Daily Shane

New York doesn't love you

2011-05-13T17:35:00.001-07:00

"The subway ride to Colombia is far. It was like really scary to do by yourself? It was like half an hour *gum snap*. The people were weird? I wish this was a new train? Where are we going again. I'd much rather go to nyu. What's that smell? Ugh I almost fell?!"

The subway is dirty. The crazy people who live here have more of a right to talk as loudly as you are right now. That tall blank guy singing California dreamin on an out of tune guitar, that old woman completely decked out in gold lemay, that other old woman that can take a single step forward with out arching backing and throwing all her wait forward while at the same time yelling "Aaaahhhhhhh shit" (she does this with every step), the little drunk Mexican who fell asleep and sneezed on my arm, the fat black lady who sat on half my thigh, and the man who finished off a whole bottle of sleeping pills while everyone watched as he slipped away (I'm disgust mind you. Don't worry I told he conductor. Wonder what happened to him). All of these people the crazy the smelly the dead eyed commuters the insanely agitated and opinionated middle aged women with eccentric fashion tastes, they all belong here. New York loves them. New York doesn't love you though, new York doesn't even like you, new York wouldnt walk across the street to piss in your mouth if your teeth were on fire. So stop complaining. Next time take a cab.

True love is...

2011-05-12T10:52:00.000-07:00

Picking up another beings poop.

The truth is...

2011-05-11T20:11:00.000-07:00

The beauty of finding five bucks on the subway platform beats the shit out of a fifty hour work week.

Warren Ellis says

2010-05-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

"Dance like you're stamping on a human face forever, love like you've been in a serious car crash that minced the front of your brain, stab like no one can arrest you, and live like there's no such thing as God."
— Warren Ellis

Pulled Down Shade- Bukowski

2010-03-30T07:51:00.000-07:00

what I like about you
she told me
is that you're crude --
look at you sitting there
a beercan in your hand
and a cigar in your mouth
and look at
your dirty hairy belly
sticking out from
under your shirt.
you've got your shoes off
and you've got a hole
in your right stocking
with the big toe
sticking out.
you haven't shaved in
4 or 5 days.
your teeth are yellow
and your eyebrows
hang down
all twisted
and you've got enough
scars
to scare the shit
out of anybody.
there's always
a ring
in your bathtub
your telephone
is covered with
grease
and
half the crap in
your refrigerator is
rotten.
you never
wash your car.
you've got newspapers
a week old
on the floor.
you read dirty
magazines
and you don't have
a tv
but you order
deliveries from the
liquor store
and you tip
good.
and best of all
you don't push
a woman to
go to bed
with you.
you seem hardly
interested
and when I talk to you
you don't
say anything
you just
look around
the room or
scratch your
neck
like you don't
hear me.
you've got an old
wet towel in
the sink
and a photo of
Mussolini
on the wall
and you never
complain
about anything
and you never
ask questions
and I've
known you for
6 months
but I have
no idea
who you are.
you're like
some
pulled down shade
but that's what
I like about
you:
your crudeness:
a woman can
drop
out of your
life and
forget you
real fast.
a woman
can't go anywhere
but UP
after
leaving you,
honey.
you've got to
be
the best thing
that ever
happened
to
a girl
who's between
one guy
and the next
and has nothing
to do
at the moment.
this fucking
Scotch is
great.
let's play
Scrabble.

This is Water

2010-03-08T10:03:00.000-08:00

David Foster Wallace

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Happy In Paraguay

2010-03-04T08:52:00.001-08:00

Super Emo Friends

2009-12-27T10:56:00.001-08:00

Keeping Things Whole - mark strand

2009-12-26T09:01:00.000-08:00

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- Mark Strand

Inner Peace

2009-12-15T06:29:00.001-08:00

I dont usually get all spiritual but this email I got recently really makes a point

Subject: Inner Peace

I am passing this on to you because it definitely works, and we could all use a little more calmness in our lives. By following simple advice heard on the Dr. Phil show, you too can find inner peace. Dr. Phil proclaimed, "The way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started and have never finished.

So, I looked around my house to see all the things I started and hadn't finished, and before leaving the house this morning, I finished off a bottle of White Zinfandel, a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream, a package of Oreos, the remainder of my old Prozac prescription, the rest of the cheesecake, some Doritos, and a box of Godiva. You have no idea how freakin' good I feel right now!

Pass this on as it was to me.

ATHF Christmas

2009-12-14T06:36:00.000-08:00

12 Days Of Guido Christmas

2009-12-13T06:41:00.000-08:00

No Offense meant... just for fun

What's are we going to do tonight Brain?

2009-12-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

Watching the Animaniacs Christmas special on VHS this morning (one of the perks of working from home)
and I thought I would share a little christmas spirit and nostalgia for 90s cartoons.
Oh Pinky and the Brain... edu-tainment, where have thou gone.

Inception

2009-11-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

Christopher Nolans newest due out this summer. Looks pretty cool.

A Little Bohemian Rhapsody Gentlemen....

2009-11-26T07:18:00.000-08:00

Once again the Muppets and Jim Henson studios prove their genius with their cover of Bohemian Rhapsody....

Here's a LINK to an editorial that was published that I wrote about the muppets.

Happy thanksgiving.
Ps this song even funnier if you have a sense of humor like I do

The Christian Side-Hug: “Front Hugs Be Too Sinful” - The Sexist - Washington City Paper

2009-11-24T18:42:00.000-08:00

The Christian Side-Hug: “Front Hugs Be Too Sinful” - The Sexist - Washington City Paper

Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious

2009-11-21T08:16:00.000-08:00

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
Published: November 18, 2009
Thanks to improved research techniques and a growing understanding of the biochemistry and the genetics of thought itself, scientists are beginning to tease out how exercise remodels the brain, making it more stress-resistant.

Click Here for Full Article

Film remakes....

2009-11-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

With Hollywood rehashing old ideas left and right to try and secure somewhat of a predictable profit margin.... here's a comparison of two films and their contemporary counter parts....

First
For those of you that haven't seen Harvey Keitel in the original Bad Lieutenant. You should.
FOr those of you that have you might under stand why Werner Herzog directing Nick Cage in a sort of remake of the same premise makes me nervous and a little confused but so far the reviews have been good.

HARVEY

Versus

NICK

Although the very last line in the Nick Cage Trailer is pretty bad ass.

Secondly

As for the zombie-esque apocalypse to go with the end of days movies that parallel our diseaster obsessed culture.
Here's one where the remake might not suck but probably will but the trailer is pretty awesome.

So check out both versions of the Crazies and think about the coverage of H1N1 and swine flu.

George A. Romero's Original 1973 Version

2009

The evolution of the God Gene

2009-11-16T05:44:00.001-08:00

From The New York Times:

The Evolution of the God Gene

New research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development.

click here for full article

Them Crooked Vultures

2009-11-15T08:55:00.000-08:00

THE Dave Grohl on drums (where he belongs), Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age vocals/guitar, and the former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones are releasing their album tuesday. 11/17...

