YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO USE MY ANSWERS! Copy this note and write a new note. Then erase my answers and fill in your answers. Tag your friends and don't forget to tag me too. Remember, you can't use the same answer as the person who sent it to you. If my answers are dumb, it's because the person before me had the good ones!
1. Name something you use in the shower: salad tongs
2. Name something a football player wears under his uniform: pantyhose
3. Name something people hate to find on their windshield: dead hooker
4. Name something a man might buy before a date: salad tongs
5. What is another word for blemish? Dubya
6. Something you cook in the microwave: chips ahoy cookies, seriously, 20 seconds, try it.
7. Name a piece of furniture people need help moving: man-sized safe
8. Name something a dog does that embarrasses its owner: puts the porn video they made on the internet
9. Name a kind of test you cannot study for: sobriety
10. Name something a boy scout gets a merit badge for: ratting out commies
11. Name a phrase with the word "home" in it: "play along with The Newlywed Game home version, only $19.95 available at Walgreens and wherever fine products are sold"
12. Name a sport where players lose teeth: The Sugar 5000
13. Name something a teacher can do to ruin a student's day: threaten to stop sleeping with him unless he murders her husband
14. What is a way you can tell someone has been crying? review the nanny-cam footage
15. Name something a person wears even if it has a hole in it: swiss cheese helmet
16. Name something that gets smaller the more you use it: global oil supply
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
25 fake things
In case you're not on the facebook.
(I would kind of like to see us lose our fascination with pseudo-obligatory nuisance chains. I mean, I thought memes were only supposed to spread via some sort of merit and not a misplaced sense of obligation/peer pressure. Having said that, yeah... I totally caved.)
1. I am fluent in almost 2 languages: English and Idioglossia.
2. Shortly after I was born, my parents were bitten by a wolfman. Raised by werefolk.
3. My boyscout leader taught me the proper way to smoke crack.
4. My favorite food is toast.
5. When I was in the 7th grade, I killed several prostitutes in dark alleyways of London and totally got away with it!
6. I am equal parts lizard, goat, soy and Rasputin.
7. As a small child, when adults used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said the same thing... "The mayor of ho-town!"
8. Throughout the 70's, I commanded my own Army of God and led my men on a campaign of destruction the likes of which Ridgewood, NJ had never seen.
9. Sometimes, when I didn't know the correct answer in history class, I would save face by pretending to be my own twin brother.
10. I once invented a time machine and went back in time and stopped myself from being born, just to see what would happen, and I've been stuck in a paradox ever since. It kinda blows.
11. My first real job in NYC was for a large company owned by a 60-something British gentleman and avid mountaineer who had once summitted Everest. One time, while flirting with our receptionist, I jokingly said I suspected the owner was merely compensating for the fact that his parents named him "Leslie" and then I called the man a "pathetic little pansy" not realizing he was right behind me the whole time. He challenged me to a race up the entire staircase of the office building (32 flights) the following day at noon. At the starting gun, he elbowed me in the ribcage as hard as he could, knocking me off balance, then bolted, taking the stairs two at a time like they were nothing. As soon as I regained my footing, I followed, ignoring the pain shooting through my chest. He had a commanding lead, but I figured I'd make up some distance if I could keep a steady pace into the upper third. By around the 25th floor, I was right on his heels, though he was still taking the stairs two at a time. The blood was pounding in my ears, as was the sound of our breathing and our footsteps echoing down the fluorescent-lit gray and beige concrete stairwell. The pain in my side had increased considerably and was making it all the more difficult to breathe, all the more painful to use the banister to help hoist myself up. I couldn't believe a guy 40 years older than me was still ahead, seemingly fine. Two flights later he faltered a bit, tripping ever so slightly, but quickly righted himself and continued as before. But it meant he was getting tired. So I made my move. Leg muscles burning, I shoved past him on the outside as we were making a flight-turn. Between huffs and puffs I said "Take THAT old man!" (though it probably sounded more like "Tay... tha... oh... muh...!") and with renewed zeal I started taking the remaining stairs 3 at a time, opening up a decent lead. This proved unsustainable and on the last flight I tripped, badly. I was disoriented for just a moment, but it was long enough for the old man to catch up. He took the opportunity to stomp my left ankle which was draped from one step to the next. I felt, and we both heard, the bone crunch a little. The pain was excruciating. Still, I dragged myself the rest of the way onto the roof, emerging into the midday sunshine only two or three steps behind him. He turned, pointed at me and was about to tell me I was fired and what a loser I was when he suffered both a massive heart attack and stroke. He was dead almost instantly. Whew, dodged a bullet there!
12. I like beagles.
13. My favorite diseases are the ones with the least clinical names: scurvy, scrapey, pringles, shegetz, exploding buttock disease, etc.
14. My favorite Star Wars character is the second Jawa from the left. I don't know his name, so I just call him 'Biff.'
15. I woud like to bring back names that have gone out of style, and so plan to call my male children things like: Smedley, Ozymandias, Abner, Agamemnon, Ivanhoe, Caligula and Kevin. My female children will be named: Bertha, Hecate, Lucretia -- wait a minute... those are actually kinda cool. Hmm. Female names not mockable. Never mind.
16. I have had lots of odd jobs: paperboy, rockboy, scissorboy, waterboy, astroboy, pickleboy, doorman, floorman, corpsman, manwhore, manservant, manager, ump, wimp, tramp, scamp, vamp, party clown, rodeo clown, subway clown, elevator clown, laundromat clown, sidewalk clown, crosswalk clown, urinal clown, fast-food restaurant employee, bookkeeper, bookloser, bookstealer, bookbanner, bookbinder, minderbinder, masterminderbinder, elf (x-mas), elf (regular), elf (high-octane), meal-replacement bartender and stooge.
17. Speaking of... My favorite of the Three Stooges is Shemp: the unsung stooge.
18. I was once bitten by a radioactive tree-sloth, giving me sloth powers, so I designed a costume and became Slothman, but nobody knew the difference so now I just hang out.
19. In the future, I will be Andy Warhol for fifteen minutes.
20. I am trying to get into the habit of... an attractive nun I met the other day. [rimshot!]
21. When future archaeologists unearth the time capsule I buried, the contents will convince them that every single other person living in this era has also buried a time capsule somewhere. I love messin' with future archaeologists.
22. I know the difference between your, you're, yore and yawer.
23. I blindly accept all cookies.
24. In all honesty, I can't be trusted.
25. Murly bok zaklompt feffen arungulous, pafto sherzen bejerzen. Oytag tatz? Totz. Tonkle totz. (See #1.)
(I would kind of like to see us lose our fascination with pseudo-obligatory nuisance chains. I mean, I thought memes were only supposed to spread via some sort of merit and not a misplaced sense of obligation/peer pressure. Having said that, yeah... I totally caved.)
1. I am fluent in almost 2 languages: English and Idioglossia.
2. Shortly after I was born, my parents were bitten by a wolfman. Raised by werefolk.
3. My boyscout leader taught me the proper way to smoke crack.
4. My favorite food is toast.
5. When I was in the 7th grade, I killed several prostitutes in dark alleyways of London and totally got away with it!
6. I am equal parts lizard, goat, soy and Rasputin.
7. As a small child, when adults used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said the same thing... "The mayor of ho-town!"
8. Throughout the 70's, I commanded my own Army of God and led my men on a campaign of destruction the likes of which Ridgewood, NJ had never seen.
9. Sometimes, when I didn't know the correct answer in history class, I would save face by pretending to be my own twin brother.
10. I once invented a time machine and went back in time and stopped myself from being born, just to see what would happen, and I've been stuck in a paradox ever since. It kinda blows.
11. My first real job in NYC was for a large company owned by a 60-something British gentleman and avid mountaineer who had once summitted Everest. One time, while flirting with our receptionist, I jokingly said I suspected the owner was merely compensating for the fact that his parents named him "Leslie" and then I called the man a "pathetic little pansy" not realizing he was right behind me the whole time. He challenged me to a race up the entire staircase of the office building (32 flights) the following day at noon. At the starting gun, he elbowed me in the ribcage as hard as he could, knocking me off balance, then bolted, taking the stairs two at a time like they were nothing. As soon as I regained my footing, I followed, ignoring the pain shooting through my chest. He had a commanding lead, but I figured I'd make up some distance if I could keep a steady pace into the upper third. By around the 25th floor, I was right on his heels, though he was still taking the stairs two at a time. The blood was pounding in my ears, as was the sound of our breathing and our footsteps echoing down the fluorescent-lit gray and beige concrete stairwell. The pain in my side had increased considerably and was making it all the more difficult to breathe, all the more painful to use the banister to help hoist myself up. I couldn't believe a guy 40 years older than me was still ahead, seemingly fine. Two flights later he faltered a bit, tripping ever so slightly, but quickly righted himself and continued as before. But it meant he was getting tired. So I made my move. Leg muscles burning, I shoved past him on the outside as we were making a flight-turn. Between huffs and puffs I said "Take THAT old man!" (though it probably sounded more like "Tay... tha... oh... muh...!") and with renewed zeal I started taking the remaining stairs 3 at a time, opening up a decent lead. This proved unsustainable and on the last flight I tripped, badly. I was disoriented for just a moment, but it was long enough for the old man to catch up. He took the opportunity to stomp my left ankle which was draped from one step to the next. I felt, and we both heard, the bone crunch a little. The pain was excruciating. Still, I dragged myself the rest of the way onto the roof, emerging into the midday sunshine only two or three steps behind him. He turned, pointed at me and was about to tell me I was fired and what a loser I was when he suffered both a massive heart attack and stroke. He was dead almost instantly. Whew, dodged a bullet there!
12. I like beagles.
13. My favorite diseases are the ones with the least clinical names: scurvy, scrapey, pringles, shegetz, exploding buttock disease, etc.
14. My favorite Star Wars character is the second Jawa from the left. I don't know his name, so I just call him 'Biff.'
15. I woud like to bring back names that have gone out of style, and so plan to call my male children things like: Smedley, Ozymandias, Abner, Agamemnon, Ivanhoe, Caligula and Kevin. My female children will be named: Bertha, Hecate, Lucretia -- wait a minute... those are actually kinda cool. Hmm. Female names not mockable. Never mind.
16. I have had lots of odd jobs: paperboy, rockboy, scissorboy, waterboy, astroboy, pickleboy, doorman, floorman, corpsman, manwhore, manservant, manager, ump, wimp, tramp, scamp, vamp, party clown, rodeo clown, subway clown, elevator clown, laundromat clown, sidewalk clown, crosswalk clown, urinal clown, fast-food restaurant employee, bookkeeper, bookloser, bookstealer, bookbanner, bookbinder, minderbinder, masterminderbinder, elf (x-mas), elf (regular), elf (high-octane), meal-replacement bartender and stooge.
17. Speaking of... My favorite of the Three Stooges is Shemp: the unsung stooge.
18. I was once bitten by a radioactive tree-sloth, giving me sloth powers, so I designed a costume and became Slothman, but nobody knew the difference so now I just hang out.
19. In the future, I will be Andy Warhol for fifteen minutes.
20. I am trying to get into the habit of... an attractive nun I met the other day. [rimshot!]
21. When future archaeologists unearth the time capsule I buried, the contents will convince them that every single other person living in this era has also buried a time capsule somewhere. I love messin' with future archaeologists.
22. I know the difference between your, you're, yore and yawer.
23. I blindly accept all cookies.
24. In all honesty, I can't be trusted.
25. Murly bok zaklompt feffen arungulous, pafto sherzen bejerzen. Oytag tatz? Totz. Tonkle totz. (See #1.)
Friday, January 30, 2009
25 Actual Things
Okay, here's the real list...
1. I was born 8 days early. This was the last time I was early for anything. Or on time even.
2. Around the age of 4, on a lovely suburban spring day, my mom told me to play outside (I think she just needed a little quiet time to herself). I refused. She shuffled me out the kitchen storm door. I opened it and came back in. She shuffled me out again and locked the storm door. I punched my fist through the window, cutting my soft little hand to ribbons. Blood and glass everywhere. What a stubborn little bastard.
3. My three most physically painful experiences so far: molar drilled with no novocaine, kidney stone, thumbnail ripped off. Of the three, I bet the one that made you wince was the thumbnail.
4. When I was a teenager, I never thought I'd live to see 30, partly because I expected Ronald Reagan, motivated solely by shits and giggles, to push The Button. But also because I assumed I'd do something really reckless at some point. These two things are of course related.
5. Even though I'm into health food and preserving nature all that good stuff, I have a secret perverse desire to create crassly commercial genetic abominations. E.g.: splice the gene that causes coffee beans to have caffeine in 'em, into cow DNA -- ladies and gentlemen, I give you... HyperBeef™!
6. Turning to sports... I peaked athletically at the age of 12. But back then (and I'm totally serious) I was pure poetry in motion. Okay, I'm still poetry in motion, only now the poet is Ogden Nash.
7. I am a perfectionist. I'm also a lazy slob. These sound completely incompatible, and they are. When I was young: torment. Now: meh.
8. In elementary school, my favorite subject was math. But in 7th grade, I decided words were more fun than numbers. Been paying the price ever since.
9. At 13, I was one of the first kids in my town to convince his parents to get a computer for the home. My dad, whose giant multinational pharmaceutical company had a Honeywell 6000 mainframe taking up half the corporate campus, wanted to know: why on god's green earth would we ever need a home computer? What the hell are you going to do with it?!? "I could do my school homework!" I said, by which I meant play games. The computer was an "Apple 2 plus" -- apple ][+ -- and it came with 48K RAM (expandable to 64K) at which my father was completely astonished. So much memory! How could you possibly ever NEED that much!? To put that in perspective, it might be enough memory to hold a second or two of an mp3.
10. I played the sousaphone in my high school marching band. Clearly, I thought I was this guy:
But everybody else probably thought I was this guy...
Really, I was probably closest to being this guy...
11. When I was at the height of my teen angst and confusion, I had a dream wherein all the mystical secrets of the Universe were revealed to me. I remember being so blissfully happy in the dream, to finally have the answers! It was all so simple. It made so much sense. I had understanding! It was genuinely wonderful. Then I woke up and was helpless to stop it from all slipping away, leaving me with an incredibly profound sense of loss. A cosmic tease of infinite bigness!
12. Whenever someone I grew up with finds me on the facebook and asks if I "remember when we did that thing by the place where we went that time? That was so much fun!/I was so mad at you!" I almost never know what they're talking about. So I ask, "Are you sure that was me?" and they're all like, "Totally sure! Don't you remember? That song by [80's pop group I swear I've never heard of] was playing on the radio and you said something funny about goats! Remember?" Um... I got nothing. This makes me feel slightly stupid. But in my defense, it was the 80's and I was in a state of fairly constant background-level existential itch, so for most of the time I just wasn't paying attention, even when it looked like I was. I usually joke that I've long since killed the brain cells that stored those memories. But I'm sure it's all in there somewhere.
13. Supposedly, my first word was "shit."
14. I never acquired ability to sight-read music because I memorized everything by ear long before figuring out what all the dots and squiggles were. Thus, I never became a musician. If I didn't believe in reincarnation, I'd probably regret this.
15. I occasionally talk to myself. For a while, this took the form of pretend conversations as a guest on Letterman. But not anymore. Now it's Jon Stewart. No offense Dave.
"None taken Jonnyboy. If you ever feel like paying us another visit, the door's always open."
