It's Christmas-Time In The City

Christmas
+ The Tenderloin

Snowman with Cracked-Out Neon French-fry hair

White People Are Mutants

Honky "Science" has finally confirmed what brown people all over the world have already known for years: White people are mutants. The study conducted at Penn State University confirmed that white skin is derived from a genetic mutation in a single individual many centuries ago. Link to article.

I already have evidence in my posession that confirms this scientific finding. Eugie's friend Ryan forwarded this to her. It's Tommy Seebach covering The Shadows song "Apache". Be forwarned: this is intensely wrong. Link

You Could Have It So Much Better

I finally downloaded (paid for, thank you!) Franz Ferdinand's latest album "You Could Have It So Much Better" and I cant believe its taken me this long to do it... this is the smartest, rockinest album I have heard in forever. This is naughty of me but it's just so good I can't resist. You can listen my two favorite songs here:

Outsiders
Fade Together

Sweetness.

*Hella* Tight

Two. No, six. No. Twelve. Baker's Dozen.Link

I don't know why but it makes me intensely happy.

Sorry, Jew Jersey

RegretTheError.com is reporting the year's biggest media errors and corrections. The "Correction of the Year" came from Denver's Daily News on July 27:

The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday's Town Talk regarding New Jersey's proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author's intention to call New Jersey 'Jew Jersey.'

The Typo of the year went to The New York Times for running a story about "beef panties". Link

Seagoats

(forewarning: if you're not into astrology or think its a bunch of bullshit because your puny mind can't comprehend the possibility of its reality then you should stop reading now and go do something else. If you are naive (or arrogant) enough to think that you can rule out its possibility because of some kind of factual analysis of this and that then I hate to inform you but you are in possession of the brutal kind of primitive consciousness which limits its understanding of the world in which it lives to things which it can grasp and know by entrapping them in the narrow confines of its own understanding. Really. Go do something else.)

Everyone that really knows me knows I'm really (really really) into astrology; its part of a pathological condition I bear that compels me to need to find patterns in things, everything to be specific. It's not a particularly comforting pathological behavior, one that might bring some kind of satisfaction or comfort or feeling of control like other varieties of compulsive behaviors like cleaning or grooming or having everything in your house perfect. Mine is a compulsion that can be unsettling. Patterns can be disturbing. Maybe my pattern-finding is an attempt to understand and give meaning to existence. Compulsion's answer to existential crisis.

In astrology every zodiac sign has a glyph, a mascot. Most of them are straightforward in their symbology: impatient aries the ram; stubborn, plodding taurus the bull; these are symbols whose meaning the mind grasps intuitively. The symbol for my own sign, Capricorn, has always stumped me though. The Seagoat. What in the hell is a freaking Seagoat? All of the other symbols of the zodiac are tangible things which exist, can be seen and touched in creation. Pisces the two fish swimming in opposite directions, one swimming toward the world and the other swimming away from it. Aquarius the water-bearer. Sagittarius the archer. The scorpion. The scales. The crab. The twins. So just where in the hell does that leave the seagoat? Ten years at least I've been thinking about this. Ten years.

Tonight I saw a movie and as I was walking to my car in the rain afterward, it finally hit me and made me laugh at myself. Symbols are things that reveal innate qualities in the things which they represent; things whose representations reveal something about their nature, right...? I've always attacked the problem in the straightforward manner that I would with any other symbol: trying to decipher its meaning by parsing the essence of the symbol's qualities. But tonight I finally realized that this line of thinking has always been a dead-end because I don't know what a Seagoat is to begin with. So I always thought about it for half-a-second and then dismissed the symbol itself as non-sensical instead of reading a deeper meaning into its lack of sense. I realized that to find its meaning I have to work backwards, in a sense, and think about the qualities of the thing itself BEFORE understanding the meaning of the symbol. In that sense the Seagoat is the anti-symbol. How appropriate in its irony for the contrary capricorn.