Them crooked vultures..... so maybe rock isn't dead.

Here are some excerpts from the Times

Them Crooked Vultures’ music — long, twisting songs with multiple sections and tempos, shot through with a scuzzy menace and dark humor — is more complex than the sounds of the Foo Fighters. Mr. Grohl called it “the most musical band I’ve ever been in"

Mr. Homme said that he considers Mr. Grohl a great frontman, but that “when he plays the drums, he always leaves my jaw dropped — that’s really where the world needs him.”

You can listen to the whole album through youtube at the moment via

http://www.themcrookedvultures.com/

Rock on and stop listening to coldplay.

Fair play: Monkeys share our sense of injustice

2009-11-15T08:35:00.000-08:00

FROM THE NEW SCIENTIST

"Concern about fairness is always asymmetrical (stronger in the poor than the rich), and the underlying emotions aren't half as lofty as the ideal itself. It is true to say that our sense of fairness seldom transcends self-interest, that it is seldom concerned with something larger than ourselves. Look at how it starts in life. Children react to the slightest discrepancy in the size of their slice of pizza compared to their sibling's. Their shouts of "That's not fair!" never transcend their own desires.

That this sense of unfairness may turn out to be quite ancient in evolutionary terms as well became clear when graduate student Sarah Brosnan and I discovered it in monkeys. While testing pairs of capuchin monkeys, we noticed how much they disliked seeing their partner get a better deal. "

CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE Fair play: Monkeys share our sense of injustice

Screen Memories A.O.Scott

2009-11-13T13:40:00.001-08:00

From the NY Times:

