Congregation of the Constable IV

Destroy All Libraries

2011-08-16T05:46:00.004-05:00

Libraries destroyed on film:

Ghostbusters (1984)--mayhem in the stacks of the New York Public Library, including paranormal card catalog redistribution and lubrication. "Where are you from, originally?"

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)--busted marble floor and presumed smoke/fire damage from igniting the Knight's Tomb.

Kick-Ass (2010)--blood and bullet holes in a private library.

The Singularity Approaches: "The Love Bug" (1968)

2011-07-24T18:52:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Steinmetz: Well then, if everything you say about this car is true, it's already starting to happen.

Jim Douglas: What's starting to happen?

TS: Us human beings--we had a chance to make something out of this world. We blew it.

JD: Okay.

TS: Another kind of civilization is gonna take a turn.

JD: Give me an -mil wrench.

TS: I'm sitting up on top of this mountain, right?

JD: Right.

TS: I'm surrounded by these gurus and swamis and monks, right?

JD: Right.

TS: I'm lookin' at my stomach.

JD: Yeah.

TS: I'm knockin' back a little rice wine.

JD: Um-hmm.

TS: Got some contemplation goin'; I see things like they are. I coulda told you all this was comin'.

JD: What's coming?

TS: Jim, it's happening right under our noses and we can't see it. We take machines and stuff 'em with information until they're smarter than we are. Take a car. Most guys spread more love and time and money on their car in a week than they do on their wife and kids in a year. Pretty soon, you know what? The machine starts to think it is somebody. I'm not saying a mechanical thing can't be a friend. Like, when I was broke one summer, there was this giant claw machine in the Sutro Amusement Park. It would grab cameras and watches and drop them down a hole to me. And I would hock 'em and buy lunch. You follow me?

JD: Yeah. I think you were up on that mountaintop too long.

TS: Contrariwise, the traffic light down the street hates my guts. I don't know why. But in the last six weeks I haven't caught anything but a stop signal. It makes me wait six seconds longer than anybody else! I timed it!

JD: Things like that happen to lots of other people too.

TS: But the other people don't tell no other people because the other people would say, "Hey-ey-ey-ey. Tennessee, that traffic light is a lot of nuts and bolts."

JD: This little car is a lot of nuts and bolts. Everything explains itself, one way or the other.

TS: You're not listenin' to me.

JD: Don't lose your grip, old buddy. This little car didn't do one thing tonight that can't be explained in terms of short circuits, sprung doors, grabbing steering, worn knuckles, maybe some advertising gimmick. I'll fix it.

TS: I don't think you got the picture.

JD: I got a beautiful picture. This baby happens to have an extra turn of speed, which is the only thing I care about. You don't understand what happens, do you? They make cars. They make 'em exactly the same way. One or two of 'em turn out to be something special. Nobody knows why.

TS: I know why.

JD: I may be kiddin' myself, but I think I can make somethin' out of that sad little bucket of bolts.

A Fingernail Sale (Ignite DC)

2011-07-08T16:25:00.003-05:00

Photo Credit: Farnsworth House

2011-06-27T18:11:00.002-05:00

From "Architecture and Aspiration" by Stephen K. Molloy in Traffic News To-Go magazine.

Mid-Century Modern in New Haven

2011-06-20T15:14:00.003-05:00

Yale University Art Gallery (1951) by Louis Kahn

David S. Ingalls Risk (1953) by Eero Saarinen

Ezra Stiles & Morse Colleges (1961) by Eero Saarinen

Temple Street Parking Garage (1962) by Paul Rudolph

Yale Art & Architecture Building (1963) by Paul Rudolph

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (1963) by Gordon Bunshaft

Kline Biology Tower (1966) by Philip Johnson

Yale Center for British Art (1969) by Louis Kahn

Modern Architecture in Columbus (IN)

2011-06-19T13:03:00.006-05:00

From Smithsonian Magazine:

"With more than 60 notable buildings and monuments, Columbus (pop. 39,000) is the nation's sixth most architecturally significant city, behind Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C., according to the American Institute of Architects."

First Christian Church by Eliel Saarinen

Irwin Union Bank by Eero Saarinen

North Christian Church by Eero Saarinen

St. Peter's Lutheran Church by Gunnar Birkets

Fire Station No. 3 by William Burd

The Republic Offices by Myron Goldsmith

Cleo Rogers Memorial Library by I.M. Pei

Commons Center by Cesar Pelli

St. Bartholomew Roman Catholic Church by Ratio Architects

Mabel McDowell School by John Carl Warnecke

Mid-Century Modern in Cambridge

2011-06-18T18:39:00.006-05:00

Baker House (1949) by Alvar Aalto

Harvard Graduate Center (1950) by Walter Gropius

MIT Chapel (1955) by Eero Saarinen

Kresge Auditorium (1955) by Eero Saarinen

Harvard Holyoke Center (1961) by Sert, Jackson & Gourley

Harvard Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (1962) by Le Corbusier

Mid-Century Modern in Baltimore

2011-06-17T17:52:00.011-05:00

Euchtman House (1939) by Frank Lloyd Wright

Hooper House II (1956) by Marcel Breuer

Temple Oheb Shalom (1960) by Walter Gropius

One Charles Center (1963) by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Highfield House Condominium (1964) by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Santiago Calatrava's Quadracci Pavilion

2011-05-31T17:59:00.004-05:00

Establishing shots of Milwaukee in the opening of the movie Bridesmaids feature Santiago Calatrava's building (Quadracci Pavilion) for the Milwaukee Art Museum:

The building is kinetic, with "wings" that open and close at set times of day, making the building appear to be taking flight over Lake Michigan:

Here is what it looks like closed:

The interior of the building can be seen in Pfizer's ads for Lipitor, starring Robert Jarvik.

As I saw it in the opening of Bridesmaids, I realized that this building has become Milwaukee's signature piece of architecture--Milwaukee's answer to the Empire State Building or Golden Gate Bridge--and I wonder how that entered into the discussions of those who commissioned the building.

Although overshadowed by the 2001 Calatrava showpiece, the bulk of the museum's collections are housed in the connected 1957 Eero Saarinen building.

Slow News Day: A History in One Act

2011-05-26T17:12:00.005-05:00

Lots of things happened on April 11, 1954. They must have. But the claim by a University of Cambridge-trained computer scientist that his supposedly super computer program has determined that the second Sunday in April 1954 was the most boring day since the dawn of the 20th Century is getting some attention on the Web.

Two information specialists sit at adjacent computers.

IS1: “What’s today’s date?”

IS2: “The 18th.”

IS1: “The 18th of November, 2010. Today will be significant.”

IS2: “Why?”

IS1: “We’re going to query the database.”

IS2: “We query it every day--what’s special about today?”

IS1: “We’re going to ask it to identify the least significant day in history.”

IS2: “How's that?”

IS1: “Every event in the database is associated with a particular date. So we just list the dates by the number of events associated with it, then find the one with the lowest number."

IS2: "Okay, here we go." IS2 types the query and hits Enter. Both ISs look at the result.

IS1: "There it is. Only three events occurred on April 11, 1954--the least significant day in history."

IS2: "Well ... 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st. Our data set starts with 1900."

IS1: "Okay--the least significant day in the last 110 years."

IS2: "I don't know that I'd measure significance with events, necessarily--and we're only looking at events. And for that matter, the number of events doesn't necessarily correlate with significance. You could have one significant event on one day and three insignificant events on another day."

IS1: "We prejudged the significance of events when we entered them into the database. My birthday isn't in there."

IS2: "Mine is."

IS1: "It is?"

IS2: "I had to do something to entertain myself while I was doing the data entry. My dog's birthday is in there, too. And the day the music died."

IS1: "So you pissed in the pool before we went for a swim?"

IS2: "I guess you could say that. But then, I still don't think you can base significance on events. History--and news--doesn't just happen instantaneously. It unfolds."

IS1: "The action doesn't unfold neatly along the lines laid out by an arbitrary system of time and dates?"

IS2: "Exactly! I remember when I was a kid and I spent a lot of time with my coloring books, coloring careful inside the lines. Then one day--I realized that people don't have lines. Nothing in the real world does. I even asked my mother what kept colors from spilling into each other if there were no lines."

IS1: "What did she say?"

IS2: "I think she changed the subject."

IS1: "So what do we have for April 11, 1954?"

IS2: "Drum roll, please!"

IS1: "Bbbbdbddddddddddddddd ....."

IS2: "On April 11, 1954, Abdullah Atalar was born."

IS1: "Who?"

IS2: "Abdullah Atalar. He's a Turkish academic of some note."

IS1: "Very little note."

IS2: "It says here that he's the Rector of Bilkent University."

IS1: "Where's that?"

IS2: "Turkey, I assume."

IS1: "And event number 2?"

IS2: "Jack Shufflebotham died."

IS1: "Wow. That met the threshold for significance?"

IS2: "He's an English football player."

IS1: "Was ..."

IS2: "Right. Well, virtually he still exists."

IS1: "Did he at least die playing football?"

IS2: "His career ended four decades earlier."

IS1: "Well, so far April 11, 1954 is still getting my vote for least significant day ..."

IS2: "There was also a general election in Belgium"

IS1: "Possibly not even of interest to Belgians. So we have a Turkish academic ..."

IS2: "Who hadn't done anything yet. As of April 11, 1954, he was of no significance. Not even a rector. Where does that fit into the scale of infamy? Who ranks higher, nearly significant or the not yet significant?"

IS1: "An English footballer ..."

IS2: "Who did nothing that day other than ... Urkkk..." IS2 slumps over in his chair.

IS1: "And a Belgian election."

IS2 straightens up. IS2: "Not even that is an outlier--Achille van Acker had been prime minister in three previous cabinets."

IS1: "I can imagine the nightly news--'Obscure Turkish academic born--film at 11.'"

IS2: "Hey! Schrodinger's Cat!"

IS1: "Whose cat?"

IS2: "Erwin Schrodinger. He proposed a thought experiment. A cat is in a box with a vial of poison and a Geiger counter with a radiation source. The Geiger counter is rigged so that when the radiation source decays, a hamnmer is tripped, and that breaks the bottle of poison, killing the cat. After one half life of the radioactive material, there's a 50 percent chance that the device has tripped, killing the cat, and a 50 percent chance that it hasn't."

IS1: "And he did this on April 11, 1954?"

IS2: "No, he never actually did this. The point was that you wouldn't know without opening the box whether the cat was alive or dead. So until you open that box and see, the cat is simultaneously both alive and dead--a quantum state."

IS1: "So he thought of this on April 11, 1954?"

IS2: "No! The point is that by observing the cat, he forced it out of this simultaneous state and into either an alive state or a dead state. Observation affected the state of the cat. Or at least that's one interpretation."

IS1: "I'm still not following."

IS2: "You said that November 18, 2010, will be significant. And it is. Because before today, April 11, 1954, was the least significant day in the 20th century ..."

IS1: "And the beginning of the 21st ..."

IS2: "Right, and now it's not!"

IS1: "It's not?"

IS2: "No, because we've observed it--or identified it--as the least eventful day, now it has significance within the context of the time period we measured."

IS1: "You're right, even if it was the least significant day before we measured it, now, because we have, it's not."

IS2: "We changed history!"

IS1: "We invented a time machine!"

The ISs give each other high fives as the curtain falls.

Spear of Longinus Adapted

2011-05-13T18:10:00.004-05:00

First Posted 18 September 2005:

An overwhelming percentage of crucifixion paintings depict the spear wound on Christ's right side; however, in the Gospel of John, the only one who mentions the occurrence of this wound, there is no indication of which side was speared. Essays by modern cardiologists support the right-side wound--however, the early Christian artists, though no doubt well-informed of the intracacies of external anatomy, would have been relatively ignorant about internal anatomy, and, more specifically, the field of cardiology. In addition, depictions of the crucifixion were verboten for several hundred years after the event itself. Therefore, without documentation, how would artists have known with any certainty whether the wound was on the left or right side? Is instead the placement of the wound artistic tradition?

Blame it on the French:
“The Byzantine or Eastern tradition was for the wound to be placed on our Lord’s right side, but a custom arose in the West, probably in South Gaul, of placing the wound on the left. This custom passed into Merovingian art and thence to Ireland and Wales.” -J. Eric Hunt, English and Welsh Crucifixes 670-1550

Statistical Outlier:
“John Valentine Haidt followed the European Renaissance school except for a few details, notable the pierced side of Christ. The Renaissance painters expressed the piercing on the right side of the body while Haidt repeatedly painted the piercing on the left.” -Robert Henkes, The Crucifixion in American Art

Leftist Conspiracy:
“... Longinus casts his lance into Christ’s left side—rather than the right, which we have come to expect. This feature, found on many early Irish crucifixion scenes, may stem from the account in the apocryphal Passion of Longinus telling how he split Christ’s heart in twain, which he could have done only if he had pierced Christ’s left side.” -Peter Harbison, The Crucifixion in Irish Art

Adapted 10 March 2011:

Louis Kahn Houses in Greater Philadelphia, PA

2011-05-01T17:43:00.007-05:00

Oser House (1939)

Genel House (1951)

Esherick House (1959)

Fisher House (1960)

100 11th Avenue, New York, NY (Jean Nouvel, 2009)

2011-04-30T18:34:00.006-05:00

Approaching 100 11th Avenue from the south, the softly angled front showing two sides accentuates the width of the facade, making the building appear somewhat squat:

Continuing past, a dramatically sharp angle appears, lifting the building and making it appear that there is no building behind the facade:

Finally, looking back from the north, the building behind the facade appears:

Paul Goldberger on 100 11th Avenue in The New Yorker, 23 November 2009.

The Tortoise and the Hare Meet Zeno of Elea

2011-04-30T18:31:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time, there was a tortoise and a hare.

The tortoise and the hare were neighbors, and as neighbors can be, they were competitive. In the winter, it was who had the most Christmas lights, the most impressive (and expensive) holiday display. In the summer, it was lawn mowers--speed, power, turning radius, cutting width. One time, the hare even challenged the tortoise to a race, but lost after he stopped to take a nap for so long that the tortoise passed him to the finish line.

One summer, the tortoise had just bought a new lawn mower, and he showed it off to the hare: "And the best thing about this mower is that it never needs to rest--it just keeps going until I reach the end of my lawn."

The hare had enough. He challenged the tortoise to another race. "This time," the hare said to himself, "I'm not going to make the same mistake--no naps for me. I'll beat that tortoise, and he'll never be able to hold that over me again."

The next day, the tortoise and the hare met at the end of their driveways. "Ready, set, GO!" The hare took off sprinting down the street. The tortoise put one foot in front of the other.

Three quarters of the way to the finish lane, the hare began to get winded. He slowed to a jog and looked behind him. There was no sign of the tortoise. Across the street, the hare spotted a Starbuck's coffee shop. "Perfect," he thought, "I can wait there, check my email, and when I see the tortoise pass by, I can sprint past him to the finish line. Best of all, I can drink coffee so I won't fall asleep again!"

The hare went in, order a tall latte, and checked his email. He finished the latte, and there was no sign of the tortoise. The manager approached and told him "Sir, if you've finished your beverage and you're not going to order anything else, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

So the hare order another latte, this time a grande. He checked Twitter and Perez Hilton. He finished the grande, and there was no sign of the tortoise. The manager approached and told him "Sir, if you've finished your beverage and you're not going to order anything else, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

The hare was exasperated at this point, and the caffeine was beginning to make him jittery. "Fine! Bring me the venti!" The venti arrived and the hare took a sip.

"Hi." This from the man next to him, who had been typing on a laptop and wearing a toga.

"Hi," said the hare back.

"My name is Zeno of Elea."

"Hi," said the hare again.

"I see you're having trouble with the manager."

"Look, man, it's just coffee," said the hare with shaking paw.

"Do you want to know a secret?"

"No."

Zeno returned to typing. The hare watched for the tortoise and slurped at his venti. He then realized that the entire time he had been at Starbuck's, drinking first a tall, then a grande, then a venti, this guy had only a short latte, from which he took careful, measured, sips.

"Okay," said the hare. "What's your secret?"

"First," said Zeno, "I drink half my coffee."

"Uh-huh."

"Then, I drink half of what's left."

"Okay."

"Then, I drink half of what's left from that."

"That's it?"

"That's it. I never finish the coffee, I just drink half of what's left. The manager leaves me alone."

"Huh." The hare took a practice sip, half of what was left.

"Thanks," said the hare. He then turned to the manager and held his venti aloft. "Cheers!"

For the next hour, the hare followed Zeno's prescription, drinking half of half, then half of half of half, then half of half of half of half, and so on. The manager left him alone.