So tonight I worked backwards and thought about what astrology believes a capricorn to be. First off, our ruling planet is Saturn. I saw a painting called "Saturn Eats His Young" in the Prado museum in Madrid two times in my life; once when I was a kid and it stood out in my mind so much that years later in my twenties when I went again I had to make a bee-line to go see if it was really real. It's brutal and horrifying and was painted during Goya's period of insanity when he was locked up in a medieval loony bin. In astrology Saturn is the planet of limitation; it rules things which are inherently thwarted. Think dog with three legs. Linda Goodman calls Saturn the karmic accountant; he comes along after long intervals (it takes Saturn 28 Earth-years to orbit the sun) to weigh ones deeds, naughty and nice, and dole out one's destiny. But out of all this weighing and calculation comes transformation and opportunity (if one is inclined to leave one's mind open to the possibility of transformation and opportunity in the face of loss). And if one is dis-inclined... well, there's always next time. But like any good bean-counter will tell you, there's always some interest to be paid when the bill finally comes.

Most people think Capricorns are sturdy, competent, ambitious, and prepared. Being one myself, I also think about Saturn/Capricorn as tenacious, making something out of nothing... about loss and lack of opportunity; but more importantly, about the opportunity IN loss. That's when the lightbulb went on: the surefooted goats' means of survival is its ability to climb the kind of sheer mountainsides that other creatures would prefer to walk around. It's capacity for survival is tied to its ability to do things the hard way; and the only way to get things done the hard way is carefully. Methodically. I was surfing in Kauai a couple years ago and saw a pack of goats literally run right up a huge vertical crumbling cliff. But you take one of those creatures and toss it in the ocean and you have taken away the only reason it still survives on this planet. A Seagoat. A goat in the ocean. Swimming. Of course.

The Psychedelic Library

I've been digging around through my old links the last few days looking for interesting audio stimulation to listen while I work and I remembered about The Psychedelic Library. It's a collection of talks and speeches by the late/great Terrence McKenna, a revolutionary in the field of consciousness studies. When I first came across this beautiful collection of works I was floored by his voice; he really sounds like a refugee from some nomadic alien race that has lost his way back to his home planet and is marooned here on Earth due to some cosmic commission to school our ignorant (m)asses about just Who We Really Are. This is a man that believes magic mushrooms are intergalactic time travelers and has been serenated by the DMT elves during an especially "peculiar" trip. This stuff is priceless.

I particularly recommend the "Plants of Power" series, "Techno Pagans at the End of History", and the "Angels, Aliens, and Archetypes" talks. All praise to the Hemporor for hosting it! Thank you! Link

Dear World: Meet The Garden Hippo

Yes, remember that you saw it here first.

This is the story of what happens when you try to clean stuff and sweep everything into a nice big pile and then... arg! How do you get it into the freaking bag to throw away? But really, the Garden Hippo is much more than a creative gardening implement. No, It's the story of father-son learning to understand one another and coming together to make something bigger than themselves... (well, bigger than themselves if they could both fit into a 55 gallon Glad bag). Link

BTW I'm Being Post-Ironic When I Say "Word"

It's been called to my attention lately that I have begun using the word "word" to indicate the affirmative in conversations with people who don't know me that well (I do it with my friends too but they get me). I'm being post-ironic, people. Think about it.

I'm Dork Enough For Both Of Us

This blog just got slashdotted, so here's a link to Xooglers for those of you who don't read slashdot. And yes, it's 1 am and I am blogging about this shit.

The blog is by ex-googlers and is an interesting read for a while, especially if you play the game where you add the words (in your head, kids), "now that i am retired and roll around in wads of cash like a sweaty hog before i go to bed every night" to the end of each sentence.

2005: "Integrity", "Inept" and "Tsunami"

First of all, let me apologize for yesterday's rambling crackhead entry. I was seriously tired and mostly incoherent but hey... it's fun.

