if you shoot yourself in the head rainbows come out

battle beyond the stars

1590, originally uploaded by Poletti.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Seventy-two small fish were briefly launched into space by researchers Thursday, hoping their swimming patterns would shed some light on motion sickness.

link

all snowflakes are different, but all raindrops are the same

the world of being secret

reminder:

the quality of a science fiction movie can be correlated to the time it takes to first view a spaceship onscreen.

whether this is inverse correlation or direct correlation is NOT YET DETERMINED

The only acceptable method of Klingon suicide is to attack a larger force.

reminder

"i tend to categorize people by their delusions"

people are like frogs in a pot of water on the stove
or bombs with personalities

thought

"funeral" is about dealing with loss: of childhood, of family members, and of innocence. it's an organic and healthy coping process.

what if "black mirror" is about someone dealing with loss in an unhealthy way?

abq

Body found in canal on ABQ’s north side
A human body has been found in an irrigation ditch near Balloon Fiesta Park on Albuquerque’s north side.

J.R. Padilla and his six-year-old daughter were bicyling on a path next to the North Diversion Channel early Sunday evening when they spotted the body.

"The man was hunched over, his pants around his ankles, his shirt over his head," Padilla recalled.

Man leads cops on 10-mph car chase
The car chase only reached speeds of 10 miles per hour, but when police corralled the fleeing suspect, what he told them was a real head scratcher.
The driver drew police attention on Georgia and Lomas Saturday night as his red car drove along with sparks flying from the front wheels.

Woman robs store to cover gambling losses
A 52-year-old woman admitted to police that she robbed a gas station and convenience store on Tuesday in order to hide gambling losses from her husband.

Dispatcher talks man through daughter’s birth
An Albuquerque 911 operator talked an expectant dad through the birth of his child Wednesday morning.

Woman killed in interstate rollover
A woman in her 20s died and seven children were injured early Thursday morning in a weather-related accident on Interstate 40.

Bank robber strikes ABQ area bank
Wednesday afternoon a bank robber copycat hit a northeast Albuquerque bank.

Authorities first believed the Wells Fargo bank inside the Smith's grocery store was robbed by the so called Babyface Bandit, but they now say the man who hit the bank is a Babyface Bandit copycat.

SWAT scene closes West Central
A man wielding what has been described as a sword compelled Albuquerque Police to shut down West Central Avenue and bring in their armored personnel carrier late Tuesday.

ABQ restaurant sees rash of robberies
Robbers in Albuquerque apparently have a taste for Twisters. The restaurant's co-owner says 13 locations have been robbed in the last nine months.

Mistrial declared in drunk nurse case
A mistrial has been declared in the case of the intoxicated nurse accused of contributing to a 5-year-old girl’s death.

Woman mugged in broad daylight
A woman visiting her family from Illinois was stabbed and robbed in broad daylight in northeast Albuquerque Sunday afternoon.

in the field, the grass is growing. there's a hole with perfectly geometric sides cut into the field. there's a fire in the hole, and it's raging, but the hole's too deep for the grass to wilt. it's just burning the deep parts.

eventually, the fire will go out, and the hole will be all that's left.

this is getting depressing

23 applications, not a single bite.

Is a time machine a weapon?

calm down.

relax. you're safe on saturn.

i have a light that causes the earth to quake

1. incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,
2. incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
3. incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
4. if they can be trained to improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

Kruger and Dunning

Eclipse 2

too weary to be angry about this

Could someone please pick up the slack.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0887261/

Friday night, I see Be Kind Rewind with Lou and Sarah. It rains. The movie isn't *quite* as good as I wanted it to be, considering how in-shock I was after watching Gondry's past efforts. Sarah twists her ankle dancing down the sidewalk. Lou gets sick but is better by the next morning, when I hear his frog croaking.

Saturday, I breakfast at the Grove and prepare for a long day of avoiding bad things, but instead end up driving to Socorro with Camelia. I buy her a cup of coffee and myself a cup of tea later. When I pour out tea, it's water again. These things happen to me around her.

That night, with Ty, I see The Handsome Family at the Launchpad. They're prefaced by two immensely forgettable bands stuck in the speed of "dirge". The Handsome Family is immensely awesome, on the other hand: musicianship, creativity, stage banter - it all comes together. I drink a few $.150 PBRs but don't really get a buzz. Fall asleep early in the a.m.

