such a Bad Thing?

I'll let you mull over that for about a week before I actually write something on the topic.

David Bowie in Pop II

2008-08-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

There’s Old Wave. There’s New Wave. And there's David Bowie...

- RCA's marketing slogan for 1977's "Heroes"

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Honeypot

2008-08-06T09:00:00.001-04:00

The Honey trap or the Honeypot, when you realize it is a term, in the spy community, for recruitment involving sexual seduction, opens itself up to a lot of crude slangy references to certain genitalia of a certain sex, perhaps, in all likelihood, the fairer of two.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion