a nightmare

I'm at Walgreen's refilling a prescription for an unknown drug every day.

It's bureaucratic, it isn't dramatic, nor Orwellian nor Kafkaesque.. It's banal in the sense of TSA procedures.

The nightmare comes from the wasted of time.

acronyms are skin

we'll come back to their details later

one from strategy:
VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world - Multiple Sources

one from fiction:
VUE(violent uknown event) - Peter Greenaway

note the power of acronyms: compartmentalization of a variety of features into a single concept. acronyms are skin.

the end of the world might be happening every day

People once made technological innovations once every ten thousand years. This rate increased quite rapidly until the 20th century, when the birth of inventions eclipsed the birth of actual humans. Our grandparents can barely use computers, but we can use any device put in front of us. This is because we know How To Adapt.


Once the apocalypse was presumed to come just once. Then they told us we could live through it. That we should be prepared for it every day.

Maybe it is happening every day. Maybe we'll be the last generation unable to survive a cataclysmic change. Maybe our grandchildren will know How To Adapt to ominpresent changes in the same way we know how to react to technological changes.

i'm not playing at this anymore

a sober evening means i expose myself to guilt and worry and stress. i rub my neck until i get pimples. a sober night means i listen to music that will make me unhappy and visit people who i've wronged.

phoenix? really?

A few months ago my cousin from South Carolina visited New Mexico and was quite taken with it. She's spent the past few months leading up to her recieving her Master's looking for a job in Albuquerque.

But now she's moving to...Phoenix.

Phoenix? Really?

That's like moving to a Siberian waste when you're really trying to live in a beautiful Danish city.

Phoenix is where the Nazis would take their summers had they won the war. It's the evil twin of of Albuquerque. Where we have dust, they have armies of underpaid maids who wipe everything down. Where we have history, they have leased cars. Where we have mystery, they have strip malls.

Phoenix is 117° Fahrenheit during the day. It's only marginally better during the night - acres of asphalt retain heat extremely well. The City of Phoenix has installed underground walkways because it's too hot to walk across the street.

In Phoenix the restaurant patios have sprinkler systems to keep you cool while you dine, but no one sits outside so the water goes to waste.

we thought we were safe

*black screen accompanied by dark noise*

we thought nothing could hurt us

*black screen accompanied by dark noise*

we thought it was over

*black screen accompanied by dark noise*

we were wrong

*jump cut after violent jump cut*

is it possible to have flashes of fierce happiness while your entire society is rolling downhill

It may be the Arcade Fire's Neon Bible on repeat. It may be my own sense of upcoming dread and doom intersecting with a general public feeling of horror at Where We Are Going. It may just be the aftereffects of too much alcohol. It could be that I work in an industry which focuses on nuclear annihilation. It could be rising gas prices.

It could even be a prophecy trying to come through.

Whatever the case, I think we're at the peak of a very long and very rocky downhill slope. At the bottom there's a sinkhole and there's no way to get out of it.

Gee, Yogi...

"Gee, Yoda, I don't think Lord Vader's gonna like that very much..."

Transformers trailer

This movie excites me so much that I've dreamt about the emotional content repeatedly.
I really will be pleased if they focus on the horror and belittling caused by invasion by a superior alien species. Giant robots are cool and all but I'm really hoping for something along the lines of Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

i would pay

for sleep without chemicals

on pencils and, their role in the mouth

The comedy K

Interestingly, the "k" sound (or the "hard c"), as heard in "quack" and "duck", has long been seen in the comedy world as especially funny. Why? It may be down to a rather odd psychological phenomenon known as "facial feedback". When people feel happy they smile, but some evidence suggests that the mechanism also works in reverse: smiling makes people feel happy.

In 1988, psychologist Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg, Germany, asked two groups of people to judge how funny they found some cartoons. In one group, each person held a pencil between their teeth without it touching their lips, which forced a smile. The other group were asked to hold the pencil with their lips (not using their teeth), forcing a frown.

The results revealed that people experience the emotion associated with their expressions. Those with a forced smile felt happier, and found the cartoons funnier than those who were forced to frown. The hard "k" often forces the face to smile (say "quack"), which may explain why the sound is associated with happiness. Whatever the explanation, if you want to make someone feel happy, offer them a cookie, not a sandwich, and a Coke, not a Pepsi.

Després de l'aiguat - Amsterdam

Després de l'aiguat - Amsterdam
Originally uploaded by Mor (bcnbits).

this got through a drunken haze which is more than i can say of many images

Having read Eco, Debord, and Baudrillard, I still do not understand semiotics

Main Entry: se·mi·ot·ics
Pronunciation: -'ä-tiks
Variant(s): or se·mi·ot·ic /-tik/
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural semiotics
Etymology: Greek sEmeiOtikos observant of signs, from sEmeiousthai to interpret signs, from sEmeion sign, from sEma sign
: a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics
- semiotic adjective
- se·mi·o·ti·cian /-&-'ti-sh&n/ noun
- se·mi·ot·i·cist /-'ä-t&-sist/ noun

histrionic black hollywood: quotes towards an essay

Butterfly McQueen: "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!"
Samuel L. Jackson: " I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"

“the lady on Quick Circle whose dogs bark when you walk up”

It's the detail in the descriptive quotes I'm interested in, not in the novelty of the snack.
For the following, please focus on the bits you think you ought to ignore.