"Thanks Dave, I'll try to pretend to make it back from time to time."
16. There are two babysitters from my childhood who stand out in my memory. One was Eddie, who could draw really cool-looking rocketships, and would let us build couch-cushion fortresses. The other was a girl whose name I've forgotten, but who we found incredibly entertaining because of this thing she could do with a ping-pong ball. (Haha, no. She could keep it bouncing on a paddle hundreds of times without missing. Impressive to a 6-year-old. Her record was over 700 hits I think. Come to think of it, that's impressive to me now! My brother and I were truly amazed but she must've been bored to tears. Yet, she indulged us, applying zen-like concentration to the super-repetitive, utterly pointless task.)
17. I was more of an adult 20 years ago than I am now.
18. I used to chop wood and carry water. Now, I chop wood and carry water. (In the future, I will use lasers!)
19. I can fall in love with a woman based solely on the sound of her voice/laugh. This has backfired on me.
20. Corollary to #19: If her voice doesn't do it for me, I could find a woman super-attractive in every other way and still not be able to -- ahem -- consummate. The attempt to ignore this has backfired on me.
21. When I was in the 5th grade, for Halloween, my elementary school had a "crazy hat contest." I figured all the other kids would come to school dressed as normal Halloween-ish things, with the addition of a hat with all sorts of wacky crap glued onto it. To counter this, and in an early manifestation of my love of efficiency, I decided to simply dress up as a hat for Halloween. I fashioned a crude giant wizard hat shape out of chicken-wire, and my mom helped me cover it in a dark fabric (all she had was purple) to which I hastily attached yellow stars and crescent moons an' shit. Even with the little eye holes we cut, it was difficult to see out of, and nearly impossible to climb stairs in. And even though it probably made me look more like a giant magical purple condom than anything else, I won the hat contest. (From this I concluded that 'concept' took precedence over 'execution', and that's why I've never achieved anything in life. Wah wah.)
22. I used to think that logic, reason and the scientific method would lead us to all knowable knowledge. I don't think that anymore.
23. As much as I consider myself a "word guy" linguistic precision doesn't really matter to me. And I'm not very good at scrabble™ -- I can't help wanting to make up my own words ('spaloney' should totally be a thing). I do take special notice whenever I, or someone else, utters a phrase or sentence which I can't imagine has ever been uttered before. One recent example: "Oh no, I spilled the oat-bran into the laundry basket full of garden hose."
24. Whenever I go for any length of time without a steady 9-to-5, I become completely nocturnal.
25. When I was 4 years old, I was in a pre-school class at our local synagogue. One day while the kids were all sitting on the floor listening to the teacher read us a story, a really tall girl named Sarah-Jane trapped me under her dress/skirt/thing. I struggled and crawled out only to have her trap me under it again. It was yellow, and allowed enough light in so I could see the floral pattern on her underwear. I remember being glad I didn't have flowers on my underwear. Anyway, as humiliated as I thought I should feel at being trapped by a girl, under her dress, I didn't want to do anything particularly drastic to change the situation. I didn't want to interrupt the teacher or the story-time, so I didn't yell. And I guess I figured it would be wrong to hit a girl, especially, you know, in the crotch. So, I just sat there, listening to the slightly muffled sound of Sarah-Jane trying to contain her giggles, and looking at her long, smooth legs. I sometimes wonder what happened to her. Probably a lawyer now.
Meme memed.
1. I was born 8 days early. This was the last time I was early for anything. Or on time even.
2. Around the age of 4, on a lovely suburban spring day, my mom told me to play outside (I think she just needed a little quiet time to herself). I refused. She shuffled me out the kitchen storm door. I opened it and came back in. She shuffled me out again and locked the storm door. I punched my fist through the window, cutting my soft little hand to ribbons. Blood and glass everywhere. What a stubborn little bastard.
3. My three most physically painful experiences so far: molar drilled with no novocaine, kidney stone, thumbnail ripped off. Of the three, I bet the one that made you wince was the thumbnail.
4. When I was a teenager, I never thought I'd live to see 30, partly because I expected Ronald Reagan, motivated solely by shits and giggles, to push The Button. But also because I assumed I'd do something really reckless at some point. These two things are of course related.
5. Even though I'm into health food and preserving nature all that good stuff, I have a secret perverse desire to create crassly commercial genetic abominations. E.g.: splice the gene that causes coffee beans to have caffeine in 'em, into cow DNA -- ladies and gentlemen, I give you... HyperBeef™!
6. Turning to sports... I peaked athletically at the age of 12. But back then (and I'm totally serious) I was pure poetry in motion. Okay, I'm still poetry in motion, only now the poet is Ogden Nash.
7. I am a perfectionist. I'm also a lazy slob. These sound completely incompatible, and they are. When I was young: torment. Now: meh.
8. In elementary school, my favorite subject was math. But in 7th grade, I decided words were more fun than numbers. Been paying the price ever since.
9. At 13, I was one of the first kids in my town to convince his parents to get a computer for the home. My dad, whose giant multinational pharmaceutical company had a Honeywell 6000 mainframe taking up half the corporate campus, wanted to know: why on god's green earth would we ever need a home computer? What the hell are you going to do with it?!? "I could do my school homework!" I said, by which I meant play games. The computer was an "Apple 2 plus" -- apple ][+ -- and it came with 48K RAM (expandable to 64K) at which my father was completely astonished. So much memory! How could you possibly ever NEED that much!? To put that in perspective, it might be enough memory to hold a second or two of an mp3.10. I played the sousaphone in my high school marching band. Clearly, I thought I was this guy:
But everybody else probably thought I was this guy...
Really, I was probably closest to being this guy...
11. When I was at the height of my teen angst and confusion, I had a dream wherein all the mystical secrets of the Universe were revealed to me. I remember being so blissfully happy in the dream, to finally have the answers! It was all so simple. It made so much sense. I had understanding! It was genuinely wonderful. Then I woke up and was helpless to stop it from all slipping away, leaving me with an incredibly profound sense of loss. A cosmic tease of infinite bigness!
12. Whenever someone I grew up with finds me on the facebook and asks if I "remember when we did that thing by the place where we went that time? That was so much fun!/I was so mad at you!" I almost never know what they're talking about. So I ask, "Are you sure that was me?" and they're all like, "Totally sure! Don't you remember? That song by [80's pop group I swear I've never heard of] was playing on the radio and you said something funny about goats! Remember?" Um... I got nothing. This makes me feel slightly stupid. But in my defense, it was the 80's and I was in a state of fairly constant background-level existential itch, so for most of the time I just wasn't paying attention, even when it looked like I was. I usually joke that I've long since killed the brain cells that stored those memories. But I'm sure it's all in there somewhere.
13. Supposedly, my first word was "shit."
14. I never acquired ability to sight-read music because I memorized everything by ear long before figuring out what all the dots and squiggles were. Thus, I never became a musician. If I didn't believe in reincarnation, I'd probably regret this.
15. I occasionally talk to myself. For a while, this took the form of pretend conversations as a guest on Letterman. But not anymore. Now it's Jon Stewart. No offense Dave.
"None taken Jonnyboy. If you ever feel like paying us another visit, the door's always open."
"Thanks Dave, I'll try to pretend to make it back from time to time."
16. There are two babysitters from my childhood who stand out in my memory. One was Eddie, who could draw really cool-looking rocketships, and would let us build couch-cushion fortresses. The other was a girl whose name I've forgotten, but who we found incredibly entertaining because of this thing she could do with a ping-pong ball. (Haha, no. She could keep it bouncing on a paddle hundreds of times without missing. Impressive to a 6-year-old. Her record was over 700 hits I think. Come to think of it, that's impressive to me now! My brother and I were truly amazed but she must've been bored to tears. Yet, she indulged us, applying zen-like concentration to the super-repetitive, utterly pointless task.)
17. I was more of an adult 20 years ago than I am now.
18. I used to chop wood and carry water. Now, I chop wood and carry water. (In the future, I will use lasers!)
19. I can fall in love with a woman based solely on the sound of her voice/laugh. This has backfired on me.
20. Corollary to #19: If her voice doesn't do it for me, I could find a woman super-attractive in every other way and still not be able to -- ahem -- consummate. The attempt to ignore this has backfired on me.
21. When I was in the 5th grade, for Halloween, my elementary school had a "crazy hat contest." I figured all the other kids would come to school dressed as normal Halloween-ish things, with the addition of a hat with all sorts of wacky crap glued onto it. To counter this, and in an early manifestation of my love of efficiency, I decided to simply dress up as a hat for Halloween. I fashioned a crude giant wizard hat shape out of chicken-wire, and my mom helped me cover it in a dark fabric (all she had was purple) to which I hastily attached yellow stars and crescent moons an' shit. Even with the little eye holes we cut, it was difficult to see out of, and nearly impossible to climb stairs in. And even though it probably made me look more like a giant magical purple condom than anything else, I won the hat contest. (From this I concluded that 'concept' took precedence over 'execution', and that's why I've never achieved anything in life. Wah wah.)
22. I used to think that logic, reason and the scientific method would lead us to all knowable knowledge. I don't think that anymore.
23. As much as I consider myself a "word guy" linguistic precision doesn't really matter to me. And I'm not very good at scrabble™ -- I can't help wanting to make up my own words ('spaloney' should totally be a thing). I do take special notice whenever I, or someone else, utters a phrase or sentence which I can't imagine has ever been uttered before. One recent example: "Oh no, I spilled the oat-bran into the laundry basket full of garden hose."
24. Whenever I go for any length of time without a steady 9-to-5, I become completely nocturnal.
25. When I was 4 years old, I was in a pre-school class at our local synagogue. One day while the kids were all sitting on the floor listening to the teacher read us a story, a really tall girl named Sarah-Jane trapped me under her dress/skirt/thing. I struggled and crawled out only to have her trap me under it again. It was yellow, and allowed enough light in so I could see the floral pattern on her underwear. I remember being glad I didn't have flowers on my underwear. Anyway, as humiliated as I thought I should feel at being trapped by a girl, under her dress, I didn't want to do anything particularly drastic to change the situation. I didn't want to interrupt the teacher or the story-time, so I didn't yell. And I guess I figured it would be wrong to hit a girl, especially, you know, in the crotch. So, I just sat there, listening to the slightly muffled sound of Sarah-Jane trying to contain her giggles, and looking at her long, smooth legs. I sometimes wonder what happened to her. Probably a lawyer now.
Meme memed.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
A New Era of Honesty and Transparency
After I became an absurdly and unalterably happy guy about 12 years ago, I found myself bereft of the perverse joy of angry cynicism and mean-spirited dark humor that had nurtured me like a criminally insane mother's love for so many years. Despite the fact that this perverse pleasure was replaced by genuine joy, and thus has long been rendered utterly obsolete, I still crave it on occasion, and depending on how much caffeine I've ingested, am still capable of conjuring up some seriously cynical, though hopefully funny, shit.
And even though an honest man is finally -- finally -- sitting in the Oval Office; and even though that pilot did an amazing job landing that jet a few doors down from my apartment; and even though, thanks to the combination of corporate layoffs, a "warn notice" and a little thing called "severance" I get to be a man of relative leisure for a time; and even though the TED conference videos consistently reaffirm my faith in humanity... there are still at least a few things worth getting psychotically enraged over.
Like the fact that while I've been quietly expecting a major melt-down of the global economy for 14 years (ever since my first real corporate job inadvertently taught me that our entire economic "system" was built primarily on... absolutely fucking nothing) the "experts" were all caught with their pants down, shocked and awed. This is so infuriating it makes me feel like the Napoleon Dynamite guy at his most exasperated: "IDIOTS!" Why, only a few months before the market first crashed, I was telling a co-worker how I occasionally fantasized about one day owning an energy-independent off-grid home up in the woods somewhere, with a greenhouse to grow my own vegetables, allowing me to cut all conceivable ties to "the system." She asked why I would ever want to do something so extreme, and, among other things, I mentioned how it was so patently -- painfully -- obvious to me that our current practice of capitalism was inherently unsustainable and doomed to fail.
Ta da!
For my next trick, I'll guess the number of jelly beans in that giant jar: zero! (You can no longer afford jelly beans.)
During that conversation, my coworker didn't agree with me. She didn't see things the way I did. Nor did I expect her to. The patterns, the connections. But the fact that the professionals, the people who supposedly devoted their careers to studying every little detail of the corrupt, unregulated house of cards vapor and make-believe we call The Market, couldn't see what was so unavoidably clear to me, a nobody, was really rather frustrating. Or maybe they just refused to see/admit it. I mean, it does make a lot more sense that it would really be collective denial instead of collective idiocy.
But... it is now the dawn of a new era. The Obama era. The era of leaders who might actually do stuff that makes sense. The era of leaders who will base their decisions on "reality" and the good advice of people who know what the fuck they're talking about. The era of leaders who, when asked simple direct questions, will give simple honest answers. The era of leaders who might actually give a shit about the people who elected them. The era of leaders who can admit it when they make mistakes and accept responsibility for their actions/decisions like any normal adult. The era of leaders who don't have their heads up their asses. The era of leaders who aren't in it solely for the money (since there won't be any). The era of leaders we can actually respect.
Goodbye to the time of unbridled stupidity and greed! Hello to the time of unbridled... um... horniness!
Best of all, I've got my next project lined up, and I couldn't ask for a better one. It's in its embryonic stages right now, so I'm not going to say anything else about it. Just, you know, send me good productivity vibes. Yeah... just like that. Ooh... yeah, vibey.
Of course, there might someday come a time when I'll need to return to playing the role of drooling lackey to some corporate ogre, combing the help-wanted ads like everybody else. And I hope that if that day does come, this era of openness and honesty will be at its full flower. Imagine the types of job listings there could be...
DETAIL ORIENTED
Hyper-organized anal-retentive mouse-person with no life whatsoever wanted for extremely abusive department assistant position. Very long hours of high-stress low-paying drudgery peppered with occasional verbal/emotional torture. Those with friends, self-respect, need not apply.
SALES $
Relentless amoral asshole wanted to SELL SELL SELL! Do you have what it takes to convince poor people to spend what little money they have on nonsensical garbage nobody would ever need in a thousand years? Can you ignore the fact that rapacious consumerism will bury civilization under its own flatulent bulk until it chokes itself completely to death? Do you often feel like a hungry shark in a tank of bleeding pudgy children who never got past the doggie-paddle? Do you like feeling that way? (Do you love it?) If you answered yes to these questions, we want to hire you, you magnificent piece of shit!
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT
Hot girl wanted for position as executive assistant to Senior VP of Marketing for a successful alcoholic beverage company. Must be exceedingly hot. Must have tastefully office-appropriate, yet totally hot wardrobe. Knowledge of and enthusiasm for alcoholic beverages a big plus. Good phone manner a plus. Anything less than top-tier hot need not apply.
HAZARD PAY
Extremely desperate individuals wanted for highly dangerous work with little chance of survival. On the job training. $1000 for every full week of service. Poor sense of smell a plus. Always plenty of positions to fill. Call any time and ask for Bob.
And even though an honest man is finally -- finally -- sitting in the Oval Office; and even though that pilot did an amazing job landing that jet a few doors down from my apartment; and even though, thanks to the combination of corporate layoffs, a "warn notice" and a little thing called "severance" I get to be a man of relative leisure for a time; and even though the TED conference videos consistently reaffirm my faith in humanity... there are still at least a few things worth getting psychotically enraged over.