Sunday, I have breakfast with Mom and Dad at Mannie's. I can't finish my orange juice. Mom and I visit the tea section of Tai Lin World Market. She buys much tea, I buy some Earl Grey. The afternoon is spent cleaning and watching Twin Peaks, which is a daunting task considering I'm only on disk 4 of something like 12. Pho at Vietnam 2000 with Mom and Dad and Lou. More Twin Peaks. Fall asleep reading David Markson's Vanishing Point.

Wake up at 6 on Monday. Red sky at morning. Fluorescent lights repeating, repeating a phrase above my desk.

reminder

Stars are not visible in photographs taken while in orbit.The sun in the Earth/Moon area shines as brightly as on a clear noon day on Earth, so cameras used for imaging these things are set for daylight exposure, with quick shutter speeds in order to prevent overexposing the film. The dim light of the stars simply does not have a chance to expose the film.

like damien loeb

, originally uploaded by rattlingdjs.

From a BBC News Magazine article on men who frequent prostitutes:
"I'm distributing my wealth to people who don't have it"

I'm pretty sure that anytime anyone anywhere says anything remotely similiar to that, they're full of shit. I won't cast either the sex trade nor men who visit prostitutes in any sort of negative or positive light and I don't know much about politics, prostitution or economics , but let me just say this: I am pretty sure that proponents of any sort of trickle-down theory of wealth are usually complete tools, just huge hypocritical apologist bastards 90% of the time.

That reminds me, my new favorite insult is "Fiscal Conservative". As in, "Nob Hill is full of lofts being built for Fiscal Conservatives. I believe I may fire-bomb several of these developments."

Indian lunch-box deliverymen - who deliver tiffin tins to workplaces around Mumbai each day - attend a laughter therapy session to beat stress in the Indian city.

What is...

• laughter therapy?
• a tiffin?

Why...

• don't we have lunch-box delivery men in America.
• don't I live in Mumbai?
• do I like this photo so much?
  

rorriM kcalB

to make my point

eclipse, originally uploaded by mraaronmorris.

This is why I am leaving.

Seattle

A hundred or so people met at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill last night, to serenade the full lunar eclipse with Bonnie Tyler's 80's classic, "Total Eclipse of the Heart." The plan was to sing the song for the entire 51 minutes of the lunar eclipse.

Nota bene: I live in one of the sunniest states in the U.S., and last night had to be overcast?
Fuck you.

Reading Rolling Stone's profile of Britney Spears. I don't care about the woman as a celebrity, but this article is titled "The Tragedy of Britney Spears," and it lives up to its hamartia-laden title.

Questions raised for me: What if the tragedy of Britney Spears et family is actually unironically Faulknerian? As in, what if we're focussing on *her* when the actual tragedy is about the Spears clan? That is to say, what if this is an ensemble piece?

What are her cousins doing? Are their days as stupidly, immaturely tragic and banal as Britney's? Are her friends from high school wasting their lives with similarly false-bloated egos? What is the difference between Britney and the best friends she left behind who are now young mothers with bad jobs and dull husbands?

Let's get back to the hometown. Let's see what's going on beyond the high economic-slash-fame peak. I think there's down-home pathos and bathos somewhere that we're missing.

Hurley Smokestack Demolition

I passed by these every time I drove to see my parents. I always timed myself to see how long it took from my first glimpse to passing them by. I think it was around 15 minutes, but I'm not sure, and now I'll really never know.

saturn 3

350, originally uploaded by Poletti.

creature

Man's sins doom him

this man with his sins, whose name we don't know, was doomed by a final sin. perhaps doomed earlier and in another way. he will now be punished, maybe in hell or perhaps elsewhere, sources say. "the man's sins, which incflude lechery and murder, mean he will be punished," said a sponsor, "i think men should punish him, though, and not devils."

the man wasn't cognizant of his fate for he was drunk on wine and unable to speak even when roused by the phone calls of those who needed him.

wrong wrench used means poor man slept on a bench

by mel spring [ap]

one man slept on the bench because of the wrong wrench. the wrench, he thought, would not strip the nuts on his tires, but it did. "now the nut is more a short cylinder than a nut" he said when someone asked me what he was doing. "i will wander to find someone with a better wrench or a plier to take the nut off"

that night, he slept on a cold bench that had no bars to keep homeless ones from being asleep on it.

"this is a terrible night," he said. " i hope it does not happen again."

mirrors won't work for robots

here and now, [AP]

Nor mirrors nor magic will work for the mechanical. They can be seen but only in camera pictures and influence only by money and fear.