Finally, the tortoise appeared, crawling slowly past on the opposite side of the street. The hare's haunches twitched, ready to pounce past him and to the finish.

The hare let the tortoise pass by before he burst out of Starbuck's, propelled by a tall, grande, and some fraction of venti. He quickly caught up to where the tortoise had been when he first sprung from the coffee shop, but at that point, the tortoise had slowly progressed a little further. The hare caught up to that point, and the tortoise had gone just a little further. Again and again the hare caught up to where the tortoise had just been, only to find the tortoise just ahead of him. He was unable to pass the tortoise to win the race.

"TORTOISE!" he shouted, shaking his paw at the sky.

The next day, the hare bought a new lawn mower.

Two Kings

2010-10-02T11:35:00.002-05:00

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind

It's close to midnight and something evil's lurking in the dark

and another

Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart

his mother called him "WILD THING!"

You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it

and Max said "I'LL EAT YOU UP!"

You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes

so he was sent to bed without eating anything

You're paralyzed!

That very night in Max's room a forest grew
and grew
and grew until the ceiling hung with vines
and the walls became the world all around

'Cause this is thriller, thriller night
And no one's gonna save you from the beast about strike
You know it's thriller, thriller night
You're fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller tonight

and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max

You hear the door slam and realize there's nowhere left to run

and he sailed off through night and day

You feel the cold hand and wonder if you'll ever see the sun

and in and out of weeks

You close your eyes and hope that this is just imagination!

and almost over a year

But all the while you hear the creature creeping up behind

to where the wild things are.

You're out of time!

'Cause this is thriller, thriller night
There ain't no second chance against the thing with forty eyes, boy
Thriller, thriller night
You're fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller tonight

And when he came to the place where the wild things are

Night creatures calling, the dead start to walk in their masquerade

they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth

There's no escaping the jaws of the alien this time

and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws

(They're open wide)
This is the end of your life.

till Max said "BE STILL!"

They're out to get you, there's demons closing in on every side

and tamed them with the magic trick

They will possess you unless you change that number on your dial

of staring into all of their yellow eyes without blinking once

Now is the time for you and I to cuddle close together, yeah

and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all

All through the night I'll save you from the terror on the screen

and made him king of all wild things.

I'll make you see!

"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"

This is thriller, thriller night
'Cause I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try
Thriller, thriller night
So let me hold you tight and share a
Killer, diller, chiller, thriller here tonight

'Cause this is thriller, thriller night
Boy, I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try
Thriller, thriller night
So let me hold you tight and share a killer, thriller, ow!

"Now stop!" Max said and sent the wild things off to bed
without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely
and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Darkness falls across the land

Then all around from far away across the world

The midnight hour is close at hand

he smelled good things to eat

Creatures crawl in search of blood

so he gave up being king of where the wild things are

To terrorize y'alls neighborhood

But the wild things cried, "Oh please don't go-
we'll eat you up-we love you so!"
And Max said "No!"

The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth

The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years

and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws

And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom

but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye

and sailed back over a year

and in and out of weeks

and through a day

And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver

and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him

For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the thriller

and it was still pop.

As Heard: "Liar, Liar" by the Castaways

2010-01-22T08:50:00.005-05:00

As heard [Actual lyrics]

Chorus:
My, my Anton pie [Liar, liar, pants on fire]
Your nose is longer than a colorful lie [Your nose is longer than a telephone wire]

Verse 1:
Ask B. Beaver why I'm sad [Ask me, baby, why I'm sad]
You've been out all night I know you've been had [You been out all night, know you been bad]
Don't tell me different I know it's a lie [Don't tell me different, know it's a lie]
Come to me, honey--see how I cry [Come kill me, honey, see how I cry]

Verse 2:
Why must you hurt me, do what you do [Why must you hurt me, do what you do]
Listen here, girl--can't you see I love you [Listen here, girl, can't you see I love you]
Make a little effort, try to be true [Make a little effort, try to be true]
I'll be happy, not so blue [I'll be happy, not so blue]

Chorus:

My, my Anton pie [Liar, liar, pants on fire]
Your nose is longer than a colorful lie [Your nose is longer than a telephone wire]

Verse 3:

You keep on telling me those lies [If you keep on tellin' me those lies]

Still going out with other guys [Still goin' out with other guys]

There'll come a day when I'll be gone [There'll come a day I'll be gone]

Take my advice--it won't be long [Take my advice, won't be long]

Verse 4:

When that day comes, it won't be bad [When that day comes, won't be mad]

Be rid of you but I'll still be sad [Be free of you, but I'll still be sad]

Despite all your cheatin', I still love you so [In spite of your cheatin', still love you so]

I'll be unhappy I let you go [I'll be unhappy if I let you go]

Chorus:

My, my Anton pie [Liar, liar, pants on fire]
Your nose is longer than a colorful lie [Your nose is longer than a telephone wire]

Observations:

It's odd that, knowing the name of the song, and understanding the content of the lyrics, I still kept hearing the first line as My, my Anton pie.
I filled in dropped words to make the lyrics grammatically whole.

A Cilantro Family Tree

2010-01-17T13:45:00.003-05:00

"This," the park ranger said, pointing out pairs of small black berries on a bush next to the trail, "is the twin-berry. It is edible."

"Ooooh! Edible berries!" Several of us plucked off a set or two and tried them. We regretted it.

"They are edible," the ranger continued. "But you'll notice I didn't say they tasted good."

There are few foods I've encountered in day-to-day cooking that I truly dislike—mustard, water chestnuts (the texture), cilantro, and an unidentified spice that a Nepalese restaurant I used to get takeout from started putting on their food.

The first time I remember encountering cilantro was in 2000. I bought a burrito in San Francisco, bit into it—and spit it out. I thought something had gone bad. But what were these green flakes? I began to find them more and more—often they were not identified on the menu. At one restaurant, they made me a delicious meal, and then, as an afterthought, dropped a handful of cilantro on the top, rendering the meal unpalatable to my taste.

My wife, however, loves cilantro. Why does it have such an overpoweringly repugnant taste to me, but a flavorful taste to her? Genetics. "Wysocki theorizes that some people have a specific anosmia—a nasal blind spot, if you will—that makes them insensitive to cilantro's pleasing, aromatic notes. All they get is a soapy-smelling component that's normally masked by the good stuff. ... Lots of people love the herb. Just as many, it seems, hate it. There appears to be no middle ground, and the reason for that just might come down to genetics. Scientists have yet to isolate the cilantro-hating gene, but a Philadelphia researcher who put twins up to sniffing the herb is hot on the trail."

(There is a middle ground—I've spoken to people who like cilantro, but don't love it—and people who have eaten it indifferently.)

My mother and sister both hate cilantro. My father doesn't know what it is. (He seldom eats out, and won't eat Mexican food for fear of intestinal distress.) Our son is too young to register an opinion on cilantro, but I'm eager to find out how my cilantro-hating genes and he cilantro-loving genes will manifest themselves in our offspring. I hope to construct a cilantro family tree to determine how these genes have been inherited.

Flavor, though, can be mutable. Sour can become sweet with the proper application of glycoprotein molecules.

Where can you get glycoproteins? From synsepalum dulcificum, also known as the miracle fruit, a native plant of West Africa. "The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit."

Miracle fruit, freeze-dried miracle fruit, miracle fruit seeds, and miracle fruit tablets, can all be purchased over the Internet. I recently bought some tablets made in a laboratory in Taiwan. The directions instructed me to let the tablet dissolve on my tongue, ensuring the glycoproteins coated my tastebuds. I sucked on the tablet like a lozenge and took a short of rice vinegar with hot sauce. The front of my tongue was dulled to the shock of this mixture—but the back and my throat were insufficiently glycoproteined. The first bite of a lemon tasted like lemonade—but subsequent bites reverted to pure sour lemon. It had the same effect with beer. The glycoproteins had no effect on the cilantro flavor, or on the taste of a dill pickle.

Test Subject V (TSV) let the tablet sit in the middle of her tongue until dissolved. She tried a pickle and a lemon slice, noting the overwhelming oddness of the change in taste. I concocted a mixture of rice vinegar, hot sauce, and lemon juice. She took a sip. It was tolerable, lacking the normal bite of the ingredients. She noted that she normally wouldn't go near the hot sauce. Her husband came in the room—a perfect control subject. She took a sip, and then offered him a sip. The flavor did not please him. He looked like he'd just eaten a twin-berry.

Guess Who Thinks She's Pregnant?

2010-01-17T12:49:00.006-05:00

Guess who thinks she's pregnant?

Nope, not her.

Nope, not her, either.

Me? Nope.

It's my sister's cat. Last week, my sister found lumps on her cat's abdomen. Concerned, she took her to the vet, who found that her mammary glands were swollen, consistent with pregnancy. Except that the cat was spayed years ago.

Now there are two possibilities at this point--the spay didn't take, which does happen, or this is a case of feline pseudopregnancy. Human pseudopregnancy happens less often in real life than it does on soap operas, but it does occur, and can even continue full-term into birth. (This is where imaginary friends come from.)

In canines, pseudopregnancy is not uncommon, but in felines it is infrequent. When it does occur, it is usually the result of a neutered male mounting the female. The female, without understanding the possibility that the male's reproductive organs are nonfunctional, believes that it must be pregnant.

"Breeders sometimes use 'Teaser Toms' to stimulate ovulation and end the estrus cycle in queens which are not yet ready for breeding. Teaser Toms are neutered by vasectomy, leaving the barbs on the penis to stimulate ovulation." -Franny Syufy, The Mating Game: Mating and Conception in Cats

In this case, however, my sister's cat has not been in contact with even a neutered male cat for more than a year (and has not had "relations" with any cat or other animal). The vet surmised the cat could be picking up on pheromones from a pregnant female. However, of the four resident human females, two are post-menopausal, and the other two have self-tested to confirm that they are not pregnant. Two frequent visitors to the house, an adult and an infant, have been in contact with a pregnant female--so I suppose it's possible that they are bringing pregnancy pheromones with them on their visits.

Gapplesoft 2009.12.05

2009-12-03T18:43:00.045-05:00

Google

Google DNS - Google is coming for you. Not content with its ability to improve the user's web experience with web applications, Big G has lately been targeting every element between you and the web--from free wifi and Chrome OS and the Go language to its own public Domain Name Service. Of course, this isn't just altruism on Google's part--these improvements will ultimately make users feel more comfortable with a cloud-computing future--using Google's ad-supported web applications. Of course it's ultimately money that drives innovation, but it's still innovation, and I benefit without paying a price.

You Can't Handle the Google! - If you break it, then you buy it--then, if you fix it, do you own it? Is Google trying to "own" the web in some sense? I don't mean this as a conspiracy theory--I'm not paranoid that Google is compiling my blog posts, email, and reading habits for some nefarious undiscovered plan ("aka Google is a fascist socialist Kenyan Muslim"). But they could very well brand it, like they did with search (ever Google a search term?). Another part of their campaign to improve the web is aimed at the website developers themselves--curiously, though, it only seems to be available for Firefox, not for Chrome. Also, why aren't Webmaster Tools and Analytics integrated?

Google v. FBI - With all the talk about the Big G's quickly growing domain of power and the imagined privacy concerns, now Google has a chance to prove it isn't a threat to the average consumer, even the creepy ones that make peephole videos.

Google Calls Murdoch's Bluff - So Rupert Murdoch thinks Google News is bad for Wall Street Journal (and presumably his other holdings)? Then he can take his urls and go home. But he should expect to get 25% less traffic--traffic that is currently funneled from Google. I understand Murdoch not liking someone else making a dime off his content, but Google News isn't at all degraded if he pulls his sites, and the idea that people aren't going to WSJ's site because the WSJ headlines on Google News say it all is simply ridiculous. If he really wants to use this situation to his best advantage, he should start tweaking his headlines to draw in more readers from Google. Instead of "University Plans Climate Data Probe," how about "Data Probe University Plans Climate"?

Google Search HCI Game, Set, Match - A couple of years ago, I took a class in human-computer interaction, focusing on improving user interfaces by grouping features logically, making buttons large enough to easily click, etc. One trick they didn't teach us was hiding all the nonessential features until the user does an onmouseover on the page. It's funny how a company that makes its revenue from ad sales so adamantly refuses to clutter its main page with anything other than what it still apparently views as its core business.

Google Gives Up Gears Ghost - I've mostly used Gears to synch my Google Docs for use on the road--but the synchronization has always been kind of spotty. It's a rare thing for Google to give up, and it's kind of sad. But they haven't been able to get Gears to play nice with Apple's latest OS, and now they're claiming that it doesn't matter because HTML5 will obviate its need. This is a good thing, though--Google is saying that a plug-in isn't necessary thanks to new web standards. That's relatively forward-looking, especially next to Microsoft's Silverlight madness.

"Lightweight" Features for YouTube - How many years has it been since Google bought YouTube? Yet their branding and light touch with features is still absent. Then comes this news about a streamlined "Feather" option for YouTube. Okay, it's only in beta, but it isn't explained very well, and doesn't work for all videos (which means those videos just won't work unless you opt back out of the beta before you try to play them). This is definitely a botched released, and it doesn't have the Google touch.

From the Department of - Holy crap. Nothing particularly useful, but definitely the future of the Web.

Merry Googlemas - Google has an offer to send one free actual holiday card with a cleverly disguised Google advertisement on it. Uh ... what for? And one? What's the point?

constable /k'ʌnstəbəl, k'ɒn-/ - Google now has its own dictionary, but why isn't it integrated with their search engine. And who wrote it? And at what point in its development did this occur?

Speaking of integration into the main search engine, Google has rolled translation into the engine, though you have to hunt down through the search options to find it. One of the acknowledged problems in the world of search is the fact that the information you're seeking may be in another language. Although direct translation is only a partial solution, it is a step forward.

And then there's this from the New York Times.

And on and on and on ...

Apple

More Apple Tablet Rumors? - I can't wait to get my greasy fingers all over the screen. I could probably even get my entire handprints on it.

Apple Streams - Unlike Google's relentless march of upgrades, acquisitions, and roll-outs, Apple moves slowly and deliberately, but with careful consideration. By partnering with a streaming service, Apple could add streaming revenue, allow users to access their libraries from any Internet-connected device, and add more avenues for people to buy music, and to play their music on? An iPod, of course.

A Million Monkeys on a Million Laptops Write a Million iPhone Apps - Articles abound this week about how the iPhone App store is getting a bit unwieldy. I came to the same conclusion more than a year ago, when two apps that made fart sounds went to court over who had the rights to that kind of application.

Microsoft

Bing Maps Goes Google - Remember that time Microsoft rolled out hybrid satellite views with street labels, and like an hour later, Google released their own version, like it was so easy it only took them minutes? Years later, Microsoft is finally making another effort to compete with Bing Maps, with 3D maps and a "bird's eye" view (angled aerial photo maps). However, the 3D maps requires the installation of an additional tool, which makes it a competitor not with Google online maps, but Google Earth. And no matter how "cool" these new features look, how useful is either of them? Especially stacked against Google's Street View, something Bing Maps still doesn't have, integration with Panoramio, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. Besides, it's unlikely that Bing will make much headway against Google Maps API. Oh, and some of the features are browser-dependent.

Microsoft Hearts Yahoo - It still seems so silly to me that anyone would actually lobby to join forces with Yahoo! It's very sad. I heard someone just bought Friendster, too.

Microsoft v. Pirates - Pirates were powerful and feared in the 18th century. So was Microsoft.

Snoring

2009-11-25T18:07:00.003-05:00

Both my parents were snorers. On a trip to Italy, sharing a room with my mother for economy, I hardly slept. I tried sandwiching my ears between pillows, filling them with toilet paper, tying shirts around my head, and even closing myself into the bathroom, curling up between the sink and toilet on the cold tile floor. Finally, exhausted at four in the morning, I left, walked a couple of blocks, and waited for sunrise at the Pantheon.

II.

My college roommate is snoring.

"Dave!"

Still snoring.

"Dave!"

Still snoring.

"Dave! Wake up!"

No answer. I stand up and walk over to his bed.

"Dave," I say, nudging his arm.

Still snoring. But why? His air passage must be blocked. Why? Because his head is tilted down toward his chest. So now what? Fix it.

Recalling CPR lessons from years past, leaning over him, I place my left hand on his forehead and my index and middle fingers from my right hand under his chin, and begin to gently tilt his head back.

At that moment, he wakes up.

III.

I'm snoring now. Is it the weight gain, the longer eyebrow hair, or something else to do with the aging process? I tried wearing an adhesive strip on my nose, opening the passages, but that didn't work. Is my pillow too soft, or my belly?

Claes Oldenburg Miniature--Only $39.99!

2009-11-24T18:25:00.002-05:00

Gapplesoft 2009.11.28

2009-11-23T18:16:00.012-05:00

Google

Google Buys Teracent - I'm including the link to the WSJ article on this that I found via Google News--I wouldn't otherwise have even gone to the WSJ site, and even this visit was cut short by the paywall. This does show that with all the recent advancements, Big G hasn't forgotten where its money comes from. (+1)

Wait--I Thought That Stuff Had Been Looted? - While looking at photos ain't the same, it's the best most of us will ever be able to do. (+1)

Google's Sorry, Very Sorry - That's an embarrassing spot to be in, but kudos for standing by the integrity of the search algorithm. Sometimes, democracy can be very messy. (+1 for the integrity)

Google Partners with TiVo - I have to be honest--I don't even understand what this is, but it sounds important. (+?)

Apple

Nosmo King - Maybe the smoke interferes with the FM transmitter, 'cause mine ain't working yet. (+0)

Magic Mouse Drivers for Windows - Thanks! Now how about some drivers for Chrome OS? (+1)

"There's an Ad for That" - Wow, it looks like Verizon made AT&T feel like Apple made Microsoft feel. I bet we could get ubiquitous wireless Internet for the same or less cost than these commercials. WWGD? (-1)

Don't Forget the Bubblewrap - I once met this woman at a conference who bragged about her degree in logistics. I didn't understand what that was at the time, but her job was walking the microphone around to audience members with questions--so I figured that's what it was about. I didn't understand why she needed a degree for that. (-1)

Apple Unveils 'Live Music'--Oops, Missed It - Okay, so it's music that was once live, and is either more vibrant than overproduced studio music or completely awful because the 'artists' have no talent. At least now we can find out before springing for concert tix. I'd like to think the bands will win, too, for monetizing something they were already producing, but it's likely some corporation actually gets the money from this sort of gig. (+1)

Microsoft

WSJ to Block Google, Sell to Bing? - I'm not mad at WSJ or Microsoft for this move--more appalled by their stupidity. I'm half-inclined to give them a point because I feel sorry for them, but I can't bring myself to award stupidity. (-1)

Windows 8 in 2012 - The thing that bothers me most about Microsoft's strategy is their tendency to announce things well before they have anything to show for it. Why would they announce Windows 8 when they've just released Windows 7? (-1)

This week's score: Google (+3), Apple (+0), Microsoft (-2)

Cumulative score: Google (+9), Apple (+1), Microsoft (-5)

Elsewhere

Has Firefox jumped the shark? Just kidding, really--after all Google Chrome is fresh out of the box and already has a Mariah Carey theme.

The Fantastic Mister _____

2009-11-21T12:58:00.002-05:00

Step 1: Obtain doll clothes of a size appropriate for groundhogs, foxes, squirrels, etc.

Step 2: Locate fresh roadkill, the more intact the better.

Step 3: Dress the roadkill in doll clothes.

Step 4: Leave the dressed roadkill where it is likely to get hit again.

Step 5: Wait and watch for amazement as passersby spot what looks like an animal that had been well-dressed when it got hit by a car.

Gapplesoft 2009.11.21

2009-11-18T20:20:00.017-05:00

How do news events affect a single user's opinion of tech company reputations?

Google
Google Phone - Last week I mentioned a mythical phone with hardware design by Apple and software by Google. This week I see a rumor of a phone with both by Google. Google hardware? It just doesn't fit their business model, or didn't--but with the announcement that Chrome OS would be sold on hardware rather than made available as a downloadable OS, I'm starting to suspect Big G of mission creep. (-1 for losing phocus)

I'm Getting Dizzy - Even my local public library has this kind of web search for terms, though I've never found it terribly helpful. I feel the same way here--though this is a very clean interface, it's hard to tell how the visual version of the Wonder Wheel connects the images, so the journey is a bit random. (+1 for interface, -1 for lack of functional use)

Will Chrome Go Platinum? - I was a bit surprised by the contentiousness of this week's Chrome OS developer code release. Some pundits praised the concept, others mocked it. I admit to falling on the praise side--long frustrated by the interference of my OS on the things I want to do, I welcome an OS designed specifically to meet my 90% need. Some decried the inability to run local applications like Photoshop, or to edit video--but when I need to do those things, I'll start up my PC and go use my Chrome netbook until the PC finishes booting. (+1 for energy efficiency, +1 for 7-second startup, +1 for being able to login to "your computer" from any other Chrome computer, -1 for only installing it on new machines)

One note to the above item: It does sound a bit like Google is developing the Zonbu, whom I note is no longer selling their silent, energy efficient computers and concentrating instead on their Linux-based web OS. I used the Zonbu for a year or two at a previous residence and found it quite useful as an always-on web terminal and liked especially that it was maintained through the Zonbu service, so it required no more user-side maintenance than an occasional restart.

[man cheers] - Google also announced this week that it has begun adding automatic captions to YouTube videos, starting with the education channels. As a hard of hearer, a frequent DVD captioner, I applaud this move. Although I found where to activate the captioning, I was unable to find a video that actually had captioning, even in the education channels. (+1 for capability, -1 for launching before widely available--what are you, Microsoft?)

Apple
Apple v. Pystar - Apple crushes Pystar's Mac clones to maintain its premium pricing margin. This from the man who didn't want to sell songs for more than 99 cents. I'm beginning to understand how someone could be a communist and a fascist at the same time, but it ain't Barack Obama. (-1 for Darth Vader-like behavior)

Apple Tablet - I admit it--I have greasy fingers. That's okay on the small-scale of my iPod Touch, but on a tablet computer? Still, I think it widespread use of tablets would be a terrific advance, and Apple is one who could design it well. So is it ever coming? Will Google end up developing it before Apple? I think Apple would rather wait until it has a great product rather than risk releasing a dud. (C'mon, already! But +1 for exercising restraint)

Microsoft
Wrap It Up In Ribbons; Drop It in the Trash - "Once you familiarize yourself with ribbons you will find it hard to go back. The ribbon interface is more intuitive and helps you operate more efficiently." Fuck that. I've been using that goddamn ribbon for two years and I hate its fucking guts. It sounded like a great idea, but somehow the next thing I need is always on a different ribbon, and the groupings seem arbitrary. If for the ribbons alone, I will never buy another version of Office again unless it's a re-release of 2003. (-1 for the fucking ribbons, you sons-of-bitches!)

Go Forward to the Past with IE9 - Seriously, this is embarrassing. You'll keep the lion's share of the market because most people are too lazy to download another browser, and I'll always be resigned to your everlasting shittiness at the office. (-1 for mooooooving soooooooo slooooooowly)

Bing Market Share Gains - It'll be a hard sell to switch me from Google, but I'm a big believer in market competition improving things for all--so for that I'm glad Microsoft is finally putting some serious effort into its search engine. (+1 for keeping Big G honest)

Silverlight 4 - Somehow I missed Silverlight until Netflix switched to it for web streaming. God knows Flash needs a little competition. (+1 for taking on Flash)

This week's score: Google (+1), Apple (0), Microsoft (0)

Cumulative score: Google (+6), Apple (+1), Microsoft (-3)

Gapplesoft 2009.11.14

2009-11-14T09:16:00.006-05:00

How do news events affect a single user's opinion of tech company reputations?

Google

Google v. Authors - Big G has shown that it's prepared to go the distance on this one. What it comes down to is this: what provides the value in Google's service--the content itself or the ability to find specific content. This clearly benefits both parties, so the profits should be shared. I can see Google throwing its mighty might around a bit in this battle. And I'm looking the other way because I want the service to work out. I'll still buy books, but only if I can ensure they contain what I want. (+1 for persistence, -1 for bullying)

SPDY Protocol, Go Language - Google rolls out a new programming language and a new web protocol? In Chrome's wake, Google is finding more and better ways to improve the web experience. Sure, it's ultimately self-serving--these improvements encourage users to move closer to the cloud-based future where Google has an advantage. But that's not a bad thing when we share the vision. (+1 for Go, +1 for SPDY)

Chrome OS - I'm moving to the cloud. I'm using fewer and fewer desktop applications, and I declare that I'm ready for a streamlined operating system that provides the legs (and nothing more) for the browser to stand on. I'm sick of the bloat. I'm freshly converted from Firefox to Chrome browser, and my Netbook is ready to boot Chrome. (+1)

Google v. Swiss Streets - I know there's a net neutrality joke in here somewhere. While I feel for people who have been immortalized picking their noses, scratching their butts, etc., there comes a point where petty privacy concerns ("someone could see what my garden looks like!") could hobble the utility of a service like this. Google's plate is as full as Obama's, but the Big G ain't caving. (+1)

Google Buys Gizmo5 - "We aren't subject to regulation because we don't provide the telecommunications backbone, or at least we didn't when we began this sentence, but we do now, so never mind." This acquisition makes Big G's legal caseload deeper and murkier, but widens the arsenal and positions Google Voice to take out Skype. But then again, I'm no phreak. (+0)

Google v. Murdoch - Howlin' Mad Rupert Murdoch threatens to de-index his news holdings from Google News. The linked article makes a point that Bing could pay to index News Corp's holdings, which would supposedly give Microsoft some kind of edge. Seriously? Big G should call Murdoch's bluff. Google's goal is to index all the world's information, not all the world's conspiracy-laden opinion masquerading as news. (+1)

Apple

Apple #1 Handset Vendor - Apple moves past Nokia in handset sales. I actually own a Nokia, but then again, I hate phones. Still, congrats to Apple. It will be interesting to see how Google's tactic of fielding the software alone plays out vs. Apple's complete product. I predict it will be hard for Apple to maintain their edge with the software design, but will always be a step ahead in hardware design. Coming never: an Android iPhone? (+1 for now)

AT&T v. Verizon - Verizon makes a fair comparison; AT&T cries foul. Apple may have chosen its partner poorly. "Can you hear me now?" (-1)

Is Apple the New Starbuck's? - Apple plans to open dozens more Apple stores. These stores are crowded for a reason--they're well-staffed, you get your receipt emailed to you--what's not to like? Apple isn't just selling products, they're selling a lifestyle, and having their own stores fits well into their business plan. (Microsoft stores, on the other hand, are a ridiculously backward idea.) (+1)

Microsoft

Microsoft v. Xbox Pirates - "If you can't open it, you don't own it." -Make Zine Owner's Manifesto. (-1)

Open, Now Closed - Microsoft incorporates open source code into a proprietary code, gets caught, cops to the mistake. But what does this say about their development process that this happened in the first place? (-1)

Microsoft: Like Apple, But Not - Microsoft employee claims that the company learned from their chief competitor when designing Windows 7. Yup, that's how it's supposed to work--if someone is doing something better, you incorporate that into your product to reduce their advantage. Then Microsoft denies the report. Uh, okay ... Yet more questions about their development process. (-1)

Bing + Wolfram - Microsoft clearly scooped Google on this one. Then again, I'm not sure it's working correctly. One of the examples of the article about the kinds of results Wolfram Alpha produces is for "france gdp". Here's what Wolfram Alpha by itself produces. And Bing. And Google. Advantage Google, which has a graph, just like Wolfram Alpha, plus more recent data. It's not clear how Bing has incorporated Wolfram Alpha data. Or has it not pulled in the data yet. That's why Microsoft gets some many black eyes--they announce what they're going to do well in advance of when they do it. (+1 for scooping Google, -1 for inexplicable execution)

This week's score: Google (+5), Apple (+1), Microsoft (-3)

Diaries and Journals: A Selection from the Library

2009-11-10T21:30:00.003-05:00

Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Ball, 1996)
Diary of a Genius (Dali, 1998)
The Journalist (Mathews, 1997)
The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1, 1931-1934 (Nin, 1969)
Diary of an Unknown (Cocteau, 1988)
Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl (Frank, 1990)
Bridget Jones's Diary (Fielding, 1999) [My wife's, I swear!]
Diary: A Novel (Palahniuk, 2004)
Days: Tangier Journal 1987-1989 (Bowles, 1991)
Journal of Albion Moonlight (Patchen, 1961)
Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal (Simpson, 1965)
My Lorraine Journal (O'Shaughnessy, 1918)
Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763 (Boswell, 1950)

Ill with the Composition - Latest Entries

2009-11-10T21:06:00.004-05:00

2009.07.26

Ill MP3: At the Rodeo - A true story from Apes in the Aviary.

2009.07.29

Ill Esoterics: A Fingernail Sale - Don't quit your day job.

[Also, check this out for more uses of the human fingernail.]

2009.08.06

Ill Esoterics: From Procreation to Text Generation - An exploration of Markov processes.

2009.08.10

Ill Musical Madeleines: Ray Lynch, "Celestial Soda Pop" (c. 1993) - What else you got in that sack, Santa?

2009.08.18

Ill Musical Madeleines: Radiohead, "Planet Telex" (c. 1998) - I'm also reminded of this roommate anytime someone cooks hot dogs in a microwave.

2009.09.17

Ill Musical Madeleines: The Kinks, "Lola" (c. 2002) - If the champagne tastes like cherry cola, you're in a crap club.

2009.11.07

Ill Esoterics: Puzzle Space - "Leisure Gestalt?" Notes from developing a presentation for the Army Operations Research Symposium.

2009.11.08

Ill Dad Rock Roundtable, Part 1 - "Dad rock"--it's more than Wilco.

Theft

2009-09-07T08:44:00.002-05:00

I.

We visited a house, looking to buy it. I showed a kid how to steal by taking his neighbor's toy and burying it in the yard. I may have confused theft with murder, but I was only seven.

II.

We stole baseball cards from the local convenience store. My friend practiced nonchalance by whistling while we stole.

III.

P. wanted Picasso prints from an art book in the school library. I separated the glue, rolled the prints, and put them up my sleeves. I walked out of the library like Frankenstein, and she pinned the curled prints to her walls.

IV.

I showed up early to the job, wanting to appear a punctual thief. I filled my backpack with reams of paper. All I needed for a novel now was to steal some words.

Showers

2009-09-07T08:39:00.002-05:00

I.

A. said something about taking a shower together, but I doubted such a thing as showering together was likely.

II.

E. promised we'd shower together in the morning, but in the morning, I pretended to sleep, waiting for her to wake me for the shower, wanting her to ask.

III.

S. entered the bathroom as I showered and asked if she could shower, too. I told her that she could in a moment because I was almost done.

IV.

L. and I stepped into the shower together clothed, and ripped wet fabric from each other's bodies.

Found Typed on a Repair Order

2009-08-07T18:55:00.002-05:00

The lonely braggart walks again
Without thought or explanation

O sweet Jesus! Drink from thine own cup
And piss the contents of your soul

(O sweet Jesus, rest thine eyes
Or you shall have no mice pie!)

Lost Tales: The Raelian Induction

2009-07-23T20:33:00.000-05:00

I. 2006.06.08: The Possibility of an Island

In 2005, on a return trip from a weekend-long drunken impersonation, I picked up in the airport bookstore Platform, a novel by Michel Houellebecq. I liked it enough that when his next book was released, I ordered it in hard cover. The Possibility of an Island included dual narratives: one in the present, following the involvement of the narrator in an alien sex cult, and another in a post-apocalyptic future, where the narrator's succession of clones reflect on immortality.

Something about the description of the cult, the Elohimites, sounded familiar, though at first I did not connect it to an event I'd read about in 2002.

II. 2007.08.06: Transmission of the Cellular Plan

Within a year, I was in contact with the Raelians, and was invited to a local celebration of the Raelian New Year. The Raelian New Year is held on 6 August, in memory of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima--the first time humans used energy to destroy themselves. At the celebration, I would be baptised into the Raelian Movement through the transmission of my cellular plan.

The closest New Year celebration was at a townhouse in a suburb of a major U.S. east coast city. Although I was hesitant to attend such a celebration with strangers, I was relieved to find that the only other celebrants were my host and guide, and one other Raelian--both somewhat alien and puny in appearance, and clearly no physical threat. The guide's vehicle outside was marked with the Raelian symbol--a spiral swirl inside the Star of David rather than the notorious on-again, off-again swastika inside the Star of David that controversially promotes the Raelians.

After introductions, I was offered food and drink. Still wary, I claimed a sensitive stomach, allowing me to be selective in choosing the most tamper-proof items. As I ate and drank, the three of us sat at the kitchen table to discuss the religion. They asked me how I came to discover Rael and his cause. I described my encounter with The Possibility of an Island and Houellebecq, whom I discovered the view as a sympathizer to their cause. They asked me how I came to reject evolutionary theory--for the Raelians are fierce creationists, believing that aliens, the Elohim, created man. Despite my reading, I was not prepared for this questions, but I found that if I led an answer, and looked at them approvingly, they finished my response with what they expected to hear.

We adjourned to the living room and watched a video of Rael, former race car driver Claude Vorilhon, dressed like a Star Trek extra, discussing his encounters with the Elohim, and the messages he received from them. After the video, our guide put on a CD of guided meditation, and I sunk into the sofa, engaging in active meditation for twenty minutes or so.

In preparation for the transmission of my cellular plan, I signed two copies of a statement of apostasy, one for my guide to submit to Raelian HQ, and one for me to provide to the church that had baptised me, rejecting my baptism in favor of the one I was about to receive. With that, the ceremony began. As the guide stood before me, he spoke some words about the principles of the Raelian Movement and pressed a damp sponge against my forehead, transmitting my DNA to the Elohim's database, so that I could be cloned, and thus--eternal life. The other participant, who had been baptised several years previous, took photos of the event.

Shortly afterward, I excused myself.

III. 2002.12.27: The Clonaid Episode

From New Scientist, 27 December 2002:

"The world's first cloned baby was born on 26 December, claims the Bahamas-based cloning company Clonaid. But there has been no independent confirmation of the claim.

"The girl, named Eve by the cloning team, was said to have been born by Caesarean section at 1155 EST. The birth at an undisclosed location went 'very well,' said Brigitte Boisselier, president of Clonaid. The company was formed in 1997 by the Raelian cult, which believes people are clones of aliens.

"'The baby is very healthy. She is doing fine,' Roisselier told a press conference in Hollywood, Florida, on Friday. The seven-pound baby is a clone of a 31-year-old American woman, whose partner is infertile, she said."

Ill with the Composition - Latest Entries

2009-07-23T16:46:00.003-05:00

2009.07.12
Ill Esoterics: Bananas - How to eat a banana like a monkey.

2009.07.19
Ill Composition Notebook Defacement - A composition composition.

2009.07.21
Ill Mirror Flash Photography - Seconds later, a baby cries.

2009.07.23
Ill Musical Madeleines: L7 "Andres" (c.2004) - Gritty rock, chalk graffiti, and lemon-leek soup descend into palmetto bugs, math problems, and "unsoberishness."

Long-Distance Lumber, Part 2

2009-07-16T17:19:00.001-05:00

"Can I interest you in our fraud protection service for $12.95 a month?"

"No, it's already in the credit card company's best interest to protect against fraud--I'm not going to pay extra."

"But this isn't just for credit card fraud; it protects against identity theft, your credit report, your social security number ..."

"Are you enrolled?"

"No, I don't have a credit card."

Monkey See, Monkey Do

2009-07-12T15:29:00.008-05:00

Yesterday, I came across a post on Lifehacker about how to eat a banana like a monkey. I immediately saw the advantage--often, when I peel using the stem, rather than the stem breaking, the back of the peel splits, resulting in a messy extraction. Here's the video (the monkey boxer shorts are a nice touch):

Later that evening, I was reading Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann to H., and when I got to the last page, I noticed the banana peel on the bedspread appeared to have been opened from the base.

I flipped back through the book to confirm that the mouse does appear to have tied the string to the stem of the banana, so it really was opened by the base.

The next day, I asked my sister about this trick, and she's been opening bananas from the base since 1995, when her friend's boyfriend (possibly a chimpanzee--I never met him) showed her. She went fourteen years without telling me! Unlike in the video, she digs her thumbnail in just above the base, and then pulls the skin over and down.

Of course, all this flies in the face of the otherwise logically flawless "Atheist's Nightmare" video:

Alphabet Lines: The Next Generation

2009-06-27T20:31:00.006-05:00

In a recent survey, seventy-six percent of respondents visualized the alphabet on one line, seven percent each on two, three, or four lines, and three percent on six lines. None of those polled responded that they visualized the alphabet on five lines, or on more than six lines.

Persky had always visualized the alphabet on four lines; therefore, this news came as a great shock to him. It had never occurred to Persky that other people might imagine the alphabet on one line, or on two, three, or six lines. While the fact of the alphabet had not changed, its form did.

The author of the article attributed the overwhelming response for the one-line visualization on the fact that so many first grade teachers posted the alphabet in one long row over the blackboard.

Why, Persky wondered, did he then visualize the alphabet, as did seven percent of the respondents, on four lines. Why did any of the twenty-four percent minority view the alphabet on multiple lines? Were they not educated in the same classrooms, with the same alphabet over the same blackboard?

And what else did Persky think he knew, but in fact, only remembered?

[Above is a re-post.]

H. has a new toy--a busy zoo. Included on the zoo is an animal alphabet (which includes "X-ray" for X and "Unicorn"--H.'s first cryptid). The alphabet is laid out on five lines (A-F, G-L, M-R, S-X, Y-Z). Will this be how he visualizes the alphabet for the rest of his life?

We also have a prominently hung sign-language poster in his play area with a four-line configuration (A-G, H-N, O-T, U-Z), which matches my own visualization.

Shelving History

2009-06-26T20:01:00.006-05:00

I.

When I was in high school, a few of my friends worked at the local branch of the county public library. (I had no job, and earned my money by selling my mother rolls of quarters I compiled using change I found around the house. After selling her the quarters, I would sneak into her room, take the quarters back, and sell them to her again. She never asked where I kept getting the quarters.)

My friends spent most of their working hours at the library shelving books. I asked once if I could help. One of them asked his supervisor. She said no.

On later trips, I would pretend to browse the return cart, and take a few books--then I would shelve them.

II.

Years later, I took a volunteer job every other Friday in the library of a local art museum. I was jealous of the librarian, with her book-scattered office, who failed to appreciate the wonder of her job. I shelved books here, too, but with permission. This lasted until I complained that one of the other volunteers was incorrectly shelving books--for example, filing a book with a cutter number of .L56 after .L9 rather than between .L5 and .L6. I discovered that it was the librarian herself doing this--she wasn't sure how cutter numbers worked, so sometimes she did it one way, and sometimes another. I refused to leave her office until she researched the issue herself.

My other duties included writing reports for the usage database, identifying the year slides of museum events were taken by analyzing fashion trends ("Judging by the size of her glasses, I'd say this took place in 1983."), and photocopying newsprint for "preservation" (I was also tempted to object to this activity, having read Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. I did save a vintage movie advertisement for 1989's Gleaming the Cube.).

My last activity before I left that job was to review the exhibition files, and write down the names of every artist that occurred, to update the database. This list, once compiled, was never used. I still check every six months by typing in the false name I entered into the list, with the intent to later construct a false exhibition file for that name.

A Survey

2009-06-26T19:50:00.003-05:00

1. How do you feel about cilantro?
A. I love it
B. I like it
C. I'm indifferent
D. I don't like it
E. I hate it
F. I don't know

2. On how many lines do you visualize the alphabet?
A. One
B. Two
C. Three
D. Four
E. Five
F. Six
G. More
H. I don't understand

3. When someone tells you they will see you "next Wednesday," what do you assume they mean?
A. The next Wednesday that occurs
B. The Wednesday of the next full week

"How to ...": A Selection from the Library

2009-06-21T20:19:00.002-05:00

How to Clean Practically Anything (Consumer Reports, 1996)
How to Know and Predict the Weather (Fisher, 1953)
How to Lie with Statistics (Huff, 1993)
How to Live Through an Executive (Hubbard, 1953)
How to Multiply Your Baby's Intelligence (Doman, 1983)
How to Pick Your Personal Lottery Numbers (Hieronomus, 1985)
How to Read a Book (Adler, 1940)
How to Read a Film (Monaco, 1981)
How to Read and Why (Bloom, 2000)
How to Stay Alive in the Woods (Angier, 1962)
How to Talk to Your Cat (George, 1986)
How to Torture Your Wife (Webster, 1948)
How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays (Eco, 1995)
How to Write (Stein, 1975)

A Video Arcade

2009-06-21T20:17:00.001-05:00

There was a sign on the saloon-style doors into the video arcade: "Tokens only--buy at front counter. Minimum purchase $3.00 for 12 tokens. No cell phones. Do not cruise the booths."

I paid with three dollar bills, and took my 12 tokens into the video arcade.

There were no overhead lights. Most of the light came from the store behind me and a lit poster marquee, displaying the channel selection immediately in front of me. There were about six or seven booths. To my left, I heard the recorded cries of orgasm. I moved to the right, wary of being taken for a cruiser. To my far right was a booth with a sign that there was no sound. I pictured a speaker gummed over with spunk.

I stepped into a booth in the middle of the arcade. To my left was a blank video monitor, underneath was a trash bucket. To my right was a low bench with a roll of toilet paper sitting to one side. Next to the door was the token slot, with a button for switching channels. I dropped in a token, and the screen lit up. Mouths and groins. I turned back toward the bench--above it, now lit by the screen, were two holes, the edges lined with duct tape--there must have been another booth behind, unoccupied.

I didn't sit on the bench. I heard someone in the hall of the arcade--a cruiser? Through the larger of the two glory holes, I saw a shadow move past the entrance of the opposite booth. I pressed the button to change the channel. Mouths and groins. I pressed again. More mouths and groins--but different each time.

Once, in a hotel room outside Montreal, I turned on the television to watch the Simpsons and found the television broadcasting porn. I switched channels. Porn again--the same porn. Each press of the channel button was followed by a blink of the screen and a return to the same content. I took a shot of lidocaine and played with my lips.

I left the arcade with eleven of my twelve tokens and an uneasy feeling, like climbing the stairs from a darkened basement.

Long-Distance Lumber

2009-06-19T16:32:00.002-05:00

"Fraud protection department."

"I'd like to dispute a charge."

"What is the nature of the dispute?"

"I didn't make the charge."

"You didn't purchase lumber at the Construction Warehouse?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"The warehouse is in England. I live in the United States."

"Maybe you purchased it online?"

"Lumber?"

Most Frequent Book References

2009-06-17T18:57:00.003-05:00

Colonel Monoceros is a big reader, or at least a frequent book referencer. His briefings read like book reports--his meetings like "Reading Rainbow." His latest opus is centered around three books:

The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, 2000
Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, 2004
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, 2008

I suspect I'm guilty of repeated book references, though I don't think I'm that overt about it. My most frequent references:

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, 1962
Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, Stanislov Grof, 1975
The Web of Life, Fritjof Capra, 1997

Take My Grief Upon Thee

2009-06-13T15:18:00.002-05:00

"... they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover." --Mark 16:18

1

Vasya’s father was dying—he had been for weeks. "A separated kidney," Vasya had heard Doctor Leshchetitsky say. Separated. One thing next to another. Push it closer—that's all that had to be done. It could be done quickly ... part the skin, move the kidney, connect it. Connect it to what? Vasya was a good student, but he was not a doctor. Still, it seemed easy enough. "Just put yourself in my hands, father, and I'll take care of everything."

He could see it happening: his eyes are open but vacant—he’s dead. He reaches out with his hand, and holds it above his father's bare torso. He closes his eyes and sees the energy flowing from his crown through his body out his hand and into his father. His hand—the power—shows him what to do. His father's eyes close, then open again. This is it, now he just has to finish the miracle. His hand trembles. His father's eyes close once more. They don't open again.

Vasya's own affliction began with a curious bump on his scalp. He found it one night when he lay awake, thinking of his father, and picking the scab from at his worry spot, just behind his hairline. As his fingers ran further afield, he encountered an aberration. He tried to pinch the bump and pull it away, thinking it might be a beetle or an engorged tick, but he found it did not taper toward his head and instead seemed to protrude from his skull, rather like a tall pox. He tried pressing it down and it gave way, disappearing into his scalp. Vasya's attention turned back to his worry spot briefly, to finish the job of picking hardened pieces of dried skin from the site. A few moments later, it occurred to him to survey the rest of his scalp for pox. Within seconds, he found another one. He searched his entire head, and it felt to be the only other one—so he employed the same technique, pressing it neatly into his skull. It, too, vanished. Then he found another one. Or was it the same? Was he merely causing the bump to change locations? As he banished it from one sector, did it simply relocate? Was it some strange code? Was he going mad? He spent half the night searching for this bump, finding it, pushing it away, searching for it, finding it, until finally he could find it no longer and dropped off to sleep.

Vasya did not mention this occurrence to his mother, who was already worried about his father's illness. Ivan Ilych had grown quite irritable lately, suffering from a bruise to his abdomen. Vasya, too, was worried about his father. Although he had gone through spells of torment in the past, this time it seemed different—it was becoming a habit of short-temperedness that fed upon itself , a true aggravation. His father, since the move to Petersburg, had seemed irritated specifically with his family. Vasya, for his part, tried to stay clear of him—but he did notice his father's increasing affection for his servant boy, Gerasim, who was bound to serve him and thus was forced to hourly face this ill temper.

2

A few weeks later, Vasya felt that the crown of his head had become very insensitive. He could feel it when he tapped his finger upon it, but otherwise, it felt as if the top of his head had been paralyzed. He continued to tap it every few minutes to reassure himself that he retained feeling. He even tried poking it once or twice with his pen knife, enough to draw a small amount of blood.

The next day, Vasya was wracked with tremendous, sharp pains, moving from one temple to the other, and sometimes shooting down the back of his neck. The day after that, walking to the gymnasium, he could feel heat generating from the center of his chest, as if a giant rose were blooming on the inside of his sternum. Then this sensation moved to his shoulder and arm. A few days later, he had the sensation of water running down his left arm, from the insider of his elbow to his wrist, and down his right leg, from behind the knee to his ankle. He thought he must be gathering attention, walking down the halls, conscious of the movement of each limb, which seemed, in addition to the movement initiated by him, to have other forces acting upon it. While Professor Syndinov lectured on Romanov dynasty, Vasya stared at the palm of his hand, moving it slowly in circles in front of him. He thought he could perceive a faint glow surrounding his hand.

Walking home from the gymnasium that afternoon, Vasya found a swallow lying dormant on the ground. He approached it, expecting it to fly off, but it didn't move. He knelt down to examine it closely. Its eyes were shut and its posture appeared stiff. He reached his hand out to it, and in doing so, became aware of a new sensation—a warmth, building around his crown, as if his hair had caught fire, and just as he touched the swallow, he felt a surge run through him in series—scalp, temples, neck, chest, shoulder, arm, hand—the swallow burst out just ahead of his hand and flew off over the houses across the street.

Vasya sat down on the ground, unable to rise. He stared at his hand, wondering what would come next. He sat there for some time and nothing happened. Finally, he stood up and walked home.

That night, as Vasya lay in bed, he stared at his fingertips. If he stared long enough, he could see a blue-green light around the edges, first his fingertips, then his palms, and finally his whole hands. It wasn't the kind of light he could see by, and he doubted anyone else would be able to see it, but he knew it was real.

3

The next day, again in Professor Syndinov's lecture, he tried to recreate his experience with the swallow. Vasya had taught himself to rid hiccups simply by waiting in expectation for the next one. He used this same concentration on his crown, which he soon found he could warm at will. He then slowly pulled this warmth down through his body like a theatre curtain, learning to control the flow into his hand, which he kept palm down on his desk. Again and again he left the warmth fully subside before summoning it again. Finally, just as the energy reached his hand, he pointed his finger out away from his desk, at the back of Andrey Demidov. His finger jerked slightly and Andrey whipped around as if he had been poked with a needle, his cheeks red, his eyes in full glare. Vasya sat stunned, his finger still pointing.

After that, he took to wearing a pair of white gloves, lest he inadvertently awaken anything that should remain at rest. He even imagined placing his palms face down on his wooden desk might cause it to sprout twigs with tiny green leaves unfurling.

4

Vasya came home from gymnasium one afternoon and found his mother and sister in the study, with Fyodor Petrovich. He crept in behind them, seeing his father laid out. Ivan Ilyich turned toward his son with a look of pity. He knew his father had hoped it was Gerasim coming in behind his wife and daughter. "How does it feel," Vasya thought, "to treat me like you do? These hands, these healing hands, they can perform miracles in my mind."

Vasya had not given up on miracles. On his way home from gymnasium, he sought out the old, the infirm. The dog chained up behind the butcher shop with the lame leg could now walk with no sign of limp. Several mice, two more birds, and a vole had been returned. One of the mice, found half frozen in the snow, he first gripped tightly in his fist until it stopped breathing, before opening his palm and bringing forth his power. "Gerasim," Vasya spoke out loud.

Despite these daily miracles, Vasya stilled doubted the power he had to heal his father, who could himself crush Vasya in his palm. As Vasya doubted, his father worsened. He now lay on the sofa without intermission.

5

Vasya approached his father, laid out in his study. The sofa enclosed his father on four sides. Soon there would be a fifth, and then, the lid of the coffin closed, a sixth. His father screamed, flailing his arms as if to fight off the lid of the coffin, closing prematurely. His hand caught Vasya on the top of his head. Vasya grasped his father's thin hand as it slid down his cheek. He held it to his lips and tried to concentrate, picturing the energy pulsing from his fingertips, pushing it through to his father's near lifeless body.

His father still screamed. Vasya cried. His father quieted to a moan, then opened his eyes, meeting Vasya's teary gaze, then looking past him to Praskovya Fyodorovna muttered "Take him away ... sorry for him ... and you. Forget."

With that, Ivan Ilych's lids slid shut over his vacant eyes and he was gone.

"It is all over."

Genel House (Louis Kahn, 1951)

2009-06-07T17:41:00.007-05:00

Collosus Libris

2009-05-25T17:53:00.006-05:00

Colossus Libris I
Reign: ~10/2005-1/2008
Material: 2"x4"s; 1"x12"s
Height: 9'
Width: 9'
Shelfspace: 72'
Additional (remote) storage: 24'
Fate: Scrapped and used for construction of chicken enclosures.

Colossus Libris II
Reign: 1/2008-5/2009
Material: 3', 4', and 6' parawood mission bookshelf kits
Height: 10'
Width: 15'
Shelfspace: 107.5'
Additional (remote) storage: 25'
Fate: Abandoned in place.

(note: partial view)

Colossus Libris III
Reign: 5/2009-
Material: 4' parawood mission bookshelf kits
Height: 8'
Width: 27.5'
Shelfspace: 220'
Additional (remote) storage: None

Seven Examples of Cryptobotany in Film

2009-05-19T20:42:00.005-05:00

1. The tree from Poltergeist (1982)

2. The singing bush from The Three Amigos (1986)

3. Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors (1960/1986)

4. The triffids from The Day of the Triffids (1962)

5. Ents from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

6. The tomatoes from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978)

7. The pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956/1978/2007)

Like Pulling Teeth

2009-05-11T19:50:00.008-05:00

I. Pulling Someone Else's Teeth

E. had her wisdom teeth out the summer we dated. I came over that afternoon, and she kissed me with her dry, anesthetized lips.

She gave me her teeth and I kept them in a film container with fake blood capsules. Once, while talking with M., I surreptitiously tipped the container back while she looked at some distraction. I started rubbing my jaw and moaning, then spit the bloody teeth into my hand. I could not have requested a more appealing reaction.

I took close-up pictures of the teeth on a shot glass with red food-coloring, earning me the nickname "Mr. Big Teeth" at the photolab. I gave an 8x10 to D., who put it on his desk at work, in the backroom at a Borders bookstore where he managed the periodicals. His co-workers complained and his supervisor removed the photo and kept it facing the wall in his office until D. could remove it from the premises. And that was how my work was banned from a bookstore.

II. More Teeth

L. had her teeth removed by her father's dentist, a man known as Saltz, who was used as a threat when she and her brothers misbehaved--"I'll take you to Saltz!" Saltz was, I imagined, a real life Orin Scrivello from Little Shop of Horrors, except that Saltz looked like Santa Claus.

L. went to Saltz on her own authority because she likes a good hurt once in a while--

(Once, at a tattoo parlor where we ran into her mother and her mother's boyfriend, her mother offered to buy her a piercing--she wanted to get her septum pierced, but no jewelry ... she just wanted to feel it. "No jewelry, no way" was her mother's rule, though she did later get it pierced.)

He threw a knee into her chest to get leverage as he yanked the teeth out.

III. At Last Pulling My Own Teeth

My wisdom teeth came in with manageable pain during a fifteen-year hiatus in dental visists. Once the dentistry resumed, it was found that all my wisdom teeth were cavity-ridden, which was not a surprise--they were my workhorse molars when my other teeth hurt from gum disease and other dental and periodontal ailments. She drilled and gave me temporary fillings with a recommendation for removal.

The next dentist also recommended removal. The endodontist objected, after giving me a root canal in my #18 mandibular second molar, because if the root canal failed and I lost the tooth, I would still be able to put in a bridge between #17 and #19. The dental surgeon countered that argument with the possibility of a titanium implant at the same installation cost as a bridge, and lower maintenance cost. I decided to have all four wisdom teeth removed because I liked the idea of a titanium tooth.

The surgeon injected my gums with novocaine and began the procedure. He and his assistant talked about how the woman who was in the "Thriller" video was just now suing Michael Jackson for payment she feels she was due for her part. The assistant told a story about an animal whose name she couldn't rememer. I waited impatiently for the surgeon to remove his hands from my mouth so I could form a word with my numbed lips--"nutria."

"Yeah, that's it."

When the surgeon was out of the room, I asked the assistant if I could keep my teeth.

"That's against policy--we have to dispose of them as biohazard waste." She leaned in close. "But I'll put them in a bag for you."

Another assistant came in and talked to me about connective tissue disorders. Her son had a pectus excavatum correction that had to be redone twice due to the failure of a new procedure. My pectus carinatum had been corrected just once, by a surgeon who must have retired between my surgery in the early nineties, and her son's on the later nineties.

The surgeon returned and pushed on my #32. Then he reached in with a pair of pincer pliers and pulled. I heard flesh tear. "That was awesome," I said, blood dripping over my bottom lip. He stitched up the hole and continued with #17, which made less sound.

"That was a disappointment, I admit," the surgeon noted, before continuing on to #1 and #16.

The procedure was over in half an hour. I returned to work with a gauze-packed mouth to show off my teeth--at last my own teeth.

I ate pudding to numb the pain. "I might have to go home early," I told a co-worker.

"Because of the pain?"

"No, it doesn't hurt as long as I keep eating pudding. But now I have to put on bigger pants."

Hands on the Wheel

2009-05-11T19:39:00.003-05:00

We were a hundred yards from the border when the police pulled us over.

"License and registration."

"May I ask what I was doing wrong."

"I'll let you know in a few minutes. License and registration."

In a few minutes? Was he still waiting for a mistake? She asked me to check the glovebox for the registration while she pulled her license from her wallet. He examined them closely.

"Was there something going on in this car that I should know about?"

That he should know about? The diamonds? The brick of heroin? The four illegal aliens crammed into the trunk with a dead hooker? What did he mean by that?

"No, officer."

"I've been following you since the parade field. You haven't been staying in the lane lines. I let it go the first few times because there were people on the side of the road, but when you didn't yield to the truck, I had to pull you over. It's a $125 fine for failing to stay within the lane lines, and another $125 for failing to yield--$250 dollars. Are you on any medication?"

"No, none at all." This was not true.

"I repeat: was there something going on in this car that I should know about?"

Did he think we'd been making out—is that what he was getting at? J. is old enough to be my grandmother. I know we make an odd couple to be seen driving around together, but there's no reason to suspect that particular type of nefariousness.

He went back to his car with her license and registration.

"I wasn't in the lane lines?"

"No, but that's how you usually drive, and there weren't any cars on the other side, so it didn't bother me."

"I saw that truck. I even said something to you about it because I thought he was supposed to yield."

"If he asks again what we were doing, tell him we were having an argument about how much money to donate to the Fraternal Order of Police."

"I hate to say this, but I think black cops are always like this. Maybe that makes me a racist to say that."

"A black cop pulled me over near here and he was very polite. I was listening to David Cassidy."

After five minutes he returned.

"For the last time, are you sure there was nothing going on inside this car that I should know about?"

"No. I'll pay better attention in the future."

As we pulled through the gate, she pointed out where a friend of hers had the bottom of his car ripped out by a faulty stopgate during his first week at work.

"Hands on the wheel."

J'accuse

2009-05-05T19:41:00.002-05:00

The mourning son assaults me
accuses me
kicks the dust of a thousand years in my eyes

That mean little girl on the playground
they said she acted that way because she liked
me
Was it love? Or just _____

She's back in my eyes again
every morning driving east

I never find the ocean
and she never promises me a kiss

[Reprinted from Grub Street, 1999]

Pre-Release: Karen King Sings Along

2009-04-29T01:19:00.000-05:00

When the late Karen King's husband left her, she consoled herself by singing along to classic country songs on the radio. She taped these sessions and sent copies to her family.

More Musical Madeleines

2009-04-29T01:15:00.004-05:00

1993. Ray Lynch: Celestial Soda Pop

It's Christmas Day, 1993. I'm in bed with the 24-hour flu, vomiting bile into a metal E.T. trashcan. Of the presents I got, the only one I can think to enjoy is a CD by Ray Lynch--Deep Breakfast, which I listen to in its entirety. I learn in the following days that is a mistake--as soon as the first song, "Celestial Soda Pop" begins to play, my stomach turns. My mother sits next to the bed, looking for something to say to make me feel better. She picks up a one-page 'zine from the bookshelf next to me and begins to read an article about what an asshole Santa Claus is. I agree sometimes. But the article contains some language that reminds me of the time I insisted that the "Parental Advisory" label on Blood Sugar Sex Magik was an overreaction, and she opened the CD booklet to the lyrics for "Sir Psycho Sexy" and read aloud: "There's a devil in my dick and some demons in my semen." The next year, I am also sick on Christmas, and my right lymph node swells up to the point where I look like I no longer have a chin on that side of my face.

1994. Zbigniew Preisner: Song for the Unification of Europe (Julie's Version)

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels ..." -- I Corinthians 13:1 In the last summer before college, I cannot sleep because of the medication. When it's hot and no one's home, I turn on the soundtrack to Krzysztof Kieślowski's Bleu, put track 22 on repeat, open my window, and climb out onto the roof of the addition. I lay there and look up at the oak-tree canopy and let the summer breezes push the music past me in waves. In light of WWII, there's something odd about tha angst of the French as documented by the Polish, as if to admit that the French are better at angst as an expression, "but, yeah, that's how we felt." (Juliette Binoche running her kunckles against a stone wall; turning, and pulling her shirt off with one smooth motion to signal to a man that she has now accepted him as her lover. These scenes constituted a language with which I tried to communicate my intentions for adulthood--but ultimately succeeded only in bedding the destructive women I identified with as a means of absorbing their angst.) After I tire of laying on the roof, I go back inside and get out the Playboy magazines and tracing paper. I am trying to learn how to draw a naked woman, something I have been working on since I was eleven, when H. asks me to try. At the time, all I had to work with was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I faithfully trace every naked curve, remove the magazine and then try to extrapolate. It never looked right. In retrospect, I'm not sure why I never referred to the collection of National Geographic magazines, at least to solve the anatomical problems. Even the Playboy tracings never looked right--I was molding the golem minus sex appeal rather than soul. I later manage some passable post-impressionist work, mostly of lesbians. Inevitably I masturbated at the conclusion of these activities--only then could I sleep.

2004. L7: Andres

It's July in Charleston, South Carolina. J. is at work and I am hungry. He is a chef, but keeps no food in his apartment. I take a shower and walk to the ABC store to buy a pint of Heaven Hill vodka for $2.69. When I return to the apartment, I take another shower to cool off and then mix the vodka with some stale pink lemonade mix I find in the cupboard. A. calls and invites me to visit. I drive drunk for the first and only time in my life. When I get to her apartment, she is listening to L7's 1994 Hungry for Stink album, which I had bought when it was released, but had long since sold. We decide to walk down Broad Street to Gaulart & Maliclet's Fast & French. We take chalk with us and write on the jersey barriers blocking off a construction area. I write "E=mγc²--don't break the laws of physics." At Fast & French, we sit in the kitchen window and eat for free. I have lemon leek soup, which I enjoy, but am never able to find anywhere again. Memories of Charleston are hazy after that ... more showers ... stepping on palmetto bugs on the way to the Piggly Wiggly ... a curator with dirty shirtcuffs at the Karpeles Manuscript Library ... drunk at a Japanese restaurant, I draw 11011213211011 on a napkin and show it to the girl next to me--she turns away and starts a conversation with someone else before I can tell her about the special powers of the number nine, describe why the inside of the letter O can make a paranoiac anxious, show her how to knife-fight, or any of the other things I do when drunk ... sober at 3am at another bar ... driving a fully-loaded Cadillac Escalade alone through Charleston to get back to J.'s apartment, sleeping, then driving back to pick him up from R.'s house ... my mother drags her toes on the sidewalk, trips, and falls.

Chicken-Killing Day

2009-04-28T21:43:00.004-05:00

On chicken-killing day, I get up early to make preparations. A stump with two nails, three-quarters of an inch apart--wide enough for a chicken neck and a sharp hatchet. A bucket for heads. A board against a tree, with a tarp and sawdust under it to catch blood dripping from open necks. String and scissors to hang them from their feet for draining. A firepit with grate and a metal pot to heat up water. Folding chairs and buckets for the pluckers. A folding table, sharp knives, and a trash barrel for the eviscerators, a hose and plastic bags to hold the bodies.

We are expecting guests.

It is my job to catch the roosters, who have been sequestered in a horse stable. It is easy when there are eighteen in such a small space, but it gets more difficult as the morning progresses. In the beginning, I refuse to use a net. I run after the crowds, and sweep my hand low, to catch them by their feet. At the stump, we take turns. One person holds their head in their gloved left hand, pushing their neck between the nail heads, while the second person pulls on their feet to stretch their neck. Then the first person raises the hatchet in their right hand and brings it down sharply. If they are good it takes only one swing. Some of us take three or four because the hatchet bit is rounded, rather than straight, and the neck feathers disguise the location of the spine.

Once the head is separated from the body, the eyes and beak may open and close. The person who held the feet lifts the body after the head has been severed and holds it upside down over the sawdust. The wings flap a few times, then slow. Suddenly, there is a great flurry of wings before they slow again, this time to stop. We then tie their feet to the board over the sawdust and let the blood drain while I fetch the next chicken. We let a few of the chickens go, to find out what it looks like to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. They do not run--they hop, somersaulting over and over. This may be because the grass is to long to navigate without sight.

Once the blood is drained, the body is cut down and dipped into scalding water. We pluck the wet feathers off the pink, goosebumped body. For some breeds this is easier than for others. The bodies often must be dunked several times during the course of the plucking. The lead eviscerator starts the day with directions that have been printed off of the Internet. She removes the neck and feet and tail, then the innards, saving the hearts and livers. Once or twice she cuts into the bile duct, pooling green bile onto the table and staining the skin.

Once the bird is eviscerated, we hose it down, bag it, and put it in the refrigerator (later transferred to the freezer).

When guests arrive, they pitch in, plucking or killing the chickens. We are done by noon.

That night, we eat hearts and livers. I have eaten chicken livers before, but never from a bird I raised and butchered myself. I did not like the texture of the heart--biting through the rubber muscle into the empty chambers.

I ask myself what we did that day.

"We killed the chickens and ate their hearts."

Ophelia Redux: A Drowner's Diary

2009-04-26T09:51:00.010-05:00

I was born out of baptism,
and if I die,
it won’t be for lack of oxygen ...

Ophelia redux:
a drowner’s diary

by jean coureaux

Tuesday, 25 July 2000...

I drowned myself again tonight.

Thursday, 27 July 2000...

the first time I drowned myself was in the evening ...

a dark blue sky and a light breeze ...

black jeans and no shirt ...

turned the water on,

knelt facing the tub,

held my right wrist in my left hand,

and tipped my body over the

edge.

blew out my breath underwater and felt the bubbles rush past my cheeks on the way to recovery

I waited.

and just when things started to go dark,

I came up for air.

Then I went under again.

Three or four times.

That was the first time I drowned myself. It was on my sister’s twenty-fourth birthday. I’m almost twenty-four now.

Monday, 31 July 2000...

I heard today that Tom Davis drowned in a lake in Canada over the weekend. They haven’t found his body.

My sister might go to the memorial service. She says Tom was always trying to live every part of his life, and that he probably wasn’t afraid of death.

I wonder what he was thinking as he ran out of air ...

"Too much water hast thou, Ophelia" -Laertes, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 7

Wednesday, 02 August 2000...

When Christ was baptized, and he came up from the water, the heavens were opened for him.

Or the heavens tore open.

It depends on who you ask. Matthew says “for,” Mark says “tore,” and Luke simply says that “heaven was opened.”

John neglects to mention the event.

“The one experience I shall never describe” -Virginia Woolf

Saturday, 05 August 2000...