Like the fact that while I've been quietly expecting a major melt-down of the global economy for 14 years (ever since my first real corporate job inadvertently taught me that our entire economic "system" was built primarily on... absolutely fucking nothing) the "experts" were all caught with their pants down, shocked and awed. This is so infuriating it makes me feel like the Napoleon Dynamite guy at his most exasperated: "IDIOTS!" Why, only a few months before the market first crashed, I was telling a co-worker how I occasionally fantasized about one day owning an energy-independent off-grid home up in the woods somewhere, with a greenhouse to grow my own vegetables, allowing me to cut all conceivable ties to "the system." She asked why I would ever want to do something so extreme, and, among other things, I mentioned how it was so patently -- painfully -- obvious to me that our current practice of capitalism was inherently unsustainable and doomed to fail.
Ta da!
For my next trick, I'll guess the number of jelly beans in that giant jar: zero! (You can no longer afford jelly beans.)
During that conversation, my coworker didn't agree with me. She didn't see things the way I did. Nor did I expect her to. The patterns, the connections. But the fact that the professionals, the people who supposedly devoted their careers to studying every little detail of the corrupt, unregulated house of cards vapor and make-believe we call The Market, couldn't see what was so unavoidably clear to me, a nobody, was really rather frustrating. Or maybe they just refused to see/admit it. I mean, it does make a lot more sense that it would really be collective denial instead of collective idiocy.
But... it is now the dawn of a new era. The Obama era. The era of leaders who might actually do stuff that makes sense. The era of leaders who will base their decisions on "reality" and the good advice of people who know what the fuck they're talking about. The era of leaders who, when asked simple direct questions, will give simple honest answers. The era of leaders who might actually give a shit about the people who elected them. The era of leaders who can admit it when they make mistakes and accept responsibility for their actions/decisions like any normal adult. The era of leaders who don't have their heads up their asses. The era of leaders who aren't in it solely for the money (since there won't be any). The era of leaders we can actually respect.
Goodbye to the time of unbridled stupidity and greed! Hello to the time of unbridled... um... horniness!
Best of all, I've got my next project lined up, and I couldn't ask for a better one. It's in its embryonic stages right now, so I'm not going to say anything else about it. Just, you know, send me good productivity vibes. Yeah... just like that. Ooh... yeah, vibey.
Of course, there might someday come a time when I'll need to return to playing the role of drooling lackey to some corporate ogre, combing the help-wanted ads like everybody else. And I hope that if that day does come, this era of openness and honesty will be at its full flower. Imagine the types of job listings there could be...
DETAIL ORIENTED
Hyper-organized anal-retentive mouse-person with no life whatsoever wanted for extremely abusive department assistant position. Very long hours of high-stress low-paying drudgery peppered with occasional verbal/emotional torture. Those with friends, self-respect, need not apply.
SALES $
Relentless amoral asshole wanted to SELL SELL SELL! Do you have what it takes to convince poor people to spend what little money they have on nonsensical garbage nobody would ever need in a thousand years? Can you ignore the fact that rapacious consumerism will bury civilization under its own flatulent bulk until it chokes itself completely to death? Do you often feel like a hungry shark in a tank of bleeding pudgy children who never got past the doggie-paddle? Do you like feeling that way? (Do you love it?) If you answered yes to these questions, we want to hire you, you magnificent piece of shit!
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT
Hot girl wanted for position as executive assistant to Senior VP of Marketing for a successful alcoholic beverage company. Must be exceedingly hot. Must have tastefully office-appropriate, yet totally hot wardrobe. Knowledge of and enthusiasm for alcoholic beverages a big plus. Good phone manner a plus. Anything less than top-tier hot need not apply.
HAZARD PAY
Extremely desperate individuals wanted for highly dangerous work with little chance of survival. On the job training. $1000 for every full week of service. Poor sense of smell a plus. Always plenty of positions to fill. Call any time and ask for Bob.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Stop Light Pollution...
... or else images like this one will no longer be possible to capture (it's a 360 degree panorama flattened out into a rectangle, showing our galaxy in the night sky over Death Valley).
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Something I'd Like to See
I just came back from the dentist. Routine cleaning/check-up. Everything's fine in there.
My dentist happens to be a really hot woman (married, alas) and all her hygienists are also really hot. Walking in there reminds me of the purple-roofed ethical suicide parlor from the Kurt Vonnegut short story, "Welcome to the Monkey House" except instead of the hot women in their white clinical outfits putting you to death, they simply inflict pain and discomfort on your tender teeth and gums for a while after which you emerge with cleaner, smoother choppers. That metal claw? The suction tube? The rotary grit-scrubber? That ultrasonic torture needle? The stuff of nightmares! Except, wielded by a pretty girl, so how bad could it all be?
Personally, I think that instead of white lab coats it would be more appropriate if they were dressed in full-on dominatrix gear. More appropriate and hotter.
That's all.
My dentist happens to be a really hot woman (married, alas) and all her hygienists are also really hot. Walking in there reminds me of the purple-roofed ethical suicide parlor from the Kurt Vonnegut short story, "Welcome to the Monkey House" except instead of the hot women in their white clinical outfits putting you to death, they simply inflict pain and discomfort on your tender teeth and gums for a while after which you emerge with cleaner, smoother choppers. That metal claw? The suction tube? The rotary grit-scrubber? That ultrasonic torture needle? The stuff of nightmares! Except, wielded by a pretty girl, so how bad could it all be?
Personally, I think that instead of white lab coats it would be more appropriate if they were dressed in full-on dominatrix gear. More appropriate and hotter.
That's all.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Get Ready for More Bloggy Goodness
Last Thursday, our overlords informed us that they are shutting our portion of the empire down and laying us all off -- over 200 people. Wheeeee.
Don't really have time to write at the moment, so perhaps more about that in a future post. You see, I have until end of day tomorrow to tie up all the loose ends, finalize everything, square everything away clear out my desk and turn in my magnetic ID card. I've got more work to do now than I've had in months.
But as of X-mas day, I will suddenly have nothing to do and nowhere to go, able to coast for at least a little while on a reasonably decent -- all things considered -- severance, and that means mucho blogging-o.
Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
But for all my regular readers: my job loss is your bloggy gain! Or will be soon.
If you have any specific requests... things you'd like me to write about, issues or problems you'd like me to address... feel free to send 'em my way.
Happy happy!
Don't really have time to write at the moment, so perhaps more about that in a future post. You see, I have until end of day tomorrow to tie up all the loose ends, finalize everything, square everything away clear out my desk and turn in my magnetic ID card. I've got more work to do now than I've had in months.
But as of X-mas day, I will suddenly have nothing to do and nowhere to go, able to coast for at least a little while on a reasonably decent -- all things considered -- severance, and that means mucho blogging-o.
Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
But for all my regular readers: my job loss is your bloggy gain! Or will be soon.
If you have any specific requests... things you'd like me to write about, issues or problems you'd like me to address... feel free to send 'em my way.
Happy happy!
Friday, December 12, 2008
Someone Made My Invention
A long time ago, I had an idea to generate electricity by harnessing the kinetic energy of people moving through doors. I didn't patent it or nuthin' but I did eventually write about it in a blog-post here. And now, a little over a year later, the thing is for reals! Woo hoo! Of course, it took the Dutch to actually make the thing. We really need to take a page from their book. Several pages really. Maybe the whole book. I, personally, would like to see our 'New Amsterdam' adopt many more of the ways of original Amsterdam. It would be better for all concerned.
Anyway, seeing as how the nifty door thing has magically appeared in the real world (or, the Netherlands anyway) about a year after I wrote about it, here's another thing that really needs to exist, which I don't have the resources to make myself, but which the Dutch could certainly show us the way toward creating/using on a large scale (more of a technique than a "thing") and if they do it a year from now, well, better late than never...
This idea came to me on September 11th, 2001. As you may recall... there were these two really tall skyscrapers, with massive fires raging on upper floors. Firefighters who arrived on the scene went into the buildings from the ground, dragging their gear up the endless flights of stairs, climbing against the tide of people fleeing, which must have slowed everybody down in both directions. They helped many people escape the towers but continuing upward, and upward to put the fires out proved futile. The buildings collapsed. They all died -- over 300 of the bravest individuals our society is ever likely to produce, faced with an impossible task which became a suicide mission, all because of an inappropriate response to a specific problem. How do you put out a massive fire on an upper floor of a skyscraper, hundreds of feet in the air? Conventional firefighting techniques were never intended for such a thing. Men carrying hose from a ground-based pump, up 90 flights of stairs -- simply not right for the job. It's not a matter of good or bad. Only a matter of finding the tool or technique that best fits the situation. You don't use a claw hammer to remove a splinter from your finger and you don't use tweezers to pull a nail out of a board.
The right tool for this particular job would have been a small fleet of water-tank equipped helicopters.
Now, obviously, these already exist. Planes too. They are used primarily to help put out forest fires, wildfires in places with no fire hydrants, etc. They fill their tanks by scooping from lakes, rivers or the ocean, then fly over the fire and drop tons of water quickly. They can also drop other types of chemical fire-retardants which, as I understand it, would've been better than water for combatting the WTC fires, since they were caused by jet-fuel. Still, water would've been better than nothing, as it could have dissipated much of the heat which is assumed to have caused the failure of the steel support beams of the towers -- unless you believe, as some video evidence seems to suggest, that there were explosive charges already in place throughout the buildings.
Regardless. Why doesn't NYC have, say, ten of these firefighting aircraft? Five even. Last I checked, this town, with so many especially tall structures, is built on a bunch of little islands. Lots of water within easy reach of just about all the skyscrapers. It would be perfectly easy to deploy such helicopters to any part of town, at a moment's notice, all filled up and ready to go.
Perhaps even better than having them repeatedly scoop up water, fly to the scene and drop it, the helicopters could be equipped with extremely powerful on-board pumps and massively long hoses that could unspool and either attach to a hydrant, or simply dip an anchored end into the river. You suck water up continuously and spray it at the fire without ever having to stop to refill. If it's the dead of winter and the river is iced over, you build a heating element into the anchor end of the hose, melt your way through the ice to the water underneath, and pump away.
This is too obvious not to exist. It might be expensive to create, maintain and deploy. It would require teams of pilots and firefighters with highly specialized training, which, again, would be costly. But compared to the loss of life and property of a 9/11? A bargain at any price! Without it, the next massive fire that takes place on a high floor of a skyscraper will be just as impossible to counter as the WTC fire was, and more brave men and women will die needlessly. But with such an obvious system in place, they would at least have a fighting chance.
Look for a Dutch company to start up such a program in a year or two.
Anyway, seeing as how the nifty door thing has magically appeared in the real world (or, the Netherlands anyway) about a year after I wrote about it, here's another thing that really needs to exist, which I don't have the resources to make myself, but which the Dutch could certainly show us the way toward creating/using on a large scale (more of a technique than a "thing") and if they do it a year from now, well, better late than never...
This idea came to me on September 11th, 2001. As you may recall... there were these two really tall skyscrapers, with massive fires raging on upper floors. Firefighters who arrived on the scene went into the buildings from the ground, dragging their gear up the endless flights of stairs, climbing against the tide of people fleeing, which must have slowed everybody down in both directions. They helped many people escape the towers but continuing upward, and upward to put the fires out proved futile. The buildings collapsed. They all died -- over 300 of the bravest individuals our society is ever likely to produce, faced with an impossible task which became a suicide mission, all because of an inappropriate response to a specific problem. How do you put out a massive fire on an upper floor of a skyscraper, hundreds of feet in the air? Conventional firefighting techniques were never intended for such a thing. Men carrying hose from a ground-based pump, up 90 flights of stairs -- simply not right for the job. It's not a matter of good or bad. Only a matter of finding the tool or technique that best fits the situation. You don't use a claw hammer to remove a splinter from your finger and you don't use tweezers to pull a nail out of a board.
The right tool for this particular job would have been a small fleet of water-tank equipped helicopters.
Now, obviously, these already exist. Planes too. They are used primarily to help put out forest fires, wildfires in places with no fire hydrants, etc. They fill their tanks by scooping from lakes, rivers or the ocean, then fly over the fire and drop tons of water quickly. They can also drop other types of chemical fire-retardants which, as I understand it, would've been better than water for combatting the WTC fires, since they were caused by jet-fuel. Still, water would've been better than nothing, as it could have dissipated much of the heat which is assumed to have caused the failure of the steel support beams of the towers -- unless you believe, as some video evidence seems to suggest, that there were explosive charges already in place throughout the buildings.
Regardless. Why doesn't NYC have, say, ten of these firefighting aircraft? Five even. Last I checked, this town, with so many especially tall structures, is built on a bunch of little islands. Lots of water within easy reach of just about all the skyscrapers. It would be perfectly easy to deploy such helicopters to any part of town, at a moment's notice, all filled up and ready to go.
Perhaps even better than having them repeatedly scoop up water, fly to the scene and drop it, the helicopters could be equipped with extremely powerful on-board pumps and massively long hoses that could unspool and either attach to a hydrant, or simply dip an anchored end into the river. You suck water up continuously and spray it at the fire without ever having to stop to refill. If it's the dead of winter and the river is iced over, you build a heating element into the anchor end of the hose, melt your way through the ice to the water underneath, and pump away.
This is too obvious not to exist. It might be expensive to create, maintain and deploy. It would require teams of pilots and firefighters with highly specialized training, which, again, would be costly. But compared to the loss of life and property of a 9/11? A bargain at any price! Without it, the next massive fire that takes place on a high floor of a skyscraper will be just as impossible to counter as the WTC fire was, and more brave men and women will die needlessly. But with such an obvious system in place, they would at least have a fighting chance.
Look for a Dutch company to start up such a program in a year or two.
Instant Holiday Classic
This double-plus-good video entitled "The Seven Levels of Christmas" was created by my friends Lem Huntington and Sean Kaplan, and is certain to worm its way into the creamy center of your mind where it will incubate, gestate, hatch, mature, and then, on the day of destiny it will leave the nest of your head to take its act on the road, whereupon you will know the bittersweet yin-yang fulfillment of parenthood at its most harrowing [cough] rewarding.
HOWEVER: I recommend you do not watch this video unless your cerebral cortex is properly coated in at least one (preferably more than one) fortifying scheduled substance. Should you watch it in your raw, unaltered state, you run the risk of being forever tormented by a recurring nightmare in which you are a space alien trapped inside Bill O'Reilly's reptillian sub-consciousness, struggling to make sense of his twisted mundanity on a level he himself is far too chickenshit to face.
Enjoy...
HOWEVER: I recommend you do not watch this video unless your cerebral cortex is properly coated in at least one (preferably more than one) fortifying scheduled substance. Should you watch it in your raw, unaltered state, you run the risk of being forever tormented by a recurring nightmare in which you are a space alien trapped inside Bill O'Reilly's reptillian sub-consciousness, struggling to make sense of his twisted mundanity on a level he himself is far too chickenshit to face.
Enjoy...
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The View
Recently, for my job, I've been researching various "green" technologies, learning about the cutting edge science and newest thinking on many fronts in the battle to create a sustainable way of life for modern humans.
I've also inevitably run across some naysayers, climate-change deniers, people who can't be bothered to go green or think it will be too difficult (especially now that the economy is in the toilet), or who simply don't want to change what they currently have/do, no matter what the consequences.