"Automated alice/can't get through the looking glass" goes the refrain to one mournful song. Robots cannot sing this song, but dulcet young girls can be contracted for pennies to sing it to them.

hair is falling out and dying in huge amounts

by hank panson

hair, that wonderful stuff that keeps you warm when attached to your head or put on your body as a coat, is falling out! the hair sfalling out because it dies and is replaced, replaced by new hair...but that new hair is also dead. "only very old hair is alive. only the small tips that are in the scalp of each one of us lives." said a man "the hair you see and touch is dead like elm leaves are right now."

it is a thing, to pet dead hair and feel good about it, or to pat a cat with much dead hair and hear it purr as you stroke something dead that cannot feel. scientists say it is truly wondrous, but that none of us will remember the wonder tomorrow.

salamanders set afire to disprove ancient myth

by ecam umater

no one tested this before, but salamanders were thought to live in flame. a test yesterday showed they don't. they are afraid and vulnerable of the flame like you or another animal.

"we put these animals into the flame to see would they play or would they panic," said a scientist. "well we found that they panicked."

each time she calls he sees your number and must hang up
by franklin monroe, UA
this girl calls the man many times and during many different hours, buteach time she calls the man must hang up. "because of who i am and who she is when we talk we fight"

this is a terrbile tragedy for the girl and the man, who wants to hear her laugh.

dissonance is now music

Tucson {ap} pure noise can now be sold as music, say the RIAA and the american music club (not the band). things without tone or rhythm can be danced to and can inspire. the chittering of animals overlaid on silence can be expected to be lasted dfrom the oversized speakers of chevy impalas on your parkways.

"everyone is a composer now," said a symphony director. "i can put a hundred people in a room and have them talk and walk and then i have recorded a beautiful aria" heavy-metal bands now feel that they can fight instead of learn their instruments.

each day from now on you will wake up to hear a song made of construction work and alarm clocks. you will contribute to this song just by being active.

Dried apes for sale

San Francisco [AP] Dried apes, primates putrefied in a stinking cauldron and then left on a sill to dry until a hungry one comes for them are now for sale at the vendors all over the city of San Francisco. Young boys and girls particularly like this new treat which, I have heard, is more savory and sweeter than jerky.

"the environment was ripe for the selling of these apes" said the supplier, a cold man with cold eyes hid behind a beard. "I have many apes, enough to supply the children of San Francisco with treats for many years."

Knees fondled by man, woman disinterested and asexual

Monreo, Africa [Returs] man , feeling frsiky, has felt a woman's knobby knees with his knobby fingers, thinking to have her randier than before. woman did not respond, nor positiviely nor negatively, except to move her knee once he was through and scratch it with a flyswatter, as if saying something was so hard.

"was as if she did not notice the pads of my fingers upon her knees or my palm on her thigh," said man, still active. "i wish she had noticed because i would have liked to touch her more, at other times and on other places"

woman, not available, was cooking stew in a kitchen pot, not ready for sex.

Everyone's laughing at me
Around Here [AP] Everyone's mocking me iwth their laughter.

"Why," I ask, "do you find me humorous?"

I will wait for your ansswer and then go back to work.

Shred pile full of love letters

Tuskegee {heuters} A pile of documents is full of love letters from a man to a woman. The pile is peppered infrequently by letters from the woman to the man, although these are short and better written.

"These letters are in my desk and I cannot read them again without crying," said the man. "I have put them in the pile so that an intern can shred them with a cross-cut shredder machine."

The shredded pieces will be put in a bag and mixed with finance and patent documents and then thrown into the rubbish. Then the man will forget the letters. The woman has already forgot the man.

Phildaelhpia [AP] A man feel bad in girlfriend’s bed, and cannot sleep. Filled with cats and their claws are active, the bed of the girlfriend, although it has pillows, makes him feel bad. Blankets thin as horizons and the cats underneath the bed and the blankets, girlfriend’s breasts are lacerated by butter knives, scalpels, and bruised by arms and teeth.

Side Effect of Sobriety

I don't remember my dreams when drunk, I just lie and sleep and in the early mornings have minor fits where I sweat the liquor out by thrashing back and forth like a mechanical bird. On particularly wet nights I wake up with no idea of where the line between blacked-out-but-awake and asleep-but-in-nightmares was laid last night. In the mornings I wonder about these things, and the uncertainty fills my days with guilt and loathing.