Most of the children at Carver — perhaps most of the children in the Delta — buy their Kool-Aid pickles from unlicensed house stores, operated by neighborhood elders who, seated at their kitchen tables, sell snacks and chips and candy to anyone who comes knocking. (If these folks sold whiskey instead of pickles, their enterprises would be known as shot houses.) Ms. Sumner’s students praised in particular “the lady on Quick Circle whose dogs bark when you walk up” and “the woman who stays on Slim Street who sells nachos, too.”

A Sweet So Sour: Kool-Aid Dills

ostensibly healthy lungs

the wheezing breaths of cardiovascular exercise

eucalyptus air in a steam room

a tiny cigarette in an apartment full of cat hair

all followed by coughs befitting the tubercular

The Brown House

The Brown House is where my mother and I lived with my father.

They were not happy, and my mother felt alone and helpless because she had no one to support her except her husband. In both practical and emotional matters, he was her only assistance.

Slowly she realized that my father was crazy, because, although he was creative and vibrant and eccentric, he could rationalize beating her, and found times to do so frequently.

At the same time, through at least one involuntary night spent in a local mental hospital, he was forced to acknowledge his own schizophrenia.

Although she could weather the pain herself, she left him the day he hit me.

The Brown House is uninhabited now, with an open foundation that fills with dirty water when it rains, and rooms full of mildew and the domestic detritus we left behind.

AN IDEA which i forgot and remembered

rewrite Aesop and the Br'er Rabbit stories in a post-apocalyptic setting


Fables of the Wasteland

PLEASE REREAD THE IMPORTANT LIST TO THE RIGHT

ITS CONTENT HAS NOT CHANGED
HOWEVER
YOUR PERSPECTIVE MAY HAVE RECENTLY

i work better with a hangover

if there's a nice clean pathway there is no way i'm walking down it but if there's a mountain i'll climb it

cf last friday wtih this friday

last thursday: old man at stoplight playing a quick ten seconds on his harmonica before the light turns green
this thursday: small boy in glasses crying in the supermarket
last friday morning: arms, legs, chest sore from exercise
this friday morning: arms, body sore from alcohol and bad sleep (in my dream i kept buying the wrong knife)
this friday: alice liddell's birthday

besides latvia

i'll spend two days in estonia (talinn)

this is my first overseas business trip and my first trip overseas since i was 18 or 19 and frankly i'm nervous to the point of panicking

museums n.jpg

museums n.jpg
Originally uploaded by The Fifth Element.

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etant_donnés :

"Marcel Duchamp's last major art work which surprised the art world that believed he'd given up art for chess 25 years earlier. It is a tableau, visible only through a peep hole in a wooden door, of a nude woman lying on her back with her face hidden and legs spread holding a gas lamp in the air in one hand against a landscape backdrop.
Duchamp worked secretly on the piece from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio while even his closest friends thought he had abandoned art.
It is made of an old wooden door, bricks, velvet, twigs, a female form made of leather, glass, linoleum, and an electric motor. Duchamp prepared a "Manual of Instructions" in a 4-ring binder explaining and illustrating how to assemble and disassemble the piece.
It wasn't until 1969 that the Philadelphia Museum of Art revealed the tableau to the public."

the Scooby Doo push-up ice creams are way better than the Finding Nemo push-up ice creams

i love the URL that Nestle (the creator of hte Scooby-Doo push-up ice creams) has for its ice creams:

kids.icecream.com

going one level up, to www.icecream.com, shows that it's a Dreyer's/Nestle site, but i like the idea that perhaps the entire ice cream industry has united to promote their products
sort of like a low-key summertime "Beef Council" or whatever the hell it is that produces those "Beef: It's what's for dinner" ads

you don't *need* to promote ice cream but if you're going to do so, you might as well buck the laws of the free market and partner with every single potential competitor and form an organization focused on the idea of ice cream

i have a new pick up line: "I'm wearing a wire."

the romance strategy is to wear a wire and to make sure everyone knows that everything we say is listened to by unknown ears far far away


i'm hoping that the threat of being discovered by quasi-illuminati agents will create an atmosphere of romance

basically i'm going to coopt the nature of the surveillance state for my own selfish animalistic purposes

.lv (dot) - LV

im gonna be in latvia at the end of may

let me know if i can bring you anything

Ethnic groups 59.0% Latvians
28.5% Russians
3.8% Belarussians
2.4% Poles
6.3% others



Fig. 1: Traditional Latvian Dress

star trek netlfix tonight afterview

bill shatner wrote and directed THE FINAL FRONTIER
its about god/absence thereof
all characters played as parodies of themselves
however kirk is always a self-parody so it kind of evens out
its like instead of reducing the amount of one spice in a ruined dish
he just upped the levels of every other flavoring to match it

this is from toothpaste for dinner and i tihnk it's funny

the garfield thing in partic'

When I was sixteen, my father gave me a book. "I think this will explain some things we've never really talked about, Drew."