Many years ago, in an age of chaos and confusion, in a world where time was money and pleasure was work, I saw a movie that changed my life forever. It was called “My Dog Skip.”
Perhaps you remember it. To be perfectly honest, I don’t. There was a dog named Skip, of course (a Jack Russell terrier with a taste for bologna) — who lived in Mississippi in some bygone, innocent era before the present age of chaos and confusion, in a world where . . . — but never mind. Kevin Bacon was in the movie and also Luke Wilson and the kid from “Malcolm in the Middle.” I recollect this stuff only because I looked back at an old newspaper review, the first I ever wrote as a film critic for The New York Times.
That was in January 2000. Since then, more than 5,000 movies have come and gone and been reviewed in The Times, most of them still living somewhere in the lucrative zombie limbo of DVD or cable programming. Some landed noisily on thousands of screens at once, gobbling up as much attention and money as the marketing machinery of the studios could buy, at least for a weekend or two. Others bloomed quietly in big-city art houses and were smiled on (if they were lucky) by ardent critics and die-hard cinephiles. Some won Oscars they didn’t deserve. Many more deserved better than they got from the Academy or the public. There were extravagant spectacles of superheroism and planetary disaster; blue-chip biopics in which famous actors impersonated famous historical personages; handsome adaptations of prizewinning literary novels; coarse comedies; exquisite relationship studies; noisy cartoons; muckraking documentaries; D.I.Y. video oddities; and multisequel franchises with lovable heroes like Harry Potter, Shrek and Jigsaw.
Did I miss any? Not as many as I might have wanted, perhaps, though at the same time I often feel as if I have some catching up to do. And after 10 years, with the calendrical end of the decade as further excuse and inspiration, I find myself wondering which of those thousands will last. And also, how, why and in what form. The possibility of a digital, on-demand afterlife guarantees at least a theoretically universal long-tail immortality to blockbusters and curiosities alike. But this state of database nonoblivion is not the same as being held in memory. Which movies are sure to be remembered? Which movies deserve to be? Are these really two different questions?
Every movie fan with the slightest scholarly or antiquarian bent carries around a canon culled from film history, a register of consensus masterpieces, important milestones and significant developments, from “The Birth of a Nation” to “Saving Private Ryan,” with a roster in between that seems, in hindsight, to be as fixed as the reading list in a college literature survey. (And of course is really every bit as much a result of argument, changes in fashion and wholesale revisionism.) There is “Citizen Kane” and the first two “Godfathers.” There are Ingmar Bergman and Yasujiro Ozu and Jean-Luc Godard.
But alongside the official pantheon occasionally incarnated in lists offered up by institutions like the American Film Institute and The New York Times, every film lover carries around a more subjective canon, an ever-shifting, impressionistic personal cinematheque. That horror movie that gave you nightmares as a child. The love story you saw on your first date with the love of your life. The dramas that ended or started friendships, soothed you in your lonely moments or made the loneliness more acute. The westerns that taught you something about courage or treachery, the comedies that schooled you in sex, the epics and biopics that overshadowed what you learned in history class.
No one, not even professional critics, lives through film history in proper chronological order. Two of the best, most lavishly praised movies of the past decade were “Le Cercle Rouge” and “Army of Shadows,” crepuscular classics by the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville that had fallen through the cracks of the distribution system back in 1969 and 1970, when they were made. And when Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” an anti-utopian, early science-fiction monument desecrated in its own time and venerated ever after, appeared in a restored and expanded version, its timeliness was at least as striking as its durability. The best new movies carry intimations of permanence along with their novelty and very quickly start to seem as if they had been around all along.
Perhaps the easiest and most satisfying way to make sense of the unruly cinematic abundance of the past 10 years is to sift through it for masters and masterpieces, kicking the tires to see what has been built to last. Whatever else was going on, a handful of great filmmakers made a handful of great films, just as in other decades. Steven Spielberg, freed in the ’90s by the successes of “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” from the burden of importance, made a series of bracingly imaginative entertainments — “Minority Report,” “Catch Me if You Can,” “War of the Worlds,” “Munich” and “The Terminal” in addition to “A.I.” — that were both nimble and deeply resonant. Clint Eastwood, in his 70s, entered the most prolific and diverse phase of his career as a director, breathing new life into long-established Hollywood genres, including the boxing picture (“Million Dollar Baby”), the crime thriller (“Mystic River”) and the combat epic (“Letters From Iwo Jima”). Martin Scorsese collected his overdue Academy Award for “The Departed”; Joel and Ethan Coen won their first Best Picture Oscar, for “No Country for Old Men,” in the midst of popping out a film a year. Gus Van Sant, Robert Altman, P. T. Anderson, Spike Jonze, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Todd Haynes. The canon of American cinema, since the early ’60s a catalog of acknowledged auteurs, expanded significantly in the new century.
Outside Hollywood, Pedro Almodóvar continued to mature into the post-sexual-revolution cinema’s most exalted and authentic exponent of the melodramatic tradition. In France, the geriatric New Wave generation (Rohmer, Rivette, Resnais, Chabrol) proved remarkably spry, even as a middle generation, including Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas and others, competed with the old-timers for prizes and attention. Every year, the Cannes Film Festival, the leading world-heritage site for the veneration of filmmakers, presented a remarkably consistent roll call of directorial renown. Wong Kar-wai, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Abbas Kiarostami, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. These may not be household names even in movie-mad American households, but they are inscribed in the registry of important international filmmakers.
Most critics, when they assemble their personal canons, will implicitly follow the director-centric impulses of the auteur theory, even if they retain some skepticism about the theory itself. That is, we will gravitate toward favored filmmakers, with plenty of room for argument about choices within a given body of work — why “Letters From Iwo Jima” and not “Changeling”? — as well as about the stature of particular artists. Are the Coens profligate geniuses or clever, cold-hearted pranksters? (“Both” may be the only acceptable answer.) Is Soderbergh a protean visionary or a formalist hack? (See above.) Such arguments, infinitely extendable and happily interminable, are what sustain film criticism in its various incarnations, professional and amateur, printed, blogged and tweeted.
This kind of argumentation has the double appeal of being both stimulating and fundamentally conservative. It allows us to think about cinema — a restless, constantly changing art form — as something fundamentally stable and coherent, in the way that other arts are imagined to be. And the emphasis on great directors and their masterpieces is also useful as an organizing principle for festival programs, film-studies syllabuses and museum retrospectives. It is, in other words, the institutional form of film criticism.
But defending — or assaulting — the reputations of prominent filmmakers and assessing the merits of their oeuvres is not the only, or even the dominant, way to arrive at some sense of a movie canon. This may have been the era of Spielberg and the Coens and the rest. But it is equally the age of “Gladiator” and “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings” and “Shrek” and “Saw” (and “My Dog Skip”) and a whole slew of new and rebooted superhero franchises. And also of Pixar, one of the few companies after Disney (which acquired it in 2006) to achieve something like auteur status in its own right.
In other words, the director-focused approach that is the default position for critics tends to angle away from how the audience — and not just the hypothetically unsophisticated, hype-hungry mass audience — responds to movies. It’s not exactly that critical judgment is opposed to, or out of touch with, popular taste. On the contrary, some of the most widely and ardently beloved franchise movies of the decade, like Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” and Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings,” have buttressed their directors’ claims to exalted, authorial status. But the critical habit of thinking in terms of collected works and major and minor artists does not correspond to the way viewers sample and discover their cinematic pleasures.
Or to the way we — by which I now mean the laity, not the certified members of the guild — remember them. What do we remember? Catch phrases, stars’ faces, scenes and sensations. Westerns, weepies, screwball comedies, sword-and-sandal spectacles, gritty little realist dramas. Feelings, images, themes.
The unofficial, demotic history of cinema is built out of these impressions and out of the patterns that turn movies into a warped, unignorable mirror of the world they inhabit. Unspool the 20th century in your head and most likely you see a progression of genres and styles: slapstick comedy in the teens, kohl-eyed melodrama in the ’20s, followed by gangster movies, screwball comedies, combat epics, films noirs, musicals and Technicolor westerns. The rebel Hollywood of the ’70s gives way to the blockbuster-mad ’80s, which is followed by the rise of the indies in the ’90s. And then?
And then Frodo and Spider-Man, Mumblecore and midbudget Oscar bait, Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen, “The Dark Knight” and the Transformers movies, along with everything else. Everything else including terrorism, war, political polarization, environmental anxiety and an economic bubble whose bursting cast a backward pall over the era’s extravagance, much as 9/11 seems to shadow even those pictures conceived and released before the attacks.
How else to make sense of the prevalence of revenge as a motive, a problem and a source of catharsis? It was hardly a new topic — payback has been the common currency of cowboys and samurai, rogue cops and righteous criminals, for a very long time — but in noncomic genres vengeance could seem like the only game in town. Sometimes the urge to repay blood with blood was treated with skepticism or at least with a sense of moral complication, as in “Mystic River” or “In the Bedroom” or “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.” But the tone for mainstream commercial entertainment was set early on, when “Gladiator” won the first Best Picture Oscar of the new decade. And nearly every hero thereafter, from Aragorn and Harry Potter to Spider-Man and even the newly young Mr. Spock and the newly sad James Bond, was caught up in a Manichaean struggle defined by an endless cycle of vendetta and reprisal.
This was even true of Jesus, whose travails in Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” played like the first act of a revenge drama, the one in which the hero is humbled as pre-emptive justification for whatever fury he comes back to unleash at the end. The violence in that film, which seemed shocking at the time, now seems fairly typical of a mainstream popular cinema saturated with images of bodily torment.
And also, perhaps, of a taste for primal, antimodern scenarios of action and reaction, in which the nuances of politics and the deliberative institutions of justice are treated with suspicion, even contempt. George Lucas’s final — which is to say middle — chapter in the “Star Wars” cycle was unusual in taking a critical view of this impulse, but not in placing it at the center of an allegorical epic. The bitterness of Anakin Skywalker, the sense of grievance asserting itself in violence, could be found in the Batman of “The Dark Knight” as well, whose voice and countenance bore a suggestive and chilling resemblance to Darth Vader.
There is something profoundly regressive in the vision of a civilization stripped down to an essentially violent core, so it is perhaps not surprising that regression of another kind provided the movies of the era with their richest vein of humor. Devotion to playthings and playmates, a fascination with bodily fluids and a queasy obsession with sex — these were what defined a movie hero not preoccupied with killing bad guys. Traditional romances and sex farces were supplanted by comedies of arrested male development, defensive glorifications of the right of boys to be boys, occasionally informed by the serious question of what it might mean to be a man.
Some of these — “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Step Brothers,” “Nacho Libre” — were among the funniest movies of the decade, but like the geek-revenge dramas and the child-friendly fantasies with which they shared box-office ascendancy, they pushed women to the edge of the frame. Movies seem to be, increasingly, for and about men and (mostly male) kids, with adult women in the marginal roles of wives and mothers, there to be avenged, resented or run to when things get too scary.
There were exceptions, of course. Five thousand movies and more, spread out over 10 years, allow for a lot of variety. Some of these will grow stranger, some more familiar. They are still out there, after all, waiting to be rediscovered and inscribed either in some future canon or in the memory banks of people who stumble across them somewhere in the digital ether. The viewing and reviewing of movies never ends but rather restarts and repeats. Here comes the mailman, with a red envelope from Netflix: a DVD of “My Dog Skip.”
A. O. Scott, a chief film critic at The Times, last wrote for the magazine about neo-neo-realism.

Having mom to dinner

2009-11-12T11:06:00.001-08:00

HAVING MOM
OVER FOR DINNER

Brian invited his mother over for dinner. During the course
of the meal, Brian's mother couldn't help but notice
how beautiful Brian's roommate, Jennifer, was.
Brian's Mom had long been suspicious of the platonic
relationship between Brian and Jennifer, and this had only
made her more curious.

Over the course of the evening, while watching the two
interact, she started to wonder if there was more between
Brian and Jennifer than met the eye.

Reading his mom's thoughts, Brian volunteered, 'I
know what you must be thinking, but I assure you Jennifer
and I are just roommates.'

About a week later, Jennifer came to Brian saying,
'Ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been
unable to find the beautiful silver gravy ladle. You
don't suppose she took it, do you?'

Brian said,
'Well, I doubt it, but I'll send her an e-mail
just to be sure. So he sat down and wrote:

__________________________________________________________

Dear Mom,

I'm not saying that you 'did' take the gravy
ladle from the house, I'm not saying that you 'did
not' take the gravy ladle. But the fact remains that one
has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.

Love, Brian
__________________________________________________________

Several days later, Brian received an email back from his
mother that read:
Dear Son,

I'm not saying that you 'do' sleep with
Jennifer, I'm not
saying that you 'do not' sleep with Jennifer. But
the fact remains that if Jennifer is sleeping in her own
bed, she would have found the gravy ladle by now.

Love, Mom

LESSON OF THE DAY - NEVER LIE TO YOUR MOTHER

2 things from the times to scare you....

2009-11-10T10:47:00.000-08:00

Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash

A garbage patch in the Pacific is one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered in the world’s oceans.

Click here for full article

Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is linked to things like cancer, obesity, attention deficit disorder and genital abnormalities, and it’s been found in our food.

http://s.nyt.com/u/DkD

Thom Yorke remixes DOOM | Radiohead At Ease

2009-11-07T11:20:00.001-08:00

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN Thom Yorke remixes DOOM | Radiohead At Ease

Why I can't watch SYTYCD

2009-11-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

Because things like this exist in the world and while I'm happy dance as an art is in the mainstream it's such a small portion of the art that a LOT of people are ingesting on a large scale....

anyway, enjoy.

An Inconvenient (but semi sexy?) Truth

2009-11-06T04:00:00.000-08:00

Wow.... score one for the fat cats. This should have been in Al Gore's Movie.

George Carlin

2009-11-05T07:03:00.000-08:00

While watching the Yankees beat the Phillees (an excuse for beer and nachos) I got bored an surfed over to see PBS airing the mark twain award ceremony for george carlin. The man is a genius. For example gold courses and cemetaries are in fact the biggest waste of real estate. Others people's stuff is shit and your shit is stuff. Seriously watch or listen to any of his material it all still applies. His arguments are rational, his rhetoric is undeniable, and it's funny as hell. I will share with you his ten commandments as they get whittled down to two.

----------Here is my problem with the ten commandments- why exactly are there 10?

You simply do not need ten. The list of ten commandments was artificially and deliberately inflated to get it up to ten. Here's what happened:

About 5,000 years ago a bunch of religious and political hustlers got together to try to figure out how to control people and keep them in line. They knew people were basically stupid and would believe anything they were told, so they announced that God had given them some commandments, up on a mountain, when no one was around.

Well let me ask you this- when they were making this shit up, why did they pick 10? Why not 9 or 11? I'll tell you why- because 10 sound official. Ten sounds important! Ten is the basis for the decimal system, it's a decade, it's a psychologically satisfying number (the top ten, the ten most wanted, the ten best dressed). So having ten commandments was really a marketing decision! It is clearly a bullshit list. It's a political document artificially inflated to sell better. I will now show you how you can reduce the number of commandments and come up with a list that's a little more workable and logical. I am going to use the Roman Catholic version because those were the ones I was taught as a little boy.

Let's start with the first three:

I AM THE LORD THY GOD
THOU SHALT NOT HAVE STRANGE GODS BEFORE ME

THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN

THOU SHALT KEEP HOLY THE SABBATH

Right off the bat the first three are pure bullshit. Sabbath day? Lord's name? strange gods? Spooky language! Designed to scare and control primitive people. In no way does superstitious nonsense like this apply to the lives of intelligent civilized humans in the 21st century. So now we're down to 7. Next:

HONOR THY FATHER AND MOTHER

Obedience, respect for authority. Just another name for controlling people. The truth is that obedience and respect shouldn't be automatic. They should be earned and based on the parent's performance. Some parents deserve respect, but most of them don't, period. You're down to six.

Now in the interest of logic, something religion is very uncomfortable with, we're going to jump around the list a little bit.

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS

Stealing and lying. Well actually, these two both prohibit the same kind of behavior- dishonesty. So you don't really need two you combine them and call the commandment "thou shalt not be dishonest". And suddenly you're down to 5.

And as long as we're combining I have two others that belong together:

THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTRY

THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR'S WIFE

Once again, these two prohibit the same type of behavior. In this case it is marital infidelity. The difference is- coveting takes place in the mind. But I don't think you should outlaw fantasizing about someone else's wife because what is a guy gonna think about when he's waxing his carrot? But, marital fidelity is a good idea so we're gonna keep this one and call it "thou shalt not be unfaithful". And suddenly we're down to four.

But when you think about it, honesty and fidelity are really part of the same overall value so, in truth, you could combine the two honesty commandments with the two fidelity commandments and give them simpler language, positive language instead of negative language and call the whole thing "thou shalt always be honest and faithful" and we're down to 3.

THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR"S GOODS

This one is just plain fuckin' stupid. Coveting your neighbor's goods is what keeps the economy going! Your neighbor gets a vibrator that plays "o come o ye faithful", and you want one too! Coveting creates jobs, so leave it alone. You throw out coveting and you're down to 2 now- the big honesty and fidelity commandment and the one we haven't talked about yet:

THOU SHALT NOT KILL

Murder. But when you think about it, religion has never really had a big problem with murder. More people have been killed in the name of god than for any other reason. All you have to do is look at Northern Ireland, Kashmir, the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the World Trade Center to see how seriously the religious folks take thou shalt not kill. The more devout they are, the more they see murder as being negotiable. It depends on who's doin the killin' and who's gettin' killed. So, with all of this in mind, I give you my revised list of the two commandments:

Thou shalt always be honest and faithful
to the provider of thy nookie.

&

Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course
they pray to a different invisible man than you.

Two is all you need; Moses could have carried them down the hill in his fuckin' pocket. I wouldn't mind those folks in Alabama posting them on the courthouse wall, as long as they provided one additional commandment:

Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself.---------------

So when comedians like Jeff dunham make light of dead Muslim terroists as a ventriloquist act or Dane cook makes up words and lowers your iq .... Remember that comedy can also challenge.

At least we still have Jon Stewart!

Some Things That Don't Make sense

2009-10-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

The following things are all further proof that there really is no rhyme or reason to everything.
Over the past few days I have heard alot of people say to me, "everything happens for a reason."
My response has been "No. It doesn't."
That's backwards logic. Everything is contingent yes and when we look back we can see a chain of events that lead us to where we are.... yes. Does that give events reason and order? Absolutely not.
Contingency doesn't not prove logic and order in the universe. Some things are illogical and I would say that most events that occur are just entirely random.
While some may say we don't the knowledge to understand the big picture or the scope to see the whole plan. I say if you stop applying reason and undue acceptance to every event that occurs in your life, THEN you can look at the big picture and see how to make contingency work for you.
Things happen and I find lots of comfort knowing there is no reason that anything is possible. Now here's a very long article on things that we still can't explain....

FROM www.newscientist.com
*19 March 2005 by Michael Brooks
* Magazine issue 2491.

1 The placebo effect

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.

2 The horizon problem

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.

You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen – but see Inside inflation: after the big bang.

So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'

3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays

FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.

As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.

Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?

One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.

Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.

Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 1020 electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we get that information, there's no telling how exotic the true explanation could be.

Update: Follow the latest hunt for GZK neutrinos.
One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong

4 Belfast homeopathy results

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

5 Dark matter

TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.

Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.

And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.

Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."

Update: Some scientists are trying to create the stuff themselves. See Let there be dark matter.
If the results turn out to be real, the implications are profound. We may have to rewrite physics and chemistry

6 Viking's methane

JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.

Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14.

So why no party?

Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?

The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."

Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.

Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.

Update: Also see our Top 10 controversial pieces of evidence for extraterrestrial life.
Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane

7 Tetraneutrons

FOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist (see Ghost in the atom). They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.

Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.

The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.

Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).

And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. "Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had any chance to expand," says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.

There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. "This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously," Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.

8 The Pioneer anomaly

THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.

That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?

Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.

Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant. Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated."

Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077).

"An explanation will be found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hope it is due to new physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall." Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.

Update: see Computer sleuths try to crack Pioneer anomaly.

9 Dark energy

IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."

One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.

Update: see Superconductors inspire quantum test for dark energy, and Dark energy: Seeking the heart of darkness.

10 The Kuiper cliff

IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing.

Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.

The evidence for the existence of "Planet X" is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled 10th planet.

There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.

11 The Wow signal

IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.

Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?

The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.

The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.

Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debate continues.

Update: see Top 10 controversial pieces of evidence for extraterrestrial life.
It was either a powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation beaming out a signal
12 Not-so-constant constants

IN 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were expecting.

If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.

But that's heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able to change. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of these really have changed?

No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.

Webb's are not the only results that suggest something is missing from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light's interaction with matter has changed.

The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).

There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out. Webb's group is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year.

"It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elements were produced early in the universe's history.

Update: No such thing as a constant constant?

13 Cold fusion

AFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.

With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.

That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.

The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.
Cold fusion would make the world's energy problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is interested

That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."

We're all the same

2009-10-02T07:44:00.001-07:00

We're not so different you and I.... said the monkey to the bum

I applied to 8 jobs in 48 hours.... then I read something like this

2009-09-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

Unemployment Hits 9.7%, but Job Loss Slows in August
By JACK HEALY

Employers eliminated 216,000 jobs in August even as the larger American economy showed signs of turning around, suggesting that while the pace of job losses continues to slow, workers will still be among the last to benefit from a recovery.

The unemployment rate, calculated in a separate survey, resumed its climb last month after a dip in July, rising to 9.7 percent from 9.4 percent, the Labor Department reported on Friday in its monthly snapshot of the job market.

As factories slowly begin to ramp up production and businesses start to restock their shelves, economists anticipate that losses will dwindle and that employers could begin creating jobs by late this year or early 2010. But most forecasters — and White House officials — still expect the unemployment rate to reach 10 percent or higher.

“The job market is in for a slog,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “It’s going to be slow, incremental improvement, and it’s the reason why the broader recovery’s going to be very fragile.”

Signs of weakness filled the report. Overtime hours were unchanged from a month earlier, and the length of the workweek was flat. Temporary employment services, among the first to hire after a recession, cut 6,500 jobs. And the rate of manufacturing job losses increased from a month earlier.

Still, Obama administration officials greeted the lower number of job losses as more evidence that the $787 billion stimulus was making a mark on the economy.

“The overall message in these numbers is that we’re headed in the right direction but we’re far from out of the woods,” said Jared Bernstein, an economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “There are simply too many Americans seeking work, and that means too many families struggling with a job market that remains well behind the curve.”

Economists had foreseen 230,000 job losses for the month, and expected the unemployment rate to hit 9.5 percent. The government also revised monthly job losses for July higher, saying the economy had shed 276,000 jobs compared with the 247,000 that had originally been reported. The June number was revised to 463,000 job losses from 443,000.

Over all, the figures evinced a dreary landscape.

Average hourly earnings rose by 6 cents in August, to a seasonally adjusted $18.65 an hour, and average weekly earnings edged up to $617.32 from $615.33 in July. And the median time workers are unemployed fell slightly, to 15.4 weeks.

Economists said the slower pace of job losses provided another sign that the recession was losing steam. The nation’s economic output is expected to rebound over the rest of the year after four quarters of contraction, and the housing market is gradually getting back onto its feet.

But economists say employers must create 300,000 to 400,000 jobs a month to bring unemployment rates back to pre-recession levels — a difficult hurdle after such a prolonged downturn.

“High unemployment rates are going to be with us for quite a while,” Michael Feroli, an economist at JPMorgan Chase, said. “It’s going to be a long, long time before we see 6 percent or 7 percent unemployment.”

Months — or years — of a lackluster job market could further strain the finances of the country’s approximately 15 million unemployed, constraining their spending and putting them at greater risk of home foreclosure or default on credit cards or auto loans.

Some 128,000 manufacturing and construction jobs evaporated in August, and businesses ranging from financial companies to retailers to restaurants appeared poised to continue cutting positions through the end of the year, economists said.

And some 20 months into the recession, people like Ginny Hoover of Williamsburg, Va., are beginning to use up their unemployment benefits, their extended benefits and even their emergency payments from the government.

Ms. Hoover, 49, said she had been unable to find any work beyond the offer of a commission-only job selling life insurance door to door since she lost her job at a pharmaceutical company in November 2007, a month before the recession began. To get by, she maxed out her credit cards, borrowed money from friends and broke her apartment lease and moved into a free rental unit owned by her boyfriend.

“It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been almost two years,” said Ms. Hoover, who is now pursuing certification as a legal assistant. “I thought maybe a month or two and I’d have another job. I never would have guessed that it would be as brutal as it was out there.”

But the loss of 216,000 jobs in August, while grim by normal standards, underscored how far the economy had come from its worst days, when an average of 691,000 jobs were lost each month in the first quarter. Economists credited the stimulus plan and other rescue efforts by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve with stabilizing the economy and slowing job losses.

“They ended the credit crisis,” Robert Barbera, chief economist at ITG, said. “Banks are functioning. You’re got some pop from the clunker program. They get high marks in those areas. It’s a real tough labor market, one of the toughest in the postwar period, but it simply looks better than it did six months ago.”

But struggling workers like Donna Angelillo, 49, of Del Ray Beach, Fla., say they have not seen any signs of improvement. Ms. Angelillo lost her job as a property manager in May and burned through her savings in two months. Her $1,000 monthly unemployment check does not even cover her $1,030 monthly rent, and Ms. Angelillo said her late bills were reaching a critical stage.

“‘I don’t have September rent, but right now I’m more concerned about the electricity,” she said. “Either today or tomorrow, they’re going to shut it off. I’m getting desperate.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Less sex, more TV idea aired in India

2009-09-01T08:21:00.001-07:00

"Not tonight honey the sham-wow guy is trying to sell me a chop-matic"

By Sara Sidner
CNN

UTTAR PRADESH, India (CNN) -- On World Population Day this year India's new health and welfare minister came out with an idea on how to tackle the population issue: Bring electricity to every Indian village so that people would watch television until late at night and therefore be too tired to make babies.

That statement raised eyebrows across this vast country -- but what are the realities and reactions from families who make up the second largest population in the world?

At 80-plus years old Omar Mohammed has never heard of population control.

He lives in India's most populous state Uttar Pradesh and has certainly done his part in contributing to India's burgeoning population.

"Now you see I have 24 children, 13 boys and 11 girls," Omar says.

Omar believes only God can decide how many children you should have. He lifts his hands to the sky and says: "This is His command. It's not my doing, it's His doing."

On the other hand there's the Arora family in the capital city of Delhi. They have two children.

"You can't even get enough water or electricity now. So its advisable that people have only two children and then they should stop having more kids." mother Anjana Arora says.

The Aroras know a little something about population issues; their daughter was given the official title of India's one billionth citizen when she was born in 2000.

With family planning and free contraceptive programs the Indian government has long tried to encourage families to have only two children.

Overall government statistics show the birth rate is coming down. The numbers show 14 of India's 35 states have reached the two child per family target.

But the push is failing in other states, especially in villages and among the poor and illiterate where the fertility rate is as high as 3.5 children per woman.

There are all kinds of reasons -- from the desire to continue having children until a son is born to lack of access to contraceptives.

The government's concern is that a booming population will further test already scarce resources, greatly impact the environment, and make life even harder for the poor.

According to the United Nations, India is home to 50 percent of the world's poor and on current projections, India will become the most populous country on earth sometime in the next 50 years, overtaking China.

Upon hearing about the latest idea to use electricity and television to give people something else to do besides procreate, mom Anjana Arora scoffed.

"That's a stupid thing" she said in English then switched to Hindi "The only way to change people's mentality is through education."

But not everyone is writing the idea off. "It's an idea that can really work." says A.R. Nanda.

Years ago Nanda helped draft some of India's population stabilization policies and he now runs the Population Foundation of India.

He says while education and access to health care is paramount, electrifying villages is not a bad idea.

"It gives a message loud and clear that we need to do something for the people which is people-friendly and which in a way will keep their minds from taking irrational decisions about producing more babies," Nanda says.

He says there are studies that prove it. One such survey done in 2006 by an Italian sexologist reveals couples with televisions in their bedrooms had sex half as much as those without it.

That being said Omar Mohammed, the man with 24 children had a different take.

"After watching TV," he says, "when we look at scintillating things we will probably want to make more children."

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/08/13/sex.or.tv

As much as I hate to link to the New York Post.....

2009-08-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

By MICHAEL RIEDEL

August 12, 2009 --

SPIDER-MAN has vanquished Green Goblin, Electro, Doc Ock and Lizard.

But when it comes to the greatest supervillain of them all -- The Riedeler -- Spidey has met his match.

The $45 million "Spider-Man," directed by Julie Taymor and written by Bono and The Edge, is caught in my net, and I can report today that escape is virtually impossible.

Mwahahaha!

Last week, production crews at both the Hilton Theatre and the scene shop where the show was being built were put on "hiatus" because the producers ran out of money. Assistants in the scene shop "ran to the bank to cash their checks because they weren't sure they'd clear," a source says.

Now comes word that the actors have been released from their contracts, with no incentive (i.e., money) to hang around waiting for the production to get back on track.

Meanwhile, ticket agents are desperately trying to get refunds for deposits from theater parties that booked early previews.

"I hope they don't stiff us the way Garth Drabinsky did," says one ticket agent, referring to the disgraced impresario recently sentenced in Toronto to seven years in jail.

A desperate attempt was made last week to save "Spider-Man" by bringing in a couple of veteran producers. But they're too smart to get involved in what's turning out to be the biggest fiasco in Broadway history.

And so, while the official line is "the production will begin previews on Feb. 25, 2010," the betting is that the Hilton Theatre, whose insides have been gutted for this show, is going to be an empty barn this winter.

"Spider-Man" has been in trouble from the beginning, done in by the inexperience of its producers -- Sony, Marvel Comics and David Garfinkle, a Chicago lawyer who, sources say, had almost no Broadway experience.

"He was in over his head," a source says.

Taymor, the director of "The Lion King," conceived of "Spider-Man" as an "installation show," something big and bold and full of special effects. Something, in other words, like Cirque du Soleil.

That's fine if you're going to put the damn thing up in Las Vegas, where "installation shows" run several times a day and are funded in large part by hotels and casinos.

But at $45 million -- and with a weekly running cost of almost $900,000 -- "Spider-Man" at the 1,700-seat Hilton could never be profitable.

The show would have to run five years, selling every single seat in the house, to just break even.

"That," says a source who crunched the numbers, "is insane."

Artistically, it's impossible to tell if "Spider-Man" is any good.

The designs for the sets and costumes that I saw were impressive, and some of U2's songs weren't bad -- moody and melodic, if not all that theatrical -- but even people working on the show weren't quite sure what it was going to be like.

"A lot of it seems to exist only in Julie's head," one source says.

Which may be where it remains for a long, long time.

Read it here at the NYP

Take A Piss Save A Tree

2009-08-05T07:44:00.000-07:00

New TV ads are encouraging Brazilians to save water – by urinating in the shower.

Brazilian environmental group SOS Mata Atlantica says the campaign, running on several television stations, uses humor to persuade people to reduce flushes.

The group says if a household avoids one flush a day, it can save up to 4,380 liters (1,157 gallons) of water annually.

SOS spokeswoman Adriana Kfouri said Tuesday that the ad is "a way to be playful about a serious subject."

The spot features cartoon drawings of people from all walks of life - a trapeze artist, a basketball player, even an alien – urinating in the shower.

Narrated by children's voices, the ad ends with: "Pee in the shower! Save the Atlantic rainforest!"

- AP

Cambodia cancels landmine pageant

2009-08-04T19:39:00.000-07:00

A beauty pageant for landmine victims has been cancelled by the Cambodian government, which branded it an insult to disabled people.

Authorities said the contest, due to launch on Friday, would damage "the dignity and honour" of participants.

Twenty women were to have competed for the title of Miss Landmine and the prize of a high-tech prosthetic limb.

Norwegian organiser Morten Traavik expressed disappointment, but said the contest would go ahead on the internet.

He said the result would be announced on 31 December. The website shows photos of the contestants, with missing limbs, wearing crowns and dresses. They are aged from 18 to 48.

Between four and six million landmines are thought to have been laid in Cambodia during its three decades of civil war.

'Mockery'

Mr Traavik - who launched the first Miss Landmine pageant in Angola two years ago - said his contest was intended to raise awareness about the issue and empower those whose lives had been affected by the explosive devices.

"I'm not looking forward to breaking the news to the 20 candidates involved, as I know they will be very disappointed in the lack of support from Cambodian authorities," he told AFP news agency.

Photographs of the participants were to have been shown in an exhibition in the capital, Phnom Penh.

But government spokesman Khieu Khanarith said the competition would "make a mockery of Cambodia's landmine victims".

"The government does not support this contest," he said.

Government and NGO teams are working to clear the country's landmines, but swathes of contaminated land remain in western border regions.

In 2007, more than 350 people were killed or injured in blasts from landmines or unexploded ordnance, Landmine Monitor said.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/8182078.stm

Published: 2009/08/03 16:10:34 GMT

© BBC MMIX

And you thought playing with your wii was fun?

2009-08-02T18:06:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has announced it's new "controller"less gaming system for xbox.
Check out the product vision below......
Eat your heart out Wii.

I mean how awesome does this look????

imagine combining it with a game like say this

And while yes I may be letting my nerd flag fly a little bit.... but a controller-less system is still pretty cool...

Subway Stories 3

2009-07-30T05:38:00.000-07:00

Hip chick, early twenties. Piercings, ink, and ipod. Sucking her thumb.

Two NJ Mayors and some Rabbis walk into a courthouse...

2009-07-23T09:29:00.000-07:00

Mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus, Several Rabbis Arrested (Update4)

The mayors of Hoboken, Ridgefield and Secaucus, New Jersey, and several rabbis are among at least 30 people arrested today as part of a public corruption and money-laundering investigation by U.S. authorities.

Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano, 32, Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, 64, Ridgefield Mayor Anthony Suarez, 42, all Democrats, Jersey City Council President Mariano Vega Jr., 59, and State Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt, 44, a Republican from Ocean Township, were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are scheduled to appear in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, later today.

“Approximately 30 arrests have occurred this morning in a two-track federal investigation of public corruption and a high- volume, international money-laundering conspiracy,” Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra, said in a statement.

The roundup of suspects is one of the largest ever in New Jersey, where more than 100 public officials have been convicted of corruption in the past few years. Prosecutors worked with an undercover witness who had been charged with bank fraud in May 2006, according to FBI criminal complaints.

Cammarano, Hoboken’s youngest mayor, was sworn in July 1. Former state Assemblyman Louis Manzo, 54, a Democrat from Jersey City, Leona Beldini, a deputy mayor of Jersey City, and several rabbis in New York and New Jersey were among those arrested.

Rabbis Named

The rabbis included Saul Kassin, 87, chief rabbi of Sharee Zion, a synagogue in Brooklyn, New York; Eliahu Ben Haim, 58, the principal rabbi of Congregation Ohel Yaacob in Deal, New Jersey; Edmond Nahum, 56, of Deal Synagogue in Deal; Mordchai Fish, 56, of Congregation Sheves Achim in Brooklyn; and Lavel Schwartz, 57, Fish’s brother. They were charged with money laundering.

Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, 58, of Brooklyn was accused of conspiring with others to acquire and trade human organs for use in transplantation. Rosenbaum, who was “purportedly” involved in real estate, was approached by a cooperating witness and an undercover FBI agent about buying a human kidney from a human organ broker, according to the complaint.

Rosenbaum said it would cost $150,000, with half payable up front, according to the complaint. Rosenbaum said some of the money would go to the donor and some to doctors in Israel, according to the complaint.

‘It’s Illegal’

“One of the reasons it’s so expensive is because you have to shmear (meaning pay various individuals for their assistance) all the time,” according to the complaint. “It’s illegal to buy. It’s illegal to sell.”

Prosecutors charged the men in a series of criminal complaints detailing the allegations. Ben Haim was accused of laundering $1.5 million through the undercover witness, who said he “was engaged in illegal businesses and schemes including bank fraud, trafficking in counterfeit goods and concealing assets and monies in connection with bankruptcy proceedings,” according to an FBI criminal complaint.

The cooperating witness is Solomon Dwek, a real estate developer in Monmouth County, New Jersey, who was charged May 11, 2006, with scheming to defraud PNC Bank out of $50 million, according to a person familiar with the matter and court records.

Prosecutors alleged that Dwek deposited two $25 million checks from another account of his, which had a zero balance. Dwek then wired $22.8 million out of PNC, falsely assuring bank officials that he would forward funds to cover the overdraft, according to prosecutors.

Dwek posted a $10 million bond, secured by $3 million in equity in the homes of his mother-in-law and sister-in-law. Dwek was never indicted, instead receiving 17 extensions from a judge to continue the period in which his case had to be presented to a federal grand jury.

Agents today brought the suspects to FBI headquarters in Newark for processing before their appearance later today in federal court a mile away. About a dozen of the suspects were transported this morning from the FBI building in a blue bus.

A press conference is scheduled for this afternoon.

Article printed in BLOOMBERG NEWS

What's that smell?

2009-07-21T05:55:00.000-07:00

America is obsessed with death... let be more specific.
America is obsessed with the WHIFF of death.

The oldest man in the world, the last WWI survivor died the other day at 113. Walter Cronkite.... don't even get me started on Michael Jackson in the news.
Still don't believe me? How do you explain all the NEAR plane crashes in the news. The ones where the pilot does their job and lands the plane?

What about near car accidents? Wouldn't that be bigger news as it pertains to more people lives? No because the whiff of death is anyone else's but there own. That is a huge no no. It's a vicarious projection of fear. A cathartic release that lets us revel in this obsession from a safe distance.

We watch celebrities and normal people who we make celebrities in the media just living their life so we don't have to focus on ours, so why not watch them die as well.

I think instead of reporting on the death of celebrities and having it overtake EVERY single media outlet to the point that it overshadows EVERYTHING in the world. We make a separate public television station that only does obituaries, not just of celebrities but of everyone. It would be the easiest way to fill 24 hours worth of programming. They would never need to air reruns. And this way when someone dies they flip on DTV instead of any and every news channel fighting for ratings to the detriment of keeping the public informed.

While we are at it I think we should remind everyone daily that they too will die eventually and it will happen at any moment no matter what we do to stop it.
This is not meant to scare the living day lights out of people (pun intended) but rather to liberate them. If you have a finite amount of resources you make the most of it (look at the green movement or the current economic crisis).