One example of this, which I find particularly frustrating, occurs around the question of whether or not, and where, to install large, utility-scale wind-turbine electric generators. Some of the places best-suited to this clean technology are at high unobstructed elevations, the tops of rolling hills and so forth, places which can be quite scenic. There are people who can't bear the thought of marring the view of such currently unspoiled natural places with obviously man-made distracting structures -- giant spinning propellers on sticks.
Now, my personal opinion is that these wind-turbines, spinning slowly in unison on a distant hill, mountain or plain, or just off the coast in the ocean, are actually quite aesthetically pleasing. But I'm also a big fan of unspoiled nature and can understand how people would prefer the view of the ocean or local mountain range sans turbines.
The problem is that these people aren't basing their aesthetic preference on enough reality.
Reality, as we humans typically experience it, consists of all this physical space around us. But it also has this other dimension, a "fourth" dimension if you will. Something called "time."
Time, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is that aspect of reality responsible for making us miss our flights. It is also the reason why the number of candles on your birthday cake keeps increasing. And as it turns out, it isn't separate from space. Space and time are actually one thing -- spacetime -- and this makes all sorts of nifty things possible, like...
- motion
- music
- stories
- growth
- evolution
- coincidences
- boredom
- getting the pizza for free
Of course, spacetime (and thus, time) is ultimately an illusion, but that's not relevant to this discussion.
What IS relevant to this discussion is that the folks who prefer the hilltop with no windmills, are only basing that preference upon a regard for space. They're completely ignoring time. As such, they think that the choice they have to make is: "should we go with the view of a lovely unspoiled mountain, or should we opt for the mountain with a bunch of annoying spinny things on it?"
But when you add time back into the equation, the real choice turns out to be between a view of a mountain with a bunch of spinny things on it, versus a view of a barren worldwide hellscape.
Now, just how MUCH time it takes to become the lifeless hellscape is impossible to determine, but if current trends persist, it could happen relatively soon. How relatively? Well... in terms of my relatives: my parents won't live to see it, but my niece and nephew absolutely will. Absolutely.
So, if you know and care about any humans whose next birthday cake will have fewer than, say, 25 candles on it, you owe it to them to take the long view of the scenic view.
I've also inevitably run across some naysayers, climate-change deniers, people who can't be bothered to go green or think it will be too difficult (especially now that the economy is in the toilet), or who simply don't want to change what they currently have/do, no matter what the consequences.
One example of this, which I find particularly frustrating, occurs around the question of whether or not, and where, to install large, utility-scale wind-turbine electric generators. Some of the places best-suited to this clean technology are at high unobstructed elevations, the tops of rolling hills and so forth, places which can be quite scenic. There are people who can't bear the thought of marring the view of such currently unspoiled natural places with obviously man-made distracting structures -- giant spinning propellers on sticks.
Now, my personal opinion is that these wind-turbines, spinning slowly in unison on a distant hill, mountain or plain, or just off the coast in the ocean, are actually quite aesthetically pleasing. But I'm also a big fan of unspoiled nature and can understand how people would prefer the view of the ocean or local mountain range sans turbines.
The problem is that these people aren't basing their aesthetic preference on enough reality.
Reality, as we humans typically experience it, consists of all this physical space around us. But it also has this other dimension, a "fourth" dimension if you will. Something called "time."
Time, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is that aspect of reality responsible for making us miss our flights. It is also the reason why the number of candles on your birthday cake keeps increasing. And as it turns out, it isn't separate from space. Space and time are actually one thing -- spacetime -- and this makes all sorts of nifty things possible, like...
- motion
- music
- stories
- growth
- evolution
- coincidences
- boredom
- getting the pizza for free
Of course, spacetime (and thus, time) is ultimately an illusion, but that's not relevant to this discussion.
What IS relevant to this discussion is that the folks who prefer the hilltop with no windmills, are only basing that preference upon a regard for space. They're completely ignoring time. As such, they think that the choice they have to make is: "should we go with the view of a lovely unspoiled mountain, or should we opt for the mountain with a bunch of annoying spinny things on it?"
But when you add time back into the equation, the real choice turns out to be between a view of a mountain with a bunch of spinny things on it, versus a view of a barren worldwide hellscape.
Now, just how MUCH time it takes to become the lifeless hellscape is impossible to determine, but if current trends persist, it could happen relatively soon. How relatively? Well... in terms of my relatives: my parents won't live to see it, but my niece and nephew absolutely will. Absolutely.
So, if you know and care about any humans whose next birthday cake will have fewer than, say, 25 candles on it, you owe it to them to take the long view of the scenic view.
Monday, December 8, 2008
flying
This simple and surprisingly lyrical little video was brought to my attention by my friend Brian Pollack. Thanks Brian, and congrats on finishing J-school!
Enjoy...
Flying from Sam Fuller on Vimeo.
Enjoy...
Flying from Sam Fuller on Vimeo.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Happy Repeal Day
Today is the 75th anniversary of the repeal of prohibition. In commemoration, read this.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Elite
I would never call myself an "elitist" but part of being truly free and open-minded is accepting that sometimes, an approach you consider outmoded (or even objectionable) may still have application/merit and may indeed be the most effective way to deal with a given task or problem, etc.
I once knew someone whose class-rage was keen enough that she would dismiss out-of-hand any musical expression that smacked of actual training. If a kid's family could afford to give him music lessons, then anything he did in life was automatically crap. The only music worth listening to comes out of slums, ghettos and poor rural areas and is made by untrained individuals using whatever simple tools they can scrounge, giving voice to the concerns and experience of folks the establishment would like to pretend don't even exist.
I totally appreciate that. And I have obviously enjoyed the sheer genius of many many artists who emerge from such backgrounds. We all have. But I also enjoy it when large groups of virtuosic musicians perform blisteringly difficult showpieces that take enormous work and dedication to master. The sheer sound! (Of course, it is possible that some of those musicians could have come from poverty, but it's very difficult/rare to even discover that you have an aptitude for the cello if nobody in the entire county happens to have one.)
Also: If I found out that a loved one needed life-saving surgery, and (all else being equal) I had a choice between a mediocre surgeon who was a really nice person, or totally genius surgeon who was an arrogant sonofabitch prick, I would choose the arrogant genius any day of the week. I imagine that practically everybody else would do the same if Dad's life were at stake.
But somehow, when the life of an entire nation is on the line -- a nation facing huge numbers of widely varying, complex, difficult problems -- millions of people seem to think that being especially smart should disqualify you from being president of that nation. Instead, they prefer, say, a mediocre guy who'd make a good drinking buddy, or even a sorta trashy woman whose responses to the most important issues of the day consist of vaguely flirtatious winking.
Interestingly, in the case of a musician or a band etc., nobody would ever have a problem with talent or genius, but economic privilege (and a lack of street-cred) is seen as a liability. And in the case of the surgeon, coming from an impoverished background would mean such a person could only have succeeded through sheer ability, whereas a child of wealth might be able to fail over and over again without consequence before ever squeaking through med-school. But in the case of a politician, millions of people were willing to ignore absolutely obscene wealth as long as the guy spoke like the dude in the next trailer (you know, Randy, the guy who accidentally shot his refrigerator the other day).
How does that happen? Seriously, can anybody explain that to me?
Clearly, we need to start teaching Civics in school again.
I once knew someone whose class-rage was keen enough that she would dismiss out-of-hand any musical expression that smacked of actual training. If a kid's family could afford to give him music lessons, then anything he did in life was automatically crap. The only music worth listening to comes out of slums, ghettos and poor rural areas and is made by untrained individuals using whatever simple tools they can scrounge, giving voice to the concerns and experience of folks the establishment would like to pretend don't even exist.
I totally appreciate that. And I have obviously enjoyed the sheer genius of many many artists who emerge from such backgrounds. We all have. But I also enjoy it when large groups of virtuosic musicians perform blisteringly difficult showpieces that take enormous work and dedication to master. The sheer sound! (Of course, it is possible that some of those musicians could have come from poverty, but it's very difficult/rare to even discover that you have an aptitude for the cello if nobody in the entire county happens to have one.)
Also: If I found out that a loved one needed life-saving surgery, and (all else being equal) I had a choice between a mediocre surgeon who was a really nice person, or totally genius surgeon who was an arrogant sonofabitch prick, I would choose the arrogant genius any day of the week. I imagine that practically everybody else would do the same if Dad's life were at stake.
But somehow, when the life of an entire nation is on the line -- a nation facing huge numbers of widely varying, complex, difficult problems -- millions of people seem to think that being especially smart should disqualify you from being president of that nation. Instead, they prefer, say, a mediocre guy who'd make a good drinking buddy, or even a sorta trashy woman whose responses to the most important issues of the day consist of vaguely flirtatious winking.
Interestingly, in the case of a musician or a band etc., nobody would ever have a problem with talent or genius, but economic privilege (and a lack of street-cred) is seen as a liability. And in the case of the surgeon, coming from an impoverished background would mean such a person could only have succeeded through sheer ability, whereas a child of wealth might be able to fail over and over again without consequence before ever squeaking through med-school. But in the case of a politician, millions of people were willing to ignore absolutely obscene wealth as long as the guy spoke like the dude in the next trailer (you know, Randy, the guy who accidentally shot his refrigerator the other day).
How does that happen? Seriously, can anybody explain that to me?
Clearly, we need to start teaching Civics in school again.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Once Again... Bike Thieves are the Lowest Form of Life
Yep.
This past Monday morning, heading out of my building to come to work, I would normally have gotten onto my bike. But no... someone had stolen the rear wheel. For those who like to keep count, this is the second rear wheel I've lost to a thief.
The first time it was totally my fault. I hadn't locked the rear wheel which was a quick-release. This time, the rear wheel was NOT a quick release, which means someone with tools came along specifically looking to strip parts off of bikes. I now fantasize about catching such a person in the act and beating them silly. Of course, in the fantasy, I just happen to be holding a 2-foot pipe wrench at the time.
Now, given that I had timed my departure for work based on having a fully functional bike to ride, I was now going to be fairly late, suddenly having to walk like the rest of the chumps. So I didn't bother to take the time to move the half-a-bike to a safer place.
Safer place?
Yeah... there's a sort of "courtyard" behind my building, where the garbage and recycling cans are, and there's a corner where a couple people lock up bikes. You can only access this area if you have a key to the building. So... you're probably wondering why I would leave my bike on the street to be picked over by tool-wielding vultures when I have access to such a place. Because: in order to get a bike in and out of there, you have to hump the unwieldly motherfucker through a gate and 4 doorways. And while that's fine if you only ride occasionally, it is less than fine if you ride all the time. It is not at all fine if you want to quickly run out, hop on and take off. It may be safer (is obviously way way safer) but it turns using the bike from a casual, easy, joyous affair into a discouraging annoyance. I can't have that.
Still, even though I was now going to be late for work, I did seriously consider taking the time to carry the almost-bike through the gate and 4 doorways and lock it up in the courtyard because if people see an incomplete bike locked to a signpost, they tend to think of it as abandoned and therefore fair game. Or like, once the thievery ice is broken, it just becomes a feeding frenzy.
But no, I just left my almost-bike where it was and walked to work, stifling the urge to kill.
When I got home that evening, someone had removed my handlebars, including the brake levers, gear shift lever and all related cables. Probably the same douchebag who took the wheel.
Fortunately, he didn't remove my pedals. You see, the rest of the bike is (was) just cheapo stock components that came with it. But my pedals are special. Seriously. They have blinking LED's in them that are powered solely by the rotation of the spindle that connects the pedals to the crank arms as you ride. They are called "Pedalites" and they work brilliantly -- one of the only consumer products I've ever encountered that I would gladly shill for (I guess that's what I'm doing right now) because I can say without any reservation whatsoever: these things are designed perfectly.
Where most pedals are rotationally symmetrical (the same when you flip them 180 degrees), Pedalites have a specific top and bottom, front and back. This is because each pedal has a white led in front, a yellow one on the side and a red one in back. Just like the convention for all vehicles. They make you super visible at night from up to a mile away, which is both safer for you and more entertaining for those who see you. :) The led's will last 20 years, there are no batteries to change (or go dead on you while riding in the dark) and -- assuming no tool-wielding vultures remove them -- you just leave 'em attached to your bike at all times, so you don't have to remember to take them with you like other bike lights that snap on and off. You also don't have to remember to turn them on at night. They just always work when you're riding. After a few minutes of sustained pedaling, the Pedalites will have stored up enough charge to keep the led's blinking even if you stop pedaling for a while, like if you coast down a hill, or stop at an intersection. And once you get to your destination, they just stop blinking after a couple minutes. Perfect. Truly. Just the right tool for the job.
But when I bought them they weren't sold in America (of course). I had to special order them from the manufacturer in the UK. So getting ahold of 'em took a little while and wasn't cheap. Including shipping, I think the total came to about $70. Still, that's not so bad when you consider how fucking awesome they are. (And at this point I believe there are some US distributors.)
Anyway, you can understand why I was so relieved to see that the asshole had neglected to remove them. Or maybe he simply didn't have the relatively specialized wrench that you need.
So at this point, my almost-bike is locked up in the garbage court, safe and sound, and I'm trying to decide what to do for bike-osity next. Should I systematically replace all the stolen parts? Or should I just get another used craigslist bike and transfer the Pedalites onto it? Or should I actually bite the bullet and get myself a brand new really nice bike fitted to my specific anatomy and riding needs? Obviously, if I go for a new bike, I'm gonna have to just suck it up and deal with humping it through all the doorways to always always always leave it locked up in the garbage court. So maybe that's not the way to go. Systematically replacing the stolen bits will actually cost more (a lot more even) than I paid for the entire bike, and will certainly cost more than getting a whole 'nother used craigslist beater special. But it will provide me the excuse to learn a bit more repair and maintenance skills, as I'd essentially have to rebuild almost the entire bike at this point. And I'd have the option to use replacement parts of higher quality than what was stolen. Though that hardly seems worth the trouble since the frame is still the old crappy frame, etc. And if I use nice expensive parts, I imagine I'll feel compelled to drag the bike back into the garbage court every night and if I'm gonna put up with that it might as well be for the sake of a truly nice bike, which would only cost slightly more than the total of all the upgrades to the old crappy one (parts of which would still be fairly crappy).
Still, I like working with my hands, and I like the thought of being completely self-sufficient when it comes to all future bike maintenance as I have this dream of riding my bike across the entire continental US and back at some point relatively soon (before I die). Actually, the full dream is to ride from NYC down to Key West Florida, then across to San Diego, then up to Seattle, then back across to Maine, then back down to NYC. Four corners. One year. Ten thousand miles. Perhaps I'll spring for a really good bike in order to make that trip. And of course, I'll need to get a few more locks. And maybe a gun. But in the mean time it looks like I'm gonna rebuild the old bike with regular ol' cheapo parts and just keep locking it -- more thoroughly -- on the street.
This past Monday morning, heading out of my building to come to work, I would normally have gotten onto my bike. But no... someone had stolen the rear wheel. For those who like to keep count, this is the second rear wheel I've lost to a thief.
The first time it was totally my fault. I hadn't locked the rear wheel which was a quick-release. This time, the rear wheel was NOT a quick release, which means someone with tools came along specifically looking to strip parts off of bikes. I now fantasize about catching such a person in the act and beating them silly. Of course, in the fantasy, I just happen to be holding a 2-foot pipe wrench at the time.