It was called What's Your God Damn Problem: A Guide To Getting A God Damn Job And Showing Your Parents Some Respect.

And right now, some lady or man's cursor is hovering over that underlined part, and they've got this pure white thought-bubble over their head, and in the thought-bubble it says, "where can i get this book". This certain brand of suburban-authoritarian person, for whatever reason... they are just straight-up Garfield. When I think about them, I can see their thoughts floating above their heads in little white bubbles, just small simple ideas. One or two clauses total, and the letters are precisely inked, just like in Garfield.

Who Moved My Lasagna?: The Sternly Suburban Authoritarian edition.

I think there should be self-help books for everything. Not like when you're at the store and you see a book on a very specific topic and say "Oh, they have books for everything!" I mean, seriously, everything everything. Then, the elderly will turn into geniuses, because all they will do is drive across the country in their RVs, helping the hell out of themselves. I mean, after the audio books come out. I guess this is a horrible idea. How many cassette tapes would the Learn How To Listen When I Tell You To Take The Trash Out Warren book even take up? And this is, I mean, maybe this is a little advanced, but I am assuming they will be personalized. This is no sweat in the future. But probably still not really a great idea, since I don't think self-help books even work.

Warren, Next Time You See Your Sister: Tell Her I Need My Sewing Machine Back

Self-help books are pretty popular though. (The sewing machine one was #2 on the NYT Best Seller list last week.) Everyone is simultaneously terrified of what other people think, and at the same time completely unable to predict what other people think. The fuel in the engine of our nation's economy is fear. The oxygen is random, inconsistent reinforcement. OH SHIT.

How To Overcome Fear: Can You Really Do It?

Yeah, you can't. Sorry dude. It is just too far in the future. All of the flashing lights and rap music have completely ruined our hormone levels. Our only relief from overstimulation is severe overstimulation, with predictable results.

Doesn't It Seem Like Society Is Changing: Or Something

Uh, yes, but the thing is: Once your society has developed the Segway, you can never go back. Up to the Segway, you can pull back... slowly phasing out cars, airplanes, et cetera, finally moving back to a renewable, agrarian ecosystem. The Segway is the fishing hook of modern society. If the Segway goes, a large chunk of the earth is going to get ripped out with it. (Possibly exposing molten core - compromise atmosphere? Reduce gravity? Check implications later, remove this section)

Dell to be what it is because of who we all are

That is a headline from an article in a business magazine and it blends technology with humanity in a way that I don't think I've ever seen before.

cookie monster eats computer

~&%~%&

"There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America"

Bill Clinton

from roger ebert, a fine description of drinking

``Trees Lounge'' doesn't paint a depressing portrait of Tommy, just a realistic one. Any alcoholic knows that life is not all bad, that there comes a moment between the morning's hangover and the night's oblivion when things are balanced very nicely, and the sun slants in through the bar windows, and there's a good song on the jukebox, and the customers might even start dancing. Tommy makes some headway one afternoon with a woman he meets in the bar; like a lot of drinkers, she can dance better than she can stand.

The meaning of sprezzatura

The meaning of sprezzatura in art and life in the High Renaissance is difficult to determine. Part of the trouble stems from the contradictions inherent in the word itself; it is paradoxical, closely related to grace, but with slightly different connotations. Castiglione's Book of the Courtier elaborated on what the word meant for social interaction. A character in the book, Count Ludovico, explains the meaning of grace, and in it he mentions sprezzatura. "It is an art which does not seem to be an art. One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it....obvious effort is the antithesis of grace." The most important aspect of sprezzatura is its two-layered nature: it involves a conscious effort which is disguised by a concealing act. Things which require effort are to be performed casually. Count Ludovico seems to be saying that grace arises out of sprezzatura. Anthony Blunt interprets it this way: "It will vanish if a man takes too much pains to attain it, or if he shows any effort to attain it. Nothing but complete ease can produce it. The only effort which should be expended in attaining it is an effort to conceal the skill on which it is based; and it is from sprezzatura, or recklessness, that grace springs." In High Renaissance life, the courtiers wanted to put on a kind of performance, a subtle one, without allowing anyone to know it was self-conscious and deliberate behavior.

star trek netflix tonight

finally talked to mom about carl on sunday

he met her in a library and she lived with him in a valley of psychoses