When sober, my sleep is filled with vivid, vibrant dreams. They're plotted exclusively with my hopes, desires, regrets, and fears - entirely devoid of the banal surrealism that typically marks dreams: these are utterly realistic. For hours each morning I struggle with the question of what is memory and what is not.

I've been feeling completely without actionable options since I got up. And then I thought, what if this is what she feels like all the time?

I want nothing more than to escape, because this town is getting to me, and people are giving up all around me.

In a flat land, you can see for miles. When a storm is on the way, you have time to fret.

Can the concept of "dog years" be positively correlated to proportionate telomere erosion between humans and canines?

aliens with orange halos

1352, originally uploaded by Poletti.

What i s thee xact natureo fth e catastrophe?

NW_0183, originally uploaded by warrenellis.

6

6, originally uploaded by Skipper Bartlett.

this would be nice just once

Name that film, originally uploaded by peternoster.

jumpsuit mark 2

vlcsnap-270574, originally uploaded by the_junk_monkey.

"Taxidermy" is the art of stuffing animal skins for the purpose of mounting.
"________" is the art of stuffing animal skins for the purpose of mounting, and then burning to ashes the resulting skins.

My glasses were stained last night from all the fucking crying.

look at this frikkin' rad girl

vlcsnap-268451, originally uploaded by the_junk_monkey.

Who's fault is this?

From Myspace.

Did I do something to deserve this redundancy?

Djinni in Islamic tradition are made of "smokeless fire," but in modern Western representations they are made of smoke.

Jinn (concealed)

وَلا جِنَّ بِالْبَغْضَآءِ وَالنَّظَرِ الشَّزْرِ

And there is no concealment with vehement hatred as well as the averting look.

Instead of the cross, the Albatross/ About my neck was hung.

Choice bit from Helmut Newton

When you arrived in Singapore you had five dollars to your name, which you immediately spent in a brothel.

My sound financial sense told me there was no difference between having five dollars and being completely broke.

discovered this weekend, the hard way

Papaya tastes like feet.

Kiran Desai on Having a Cook

A fine reminiscence by an author whom I'm not familiar with on growing up with a petulant but valuable live-in cook:

The more the emotional facets of our own experiences became linked to Saratbhai’s cooking, the more our fear mounted that he would one day be stolen from us. My father would say, “The wife of that architect down the road, she’s after Saratbhai, keeps smiling at him in the Mother Dairy milk line.” Saratbhai was irreplaceable: he knew it; we knew it; he knew we knew it; and this gave him permission to indulge his contrariness.

link

1998

I ask myself every day the same question. Perhaps I phrase it differently or perhaps I pretend it’s a different question, but it is the same question nonetheless. I ask myself “How long can you keep this up?” or perhaps I’ll say “What exactly is it that you are trying to accomplish?” or perhaps “Who is it you’re trying to improve?” If it’s a bad day I’ll ask “Who is it that you’re trying to destroy?”

But generally the question I ask myself is “How wrong do you think you generally are?” Or to put it another way, “How much of a fuckup do you think you generally are?”

It’s a hard question. But someone has to answer it.

Electrical Butterfly Wing

Electrical Butterfly Wing, originally uploaded by Ben Morson.

killer spacesuits

395
Originally uploaded by Poletti

Scepter of butter,
Anointed by rotten peas
I am compost king!


-


Misshapen cuticles
Dirty palms, fruit stained and pink
These are monkey hands


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Godzilla eats trains
King Kong eats island virgins
I burn my waffles


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Autobots drink oil,
The gods sip on ambrosia
I have a juice box


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Laundry room smells calm
Boys plash in the wading pool
The sand smells of pee


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NASCAR drivers race
The Rock fights, George Bush sputters,
I tie my shoelaces

eec: once upon a time no one lived in a pretty how town with up so floating anyone

fran: no no sorry mr cummings try again

eec: okay fran

eec: anyone lived in a hippy pow ---

fran: sorry e e try again youre getting it though, i can see we – we’re on to something big…

eec: anyone lived in a pretty how town with up so floating many bells down

fran: thats terrific mr cummings! really great, I mean it

Over the weekend, I pick up Charles Stross’ Iron Sunrise and immediately the preface – with its thanks given to Cory Doctorow – bothers me. I read many pages and enjoy it despite the influence of the 00’s Douglas Coupland-cum-technology apologist. It is hard to dislike a book by a man who dresses a SWAT team in “the gray and beige of office camouflage,” regardless of the company he keeps. (It must be said, though, that those parts of the book that bear the influence of Doctorow most obviously are the weakest.)