Now, given that I had timed my departure for work based on having a fully functional bike to ride, I was now going to be fairly late, suddenly having to walk like the rest of the chumps. So I didn't bother to take the time to move the half-a-bike to a safer place.
Safer place?
Yeah... there's a sort of "courtyard" behind my building, where the garbage and recycling cans are, and there's a corner where a couple people lock up bikes. You can only access this area if you have a key to the building. So... you're probably wondering why I would leave my bike on the street to be picked over by tool-wielding vultures when I have access to such a place. Because: in order to get a bike in and out of there, you have to hump the unwieldly motherfucker through a gate and 4 doorways. And while that's fine if you only ride occasionally, it is less than fine if you ride all the time. It is not at all fine if you want to quickly run out, hop on and take off. It may be safer (is obviously way way safer) but it turns using the bike from a casual, easy, joyous affair into a discouraging annoyance. I can't have that.
Still, even though I was now going to be late for work, I did seriously consider taking the time to carry the almost-bike through the gate and 4 doorways and lock it up in the courtyard because if people see an incomplete bike locked to a signpost, they tend to think of it as abandoned and therefore fair game. Or like, once the thievery ice is broken, it just becomes a feeding frenzy.
But no, I just left my almost-bike where it was and walked to work, stifling the urge to kill.
When I got home that evening, someone had removed my handlebars, including the brake levers, gear shift lever and all related cables. Probably the same douchebag who took the wheel.
Fortunately, he didn't remove my pedals. You see, the rest of the bike is (was) just cheapo stock components that came with it. But my pedals are special. Seriously. They have blinking LED's in them that are powered solely by the rotation of the spindle that connects the pedals to the crank arms as you ride. They are called "Pedalites" and they work brilliantly -- one of the only consumer products I've ever encountered that I would gladly shill for (I guess that's what I'm doing right now) because I can say without any reservation whatsoever: these things are designed perfectly.
Where most pedals are rotationally symmetrical (the same when you flip them 180 degrees), Pedalites have a specific top and bottom, front and back. This is because each pedal has a white led in front, a yellow one on the side and a red one in back. Just like the convention for all vehicles. They make you super visible at night from up to a mile away, which is both safer for you and more entertaining for those who see you. :) The led's will last 20 years, there are no batteries to change (or go dead on you while riding in the dark) and -- assuming no tool-wielding vultures remove them -- you just leave 'em attached to your bike at all times, so you don't have to remember to take them with you like other bike lights that snap on and off. You also don't have to remember to turn them on at night. They just always work when you're riding. After a few minutes of sustained pedaling, the Pedalites will have stored up enough charge to keep the led's blinking even if you stop pedaling for a while, like if you coast down a hill, or stop at an intersection. And once you get to your destination, they just stop blinking after a couple minutes. Perfect. Truly. Just the right tool for the job.
But when I bought them they weren't sold in America (of course). I had to special order them from the manufacturer in the UK. So getting ahold of 'em took a little while and wasn't cheap. Including shipping, I think the total came to about $70. Still, that's not so bad when you consider how fucking awesome they are. (And at this point I believe there are some US distributors.)
Anyway, you can understand why I was so relieved to see that the asshole had neglected to remove them. Or maybe he simply didn't have the relatively specialized wrench that you need.
So at this point, my almost-bike is locked up in the garbage court, safe and sound, and I'm trying to decide what to do for bike-osity next. Should I systematically replace all the stolen parts? Or should I just get another used craigslist bike and transfer the Pedalites onto it? Or should I actually bite the bullet and get myself a brand new really nice bike fitted to my specific anatomy and riding needs? Obviously, if I go for a new bike, I'm gonna have to just suck it up and deal with humping it through all the doorways to always always always leave it locked up in the garbage court. So maybe that's not the way to go. Systematically replacing the stolen bits will actually cost more (a lot more even) than I paid for the entire bike, and will certainly cost more than getting a whole 'nother used craigslist beater special. But it will provide me the excuse to learn a bit more repair and maintenance skills, as I'd essentially have to rebuild almost the entire bike at this point. And I'd have the option to use replacement parts of higher quality than what was stolen. Though that hardly seems worth the trouble since the frame is still the old crappy frame, etc. And if I use nice expensive parts, I imagine I'll feel compelled to drag the bike back into the garbage court every night and if I'm gonna put up with that it might as well be for the sake of a truly nice bike, which would only cost slightly more than the total of all the upgrades to the old crappy one (parts of which would still be fairly crappy).
Still, I like working with my hands, and I like the thought of being completely self-sufficient when it comes to all future bike maintenance as I have this dream of riding my bike across the entire continental US and back at some point relatively soon (before I die). Actually, the full dream is to ride from NYC down to Key West Florida, then across to San Diego, then up to Seattle, then back across to Maine, then back down to NYC. Four corners. One year. Ten thousand miles. Perhaps I'll spring for a really good bike in order to make that trip. And of course, I'll need to get a few more locks. And maybe a gun. But in the mean time it looks like I'm gonna rebuild the old bike with regular ol' cheapo parts and just keep locking it -- more thoroughly -- on the street.
Arm Injury Update
Arm don't hurt no more.
Still a bit indented, but not as gnarly-looking as it was.
Should recover completely, though might just have to live with the slight indentation. Time will tell.
Still have some of the happy pills left though. Woo hoo!
Still a bit indented, but not as gnarly-looking as it was.
Should recover completely, though might just have to live with the slight indentation. Time will tell.
Still have some of the happy pills left though. Woo hoo!
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Republicanism Explained
In psychology, the term projection refers to a defense mechanism whereby one assigns one’s own unacceptable thoughts, motivations, desires, or even behaviors, to others. Projection reduces feelings of guilt and anxiety by allowing the expression of the unacceptable subconscious impulses while shielding the ego from their existence, keeping them hidden from conscious awareness. Projection is related to and dependent upon denial, arguably the only defense mechanism more primitive than projection.
An extremely simplistic example: Two young children are playing in the house. While mom's back is turned, her younger child knocks a flowerpot onto the floor, making a mess. When mom turns around and sees it, the younger child points to the older child and says "He did it!" Denial, and projection.
An example that is almost as simple, but much more annoying and dangerous: A Republican presidential campaign runs TV ads containing shockingly tasteless, misleading distortions and outright lies about the Democratic opponent. They then accuse the Democrats of running the most shockingly tasteless and misleading campaign in history.
Of course, the Republicans do this every election, so there's a chance that they are, in fact, fully aware of what they're doing and so are purposefully shitty human beings.
But seeing as how they've taken almost all their plays from famously sinister historical precedents, I could see how they might need to employ any defense mechanism available, no matter how primitive, to squash a shitload of collective guilt, just so that they can face another day on this earth, or another long night of what should, by right, be a sleepless, demon-haunted torment.
An extremely simplistic example: Two young children are playing in the house. While mom's back is turned, her younger child knocks a flowerpot onto the floor, making a mess. When mom turns around and sees it, the younger child points to the older child and says "He did it!" Denial, and projection.
An example that is almost as simple, but much more annoying and dangerous: A Republican presidential campaign runs TV ads containing shockingly tasteless, misleading distortions and outright lies about the Democratic opponent. They then accuse the Democrats of running the most shockingly tasteless and misleading campaign in history.
Of course, the Republicans do this every election, so there's a chance that they are, in fact, fully aware of what they're doing and so are purposefully shitty human beings.
But seeing as how they've taken almost all their plays from famously sinister historical precedents, I could see how they might need to employ any defense mechanism available, no matter how primitive, to squash a shitload of collective guilt, just so that they can face another day on this earth, or another long night of what should, by right, be a sleepless, demon-haunted torment.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Arm Injury Update
Well, I managed to find an orthopedic surgeon to look at my arm last Friday. He said that yeah, I tore some of the muscle, but since much of it is still intact, it should heal. He told me to keep it iced and elevated and he gave me a prescription for a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory for some reason. Then he told me to come back in two weeks at which point if the arm didn't look at least somewhat better he'd start me on a course of physical therapy. So, that's something. And though it still looks a bit gnarly and indented, it doesn't really hurt anymore (unless I really poke at it or try to lift a car). I just picked up the prescription for the anti-inflammatory pills from the Duane Reade near work, popped one, and it's making me feel floaty and good. Unexpected bonus. But now a little googling has revealed that possible side effects include stomach bleeding. Woo hoo. Modern medicine is dumb.
In other news, I was feeling a bit bummed out about the whole arm-injury thing and just sort of blah about life in general so I decided on a spur-of-the-moment basis to join a small group of friends and go on an Ayahuasca journey upstate over the weekend.
For those who don't know, Ayahuasca is a traditional Amazonian shamanic plant-medicine used to heal illnesses physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, and its reputation as the strongest psychedelic/entheogen in the world is well deserved. The active compound it contains, Dimethyl Tryptamine (DMT), is actually produced in trace amounts in the human body by the pineal gland in the brain, and is supposedly released at certain key moments of your life: the point when your soul "enters" your body as a new human (which, by the way, does not occur at conception), during sex, whenever you get abducted by aliens, when you die, and the first time you eat a bacon cheeseburger.
By itself, DMT cannot be administered orally, as digestion breaks it down into much less interesting molecules. So the ayahuasca preparation also includes a plant that contains harmine/harmaline, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) which prevents the breakdown of the DMT which can then pass into your bloodstream intact. When modern scientific "experts" asked native Amazonians how they were able to determine which two specific plants, out of the tens of thousands in their local biota would combine to produce the remarkable end result, they apparently said something like: "the mushrooms told us."
Drinking ayahuasca is unpleasant for most people. But most people are wimps. I am not a wimp. I don't mind bitter sour horrible gook. Until I'm puking up buckets of it.
And that's one of the main things you have to know about ayahuasca: it is a strong purgative. It reaches into every fiber of your being, down to the level of your very soul, grabs onto the impurities and forces you to expel them through either the beginning of your digestive tract or the end of it. On top of that, it renders you shakey and dizzy and barely able to speak or stand, much less walk.
It is not a party drug.
All your senses are sharpened, but you spend most of the typically 6 to 8 hour trip just lying motionless until struggling to crawl a few feet in the grass to hurl. I gotta say, the ayahuasca may be nasty to drink, but it's even less pleasant coming back up violently while your sense of taste is elevated. As for the occasional need to shit, well... the closer the toilet the better. Some people even do these "rituals" wearing Depends undergarments.
Of course, most of the time you're lying motionless, you're having a pretty intense mental/spiritual experience, and supposedly, the more you let go and just let the brew clean you out, the more amazing the visionary experience can be, as the plant intelligence gets to work with you on higher and higher levels of being.
The whole thing seems pretty geared toward crushing your ego. It automatically reduces you to the level of a newborn baby, puking and pooping and unable (or barely able) to walk or talk, which is obviously humbling and comically frustrating for the typical thinking adult, but the rewards can be as intense as the ordeal is difficult. And I can say that this was completely true for me personally. Modern medicine: feel good now, feel crappy later. Shamanic medicine: feel crappy now, feel good later.
The most interesting part of my experience was the impression of being "scanned" -- having some kind of energetic intelligence systematically examine and evaluate every part of my personal, um, energy matrix. Maybe that's how it knew what I should puke up later. Hah.
I was also involved in a friendly dialogue which gave me little bits of advice here and there. Nothing too earth-shattering, but definitely helpful. I was hoping to really zone out at some point and go into a completely other dimension (a fairly common ayahuasca experience) maybe meet the bio-mechanical elves who would dance their little dance and then take me to meet the all-knowing Turnip King, but there were external factors that prevented this.
You see, given the fairly harsh nature of the experience, it is traditional to do it in a very controlled, very serene nurturing setting. You do it after nightfall, under the stars in the jungle surrounded by nature and warmth and quiet, with supportive expert guides to help you in a pinch.
We, however, went to... Camp D.
[Explanation of the Camp D. experience coming soon.]
In other news, I was feeling a bit bummed out about the whole arm-injury thing and just sort of blah about life in general so I decided on a spur-of-the-moment basis to join a small group of friends and go on an Ayahuasca journey upstate over the weekend.
For those who don't know, Ayahuasca is a traditional Amazonian shamanic plant-medicine used to heal illnesses physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, and its reputation as the strongest psychedelic/entheogen in the world is well deserved. The active compound it contains, Dimethyl Tryptamine (DMT), is actually produced in trace amounts in the human body by the pineal gland in the brain, and is supposedly released at certain key moments of your life: the point when your soul "enters" your body as a new human (which, by the way, does not occur at conception), during sex, whenever you get abducted by aliens, when you die, and the first time you eat a bacon cheeseburger.
By itself, DMT cannot be administered orally, as digestion breaks it down into much less interesting molecules. So the ayahuasca preparation also includes a plant that contains harmine/harmaline, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) which prevents the breakdown of the DMT which can then pass into your bloodstream intact. When modern scientific "experts" asked native Amazonians how they were able to determine which two specific plants, out of the tens of thousands in their local biota would combine to produce the remarkable end result, they apparently said something like: "the mushrooms told us."
Drinking ayahuasca is unpleasant for most people. But most people are wimps. I am not a wimp. I don't mind bitter sour horrible gook. Until I'm puking up buckets of it.
And that's one of the main things you have to know about ayahuasca: it is a strong purgative. It reaches into every fiber of your being, down to the level of your very soul, grabs onto the impurities and forces you to expel them through either the beginning of your digestive tract or the end of it. On top of that, it renders you shakey and dizzy and barely able to speak or stand, much less walk.
It is not a party drug.
All your senses are sharpened, but you spend most of the typically 6 to 8 hour trip just lying motionless until struggling to crawl a few feet in the grass to hurl. I gotta say, the ayahuasca may be nasty to drink, but it's even less pleasant coming back up violently while your sense of taste is elevated. As for the occasional need to shit, well... the closer the toilet the better. Some people even do these "rituals" wearing Depends undergarments.
Of course, most of the time you're lying motionless, you're having a pretty intense mental/spiritual experience, and supposedly, the more you let go and just let the brew clean you out, the more amazing the visionary experience can be, as the plant intelligence gets to work with you on higher and higher levels of being.
The whole thing seems pretty geared toward crushing your ego. It automatically reduces you to the level of a newborn baby, puking and pooping and unable (or barely able) to walk or talk, which is obviously humbling and comically frustrating for the typical thinking adult, but the rewards can be as intense as the ordeal is difficult. And I can say that this was completely true for me personally. Modern medicine: feel good now, feel crappy later. Shamanic medicine: feel crappy now, feel good later.
The most interesting part of my experience was the impression of being "scanned" -- having some kind of energetic intelligence systematically examine and evaluate every part of my personal, um, energy matrix. Maybe that's how it knew what I should puke up later. Hah.
I was also involved in a friendly dialogue which gave me little bits of advice here and there. Nothing too earth-shattering, but definitely helpful. I was hoping to really zone out at some point and go into a completely other dimension (a fairly common ayahuasca experience) maybe meet the bio-mechanical elves who would dance their little dance and then take me to meet the all-knowing Turnip King, but there were external factors that prevented this.
You see, given the fairly harsh nature of the experience, it is traditional to do it in a very controlled, very serene nurturing setting. You do it after nightfall, under the stars in the jungle surrounded by nature and warmth and quiet, with supportive expert guides to help you in a pinch.
We, however, went to... Camp D.