Here's an interesting story: Merriam-Webster is reporting the top words searched for on their online site for 2005, and it's a funny combination of words, at least the "integrity" and "inept" part.

The most searched-on word for 2005 was the word "integrity" with 200,000 hits. Which is encouraging; at least now America can actually define the frekkin word.

The unfortunately-named Ralph Whitehead, a journalism professor or e-x-p-e-r-t, hypothesizes that perhaps (i love that word, "perhaps") integrity has become so scarce in our society that its definition has become unfamiliar.

An exerpt from CNN's story:

Immediately after Simon Cowell, the acid-tongued host of the popular television show "American Idol," called one aspiring singer "insipid," Merriam-Webster noticed a dramatic spike in the number of lookups for the word, which the dictionary defines as "lacking in qualities that interest, stimulate or challenge: dull, flat."

Link

Language Has Failed Us (or maybe just me)

So I was in an intense state of sleep-dep last all day yesterday beacuse I was working on a project and get stuck in one of those infinite-loop mind states you sometimes get into when you've been staring at a computer screen for days on end; kind of like the blue screen of death only in your head. So I stayed up way too late and all day the next day I kept having these strange out-of-body ish moments where I'd be going thru my daily routine and suddenly normal, mundane things would strike me as inordinately strange and I felt completely disconnected from my life and the moment-to-moment experiences which make up my life.

Two things that really struck me throughout the day:

1)Instant Messaging is wierd.
I talk to many of my friends more thru IM than in person on a day-to-day basis. How wierd is that? I communicate with the people in my life thru little words on a screen that come out of my friends' heads as ideas which are put into words which make up the sentences, which are then parsed and broken back down by a machine into words, then letters, then zeroes and ones, shoved thru miles and miles of wires, and then repackaged from zeroes and ones into letters and then words and then sentences which my mind turns into ideas that eventually go into my head (most of the time).

2)Using Language is Extrememly Infefficient
This led me to the realization later in the day that language, as a system, is extremely inefficient and primitive. I often suffer from a lack of ability to communicate the thoughts in my head into words. There are a million thoughts that go thru my head every day that don't get parsed into words; they are thoughts, they can be very complex, but they aren't words yet... they are like these gelatinous ideas that contain no words but *DO* have content and meaning. Ideas with content but not words, true Thoughts, happen in the blink of an eye and can range from very simple (i.e. "red light") to very complex (i thought about giving an example of complex but complex is relative and besides that's personal) and aren't necessarily just instinctual.

And on top of that, many thoughts don't really seem to become word-ed until you direct your consciousness to be AWARE of them; so it logically follows that even the act of TRYING TO BE AWARE of your thoughts which DON'T contain words CREATES WORDS. What I'm talking about is that state when you wake up in the morning but aren't really self-aware yet; emotions are another example because they contain no words but you can experience them rather acutely without words at all. You can describe emotions with words, but when you experience them in and of themselves, they are wordless. Feelings. Feel-ings.

I don't have to think logically in order to have an emotion, say empathy. I can see somebody in pain and I instantly feel bad for them; I don't have to work thru it like a math problem (in my head), "oh they are in pain; i know what feels like; i can conclude that i feel bad for them" because three statements ago, I already felt it.

It's like the question: WHY ARE THINGS "FUNNY"? What is funny? What does that mean? Funny. Funny is when symbols, gestures, things that happen have multiple meanings that produce unexpected, right? And the multiplicity doesnt need to be explicit; nobody has to tell you in words the second (or third or fourth) meaning and why its funny, you just instantly understand, without necessarily having to communicate the other (multiple) meanings with words. When you see someone fall down the stairs, or even if your own dumb ass falls down the stairs, it is ALWAYS -- ALWAYS funny. You ever wonder why??? WHY is that funny? What does that mean? What distinguishes falling down the stairs from anything else, say, driving a car or walking across the room? (This is the part where you say, "cuz its funny!") but really it's because its something that is unexpected and wasnt supposed to happen, doesnt happen very often (unless you're a total spaz) but did. And if people always fell down the stairs in the exact same way, eventually it would stop being funny, right? It's the subtle nuances that foil our expectations that create a different, unexpected meaning which is not explicit but implied, and therefore, funny.