On Saturday I drink with Taylor and her neighbor. We speculate about contrails, for that afternoon there are dozens in the sky. Later, I drink again with Louis and his friends – all girls, that night, for some reason. Perhaps strong friendships with women run in the family? Virtually all my friends are women...

It’s Lou's coworker’s birthday and the intent is to dine, drink, and bake a cake. The ingredients remain on my counter: we never got past the pizza. I succumb to the power of pizza and eat several slices. I go to bed before 10. It’s either the whiskey and beer or the cheese (which I’m totally unaccustomed to, having largely given up on dairy products some months ago), but something wakes me up to vomit copiously in the early hours. The next day I have a hangover bordering on torture – the sort of blackout hangover that makes one's nightmares more akin to hallucinations. It fortunately blossoms into the sort of spent but observant mood that makes a Sunday most enjoyable. Breakfast with Taylor at Sunshine Café: Over bagels and a burrito we make excellent progress on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle and feel very proud. Her sister gives me a beautiful bead, green and blue and spherically organic in a way that makes me think of the fragile, beautiful parts of the ocean: eggs and coral and jellyfish. We sit outside and bask in the sun. The strong indicator that spring is on its way makes me apprehensive of the coming and constant heat. Lazy, I learn that scratching a dog with the tip of a pen makes her tail wag just as much as using one’s hands.

Later, I come home and reread (or read, I should say, because the material doesn’t look familiar) some old writing of mine and find that, however psychologically damaging it may have been, the year (fall 2001 to fall 2002) I spent punishing myself in solitude and misery did not go completely to waste.

Sunday evening, Lou and I watch Every Which Way But Loose and I am, as usual, amazed at how funny Clint Eastwood can be.

Iron Man: the movie

....Actually looks more or less watchable (except for the cringe-inducing use of the eponymous Black Sabbath song). My hope is that Robert Downey Jr.'s characterization of Tony Stark will be faithful enough to the comics that he'll drink like Mickey Rourke in Barfly. Screw that Spiderman-claptrap about keeping one's identities separate. Trash the Punisher revenge fantasies and the X-men "superhero-as-minority" thing, I want filmic representations of hopeless drunks with metal suits.

This is what I want:

I dearly love a bit of irony in the morning.

Anti-McCain Republicans choosing to vote Democrat rather than vote McCain in are calling themselves "suicide voters."

Aha.
Aha. Ha.

Ahahahahah ahahahahah.


link
edit: link 2

today on the BBC News website: "Baby found in tornado rubble"

Query: Were they not expecting to find this baby? Is this a tornado changeling?

The German lived in the Black Hills and he drank himself to death. Apparently he wished to obliterate something.

From a story by Malcolm Lowry set in the world of "Deadwood."
I must now resume watching Deadwood, and must commence reading Lowry, because that is such a good line.

busy but clear, like bees.

war ducks?

40% of all victoria's secret sales are thongs

i fuckin' hate those things

ironically, FUBU is a white guy thing now

nobody understands why a dog likes his head out the window

a female goat is a misha.

pictured: a fine Irish billy goat.

every dysfunctional family is fuel for both comedy and drama, often at the same time. at all levels: even the themes are funny and sad at the same time. it's a kind of pathos that doesn't get written down.

breathing

Practically speaking, is the advice "stop and smell the roses" really just a way to get someone to do some deep-breathing exercises?

I recently learn that the small quantity of bourbon lost to evaporation during the aging process is referred to by bourbon-makers as: the angels’ share. And the small quantity of bourbon lost to sloshing onto the kitchen counter or to dripping down the neck of the bottle after I pour is referred to by us as: the devil’s due.

link

It's sort of like a fraternity initiation, only they don't give a shit if you survive.

Baby monotromes are called "puggles"

why are the most attractive women dead?

the most attractive woman on the planet is a Soviet girl who's now probably long past her prime.

Charlie Brown is eight years old throughout the bulk of the run.
There's no one more vulnerable and sensitive than a small boy.
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Learn to relax.
Five cents, please.
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Charlie Brown: Snoopy
Snoopy: Birds.

Question: Is Ramona Quimby a version of Charlie Brown?

Answer: No. Ramona Quimby's father is a version of Charlie Brown.

Being exploded is just like being eaten except in the obverse.

"Your life is a concert of lies," Erin said, "I'd call it a symphony, but you're simply not organized enough."

angels are reading my brain

This is happening.

Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt - "I'm hoping one day I'll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these," she said. "I know it's not good for me." Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.