[Explanation of the Camp D. experience coming soon.]
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
I don't have time for this shit
Greetings from the Mount Sinai Hospital emergency room. I'm just waiting for a doctor to come look at my arm. Last night, I was "doored" while riding my bicycle home from work. Coming up 10th avenue, I passed by a cab that was letting two passengers out. The door on the sidewalk side of the cab opened, so I figured, "Good... they're getting out on the safe side like they're supposed to and I'm clear to keep going." But just as I was about to pass, the door on the traffic side of the cab flew open with no time for me to react and I simply smashed into it.
The idiot got out and asked if I was okay. I was a bit dazed and infuriated and suddenly too hopped up on adrenaline to realize how much my right arm hurt and just said, "Yeah I'm fine" with an accompanying withering scowl. But my right bicep had borne most of the brunt of the impact, hitting the top edge of the open taxicab door, hard. Once I got home, I noticed that it hurt like a motherfucker, and that I couldn't move it much or use it to lift anything without severe pain. So I rolled up my sleeve to examine it and saw something I've never seen before, on my body or anyone else's... The skin wasn't broken, but there was this weird-looking indentation in my bicep at the point of impact. It looks and feels like I partially tore the muscle. Which could conceivably require surgery to correct.
And now, even though I have health benefits, I'm running headlong into medical system bureaucratic red-tape and runaround nonsense.
It's later. I'm home now.
The Hospital made me get some pointless x-rays. And they were all, "Well, the x-rays look fine" and I was like, "no shit assholes! I could've told you that they'd come out looking fine, because I can tell that there's nothing wrong with my arm bones. It's the MUSCLE that's fucked up, and everyone knows that soft tissue doesn't show up on bloody x-rays!" It was maddening. But, you know me... I don't like yelling at people who are at least attempting to help me, even if totally incompetently. They were just following SOP and even though I really needed to be looked at by an Orthopedic Surgeon, they couldn't even ask one to come down unless I had first gotten x-rayed. Which also has to do with properly milking my insurance plan. I'm surprised they didn't order an MRI, a CAT scan, a PET scan and a colonoscopy.
Actually, an MRI might've been slightly useful, as it does resolve soft tissue to a certain degree.
Anyway, even after getting the x-rays taken, they couldn't convince an orthopod to come down and look at me. But they did give me a Percoset (and a prescription for same) and the phone number of an orthopedic surgeon affiliated with Mount Sinai. By then it was too late to reach anyone in his office to make an appointment, and also by then, my coworkers (God bless 'em) had come up with a list of much better specialists to go see. So I'll call tomorrow and set up an appointment to get looked at for reals and hopefully this can happen sooner than later. A good specialist in high demand -- who knows how long it'll be before he can squeeze me in? I just hope I can book the appointment before my arm heals like this permanently, leaving me with diminished use of it (not to mention slightly deformed).
Though, even if that happens, I'm still gonna ride my bike everywhere.
Bikes rule!
The idiot got out and asked if I was okay. I was a bit dazed and infuriated and suddenly too hopped up on adrenaline to realize how much my right arm hurt and just said, "Yeah I'm fine" with an accompanying withering scowl. But my right bicep had borne most of the brunt of the impact, hitting the top edge of the open taxicab door, hard. Once I got home, I noticed that it hurt like a motherfucker, and that I couldn't move it much or use it to lift anything without severe pain. So I rolled up my sleeve to examine it and saw something I've never seen before, on my body or anyone else's... The skin wasn't broken, but there was this weird-looking indentation in my bicep at the point of impact. It looks and feels like I partially tore the muscle. Which could conceivably require surgery to correct.
And now, even though I have health benefits, I'm running headlong into medical system bureaucratic red-tape and runaround nonsense.
It's later. I'm home now.
The Hospital made me get some pointless x-rays. And they were all, "Well, the x-rays look fine" and I was like, "no shit assholes! I could've told you that they'd come out looking fine, because I can tell that there's nothing wrong with my arm bones. It's the MUSCLE that's fucked up, and everyone knows that soft tissue doesn't show up on bloody x-rays!" It was maddening. But, you know me... I don't like yelling at people who are at least attempting to help me, even if totally incompetently. They were just following SOP and even though I really needed to be looked at by an Orthopedic Surgeon, they couldn't even ask one to come down unless I had first gotten x-rayed. Which also has to do with properly milking my insurance plan. I'm surprised they didn't order an MRI, a CAT scan, a PET scan and a colonoscopy.
Actually, an MRI might've been slightly useful, as it does resolve soft tissue to a certain degree.
Anyway, even after getting the x-rays taken, they couldn't convince an orthopod to come down and look at me. But they did give me a Percoset (and a prescription for same) and the phone number of an orthopedic surgeon affiliated with Mount Sinai. By then it was too late to reach anyone in his office to make an appointment, and also by then, my coworkers (God bless 'em) had come up with a list of much better specialists to go see. So I'll call tomorrow and set up an appointment to get looked at for reals and hopefully this can happen sooner than later. A good specialist in high demand -- who knows how long it'll be before he can squeeze me in? I just hope I can book the appointment before my arm heals like this permanently, leaving me with diminished use of it (not to mention slightly deformed).
Though, even if that happens, I'm still gonna ride my bike everywhere.
Bikes rule!
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
I'm feelin' a little punchy today
I'm sure turducken tastes good and all, especially deep-fried in a giant vat of bacon grease like they do it in the fat states, but I simply cannot abide a foodstuff with the word "turd" in its name.
Though, I must admit I do seem to have a morbid fascination with turduckens and spend a goodly amount of my day wondering about things like: If you successfully shove a turducken into another turducken, could you destroy the universe? Or just the red states? I guess we won't find out until next spring when the large hadron collider comes back on line.
Though, I must admit I do seem to have a morbid fascination with turduckens and spend a goodly amount of my day wondering about things like: If you successfully shove a turducken into another turducken, could you destroy the universe? Or just the red states? I guess we won't find out until next spring when the large hadron collider comes back on line.
Top 10 Points of Comparison
Between the Republican Party and the Third Reich (just off the top of my head)...
1. Masters of the Big Lie
2. Scapegoating
3. Responsible for the deaths of large numbers of innocent people
4. Strong adherence to false beliefs
5. Willingness to blindly follow incompetent leadership
6. Causing economic ruin of their own nations
7. Leaving behind a massive rift in their own societies (Berlin Wall, red/blue divide)
8. Claiming to be on a mission to improve the world
9. Rigid control of media
10. Prescott Bush (Dubya's grandfather) (Okay, not really a point of comparison, but simply a direct link.)
11. Racism
12. Oops. I meant to stop at 10.
1. Masters of the Big Lie
2. Scapegoating
3. Responsible for the deaths of large numbers of innocent people
4. Strong adherence to false beliefs
5. Willingness to blindly follow incompetent leadership
6. Causing economic ruin of their own nations
7. Leaving behind a massive rift in their own societies (Berlin Wall, red/blue divide)
8. Claiming to be on a mission to improve the world
9. Rigid control of media
10. Prescott Bush (Dubya's grandfather) (Okay, not really a point of comparison, but simply a direct link.)
11. Racism
12. Oops. I meant to stop at 10.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Bikram
I've been meaning to start up a regular yoga practice of some kind for a while now. Like, 10 years. Yesterday, I finally took the plunge. Bikram. The hot yoga.
At first the heat felt kinda good. A somewhat humid 105 degrees. And the first few postures didn't seem too terribly strenuous. The guy teaching the class called out instructions peppered with a continual rapid-fire stream of little tips and motivations and information about the benefits of the postures, etc., and though this made him sound like some kind of crazed new-age county-fair auctioneer, it was actually pretty helpful and inspiring. I thought: "90 minutes of this? No problem."
After maybe an hour, I felt like I was being ass-raped by Satan.
I was pouring more sweat from every square inch of the surface of my body than I thought possible, and gradually I could feel the blood-vessels in my extremities constricting and my brain shutting down. Ah... severe dehydration. I had brought a decent-sized (or so I thought) container of water with me (they also sell large bottles of smart water), but I'd finished all of it and there was still plenty of class to go. And they don't let you leave the hot room under any but emergency situations. I wasn't sure if my situation qualified as an emergency, but that's probably only because my mind had ceased functioning. So I just sat down on my sweat-soaked towel. Then I curled up into fetal position on my side for a bit, trying to see if I could get some feeling back into my strangely tingling arms and legs. And face.
Lying down wasn't so unusual. Looking around, almost everybody in the class had to stop at one point or another. But they all still had water left to drink. So they weren't necessarily dealing with dehydration, but rather were just a bit overcome by the heat and the exertion. In my case, the heat and exertion weren't the problem. I had simply underestimated how much water I'd need to drink, didn't bring enough, and now I was dying. But the crazed auctioneer thought I was just slacking and so encouraged me to push myself. I did what I could, but it's not easy to do the postures on numb legs. But since my brain had gone numb too, I didn't really care.
After the class, I somehow managed to drag myself into the men's locker room. I went to the bathroom, and drank some tap water from the sink. It was just enough to return a tiny amount of limb and brain function, such that I could shower and put my street clothes back on. On my way out, I bought one of the smart waters and drank the entire liter down in one go. I immediately felt completely better. Suddenly I could think and walk and speak again like a normal human.
But I was a bit wobbly and cold on my bike ride home.
And today, I'm a bit achey, though not as bad as I feared I might be.
I'm not going to a class today. Still thirsty from yesterday's class. But I'll go tomorrow after work. And I'll buy two liters of smart water to bring into it with me. Maybe three.
At first the heat felt kinda good. A somewhat humid 105 degrees. And the first few postures didn't seem too terribly strenuous. The guy teaching the class called out instructions peppered with a continual rapid-fire stream of little tips and motivations and information about the benefits of the postures, etc., and though this made him sound like some kind of crazed new-age county-fair auctioneer, it was actually pretty helpful and inspiring. I thought: "90 minutes of this? No problem."
After maybe an hour, I felt like I was being ass-raped by Satan.
I was pouring more sweat from every square inch of the surface of my body than I thought possible, and gradually I could feel the blood-vessels in my extremities constricting and my brain shutting down. Ah... severe dehydration. I had brought a decent-sized (or so I thought) container of water with me (they also sell large bottles of smart water), but I'd finished all of it and there was still plenty of class to go. And they don't let you leave the hot room under any but emergency situations. I wasn't sure if my situation qualified as an emergency, but that's probably only because my mind had ceased functioning. So I just sat down on my sweat-soaked towel. Then I curled up into fetal position on my side for a bit, trying to see if I could get some feeling back into my strangely tingling arms and legs. And face.
Lying down wasn't so unusual. Looking around, almost everybody in the class had to stop at one point or another. But they all still had water left to drink. So they weren't necessarily dealing with dehydration, but rather were just a bit overcome by the heat and the exertion. In my case, the heat and exertion weren't the problem. I had simply underestimated how much water I'd need to drink, didn't bring enough, and now I was dying. But the crazed auctioneer thought I was just slacking and so encouraged me to push myself. I did what I could, but it's not easy to do the postures on numb legs. But since my brain had gone numb too, I didn't really care.
After the class, I somehow managed to drag myself into the men's locker room. I went to the bathroom, and drank some tap water from the sink. It was just enough to return a tiny amount of limb and brain function, such that I could shower and put my street clothes back on. On my way out, I bought one of the smart waters and drank the entire liter down in one go. I immediately felt completely better. Suddenly I could think and walk and speak again like a normal human.
But I was a bit wobbly and cold on my bike ride home.
And today, I'm a bit achey, though not as bad as I feared I might be.
I'm not going to a class today. Still thirsty from yesterday's class. But I'll go tomorrow after work. And I'll buy two liters of smart water to bring into it with me. Maybe three.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Time for a Change
Conservatives who run for office like to invoke moral heroes of the past, specifically the Founding Fathers of the United States, and, you know, Jesus. Somehow, they don't see any hypocrisy in the fact that these heroes were all flaming liberals of the very highest order. Revolutionaries in fact. Invoking them appeals to conservative voters' desire for comforting familiarity, (even as they miss the point of what they find comfortingly familiar).
Despite the shortcomings of Jonathan Haidt's lecture (and an article of his that my friend Chris recommended), it is largely thanks to them that I am reminded of the need to find common ground with people whose views I find difficult to accept, or even understand. Conservatives. People who strongly resist change (despite the fact that change is the only constant).
Haidt starts his lecture pointing out that "openness to new experience" is a psychological trait, and some people rate highly in it, and others less so. Those who rate highly tend to vote liberal, and those less so tend to vote conservative. So it's no wonder that the conservative Republican base got so excited by Sarah Palin. McCain is a slightly "new" experience for some of them, and Obama is obviously shockingly new for them, whereas Palin is almost exactly like a female version of who we already have in the White House. Ah... comforting. Familiar. And even though it doesn't take a genius to see that the Republican leadership is systematically destroying the country, conservatives fear change so much that they would have more of the same despite the fact that "staying the course," sets the stage for truly calamitous changes later: full-scale socio-ecomic upheaval, etc. Their inclination to self-delude in service to their comfort-zone is so strong that they've actually tried to convince themselves that the country is going down the tubes because of the liberals in Congress, who, after all, have had a slim majority for the last two years (as if the manifold horrors and lies and outrages of the last 8 years all occured in these last 2, and somehow originated in the Capitol Building instead of the White House).
Unfortunately, change really IS the only constant and denying or putting it off only causes it to be more painful when it finally does happen.. The skill is in knowing when to push for it, when to simply let it happen, and when to push back a little, perhaps to redirect it. Nothing you do can stop it though. Might as well try to prevent your children from growing up. Oh sure, you can keep insisting that there's a Santa Claus, well into their teens. Or you can try to shield them from ever learning about human sexuality or anything else that might lead to a loss of innocence. But one day, your daughter is gonna get her period. And little Billy, well, sure he might be a bit slow, but even he's gonna figure out that Santa was really Dad all along.
In our case, as Obama has stated repeatedly, we are desperate for change. Wholesale, comprehensive, cleansing, corrective change. The Karl Rove / Dick Cheney / Monkey Boy administration has been like an enormous brain tumor slowly killing the United States while inducing disturbing personality alterations and interfering with mental faculties and overall competence. The change we need is nothing less than life-saving brain-surgery for an entire country. But you know how it is... people are afraid of hospitals/doctors/surgery. And that's understandable. Surgery is a bit scary. So even though it makes no sense, there are people who would prefer to see how the brain-tumor "plays out," rather than risk cutting open our head and removing it. But if we leave it in place (and vote for more Republicans) it will definitely kill us. If we vote to remove the tumor, (enter Dr. Obama) we're not sure what the outcome of the surgery will be. Though he seems highly intelligent and highly skilled, we don't know this doctor so well. Unless you're very "zen," uncertainty isn't easy. No matter what happens with the surgery, we can assume that the recovery process won't be easy either. But at least we won't have a terminal fucking brain tumor anymore!
Ahem.
One last thing and then I'm going to sleep...