In the bar tonight, someone pointed at the TV. When I looked up, I saw Tom Davis,

smiling.

I thought they had found his body.

There was no sound, but they showed pictures of the lake surrounded by mountains and pictures of his parents looking anxious.

They hadn’t found the body.

How long had he been in the water now?

What did he look like?

Was he bloated and blue?

Was he even recognizable?

Sunday, 06 August 2000...

Tonight, I will drown myself again.

[Reprinted from Red-City Review #2, 2001]

A Portrait of the Artist's Girlfriend As a Young Woman

2009-04-24T16:52:00.003-05:00

I started dating R. at the end of my freshman year at college. The relationship was awkward for me because I'd never had a girlfriend, or even really dated. Despite her reputation for being shy, R., it didn't seem, had ever been single. I tried to confess my feelings to her, and she asked me to prove them, logically. My grounding in symbolic logic was little use to me, as I could not solve the proof R + G = RG. We made out—at last a kiss!—to John Coltrane's "Blue Train," which she played on repeat. I groped her awkwardly. I was eighteen years old.

That summer, I saw R. only once, when I stayed the night with her at her mother's ramshackle Victorian in Dover. She was working when I arrived, but she'd left a key for me. I wandered around this strange house until she called me to pick her up from the country club where she was working as a waitress. I pursued her sloppily. She was distant. I drove her back to work the next day and went back to the house. While she was there, her mother came home. I introduced myself from the top of the stairs and kept my distance. That night, separate rooms, but they connected and we spent the night in the same bed again. I left the next day, and didn't see her again until we were back at school.

It was my birthday. I was telling my friend S. how aloof she seemed, and when I turned I saw her on the porch, with a guy massaging her shoulders. She told me later that he worked at the country club—she didn't think I cared because I didn't visit her and was silent when I called. We broke up. A few weeks later, she told me she had a headache and pulled me close for a kiss before dismissing me again.

Then she wanted to go with me to go see Fugazi. I found out her boyfriend was driving us. We walked together through Georgetown the afternoon of the show, the three of us. He charged ahead and I walked a step behind her to the side, out of courtesy. I knew she was a nervous person and made sure she always had an exit.

One evening, returning from a trip with my friend K., I found R. had been asking for me—she thought I was on a date with K.'s sister. She greeted me at the back door to her dormitory wearing a pair of orange shorts, which I followed up the stairs, inches from my face. We went further that night than ever, and the next day she left me for B., to whom she'd not yet confessed her feelings.

I started dating P. at the end of my sophomore year at college. The relationship was awkward for me because P. already had a boyfriend. We wrote long emails and hung out for hours, but she didn't kiss me until the last night of school, and she did so quickly, just as I was about to fall asleep next to her. "Wait ... I didn't even get a chance to participate," I argued, which won me a longer follow-up kiss. We saw each other frequently that summer, but she retained her boyfriend. Then she broke up with me because I was leaving the country on a fellowship I'd signed up for after things went sour with R.

I left the country in tears. While I was away, P. had her senior art show, in which she painted portraits of friends. She also asked R. to sit for a portrait. R. later tried to buy the portrait, but couldn't afford the price P. asked. I thought about buying the portrait for her because it seemed like the only way to separate these women from my life.

I don't know what became of that painting.

II.

I had only been out of a relationship with J. for a couple of months and was playing in a band with G., who introduced me to her friend S. "Are you attracted to me?" I asked her one night on the phone. "Yes," she told me, but she didn't want to date. The next day I went to a barbeque at a friend's house. When I returned to my apartment, there was a message from S. She wanted to see me. I picked her up and brought her back to the apartment. We watched "Night of the Living Dead" and made out. A week later, after our second performance had gone badly, G., S., A., D. and I went back to S.'s room and started drinking a jug of wine and playing strip poker. At one point, S. showed D. a photo from a box under her bed, but she wouldn't show me what it was. We started playing strip poker and one thing led to another and that was that.

A few days later, she showed me the photo—it was of a painting made by a boyfriend back in Las Vegas, she was naked, laying on the carpet asleep, her legs parted slightly in the direction of the canvas. It bothered me, the existence of this painting. I asked if she could inquire the price. Three thousand dollars.

That weekend, she got drunk at a bar and we had sex on the balcony of my apartment. The condom broke. She took the morning after pill and I brought over a VCR so we could watch movies. The next day she called me and broke up. I didn't care anymore. She's made me feel mean and reckless and I hated her for it.

I don't know what became of that painting, either.

The Ravitch Procedure

2009-04-24T16:44:00.006-05:00

The stage is dark. A wide spot reveals the NARRATOR laying on a table wearing a paper hospital gown with his arms outstretched, looking up. He turns his head toward the audience and speaks.

NARRATOR: Ten seconds before the operation, a nurse with a faint blonde mustache strapped me to the surgical table, leaned over and whispered in my ear “It will all be over soon …” The anesthetist masked me, asked me to breathe deeply and count backwards from ten. ... Ten.

The light goes out and the stage is dark for several seconds. When the light returns, this time a narrow spot, the narrator is center stage, standing, with a flashlight held under his chin.

NARRATOR: When I was seven years old, my best friend Chris, who was then six, went into the hospital for an operation to correct a serious rib deformity. He had what was known as pectus excavatum, or a sunken chest. His ribs had grown too fast and depressed his sternum almost to his spine, limiting his lung capacity and endangering his heart. I was too young to understand the details of the operation, but imagined a surgeon in bib overalls trying to fix Chris’s chest with a toilet plunger, like pulling dents from a car. This failing, I assumed that they would open him up, oil his rusty rib hinges, and put a stick in his chest as a spacer, balanced between his spine and his sternum. I was only seven at the time, and this was prior to the broadcasting of surgical procedures on The Learning Channel. Even if such an educational avenue had been available, my sister and I were discouraged, apart from the Muppet Show, from watching television; and muppet anatomy was distinct from human anatomy to the extent that toilet plungers and sticks were standard tools of the muppet medical trade.

The flashlight is turned off, and the stage is once again dark.

PREACHER: A reading from Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 7: "The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being."

A spotlight reveals the NARRATOR standing center stage in a pair of swimming trunks, with no shirt.

NARRATOR: I don’t know who noticed the lump first. My mother thinks the doctors had mentioned it, but showed little concern. I first remember being conscious of an abnormality when I was swimming close to the bottom of a pool and scraped my sternum up against the rough surface. The scratch drew attention to my deformity, like a thin arrow. I found that I was different from the other kids. They didn’t have protruding sternums. At night, feeling self-conscious, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tried to push my sternum in. It was able to push it in slightly, but my ribs bowed out at the pressure. Self-consciousness aside, this soon became a favorite trick. When my sister brought dates over to the house for dinner, I lifted up my shirt and pressed my sternum in and out to make my ribs wave ‘hi.’ My parents, feeling that their nature may have contributed to my deformity, and their nurture may have contributed to my odd disposition, decided to make restitution by sending me to a psychiatrist and a surgeon. The psychiatrist prescribed Prozac, but the surgeon, he had a grander plan in mind: the Ravitch procedure.

The spotlight goes out and the stage is dark.

PREACHER: A reading from Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 21: "The Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh.”

The spotlight (now wider) reveals the NARRATOR standing center stage, still in swimming trunks, but now also wearing a t-shirt. He is joined by the SURGEON and his MOTHER and FATHER.

NARRATOR [to audience]: As the surgeon explained, he would cut open my chest, remove extra rib cartilage, break my sternum, and reposition it.

The NARRATOR turns to the SURGEON.

NARRATOR: Can I keep it?

SURGEON: Keep what?

NARRATOR: The extra rib cartilage.

The NARRATOR turns back to the audience.

NARRATOR: My parents looked startled, but didn’t say anything. After all, wasn’t my upbringing ultimately to blame for such a request?

SURGEON: Yes ... okay ...

NARRATOR: I did not, however, wake up to a bag of rib cartilage. Either the surgeon forgot my request, only pretended he would comply, or my parents voiced an objection behind my back--the presence of such an artifact may have called for increased psychiatric counseling.

The spotlight goes out and the stage is dark.

PREACHER: A reading from Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 22: "The Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man."

The spotlight (again narrow) reveals the NARRATOR still standing center stage, in swimming trunks and t-shirt.

NARRATOR: One day, I ran into Chris, and told him the news: I had pectus carinatum. “Maybe we were Siamese twins connected at the chest,” I said, “and the doctor sneezed while cutting us apart.” It did seem a strange coincidence that two best friends unknowingly had complementary rib cage deformities: his excavatum and my carinatum. To this day, I am convinced that my rib cartilage never made it to the medical incinerator. Instead, the surgeon had made from it a mistress, whose birthdate coincides with the date of my operation: August the twenty-second, nineteen hundred and ninety-one.

The spotlight goes out and the stage is dark.

PREACHER: A reading from the Gospel of John, Chapter 11, Verse 39: “‘Take away the stone,’ he said.”

The narrow spot reveals the NARRATOR, once again laid with arms outstretched on the table, wearing a paper hospital gown, open to the front, over his swimming trunks. He is facing up while speaking.

NARRATOR: I opened my eyes. It was Genesis. The elements came one at a time. First there was light.

The full stage lights come up, revealing, besides the NARRATOR on the table, several rows of empty tables around him.

NARRATOR: A bright, blinding light—those were my eyes. Then there were screams and machines—those were my ears. My tongue was covered in fog. A whiff of oxygen—my nose. But something was missing. Where was my body? Was it this thing here, in front of me? What do I do with it? I tried it on.

The NARRATOR sits up on the table, facing the audience.

NARRATOR: When I woke up in the recovery room, I yelled. Specifically, I yelled ‘Oh, fuck!’, but I don’t think anyone heard me, or if they did, they forgave me. The Ravitch procedure was complete. While I slept, surgeons had opened me up, destroyed my sternum, and rebuilt it to look the way God intended. The evidence: an incredible pain, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It seemed to extend from my sternum to my scalp, fingers, and toes. It was like my heart itself had been broken and I could do nothing but cry. Crying, I soon discovered, made the pain worse, so, I would gradually discover, did laughing, coughing, vomiting, sneezing, yawning, and bowling.

Two NURSES walk on stage with an IV stand, and attach the IV to the NARRATOR's arm, handing him a switch before walking offstage.

NARRATOR: I spent the first few days hooked up to a morphine drip. Every eight minutes, they told me, if I needed more of the juice, I could press a button and the beautiful machine would deliver my fix. Pressing the button more than once every eight minutes would not increase the delivery, but that first night, I spent hunched over the button, tapping out an S-O-S more than twenty times a minute—tap tap tap press press press tap tap tap … tap tap tap press press press tap tap tap … tap tap tap press press press tap tap tap … The next day was slightly better. The pain still took up much of my awareness, but I could see around it now. I looked under my gown at the mass of tape holding the incision closed (no staples or stitches were used) and the plastic tube protruding from my chest cavity, draining blood and fluid into a bag by the side of the bed. There was a bathroom to my left, a curtain to my right, and in front of my bed, a plastic chair and a small TV/VCR mounted high on the wall. I found a remote control and turned on the television.

The NARRATOR picks up a TV remote from the table next to him and turns on a television stage right. Two VISITORS enter stage left and sit on the empty table next to his. He ignores them.

NARRATOR: I probably had guests that day, but I couldn't remember them. Likely they came and went, taking turns sitting in that plastic chair and reading magazines. Conversations were painful because the questions put my mind on the operation and its consequences. I didn’t want to answer questions about how I felt because I didn’t want to think about it. The television asked no such questions—it ignored my plight and I loved it for its indifference. My visitors went largely unappreciated over my five-day internment. Hospital rules dictated that family members could visit, but friends could not, meaning fun was definitely out. My uncle and cousins visited me at my bedside, while my best friend had to stand down in the lobby and wave at the closed-circuit television camera. I dumbly waved back. I was too groggy for conversation, and gifts ranged from Legos I was too old to play with to a fruit basket full of fruit too hard for me to eat. More of the body’s muscles go into biting into an apple than one might assume. What did these people want from me? I had always thought it awkward to visit people in the hospital, but was assured that I was visiting for them, not for me, and that they appreciated the company. But here I was in the bed, and I most certainly did not appreciate having me people stare at me and nod gravely—it was awkward for them and it was awkward for me. They sat in the chair. I watched the television.

The NARRATOR stops speaking and watches television as the guests get up and exit stage left. The NARRATOR turns back to the audience.

NARRATOR: After three days in the hospital, I was due to depart on the next day. Finally getting hungry, for dinner I ordered chocolate milk and pizza. Each item appealed to me separately when selecting from the menu, and I failed to consider them en masse, and in conjunction with the blackberry-flavored Clearly Canadian sparkling water I had selected from a gift basket. I vomited. In response to this rapid, reflexive regurgitation, I was retained. Rats. They decided to keep me for an extra day, to ensure that my response was indeed to the combination of chocolate milk and pizza, and not to some medication.

The light goes out, including the TV, and the stage is dark.

PREACHER: A reading from the Gospel of John, Chapter 11, Verses 43 and 44: “Jesus called in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go.’”

A narrow spot reveals the narrator, in swimming trunks and t-shirt, standing center stage front, with the curtain closed behind him.

NARRATOR: On the morning of the fifth day, I was released. I moved slowly, and carefully, as if my heart were an egg. The next day, I went bowling. Because I’d only seen my friends on closed-circuit television, when my friend Eric called me and asked me to go bowling, I felt I couldn’t refuse. And maybe Eric didn’t even intend for me to bowl, just to watch him, but once I was at the bowling alley, it seemed like the thing to do. I knelt down, cradled the ball in my arms, stood up, ran toward the foul line, stopped suddenly, and let the momentum of the ball carry it down the lane. At my post-operative visit, a nurse peeled back the layers of white tape that had held shut my chest cavity for weeks, and revealed a long, pink scar horizontally across my ribs. In combination with my nipples, it appeared that I had a bored face on my chest. The face had a raised pink dot on its chin, below my sternum, evidence of my drainage hole. The doctor came in to ogle his handiwork. He seemed pleased—the scar was like his signature on his magnum opus, a crooked sternum that resembled what a sternum was supposed to look like—a sculpture of sorts: the Ravitch sculpture. I imagined meeting Chris again, walking down the street. We'd each lift our shirts and compare our experiences--no longer complementary, our scars now synchronized, harmonious, humming in resonant frequency.

The light fades out.

THE END.

Five Musical Madeleines

2009-04-18T22:18:00.003-05:00

"And suddenly the memory revealed itself. ... The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost palpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." -Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

1992. Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody

I'm in the back of a car with S. and her brother C. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is playing on the radio and I'm headbanging. S. thinks this is enormously clever because the movie "Wayne's World" has not yet been released in France. C. is likely rolling his eyes, as he did in response to most of my words or actions. We go miniature golfing. Their mother buys me Pepsi and Snickers, which they sneeringly nickname me—it is an easy diet between ten at night and four in the morning, while the family sleeps and I lay awake in S.'s bedroom, in my own time-zone, reading hundreds-pages Stephen King novels. I celebrate the end of each with a good wank before sleeping. When I get up in the afternoon, I open the door of my bedroom, step out onto the patio, and into the pool. S. joins me later and we play catch. Her top begins to come off as she jumps to catch the ball I purposely throw too high. She doesn't mind and neither do I. I throw it high again and her tipped top slides off onto the surface of the water. After the pool, I put together a puzzle while watching Ghostbusters dubbed into French. When I finish the puzzle, I get up for a celebratory Pepsi and Snickers and when I come back, C. is dismantling the puzzle and returning it to its box. The Olympics are on. So is a show where the Muppets sit at a bar with the masks of Mitterand and others of his cabinet and make wry comments over colored martinis. My sister calls from A.'s apartment, where she must share a bed with a nude A., and her mother wakes them each morning with a mocking "coo-coo!" I rudely point out that she is interrupting a show I barely understand. The family eats dinner on the patio. We have hamburger et frites, which compliments my Pepsi and Snickers diet, and S.'s father asks to examine my pectus carinatum. A year later I'm back in Cannes staying with T. He plays Queen to wake me in the morning until I threaten to shoot his poster of Alyssa Milano with a BB gun. He switches to "Come As You Are" and I shoot his poster anyway. You cannot order pizza here without black olives. There is no shower curtain, so I must squat in the tub with a handheld shower and still I manage to flood the floor each time. I spend as much time as possible hanging out with a girl down the hall. She speaks no English, so we listen to music. Occasionally her German exchange student translates between us. We sneak a beer and I mock catatonic, chanting "Bueller ... Bueller ... Bueller ..." She draws a picture of a rubber ducky on a piece of paper and tells me to "Fuck Off!" When T. leaves for Paris, we eat his Easter candy, fill the wrappers with toilet paper, and leave a note at the bottom of his basket that reads "Pas Moi."

1995. Television: 1880 Or So

I'm sitting on the floor next to the pool table--I'm fixing P.'s purse, and she kisses me. "The tender things are upon me now." I picture us as Li Baotian and Gong Li making love against the dye vats in Ju Dou, wet silk spilling across our bodies. We want to do more, but A. is in the room. A year earlier, I played billiards all summer in this room while listening to Television. I bought it while looking for a song that played in the background in PBS' "Rock and Roll" documentary, episode 9, while Richard Hell spoke, with a tag that read "Richard Hell, Television." It was months more before I found out that this song was "Blank Generation" by The Voidoids, and by that point I'd bought Adventure, Marquee Moon, and even The Blow-Up. The precision of Richard Lloyd's guitar picking echoes the clack of billiard balls. Now everything that occurs in this room, until we give away the pool table and abandon the house, sounds like Richard Lloyd and feels like P.'s lips on mine. P. decides two weeks later that she wouldn't leave her boyfriend (Li Wei) for me because I was leaving the country on a year abroad I'd signed up for after breaking up with my previous girlfriend, R. I cry all the way home while listening to the last mixtape she made me, with a photo of Gong Li on the cover. After I leave the country, P. makes a painting of R. "Oh rose of my heart, the vision dims."

1996. Sonic Youth: The Good and the Bad (Backwards)

I'm walking down the High Street with my headphones on, following a goth girl I'd spotted several blocks ago. She enters a bank and I stand outside, waiting to resume my chase. A woman crosses the street. She tells me she has been following me. As I walk, I listen to a tape I copied from L.--Sonic Youth's first album, which plays forward on one side and backward on the other. I didn't learn until the album was re-released on CD that they'd only done this for one edition of the tape. I reverse the CD so I can listen how I remember it, with a guitar vppp for each footfall, propelling me up and down High Street in search of people to follow or away from people that might be following me. I buy three posters for my room--one for Kieslowski's Bleu, one for Blur, and one with Renton's soliloquy from Trainspotting. I sit alone in my room, in the lotus position on my bed, and read the Trainspotting poster from end to beginning. I do this alone at first, and then in public, reading aloud "Teliot!, Teliot!" in an E.T. voice. I laugh at the assertion of a passing Subaru.

1998. Radiohead: Planet Telex

The apartment on Gelding Drive. S. makes hot dogs in the microwave. I try to make dinner using a black bean burger. The patty is bland, so I add barbecue sauce. This is too tangy, so I add Frosted Alphabits from S.'s collection of forty boxes of cereal ... I reason he can't miss it if I only take a little from each box. I sit down at the black lacquered table and turn on the CD player. Eating takes me five minutes only, but I always start at the beginning of The Bends. Sitting at his computer in the dining room, S. mocks the opening guitar to "Planet Telex." I counter his behavior by staging a life-size cardboard cut-out of Barbra Streisand next to his computer. Neither of us drinks normal milk. I drink soy and he drinks acidophilus with bifidobacterium. I also keep a hammer in the refrigerator because there's enough room and I have no other place to put a hammer where I will not lose it. There's a strip mall across the street where my sister works at a health food store next to an Italian cafe. I sit down for ten minutes ... if no one speaks to me, I walk out ... if someone takes my order, I ask for a pound of angel hair with tomato cream sauce. When we leave the apartment in S.'s car, he tunes the radio to a station that plays disco ... we're out of range of the tower, but S. reconstructs the song through the fuzz. All I hear is static.

2002. The Kinks: Lola

Driving north from Oberlin, Kansas, toward Valentine, Nebraska. I left home just a week before. Rolling dusty green hills broken by quick crevasses filled with saplings and dry streambeds. A few days earlier, at a gas station near Hermann, Missouri, I bought a few tapes to play in the car--Grandpa Jones, Johnny Bond, and The Kinks. Since then, a stop at the pirate house in Lawrence--no one was in so I unbuckled the typewriter, pulled up a cinderblock, and nothing came out. T. was asleep inside, I found out later. I stayed in F.'s mother's room--she was away in Alaska. In the hallway was a box of communal pornography--I contributed marginalia to some of the more interesting articles. We drank beer and talked all night under flashing neon lights. I woke up early, and wandered down to the living room where a train hopper with horns tattooed on his forehead was watching The Rock. I asked his name and in a dark brown voice he said "fuck." I continued west across Kansas, refueled in Junction City, had lunch in wide-boulevarded Russell, and went to the movies in Colby, twenty-five miles short of the Colorado border. It was windy, then, and I turned north toward Atwood and Ludell. The one motel in town was closed for the night, so I parked in the lot and crawled in the back to sleep. Up with the sun again, I passed through Ludell and Oberlin and once again aimed north, heading across western Nebraska toward the Black Hills. When Lo-Lo-Lo-Lo-Lola ends, I rewind the tape to the beginning of the song and let it go again and again.

TV 24-7-365

2009-03-30T17:20:00.001-05:00

The final piece for "TV Loves You Back March" on Voguing to Danzig.

Happy Days

2009-03-26T16:58:00.001-05:00

Yet one more piece in Voguing to Danzig's "TV Loves You Back March."

A History of Teeth

2009-03-22T08:30:00.016-05:00

H's teeth are coming in--he cries out at night. My teeth are coming out--I cry with him. Neither of us can sleep, and so, neither can L, whose teeth are fine and gums finer.

When I was short, I did not like to brush my teeth, and avoided it when possible. My sister brushed hers at least once daily--but when we went to the dentist, she had my cavities. She was my picture, hidden away.

A year ago, L talked me into going to see a dentist to tend to my aching, bleeding gums. They performed a deep cleaning--essentially flossing with a metal pick--the second time I've undergone this procedure. They also found, or claimed to, seven cavities.

"Come back next week and I'll fix it."

"Next week," I said, "I'm going to Australia."

When I did get cavities, they were in teeth that would soon fall out, one before the other. They drilled and filled the one that would fall out last. It fell out first.

This dentist was of the type that liked to lecture. Her expectation was not that I should floss at some reasonable interval, such as after meals, but constantly. It was the dental version of the "permanent revolution." I was to floss when I woke, before I went to bed, after meals, before meals, while driving, between meetings, etc. I took this advice like medicine for my first several visits, but one morning, arriving as the first appointment, she arrived at the same time--and as I took the stairs to the second floor office, she took an elevator. So I was now expected to take advice on oral hygiene from an overweight woman who would not take the stairs to the second floor? No more.

I did not go to the dentist for fifteen years. My wisdom teeth came in. I drank a glass of Tang and toughed it out.

After all seven cavities had been drilled and filled (she would only put temporary fillings in the wisdom teeth, which she recommended I have extracted), I excused myself from the office, moved, switched jobs, and had a baby. I never returned.

E had her wisdom teeth removed. She returned to me with numbed mouth--her kisses were dry and awkward. As a prize, she gave me her teeth. I put them in a film cannister with fake blood capsules. When M is not looking, I sneak them into my mouth, then hold my jaw and moan. When she asks what is wrong, I spit teeth and blood into my palm.

The problems with my teeth continued on and off. My gums bled almost without provocation. Even a bite into a banana left bloody residue on the stump. Bread was stained as it was eaten. Is stigmata of the gums a sign of the apocalypse?

C got braces to rein in his teeth. After a year or two, they gave up trying to fit his teeth into a mold. His face grew up around the teeth, and now they give him character.

The pain was not limited to my gums, which were in decent shape after healing from the last deep cleaning. Pain radiated out from my lower left jaw, up into my head, causing my eyes to blur and tear. I chose a new dentist, once again determined to set my teeth straight.

Meanwhile, I self-medicated. What I really wanted was lidocaine, which I'd been prescribed once for an ulcer on my uvula--I gargled with that and numbed my whole mouth, spent a good fifteen minutes after each dose playing with my lips. Now all I could get was benzocaine, 20%. There wasn't enough to gargle, so I squeezed some onto my finger and caressed my gums. But I couldn't scratch what itched.

T said she would not kiss D because of his teeth. They are clean, but slick and too long, like a dog's. My teeth are also like a dog's when I bite into a chicken leg. T has never seen me eat a chicken leg. Will she kiss me? What if I bite her leg?

Dr. M tells me it's not the wisdom teeth, but he thinks I should get them extracted anyway. "I can hardly even see them, so I don't think you could possibly brush them properly." The problem, he finds, is that the filling in the tooth just ahead of the wisdom tooth on the lower left side, number 18, is so deep that it may be in direct contact with the nerve. Irreversible pulpitis. The solution: Endodontic therapy--drill out the filling, remove the nerve, crown the tooth--a root canal.

My sister has not had a root canal. Am I now her picture of Dorian Gray?

"A root canal is to my thirties was a tattoo was to my twenties," I tell a co-worker.

"And a colonoscopy will be to your fifties," she replies.

From Nothing to Something and Back to Nothing

2009-03-13T19:40:00.001-05:00

Another piece in Voguing to Danzig's "TV Loves You Back March."

Wish Me No Whammies

2009-03-09T16:55:00.003-05:00

A rough draft of "Wish Me No Whammies" is part of Voguing to Danzig's "TV Loves You Back March."

Ten Statements About Hair (or Not) in Chronological Order of Occurrence

2009-02-28T21:28:00.005-05:00

When I was two years old, I tore out my grandmother's hair. We screamed. She grabbed her wig out of my hand and put it back on her head like a shower cap.
In high school, we were forbidden by the dress code to have hair past the tops of our collars. We grew our hair out the front instead, covering our faces. Even if our hair had touched our collars, no one would have recognized us.
I noticed my first grey hair at fourteen. "Hello, there," I said, to my age.
On a trip to Las Vegas after graduating high school, my father picked up a magazine advertising escort services and put it on his head to keep his scalp from being burned by the hundred-degree sun.
Weasel used Elmer's glue to keep his mohawk up. The child of one of the Christians who came to the square to pray for our salvation asked if she could touch his mohawk. He leaned over. Later that night we got caught in the rain and the white glue dripped down his face.
When I was nineteen years old, I sat on the floor of a girl's dorm room, helping her undo her braids. The first one came off in my hand. I didn't know what to do with it.
My friend M is bald on top and combs his side hair over to protect his head, or to make it look like he has hair, or something. On windy days, the hair flies up like a sail and he has trouble keeping his balance.
One morning in my late twenties, I though my hairline was preceding. Then I realized it only looked like it was advancing in the middle because it was in retreat on either side.
I have a worry spot just behind my hairline above my forehead. I pick there when I am anxious. If my hairline recedes in the middle, my worry spot will look like a bindi dot.
When I get my hair cut, I tell the barber not to cut it too short on the top of the back because it will stick up. I won't call it a cowlick because a cow has not been licking it.

Viviparous Blenny, Volume 1: Synchronicity

2009-02-22T22:03:00.002-05:00

Issue featuring work by three congregationalists:

Thomas Hawkins: "The Girl I Almost Married, and Then Did"
Walter Persky: "Come, Katya"
Paul Duckowitz: unititled comic

Meal Plans #1

2009-02-22T21:48:00.009-05:00

"And then it occurred to me, like a flash, that no one would refuse a man a meal if only he had the courage to demand it. I went immediately to a café and wrote a dozen letters. 'Would you let me have dinner with you once a week? Tell me what day is most convenient for you?' It worked like a charm. I was not only fed ... I was feasted. Every night I went home drunk. They couldn't do enough for me, these generous once-a-week souls. What happened to me between times was none of their affair. Now and then the thoughtful ones presented me with cigarettes, or a little pin money. They were all obviously relieved when they realized that they would see me only once a week. And they were still more relieved when I said--'it won't be necessary any more.' They never asked why. They congratulated me, and that was all. Often the reason was I had found a better host; I could afford to scratch off the ones who were a pain in the ass. But that thought never occurred to them. Finally I had a steady, solid program--a fixed schedule. On Tuesdays I knew it would be this kind of a meal and on Fridays that kind." -Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

"'We have a different calendar in Krakatoa. It [...] is a Restaurant Calendar. The months are shorter. There are twenty days to the Krakatoan month, and they are named after the families, 'A' Day, 'B' Day, 'C' Day, and so forth up to 'T' Day. There are eighteen months to the Krakatoan year. Each day of one of our months, we eat at a different restaurant. On 'A' Day, we eat at the A.'s Restaurant, on 'B' Day at the B.'s, and so forth. Each family only has to work on his day of the month. [...] We are all Americans here. The international restaurants were built simply to give variety to our days. When, in the early stages of our lives here, we found that we could all live happily under the Restaurant Government, we decided to make each restaurant different so that on certain days we could look forward to having a food which was unusual and good to eat. We Americans all have different inherited tastes so we decided that each restaurant should serve the food of a different nation. We arranged this alphabetically also. The A.'s run an American restaurant and serve only real American cooking. You are now eating at the B.'s. This is a British chop house. The C.'s run a Chinese restaurant. The D.'s run a Dutch restaurant, the E.'s an Egyptian restaurant; you can run through the alphabet up to T. The T.'s run a Turkish coffee house.'" -William Pène du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons

To be continued ... with 19th century Parisian café subscriptions, eating in utopia/dystopia (1984, Brave New World, News from Nowhere, etc.)

Cryptozoological Excuse #2

2009-02-22T21:02:00.002-05:00

Cryptozoological Excuse #1

2009-02-22T20:59:00.001-05:00

File Under Selfcontainment

2009-02-09T18:35:00.001-05:00

A sign that reads "Free Sign"
The question "Can I ask a question?"
"I" as an autoacronym

Inventory

2009-01-30T21:09:00.000-05:00

Grey hair, glasses
Beard--unkempt
And a round, tattooed torso
Past which I see only
The tip of my right shoe
That lets water seep to my sock
When I step in a puddle

Walter Persky: Christmas in Honolulu

2006-12-29T21:51:00.000-05:00

Eggs on the Street

2006-11-12T09:57:00.000-05:00

On hot days, can you really cook eggs on the sidewalk? Today we aim to find out. To turn from liquid to solid, the egg white needs to reach a temperature range of 62 to 70 degrees Celsius. The highest temperature on record is 58 degrees Celsius, measured on September 13, 1922, in Al ‘Aziziyah. It should be noted, however, that this is a measure of ambient temperature, not the temperature on a heat-conducting surface in direct sunlight. If you visit Al ‘Aziziyah, will you find someone frying an egg on the sidewalk? Not likely—the Libyans prefer their filfil harr mahshi bil hoot.

Vicinity Broadcasting of Digital Metadata

2006-10-22T08:55:00.000-05:00

Digital radio sends metadata with song information with the signal. This technique can also be used for vicinity broadcasting, with a local digital broadcast sent by a central unit to speaker modules. Cell phones can be modified to pick up this signal, displaying the song title, artist, etc., of the song playing, and allowing the user to download the song, if desired, from a digital music store, with charges to the user's phone bill. Car radios could be similarly modified and associated with an account. Hear a song you like in the bar, on the car radio, or while walking down the street? Press a button and it's yours.

Ugly Democracy

2006-09-28T20:56:00.000-05:00

If you want to know how democracy could be a bad thing, look at the ferrets on Swarmsketch. The center of the drawing is dominated by what appears to be a squirrel, or possibly a cat, but is certainly not a ferret, while the more ferret-omically correct creatures are relegated to the edges of the drawing. Swarmsketch offers up a random search term and invites users to contribute a short line to a collective sketch, and to vote on whether to keep or remove other sketchers’ lines. As “Ferrets” makes it clear, however, a majority of users aren’t even clear what a ferret looks like. Swarmsketch drawings inevitably wind up an almost incomprehensible doodle, including some evidence that users are voting to keep lines that are connected in no way to the central subject of the drawing—a profound result.

Clouds Over Buffalo

2006-09-26T19:01:00.000-05:00

Clouds 2006-09-12

2006-09-14T21:12:00.000-05:00

Clouds 2006-09-10

2006-09-10T16:57:00.000-05:00

More Clouds, Different State

2006-09-04T18:37:00.000-05:00

Crowded in a Box with a Blue Light On by Jean Coureaux

2006-09-04T10:40:00.000-05:00

Churn by Jean Coureaux

2006-09-04T09:39:00.000-05:00

Markov Music

2006-09-04T08:15:00.000-05:00

David Cope probably uses of Markov analysis to write "new" pieces by dead composers.