(I'm becoming aware that I'm rambling like a total stoner but whatever, man).

Ok, I'm getting to a point: if there are ways to experience states of mind that contain no words but DO have meaning: thoughts, emotions, mental images then WHY (why why why!!!) is it that to actually communicate those things to other people, people who experience these same states on a daily basis and instantly understand what you mean once you explain it with words, WHY in the heck do i need to go thru all the trouble to break it down into the little tiny zeroes and ones of language - SOUNDS (or SYMBOLS which signify sounds), which the reciever has to reconstruct from sounds back into words and then sentences and THEN finally BACK into either the originial raw ideas, thoughts, or mental images.

When you really step back and analyze this process as a system, its really kind of
inefficient.

It happense relatively quickly most of the time so we don't really notice its inefficiency. But we do know that when we meet people who we have an affinity for, most of the time you'll notice that you have an easier time communicating with those people because there is an unspoken understanding that forms a sort of foundation; things which go unsaid but ARE communicated nevertheless. So we tend to gravitate towards them because they "get" us; our ability to communicate and understand is quick, efficient, and feels more... effortless.

So I guess I'm saying its time to really overhaul the entire IDEA itself of communication and what we understand communication TO BE and become aware of the artificial notions of language that we inject into it, without concerning ourselves with what we think the "logical" limits of human potential are.


***End of transmission


Visual aid courtesy engrish.com.

Bedbugs Bite

From my keyboard to God's ears (see my last post that is vaguely Armageddon-consciousness): people ARE picking fleas off of each other in urban areas. My friend at Yahoo pointed me to the Yahoo Buzz Log which documents the day's big movers in Search; how many people are looking for this or that. One of today's biggest movers is the term "bedbugs", up by more than 1400% after 2 Swiss women that stayed in a large Manhattan hotel, aquired bedbugs, and are now suing the Hotel Pennsylvania for it. Link

I'm glad things are working out for these 2 women; it's usually pretty hard to sue for getting bedbugs because the carriers are usually broke-ass hippies.

My question is whether Vegas has started giving odds on search terms...? If you look at the buzz log it gives detailed information on the days biggest movers, broken down by category; both Don Ho and Eddie Van Halen were the today's breakout stars in the general category. It's an interesting peek into the collective consciousness.

Big Dumb Building

Taiwan's Taipei 101, the world's largest building, was supposed to be the model of the city of the future. CC showed me this documentary about plans for a mega-version of Taipei 101 that is supposed to fix Tokyo's housing problems in the future. The plans for this thing made it look like a giant death-trap to me, but the documentary actually somehow sold me on the idea and by the end of it, it didn't sound as crazy.

Well, it kinda sounds crazy again. Experts are becoming suspicious that the 1,6667 foot-high structure in Taiwan has not only triggered earthquakes in Taiwan, but has actually re-opened an ancient earthquake fault, says geologist Cheng Horng Lin from the National Taiwan Normal University.

"Many engineers and scientists are more perturbed about the impact of other types of construction.... One of the most convincing examples is the Koyna Dam earthquake, which occurred in 1967. More than 120 people died and many more were injured when a magnitude 6.5 earthquake shook the ground around the recently constructed dam in Maharashtra state, India. It is thought that the huge weight of water changed the stresses in the ground." Link

Point being: dont' worry about where you'll live in the future... it won't be long before we're back to swinging from trees and picking fleas off one another at this rate.

Control Room

If you think you know anything about the Iraq war or American news media, you should Netflix this movie. Link