As difficult as it is for me to fathom how people can take their group cohesion and loyalty (positive traits) and blindly apply them to such obvious liars and thieves as Cheney/Bush, I have to say, the problem isn't the conservative voters. It's the liars and thieves. The Republican party. If the Republican leaders actually lived and governed according to the moral values they claim to hold dear (the values their supporters certainly DO hold dear) then we would not have been lied to about Iraq, because if you're loyal to your group, you don't lie to them. And we wouldn't be in the absolutely sickening financial disaster we're experiencing. Would actual fiscal conservatives ever have allowed conditions to persist that could lead to the unmitigated debacles in the home-loan industry, at AIG, Lehmann Bros., Merrill Lynch? I just found out that my bank might be up for sale (Washington Mutual). I'm sorry, but the people that conservatives vote for don't actually have conservative morals. For them to have conservative morals, they'd have to have morals.
Good night.
Despite the shortcomings of Jonathan Haidt's lecture (and an article of his that my friend Chris recommended), it is largely thanks to them that I am reminded of the need to find common ground with people whose views I find difficult to accept, or even understand. Conservatives. People who strongly resist change (despite the fact that change is the only constant).
Haidt starts his lecture pointing out that "openness to new experience" is a psychological trait, and some people rate highly in it, and others less so. Those who rate highly tend to vote liberal, and those less so tend to vote conservative. So it's no wonder that the conservative Republican base got so excited by Sarah Palin. McCain is a slightly "new" experience for some of them, and Obama is obviously shockingly new for them, whereas Palin is almost exactly like a female version of who we already have in the White House. Ah... comforting. Familiar. And even though it doesn't take a genius to see that the Republican leadership is systematically destroying the country, conservatives fear change so much that they would have more of the same despite the fact that "staying the course," sets the stage for truly calamitous changes later: full-scale socio-ecomic upheaval, etc. Their inclination to self-delude in service to their comfort-zone is so strong that they've actually tried to convince themselves that the country is going down the tubes because of the liberals in Congress, who, after all, have had a slim majority for the last two years (as if the manifold horrors and lies and outrages of the last 8 years all occured in these last 2, and somehow originated in the Capitol Building instead of the White House).
Unfortunately, change really IS the only constant and denying or putting it off only causes it to be more painful when it finally does happen.. The skill is in knowing when to push for it, when to simply let it happen, and when to push back a little, perhaps to redirect it. Nothing you do can stop it though. Might as well try to prevent your children from growing up. Oh sure, you can keep insisting that there's a Santa Claus, well into their teens. Or you can try to shield them from ever learning about human sexuality or anything else that might lead to a loss of innocence. But one day, your daughter is gonna get her period. And little Billy, well, sure he might be a bit slow, but even he's gonna figure out that Santa was really Dad all along.
In our case, as Obama has stated repeatedly, we are desperate for change. Wholesale, comprehensive, cleansing, corrective change. The Karl Rove / Dick Cheney / Monkey Boy administration has been like an enormous brain tumor slowly killing the United States while inducing disturbing personality alterations and interfering with mental faculties and overall competence. The change we need is nothing less than life-saving brain-surgery for an entire country. But you know how it is... people are afraid of hospitals/doctors/surgery. And that's understandable. Surgery is a bit scary. So even though it makes no sense, there are people who would prefer to see how the brain-tumor "plays out," rather than risk cutting open our head and removing it. But if we leave it in place (and vote for more Republicans) it will definitely kill us. If we vote to remove the tumor, (enter Dr. Obama) we're not sure what the outcome of the surgery will be. Though he seems highly intelligent and highly skilled, we don't know this doctor so well. Unless you're very "zen," uncertainty isn't easy. No matter what happens with the surgery, we can assume that the recovery process won't be easy either. But at least we won't have a terminal fucking brain tumor anymore!
Ahem.
One last thing and then I'm going to sleep...
As difficult as it is for me to fathom how people can take their group cohesion and loyalty (positive traits) and blindly apply them to such obvious liars and thieves as Cheney/Bush, I have to say, the problem isn't the conservative voters. It's the liars and thieves. The Republican party. If the Republican leaders actually lived and governed according to the moral values they claim to hold dear (the values their supporters certainly DO hold dear) then we would not have been lied to about Iraq, because if you're loyal to your group, you don't lie to them. And we wouldn't be in the absolutely sickening financial disaster we're experiencing. Would actual fiscal conservatives ever have allowed conditions to persist that could lead to the unmitigated debacles in the home-loan industry, at AIG, Lehmann Bros., Merrill Lynch? I just found out that my bank might be up for sale (Washington Mutual). I'm sorry, but the people that conservatives vote for don't actually have conservative morals. For them to have conservative morals, they'd have to have morals.
Good night.
Jonathan Haidt TED Talk
This video explains a lot. But it doesn't go far enough. Gravesian Spiral Dynamics theory is more comprehensive. Still, this is definitely worth watching, especially with the election coming up so soon...
Friday, September 12, 2008
If McCain Wins
If John McCain becomes the next president of the United States, whether through voter fraud, rigged voting machines, cops barring black people from entering the polls, or whatever nefarious means, then here is my timeline of the future...
January 20, 2009 -- 12 noon: John McCain sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.
January 20, 2009 -- 12:01 PM: John McCain assassinated. Suspect is caught and declared to be an Islamic Fundamentalist, but is in actuality a Republican operative.
January 20, 2009 -- 12:03 PM: Sarah Palin sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America.
Over the course of her first year in office, the US launches unprovoked military strikes on: Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, France, the international space station, and the sun.
The ideological split of the populace of the United States increases sharply. Hostilities flare up. All our armed forces including the National Guard, all reserve units and all private mercenary forces are spread too thin around the world to intervene domestically and local police forces are overmatched. Seeking a better life for their children, people of differing views relocate in order to live with folks they find more agreeable, until North America effectively turns into this:
(remember that?)
2010: Sarah Palin agrees to let certain areas officially secede (the ones with all the gays, blacks, hebrews and what she calls "book-readin' types.") The economy of Canada skyrockets, based on the enormous infusion of intelligent, creative talent and innovative thinking that immediately takes place.
February 2011: The only thriving industries left in Jesusland are: weapons manufacture, factory-pig-farming, NASCAR, Fox-Propaganda, tobacco, beer and privatized prisons.
April 2011: Sarah Palin announces a plan to create a million new jobs constructing a 50-foot thick, 100-foot high, 6000-mile long concrete wall on the border between Jesusland and Canada. She will claim that this is a security measure to protect all the faithful citizens of Jesusland from the filthy heathen terrorists of Canada, and it will be overwhelmingly supported. In truth, it is to prevent Jesusland's slaves and women from escaping.
June 2011: NASCAR, factory farming, Fox and the prison-industrial complex partner to create "Deathrace" and "Soylent Green". Starving Jesuslanders are killed and secretly fed to other Jesuslanders in the most entertaining way available.
2012: Despite the forced teen-pregnancy policy, the population of Jesusland continues to dwindle. Nevertheless, its consumption of fossil fuels keeps increasing. Global climate change effects turn much of the heartland, what had previously been the breadbasket of the world, into lifeless dustbowl. Coastal cities drown. Wildfires scorch the southland. Mass starvation, riots, soylent green!
Meanwhile, to the north, on the Canadian side of the "Freedom Wall"...
Every citizen receives free comprehensive health care and free education up to any level one wishes to pursue. Marijuana is legalized, and becomes an enormous source of revenue for the federal government. Crime is virtually non-existent. Canada quickly achieves the highest standard of living in the world.
2010: Global climate change effects alter much of Canada's coastline, but turn vast areas of previously uninhabitable frozen wasteland into lush temperate zones. Canada begins constructing the world's first completely self-contained carbon-neutral domed city above the arctic circle. The Canadian solar and wind-power industries thrive. The Canadian electric car industry is second-to-none. Canada dominates pop-culture in music, film, TV, fashion, publishing, etc. etc.
2011: Using some of Canada's vast wealth, the entire Canadian side of the "Freedom Wall" is covered in a solar powered ultra-hi-resolution LED display. A trompe l'oeil image of an imense unspoiled wilderness is created to make it seem as if Jesusland doesn't even exist. A yearly design competition gives artists from around the world a chance to create something for the "world's biggest canvas" and the winning entry will run for a month before the usual landscape image returns.
2012: Canada is a shining beacon of hope and people flock there from every corner of the globe. Except of course, from Jesusland. The few who make the attempt to either climb over or tunnel under the wall, are killed immediately and all record of their existence is expunged by the Government of Jesusland. Fox never reports these incidents.
January 20, 2009 -- 12 noon: John McCain sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.
January 20, 2009 -- 12:01 PM: John McCain assassinated. Suspect is caught and declared to be an Islamic Fundamentalist, but is in actuality a Republican operative.
January 20, 2009 -- 12:03 PM: Sarah Palin sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America.
Over the course of her first year in office, the US launches unprovoked military strikes on: Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, France, the international space station, and the sun.
The ideological split of the populace of the United States increases sharply. Hostilities flare up. All our armed forces including the National Guard, all reserve units and all private mercenary forces are spread too thin around the world to intervene domestically and local police forces are overmatched. Seeking a better life for their children, people of differing views relocate in order to live with folks they find more agreeable, until North America effectively turns into this:
(remember that?)2010: Sarah Palin agrees to let certain areas officially secede (the ones with all the gays, blacks, hebrews and what she calls "book-readin' types.") The economy of Canada skyrockets, based on the enormous infusion of intelligent, creative talent and innovative thinking that immediately takes place.
February 2011: The only thriving industries left in Jesusland are: weapons manufacture, factory-pig-farming, NASCAR, Fox-Propaganda, tobacco, beer and privatized prisons.
April 2011: Sarah Palin announces a plan to create a million new jobs constructing a 50-foot thick, 100-foot high, 6000-mile long concrete wall on the border between Jesusland and Canada. She will claim that this is a security measure to protect all the faithful citizens of Jesusland from the filthy heathen terrorists of Canada, and it will be overwhelmingly supported. In truth, it is to prevent Jesusland's slaves and women from escaping.
June 2011: NASCAR, factory farming, Fox and the prison-industrial complex partner to create "Deathrace" and "Soylent Green". Starving Jesuslanders are killed and secretly fed to other Jesuslanders in the most entertaining way available.
2012: Despite the forced teen-pregnancy policy, the population of Jesusland continues to dwindle. Nevertheless, its consumption of fossil fuels keeps increasing. Global climate change effects turn much of the heartland, what had previously been the breadbasket of the world, into lifeless dustbowl. Coastal cities drown. Wildfires scorch the southland. Mass starvation, riots, soylent green!
Meanwhile, to the north, on the Canadian side of the "Freedom Wall"...
Every citizen receives free comprehensive health care and free education up to any level one wishes to pursue. Marijuana is legalized, and becomes an enormous source of revenue for the federal government. Crime is virtually non-existent. Canada quickly achieves the highest standard of living in the world.
2010: Global climate change effects alter much of Canada's coastline, but turn vast areas of previously uninhabitable frozen wasteland into lush temperate zones. Canada begins constructing the world's first completely self-contained carbon-neutral domed city above the arctic circle. The Canadian solar and wind-power industries thrive. The Canadian electric car industry is second-to-none. Canada dominates pop-culture in music, film, TV, fashion, publishing, etc. etc.
2011: Using some of Canada's vast wealth, the entire Canadian side of the "Freedom Wall" is covered in a solar powered ultra-hi-resolution LED display. A trompe l'oeil image of an imense unspoiled wilderness is created to make it seem as if Jesusland doesn't even exist. A yearly design competition gives artists from around the world a chance to create something for the "world's biggest canvas" and the winning entry will run for a month before the usual landscape image returns.
2012: Canada is a shining beacon of hope and people flock there from every corner of the globe. Except of course, from Jesusland. The few who make the attempt to either climb over or tunnel under the wall, are killed immediately and all record of their existence is expunged by the Government of Jesusland. Fox never reports these incidents.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Saturday, September 6, 2008
New Camera
Just got me a Sony DSC W-200. Consumer Reports liked it. I know they ain't exactly photography experts, but they ranked this particular camera way high, said it took nifty shots in low light (which is something I like to do) and I found a great deal on a used one (they don't make new ones of this model anymore).
It may be just a nuthin' little point-and-shoot, but here's what it did when I aimed it at the stuff I can see from my roof...
It may be just a nuthin' little point-and-shoot, but here's what it did when I aimed it at the stuff I can see from my roof...
Friday, September 5, 2008
Origin of the Republican Playbook
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war ... That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
--Hermann Goering (1893-1946) Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the number 2 man in the Third Reich. Quoted on April 18, 1946 at the Nuremberg Trials.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Sorry!!
Okay okay... I know, I've been away for a long time. Well, to that I say: it's summer. And staying inside sitting on your ass writing blog posts during summertime is idiotic. Therefore, I'm on strike! Okay, just taking a break.
If you have abandonment issues, please rest assured that I will return to blogging full on... eventually. Someday.
In the meantime, I'm trying to channel what meager creative energies I can actually muster into the book I'm writing. Yes, that's right... a book. (It's an amazing technology. You can read it without using any electricity whatsoever!) Of course, just because I'm writing it doesn't mean anybody is necessarily publishing it. But if my legions of blog readers all band together and start a letter-writing campaign, I'm sure we can convince some publishing company hack to buy my nonsense and distribute it to the word-starved masses out there. It can't miss! It's gonna be on the NYT best-seller list so long it's gonna make the Harry Potter books look like they were written on gum wrappers (even the ones that weren't).
Now, I know what you're saying... you're saying, "Oh honey... the masses aren't starved for words. They're starved for candy and pizza." And then you add something about the fact that 3 blog readers don't equal "legions." Yeah yeah.
Well, never you mind what does or does not add up to a legion. Or who is or is not starving and for what. As a back-up plan to the whole book thing, I'm inventing candy pizza. Or pizza-candy. So one way or another, I'm gonna be on Easy Street soon.
I wonder who my neighbors will be down on Easy Street. Well, I guess it depends on whether I'm on East Easy or West Easy. (West. Definitely. Better restaurants. Much more fashionable douchebags. Etc.)
What is this "book" I speak of going to be "about" you ask? Simple: it's a guided tour of all the famous places in New York City where I've ever taken a dump. Genius, right? Don't steal it! Lousy book idea stealers!
Anyway, the book ain't gonna write itself, and there's only so much writing-energy in my body at any given moment, so the blogging will continue to be spotty-at-best for a while. I do apologize. If you don't want to have to keep checking all the time to see if I actually post something new, just do what the most tech-savvy of my legions of readers have done, which is subscribe to the RSS feed that all blogger.com or blogspot.com blogs automatically, um, have. My friends who do this assure me it is extremely simple. So simple that only a 6-year old can explain the process to you. If you need help, let me know and I'll put you in touch with my niece. She wants to be the little mermaid when she grows up.
If you have abandonment issues, please rest assured that I will return to blogging full on... eventually. Someday.
In the meantime, I'm trying to channel what meager creative energies I can actually muster into the book I'm writing. Yes, that's right... a book. (It's an amazing technology. You can read it without using any electricity whatsoever!) Of course, just because I'm writing it doesn't mean anybody is necessarily publishing it. But if my legions of blog readers all band together and start a letter-writing campaign, I'm sure we can convince some publishing company hack to buy my nonsense and distribute it to the word-starved masses out there. It can't miss! It's gonna be on the NYT best-seller list so long it's gonna make the Harry Potter books look like they were written on gum wrappers (even the ones that weren't).
Now, I know what you're saying... you're saying, "Oh honey... the masses aren't starved for words. They're starved for candy and pizza." And then you add something about the fact that 3 blog readers don't equal "legions." Yeah yeah.