According to his notes, Cope bases his pieces on three principles:

deconstuction (analyze and separate into parts)
signatures (commonality - retain that which signifies style)
compatibility (recombinancy - recombine into new works)

I suspect Cope's software uses Markov analysis to establish style signatures.

Kansas Clouds

2006-08-29T19:35:00.000-05:00

Honk If You Love ...

2006-07-21T20:39:00.000-05:00

Gleaming the Cube

2006-07-15T18:17:00.000-05:00

After photocopying a 1989 article on painter David Bates at the library yesterday, I was supposed to toss the newspaper in the recycling bin, but then I saw this ...

It looks like someone (not me) took a bite out of Christian Slater's face. And did skateboarders ever wear flannel shirts tucked into pleated slacks? Even in 1989?

Manhattan Apartments by Walter Persky

2006-07-08T19:10:00.000-05:00

Lending Coöperatives

2006-07-08T16:31:00.000-05:00

Hula hoops, pet rocks, leg warmers, Manic Panic hair dye, ... distributed peer-to-peer loans? It's all the rage with the kids these days.

Here's how it works: lenders pick an amount of money to lend and an interest rate; borrowers pick an amount of money to borrow and an interest rate. Zopa and Prosper match lenders with borrowers, diversifying/distributing the loaned money across many borrowers and the borrowed money across many lenders, to minimize risk. Borrowers with poor credit are considered higher risk, but lenders who are willing to take that risk with a distributed loan, can charge a higher interest rate to cover the risk.

Weekend Coincidences

2006-07-02T20:39:00.000-05:00

Coincidence 1: Reading two separate articles in two separate publications, I encountered the word 'midden', in both cases referring to a refuse pile (mostly) consisting of discarded oyster shells.

Coincidence 2: L and I watched a documentary on Koko the gorilla on public television. Later that night, I read an article on a gorilla from the National Zoo who died while having heart surgery. (It was not Dick Cheney.)

Coincidence 3: Driving home, 'You Be Illin'' played on my iPod, with the first lines ("One day when I was chillin' in Kentucky Fried Chicken/Just mindin' my business, eatin' food and finger lickin'") coming on just as we passed a KFC.

Superstar

2006-06-26T19:22:00.000-05:00

"In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."

-Andy Warhol

"And ... action."

I stand by the dumpster with a log cradled in my arms.

A man and his young son cross the parking lot, weave between two gas pumps and walk toward a white van parked to my left. As they approach, I lift up the lid to the dumpster, throw in my log, turn, and wave. I walk behind the dumpster, over to the wall, and stand.

"Cut. You're finishing your work before you're in frame. I'll give you a cue when you should put the log in the dumpster."

"Places! And ... action."

I stand by the dumpster with a log cradled in my arms.

A man and his young son cross the parking lot, weave between two gas pumps and walk toward a white van parked to my left. I watch the director for my cue. Then I notice the man behind him waving at me. I lift up the lid to the dumpster, throw in my log, turn, wave quickly to catch up with the scene, and walk away.

"Cut. Don't be so dismissive with your wave. You know him. You let him sleep in the bathroom."

"Places! And ... action."

I stand by the dumpster with a log cradled in my arms.

A man and his young son cross the parking lot, weave between two gas pumps and walk toward a white van parked to my left. As they approach, I lift up the lid to the dumpster, throw in my log, turn, and wave. I walk behind the dumpster, over to the wall, and stand.

"Cut."

Three Things I Learned By Taking the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Audition Test

2006-06-18T13:01:00.000-05:00

While I knew that 2T, 3T, and 4T were standard sizes of toddler wear, cerulean is considered to be blue, mules usually can't reproduce (thank you, Liberty Heights, for that factoid), and there have been three U.S. presidents named George (my father claims there were only two--the other one, he contends, doesn't count), I still flunked the written test in the audition for "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

I found most of the thirty questions easy, a few at least logically deducible, and there were only about five where I was forced to guess. Of those five, I guessed three wrong, giving me a 90 percent score--not high enough, apparently, to move on to the personality interview.

But, hey, now I know these things:

1. Barbie's middle name is Millicent. I didn't even know Barbie had a middle name. Her full name, for the record, is Barbara Millicent Roberts. She has six siblings (Skipper, Tutti, Todd, Stacie, Kelly, and Krissy). I swear I must have gone to school with at least one of these WASP-y bitches.

Barbie and Ken dated from 1961 to 2004, when they broke up. Ken has a brother named Tommy, and I'll bet he had something to do it.

Two of the other choices were Martha and Ruth. I figured Ruth was a trick, going for the sound association with Baby Ruth, so I chose Martha instead. If I'd known that Barbie had a sister named fucking Tutti, I would have chosen Millicent.

2. Oprah Winfrey is one of the founders of Oxygen Media. My other choices were Quincy Jones, Martha Stewart, and Emeril Lagasse. I didn't even know what Oxygen Media was, but it sounded like it had something to do with cable TV, and I associated it with SpikeTV, another cable channel I'm too cheap to spring for.

I logically deduced (incorrectly) that if Martha or Oprah were going to start a cable channel, it would be part of their existing media conglomerate. That left me with Quincy Jones and Emeril Lagasse (the two choices I would have immediately eliminated had I ever seen the Oxygen network). I knew Quincy Jones is a musician and that Emeril is some kind of celebrity chef, and cable TV loves chefs, so that sort of made sense. Even though it was WRONG.

3. The powder inside the Etch-a-Sketch is aluminum powder. Maybe it was the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" logo pencil I was using that chose for me, but I picked graphite powder.

When my number wasn't called, I pocketed the pencil and left.

At least Jeopardy! gives you a pen.

Shoes

2006-06-18T11:51:00.000-05:00

I. Seven Up

In fourth grade, we play a game called Seven Up. Seven people stand at the front of the room while the rest of us close our eyes and put our heads down on our desks. The seven then walk through the room, each one of them tapping one of us on the head. When the seven return to the front of the room, we lift our heads and those who have been tapped guess which one of the seven tapped them.

I cheat by looking through my elbow at the shoes of my tapper. It is A. When she returns to the front of the room, she says to another one of the seven, E (the first girl I ever see faint), "I picked someone I like." When it is my turn to guess, I chose J.

II. A History of My Shoes

August 1998: S picks me up to go to the club. Outside the club, I change into my dancing shoes and put my street shoes in the trunk of S's car. I meet a red-headed woman in the club. She writes her phone number on a red napkin. When S drops me off, I forget my shoes, leaving them in the trunk. The next day, D lends me a pair of shoes he intended to discard, to wear until I get my shoes back from S.

S disappears. I continue wearing D's shoes for two years, wearing holes through the soles until my socks get wet when I step in puddles.

May 2000: G and I drive 900 miles to Missouri to pick up D and his bike. When we arrive at D's apartment, he is not there. G and I walk around the neighborhood. It has just rained, and my socks get wet when I step in puddles. When D arrives, I complain about my wet socks. He gives me a pair of sneakers he intended to discard.

April 2004: I am married to the red-headed woman I met in the club. I am mowing the hill on the side of our lawn while wearing D's sneakers, which have separated at the sole on the outside of the left shoe. I step out through the separation, and plant my foot on the lawn.

I walk to Sneaker Town and buy shoes.

Free Sign

2006-06-05T19:38:00.000-05:00

News or Gossip?

2006-05-19T10:43:00.000-05:00

"Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!" -Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondent's Association Dinner

"One of the cardinal rules of journalism is that if a person alleges factual errors but then refuses to provide details, that person is just blowing smoke." -Andrew Leonard, Salon.com

"Tell me what you want, what you really really want." -Spice Girls, Wannabe

Reporter: Sir, Mr. Smith has said that you support tax increases for middle-class voters. How do you repond to that?

Mr. Jones: How do I respond to that?

Reporter: Yes.

Mr. Jones: How do you respond to that? I don't care what Mr. Smith thinks about me, I don't expect him to vote for me.

Reporter: How do you respond to his allegations?

Mr. Jones: Are they true?

Reporter: That's my question.

Mr. Jones: No, your question was about how I respond to his allegations. That's not my job. You're the reporter. Go find out if it's true. If it is, by all means come back and ask me about it. If it isn't true, go ask him about it.

If Watergate happened today, the Washington Post would print an article with the headline: "Top Source Says Nixon a Crook" and leave it at that. The national media seems to think that to deliver a "balanced" story, they must present two diametrically opposed positions, giving them equal creedence, regardless of whether these positions can be supported with verifiable facts. Deep Throat told Woodward to "follow the money," and Woodward and Bernstein did just that, investigating and putting together a newspaper story, not a gossip column.

This is the same culture shift that allows intelligent design to be considered equally credible to evolution. One has facts that can be tested and either proven or disproven--the other is based solely on belief.

Information Infiltration

2006-05-19T09:20:00.000-05:00

Working Just Outside the Quotes

In Lytton Strachey's biographical essay "The Sad Story of Dr. Colbatch," he writes: "The rector of Orewell was 'a casuistic drudge,' a 'plodding pupil of Escobar,' an insect, a snarling dog, a gnawing rat, a maggot, and a cabbage-head. His intellect was as dark as his countenance; his 'eyes, muscles, and shoulders were wrought up in the most solemn posture of gravity'; he grinned horribly; he was probably mad; and his brother's beard was ludicrously long."

Strachey begins his description of the rector of Orewell with quoted "facts," but then he drops the quotes and extrapolates into such increasingly ridiculous descriptions as "cabbage-head."

Strachey's syntactical manipulation was intended as a joke, so he didn't work very hard to conceal it. But he could have very well inserted one reasonable unquoted fabrication amidst several quotes and few would have noticed.

Valid Fakes

In Orson Welles' Vérités et mensonges (aka F for Fake), master art forger Elmyr de Hory repeatedly expresses his disdain for the dual construct of "art markets" and "art experts." De Hory used expert dealers to validate his fakes, knowing that there was a certain plasticity to their expertise--because it was in their financial interest for these paintings to be real. If the dealers later realized they'd been deuped by de Hory, they wouldn't reveal the scheme, because it would wreck their "expert" credibility. (De Hory himself never sold directly to collectors.)

One dealer recalled asking de Hory if he had a Modigliani portrait of Soutine. He said that he didn't. Later that night, the dealer got a call from de Hory who just happened to have found such a portrait in his drawer.

Ironically, after his fakery was revealed, a market developed for de Hory's false paintings.

Information Infiltration

Strachey's technique used proximity to facts to validate his falsehoods. Elmyr de Hory used a weak point of entry to validate his. Both are methods of information infiltration--the acceptance of fabricated content into the broader corpus of knowledge.

JCX@BQE

2006-05-08T18:26:00.000-05:00

Photos from LuckyRobotYear by Jean Coureaux at the R-Bar in Brooklyn.
On exhibit through May 2006.

Portrait of AM by Walter Persky

2006-04-23T12:59:00.001-05:00

Walter Persky at the National Gallery

2006-04-20T17:53:00.000-05:00

Four Paintings

2006-04-07T17:46:00.000-05:00

The Delaware Art Museum recently acquired four paintings, all historically insignificant and aesthetically vacant.

Which is the most hideous? You decide:

Untitled by Dan S. Groesbeck:

"They stopped at a water-hole and filled the ollas" (1912) by Gayle Porter Hoskins"

Marooned (2004) by Leonard Filgate (that's an anthropomorphic mouse in a bathing costume laying on a rock):

Two Clowns (1940) by Walt Kuhn:

"Some of My Best Friends are Skateboarders!"

2006-04-03T20:28:00.000-05:00

The Wilmington Skate Project will be hosting an art show benefit to help raise awareness and funds for the future Wilmington Skate Plaza.

Saturday, April 22nd, 5-10 pm at the Brandywine Town Community Center at Naamans road and Route 202. (The building by the fountain). Participating artists include Shepard Fairey, House Industries, Evan Hecox, Andy Jenkins, Chris Pastras, Jim Houser, Jean Coureaux, and more. There will be a suggested $5 donation at the door. Selected works will be available for purchase.

Next Thursday

2006-03-21T20:41:00.000-05:00

Some people, when I say I'm going to do something next Thursday, assume I mean the next Thursday that occurs (the 23rd of March), and some assume I mean the Thursday that occurs in the next week (the 30th of March). For part of the week, these assumptions will coincide, but for part of the week, they will not.

How do people learn what "next Thursday" means? Do the differences break down along social or geographical lines?

Dreaming Again Again

2006-03-18T09:16:00.000-05:00

In a town in the southeastern United States, I attend a soccer game, but leaving the game, there seems to be some unrest. At first I think it is hooliganism, but as I drive away, I see scattered groups of people fighting, signs of lawlessness.

My car runs out of gas. I get out and walk down the street, trying not to be spotted. I find a school. The doors are barricaded with chairs, but when I knock, someone moves the chairs to let me in. I pace in the hallway, and try to call L with my cell phone. There is no answer.

It is dark outside now. I leave the school and walk back to my car. There are drunk people with guns sprawled out on lawns, looking for trouble. I stay to the shadows, duck into alleys, but am sometimes surprised by spotlights hooked up to motion detectors. I get back to my car, but I don't know how I'll get home.

Dreaming Again

2006-03-17T08:05:00.000-05:00

L and I go to a Ruth's Chris Steak House for J's birthday. We wait in line to get inside. A waiter comes out to tell us the specials--all red meat. Because I don't eat red meat, L offers to go somewhere else for dinner, to catch up with J and his friends later. But I know she likes red meat, so I tell her I'm not hungry anyway.

We go inside and sit at a table with J and his other friends. When we sit at our places, we find our drinks are already at our places, without having ordered. Mine is a bottle of Tsingtao, but when I drink it, it tastes like iced tea.

This morning, I confirmed with L that J is a vegetarian.

Another Dream

2006-03-16T18:43:00.000-05:00

As I fell asleep, I thought about a virtual library where the books could all be rearranged at a click according to any of the metadata. I could browse the library, viewing the titles on the spines, select a book, open a book, view the contents, etc. I could also narrow my search, and as it narrowed, only the relevant books would appear on the shelves. I could even build private libraries, by labeling books, having them appear in my libraries for linguistics, library science, or a collection of books by the members of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle.

I am in a library of only four million volumes. I’m puzzled by the relatively small collection in contrast with the grand, sweeping design of the building. I take an escalator to the fourth floor, with the feeling I’m doing something forbidden. When I reach the top, a wall of windows to my right looks out over the street of a northern city, somewhere in Scandinavia, or even Canada. To my left, automatic glass doors lead to a walkway to some other building, or possibly a parking garage. The motion sensor is broken or turned off—as I approach, the doors do not open. I can see some building supplies piled up inside, as if the interior of the walkway is still under construction.

I go back down the escalator and out onto the street. My sister is there. Together, we go to a giant stone church, at least eight stories high before it even begins to converge to the steeple. I realize now that this northern town is Reykjavik, and the church is a much taller version of Hallgrímskirkja, as if eight stories had suddenly lifted up beneath it. It also reminded me of the Salt Lake LDS temple—perhaps instead of Reykjavik, this was Salt Lake City.

My sister and I take the stairs up to the eighth floor. The inside looks like a school hallway, with doors into classrooms—none of the grandiosity one might expect in a church of this size. We walk out onto a balcony. The church is on a hill, overlooking the downtown area. A low, black cloud drifts over downtown, with dark funnels reaching to the street, destroying everything in their path. We decide to stay in the church until it passes, and move toward the center of the building, away from windows. A group of school children joins us. My sister tries to reach her husband using her cell phone, but can’t get a connection.

[I've only been to the downtown part of Salt Lake City once, but upon realizing that the church my sister and I entered reminded me of a Mormon temple, I began to look at pictures of the Salt Lake LDS temple, a tornado ripping through downtown SLC, and the SLC Public Library, all of which resemble the places and events in my dream (and thereby linked above). I have never been inside the Salt Lake LDS temple or the SLC Public Library, and I do not recall having prior knowledge of the 1999 tornado. And for the record, the SLC Public Library has only a half a million volumes, though that could account for my puzzlement over what seemed a collection too small for the building.]

A Dream

2006-03-15T19:50:00.000-05:00

A giant woodpecker with a pelican beak and yellow plumes on its brow pecks on the glass door. Then he flies off and comes back with a dead, flattened crow in its beak, dropping it outside the door for my inspection.

I open the door and step over the crow, onto the deck. The woodpecker is gone.

I feel the boards of the deck bowing up into the arches of my feet. I step aside and the tip of the pelican beak punches through the wood and withdraws. Again, I feel the boards bowing against my feet.

I step over the crow and back inside.