Well, never you mind what does or does not add up to a legion. Or who is or is not starving and for what. As a back-up plan to the whole book thing, I'm inventing candy pizza. Or pizza-candy. So one way or another, I'm gonna be on Easy Street soon.
I wonder who my neighbors will be down on Easy Street. Well, I guess it depends on whether I'm on East Easy or West Easy. (West. Definitely. Better restaurants. Much more fashionable douchebags. Etc.)
What is this "book" I speak of going to be "about" you ask? Simple: it's a guided tour of all the famous places in New York City where I've ever taken a dump. Genius, right? Don't steal it! Lousy book idea stealers!
Anyway, the book ain't gonna write itself, and there's only so much writing-energy in my body at any given moment, so the blogging will continue to be spotty-at-best for a while. I do apologize. If you don't want to have to keep checking all the time to see if I actually post something new, just do what the most tech-savvy of my legions of readers have done, which is subscribe to the RSS feed that all blogger.com or blogspot.com blogs automatically, um, have. My friends who do this assure me it is extremely simple. So simple that only a 6-year old can explain the process to you. If you need help, let me know and I'll put you in touch with my niece. She wants to be the little mermaid when she grows up.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
A New Thing
On my way to work this morning, I saw something I'd never seen before: a yuppie woman in an expensive-looking business suit riding a bad-ass motorcycle to work.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the still-relatively-newly-high price of gasoline.
I know most people who read this are fellow New Yorkers, who don't generally drive cars and are only affected by high petroleum prices when paying for certain well-traveled food items at the grocery store, or when booking a flight to the west coast or overseas. (I myself am allowing the high price of jet fuel to deter me from going to Burning Man this year. Not that I needed a strong external deterrent. I'm now leaning most heavily toward using my vacation days for some kind of relaxing writing retreat.) But I do have plenty of friends out there in the hinterlands who've got to drive a car pretty much every day.
And it's not like this whole oil thing is a temporary condition. Exxon just posted the largest quarterly earnings of any company in US history, and the amount of oil in earth's crust is still finite. Even if Obama wins, and even if we stop fighting wasteful wars, and even if we implement a strong energy policy, and start demanding justice and fairness from the oil-industry, the high cost of petroleum-based transportation is never going to improve significantly. It only stands to worsen, really.
Which is obviously a huge pain in the ass for all the folks out there who rely on gas-guzzlers to make a living (or to get pussy, etc.). Yet, it is ultimately a good thing, as it will discourage us from emitting carbon, and encourage us to find creative solutions to this whole 'a to b' problem.
I've got one of them creative-type solutions bouncing around in the back of me noggin' and I'd like to share it with all y'all (though if anybody gets rich off this idea, it should be me!)...
Electric cars!
Okay, I know plenty of purely-electric cars already exist. And people don't like 'em because...
1. it takes too long to recharge their batteries (using today's common technologies)
2. their range is too limited (using today's technologies)
3. golf-cart aesthetics
Well, first of all, for 90% of the driving that 90% of Americans do, the short range and low speed of even the cheapest all-electric cars would be perfectly fine. You'd use your car the way you currently use your cell phone. Wake up in the morning, unplug your car from the wall outlet (in your garage, say), drive to work. Work. Drive to the supermarket. Drive home. Plug your car in. Eat dinner, watch TV, go to sleep. Repeat ad infinitum.
Ah, but the reason why the market doesn't go for that, is because of the other 10% of the time, when it's the weekend, say, or other leisure time, and a longer trip up the California coast to Big Sur, say, is desired. From LA to Big Sur is about 300 miles. There ain't a single all-electric car ever made that could do that trip on a single charge. And look how great it is at Big Sur. Don't you just want to be there? There's really no way to get there except by car (unless you're an even more dedicated cyclist than I am, which most Americans definitely are not).
So, how can you get from LA to Big Sur in an all-electric vehicle, even a really good one like this?
Well, some companies suggest using a small internal combustion engine (ICE) to power an on-board generator, which will trickle-charge the car's batteries as you drive, thus extending the range by several hundred miles on not too much fuel. It's basically a form of hybrid, only a little different from the hybrid cars currently on the roads. But such range-extended electric vehicles (REEVs) still need fossil fuels and still emit carbon.
Some people suggest creating recharge stations all over the highways. Which is fine, except people still don't like the thought of having to stop for a long time to recharge before heading back out on the road.
SO, the Jon Levin solution is as follows: tow a flatbed trailer of solar panels with your electric car. A flexible power cable runs from the flatbed to the power-socket on the car. The flatbed would only add a small amount of weight and could be designed to induce as little aerodynamic drag as possible. It might have to be really long in order to have enough surface area for photo-voltaic panels sufficient to generate the electricity needed to continually trickle-charge the batteries in your electric car, but so what? Once you're out on the highway, who cares how long the thing you're towing is? Maybe once you get to your destination, the thing collapses, accordion-style, to take up less room. Or maybe it can be reconfigured to fold up over the car, while parked in the lot of the local Wal*Mart, say. Keeps your car shaded, keeps your batteries full, doesn't take up extra room in the parking lot, especially if the car you're starting with is a Smart Car.
But what if it rains?
Come on, don't be stupid -- who wants to drive up the California coast to Big Sur in the rain?
You heard it here first!
I wonder if that has anything to do with the still-relatively-newly-high price of gasoline.
I know most people who read this are fellow New Yorkers, who don't generally drive cars and are only affected by high petroleum prices when paying for certain well-traveled food items at the grocery store, or when booking a flight to the west coast or overseas. (I myself am allowing the high price of jet fuel to deter me from going to Burning Man this year. Not that I needed a strong external deterrent. I'm now leaning most heavily toward using my vacation days for some kind of relaxing writing retreat.) But I do have plenty of friends out there in the hinterlands who've got to drive a car pretty much every day.
And it's not like this whole oil thing is a temporary condition. Exxon just posted the largest quarterly earnings of any company in US history, and the amount of oil in earth's crust is still finite. Even if Obama wins, and even if we stop fighting wasteful wars, and even if we implement a strong energy policy, and start demanding justice and fairness from the oil-industry, the high cost of petroleum-based transportation is never going to improve significantly. It only stands to worsen, really.
Which is obviously a huge pain in the ass for all the folks out there who rely on gas-guzzlers to make a living (or to get pussy, etc.). Yet, it is ultimately a good thing, as it will discourage us from emitting carbon, and encourage us to find creative solutions to this whole 'a to b' problem.
I've got one of them creative-type solutions bouncing around in the back of me noggin' and I'd like to share it with all y'all (though if anybody gets rich off this idea, it should be me!)...
Electric cars!
Okay, I know plenty of purely-electric cars already exist. And people don't like 'em because...
1. it takes too long to recharge their batteries (using today's common technologies)
2. their range is too limited (using today's technologies)
3. golf-cart aesthetics
Well, first of all, for 90% of the driving that 90% of Americans do, the short range and low speed of even the cheapest all-electric cars would be perfectly fine. You'd use your car the way you currently use your cell phone. Wake up in the morning, unplug your car from the wall outlet (in your garage, say), drive to work. Work. Drive to the supermarket. Drive home. Plug your car in. Eat dinner, watch TV, go to sleep. Repeat ad infinitum.
Ah, but the reason why the market doesn't go for that, is because of the other 10% of the time, when it's the weekend, say, or other leisure time, and a longer trip up the California coast to Big Sur, say, is desired. From LA to Big Sur is about 300 miles. There ain't a single all-electric car ever made that could do that trip on a single charge. And look how great it is at Big Sur. Don't you just want to be there? There's really no way to get there except by car (unless you're an even more dedicated cyclist than I am, which most Americans definitely are not).So, how can you get from LA to Big Sur in an all-electric vehicle, even a really good one like this?
Well, some companies suggest using a small internal combustion engine (ICE) to power an on-board generator, which will trickle-charge the car's batteries as you drive, thus extending the range by several hundred miles on not too much fuel. It's basically a form of hybrid, only a little different from the hybrid cars currently on the roads. But such range-extended electric vehicles (REEVs) still need fossil fuels and still emit carbon.
Some people suggest creating recharge stations all over the highways. Which is fine, except people still don't like the thought of having to stop for a long time to recharge before heading back out on the road.
SO, the Jon Levin solution is as follows: tow a flatbed trailer of solar panels with your electric car. A flexible power cable runs from the flatbed to the power-socket on the car. The flatbed would only add a small amount of weight and could be designed to induce as little aerodynamic drag as possible. It might have to be really long in order to have enough surface area for photo-voltaic panels sufficient to generate the electricity needed to continually trickle-charge the batteries in your electric car, but so what? Once you're out on the highway, who cares how long the thing you're towing is? Maybe once you get to your destination, the thing collapses, accordion-style, to take up less room. Or maybe it can be reconfigured to fold up over the car, while parked in the lot of the local Wal*Mart, say. Keeps your car shaded, keeps your batteries full, doesn't take up extra room in the parking lot, especially if the car you're starting with is a Smart Car.
But what if it rains?
Come on, don't be stupid -- who wants to drive up the California coast to Big Sur in the rain?
You heard it here first!
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
The Glory of Health Benefits
Personally, I think it's wrong that in order to afford even minimal health care in this country, most of us have to play drooling lackey to the corporate ogre. More even than that, we have to be among the lucky lackeys -- on the ogre's good side, at least enough to be invited to join the ogre's health club. The health benefits club. Membership has its privileges.
Of course, the fact that I find our "system" a shameful and disheartening mess in no way stops me from finally going to see what that horrible pain in my neck has been about all these years, now that the ogre has embraced me to his sweaty bosom for a time.
So, with health club membership card in hand, I went on over to West Side Chiropractic on 43rd st. (right near my apartment) and the good doctor Mark checked me out, asked me a bunch of questions, etc. etc. Then he sent me across town to get a set of spinal X-rays.
X-rays kind of creep me out. Radiation in general. Ever since I saw that old (1957) B-movie, "The Incredible Shrinking Man" on TV when I was a kid. The guy gradually and embarrassingly shrinks down to the size of an insect, is attacked by a spider that's much bigger than him, and has to stab it in the thorax with a sewing needle. And then he just keeps right on shrinking! The movie ends with some vaguely overblown claptrap about him inhabiting the sub-atomic realm. (Thanks to Michaelson for rekindling my enjoyment of the word 'claptrap' by the way.)
But I got the X-rays taken, and brought the prints home with me. I don't feel any worse for wear, and am seriously looking forward to bringing the spinal snapshots to the Chiro-dude and having him snap and twist and crunch me back into proper alignment, which I probably haven't been in for over 10 years -- ever since I foolishly tried to do a headstand while riding the Cyclone. That first drop man...
I wonder what it'll be like, to wake up in the morning without pain... will I see rainbows and fairies and unicorns shooting out of that eye on top of the pyramid? I bet I will.
To look at me, you probably wouldn't know that I've been in more-or-less constant pain for years. I'm one of those guys who just sort of ignores pain. Until it kills me dead. Then I say, "Oh... should I maybe have DONE something about that horrible pain I was in all those years? Huh..."
I'm just so used to feeling a constant dull ache and sharp stabbing pains in my neck/shoulder/back area whenever I try to do anything crazy, like turn my head to either side, or look up, or, you know, down, etc., that I sort of just forgot that I wasn't supposed to be in pain. Apparently, normal people don't feel this way, and don't tolerate such a thing for years on end if they can help it. Of course, I was never on the Ogre's good side long enough to make it into the club before. So, there's that.
Supposedly, being out of alignment, with bits of your central nervous system all constricted, hampers all sorts of routine, um, stuff. I mean, for all I know, I'm supposed to be a dynamic motivated individual, instead of a lazy sack o' crap. Maybe, when the electrical impulses traveling along my spinal cord get going properly again, I'll be able to finally, finally, begin realizing my lifelong dream of becoming a fashionably tormented vigilante superhero, and really start kicking some ass! Or begin realizing my other lifelong dream of sitting around in no pain (ass kicking optional).
Whatever.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Of course, the fact that I find our "system" a shameful and disheartening mess in no way stops me from finally going to see what that horrible pain in my neck has been about all these years, now that the ogre has embraced me to his sweaty bosom for a time.
So, with health club membership card in hand, I went on over to West Side Chiropractic on 43rd st. (right near my apartment) and the good doctor Mark checked me out, asked me a bunch of questions, etc. etc. Then he sent me across town to get a set of spinal X-rays.
X-rays kind of creep me out. Radiation in general. Ever since I saw that old (1957) B-movie, "The Incredible Shrinking Man" on TV when I was a kid. The guy gradually and embarrassingly shrinks down to the size of an insect, is attacked by a spider that's much bigger than him, and has to stab it in the thorax with a sewing needle. And then he just keeps right on shrinking! The movie ends with some vaguely overblown claptrap about him inhabiting the sub-atomic realm. (Thanks to Michaelson for rekindling my enjoyment of the word 'claptrap' by the way.)
But I got the X-rays taken, and brought the prints home with me. I don't feel any worse for wear, and am seriously looking forward to bringing the spinal snapshots to the Chiro-dude and having him snap and twist and crunch me back into proper alignment, which I probably haven't been in for over 10 years -- ever since I foolishly tried to do a headstand while riding the Cyclone. That first drop man...
I wonder what it'll be like, to wake up in the morning without pain... will I see rainbows and fairies and unicorns shooting out of that eye on top of the pyramid? I bet I will.
To look at me, you probably wouldn't know that I've been in more-or-less constant pain for years. I'm one of those guys who just sort of ignores pain. Until it kills me dead. Then I say, "Oh... should I maybe have DONE something about that horrible pain I was in all those years? Huh..."
I'm just so used to feeling a constant dull ache and sharp stabbing pains in my neck/shoulder/back area whenever I try to do anything crazy, like turn my head to either side, or look up, or, you know, down, etc., that I sort of just forgot that I wasn't supposed to be in pain. Apparently, normal people don't feel this way, and don't tolerate such a thing for years on end if they can help it. Of course, I was never on the Ogre's good side long enough to make it into the club before. So, there's that.
Supposedly, being out of alignment, with bits of your central nervous system all constricted, hampers all sorts of routine, um, stuff. I mean, for all I know, I'm supposed to be a dynamic motivated individual, instead of a lazy sack o' crap. Maybe, when the electrical impulses traveling along my spinal cord get going properly again, I'll be able to finally, finally, begin realizing my lifelong dream of becoming a fashionably tormented vigilante superhero, and really start kicking some ass! Or begin realizing my other lifelong dream of sitting around in no pain (ass kicking optional).
Whatever.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Monday, July 28, 2008
New York's Finest
My co-worker, Tamara told me about this Youtube video that's also up on gothamist.com. You know... I want to be okay with cops. I've known a few personally, and they were perfectly decent human beings. They've clearly got a difficult job and I certainly wouldn't want to be in their shoes, so I try to cut them some slack, even when they over-react to trivial things.
But then you see something like this...
What the fuck? Am I missing something? On some level, I probably shouldn't be surprised by this, yet I am. And I find myself taking it personally.
I've never participated in a critical mass ride, but looks like I'm gonna have to start. Should probably get some body armor first though.
But then you see something like this...
What the fuck? Am I missing something? On some level, I probably shouldn't be surprised by this, yet I am. And I find myself taking it personally.
I've never participated in a critical mass ride, but looks like I'm gonna have to start. Should probably get some body armor first though.
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