People might start living their lives or at least pay attention to those living breathing bags of flesh and bone around them and less to people they will never meet who don't give a crap whether they live or die flickering on the screen in front of them.

Then again we like the smell of others people decay.

Long live schadenfreude!

crazy

2009-07-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

javascript:void(0)

In Atlantic City till Saturday....

2009-07-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

Atlantic City needle-exchange program shows mixed results
by The Star-Ledger Continuous News Desk
Monday January 19, 2009, 5:44 AM

First-year statistics show Atlantic City's needle-exchange program has been highly successful in distributing clean needles, but subpar in getting drug addicts into rehabilitation, according to a report in the Press of Atlantic City.

The report said Atlantic City gave out 60,001 needles between the start of the program and Jan. 5 and 52.9 percent of Atlantic City's needles have been returned to the city's Tennessee Avenue facility - an indication that used needles are not being passed on. Atlantic City ranked last among the four New Jersey programs in drug referrals, with just 74 as of Dec. 21.

Aw *&%&^$%

2009-07-13T07:35:00.000-07:00

BBC news reports on a study that swearing scientifically helps deal with pain by tapping into the brain's natural fight or flight response. It does say that casual swearing will lessen this effect but at least there is some provable evidence that expletives aren't entirely useless... :).

Click Here for full article

Be Afraid

2009-07-12T06:41:00.000-07:00

Somali-Americans Turn to Terrorism

Somalian students raised in Minneapolis are giving up dreams of becoming doctors or entrepreneurs to instead join a militant Islamist group aligned with Al Qaeda that is fighting to overthrow the shaky Somali government. The more than 20 young Americans are the focus of what may be the most significant domestic terrorism investigation since Sept. 11. One of the men, Shirwa Ahmed, blew himself up in Somalia in October, becoming the first known American suicide bomber. The men—who, growing up embraced, basketball and the prom and the Mall of America—appear to be motivated by a mix of politics, faith, and a feeling of loyalty to their homeland, and they are trying to recruit other young Americans to their cause. "This case is unlike anything we have encountered," said Ralph S. Boelter, the F.B.I. agent leading the investigation.

Read the full article HERE

This is just getting rediculous..

2009-07-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson lay in his golden casket at his memorial service without his brain. The Los Angeles coroner confirmed yesterday that the organ was retained to carry out tests.

Aren't they worried that zombie Michael will rise up dancing hungry for human flesh and brains?

Internet traffic linked to the memorial service was 67% above average, making it the second-largest online traffic peak, according to Akamai Technologies, whose networks process 20% of all traffic on the internet

- Use of news sites almost doubled (from 2 million visitors per minute, the average, to nearly 4 million) while use of online video streaming was up by 471%, Akamai said

- 9.7 million watched the event online at CNN.com, but total online figures are not yet available

- On Twitter, 80,000 messages per hour included the phrase Michael Jackson, while over a million Facebook users fired off 6,000 updates per minute directly linked to CNN’s live feed of the event

- Michael Jackson has 7,453,072 fans on Facebook, and counting (Barack Obama has 6,441,466).

- The virtual Michael Jackson glove has become the most popular gift in the site’s history, as more than 800,000 gloves have been exchanged by Facebook friends

- 6.5 million watched the memorial event on TV in the UK and 31 million in the US. Estimates say at least 1 billion watched worldwide but it is not yet clear whether the figures will beat the 2.5 billion who watched Diana, Princess of Wales’s memorial service

Sources: Akamai Technologies, Facebook, Times database

Just shows to go you that people's priorities are messed up.... It's a dead issue.

And I'll cry if I want to.

2009-07-10T03:27:00.001-07:00

I have the same birthday as Jake La Motta. (Raging Bull).

Hopefully this conversation won't happen at the pub....

Subway Stories 2

2009-07-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

The short man with D&G glasses hemmed his pants with binder clips. Sitting across from him was a woman reading a fashion magazine open to the page with her picture on it.

JACK WHITE is a Jenius

2009-07-08T09:09:00.000-07:00

Alliteration aside. He is the one of the only musicians still making new music that rocks.

His new band The Dead Weather features the vocalist from The Kills, the guitarist from Queens of The Stone Age, and Jack is on the drums.... move over dave grohl... (maybe not)

Anyway the new album is called Horehound and you can listen to the entire thing free for the next 24 hours here

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN FOR FREE

Give it a listen while its free or buy it cause the music you're listening to now rots and is incredibly derivative. It's not a secret. Everyone knows it.

Career Opportunities

2009-07-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

So Iggy Pop has a new cd out called "Préliminaires"
It's somewhere between Tom Waits and Jacques Brel

It's weird but I like it, it's based on a french novel but I won't bore you with the details. Check it out if that sounds like something that would tickle your fancy.

Speaking of your fancy and tickling.... post-grad life seems like a constant struggle to find a balance between tickling your fancy and working to afford feathers. Why not work in a pillow factory. Crap metaphor but you should like your job, no?

I would also like to share in this little bit of brilliance from the brilliant film "There Will Be Blood"

There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone.....

I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry... to have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these... people.
[laughs]

Without Daniel Day Lewis behind those words they don't have the same impact...

Working towards retirement... working to afford a life of leisure... that's just the business model of the religious afterlife isn't it. A promise of pearly gates and saint peter or pearly white beaches in sunny saint petersburg florida...

Something to think about if your adhere to one idea or the other, or both.

And We're back

2009-07-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

So after a few weeks traveling from Jacksonville, Florida to Chautauqua, New York I can say a few things about city life....

I don't necessarily need to see that much wildlife in such close proximity on a daily basis... I went to the bronx zoo. That was cool. Lizards mating on the sidewalk and palmetto bugs (which is a roach that can fly) in the dance studio are unnecessary...

The kids were awesome though. I felt like a proud parent by the end of the week.....
Speaking of family, Tap Kids performed upstate. The show and cast was awesome, as for Chautauqua...the word compound is loaded and probably not accurate but religious compounds do exist in upstate new york... however maybe it's just my cynicism but when everyone is nice and pleasant I become very edgy... just waiting for them to pounce you know... I didn't drink any of the kool-aid but I was on the lookout.

Being back in the city reminds me of why I love to live here. You feel like you are apart of something much larger than yourself. Rush hour subway will remind you that you are not the most important center of the universe. 1.6 million other people are trying to pay ridiculous rent on the island of Manhattan... and yet there are people who do act like they are the most important s.o.b. in the whole world and well what can you do. One man's zen metaphor for the unity of the human race is another's ego trip. Probably more of a rebellion against getting lost in the sea of people but I say ride the wave.

Speaking of riding the wave- sometimes it is better to fight against the tide. US airways might cancel your flight and tell you you have to fly half way down the coast then wait 2 hours to turn a 1 hour long flight into an 8 extravaganza. If you ask you might end up on an even earlier flight.

So does the squeaky wheel get the grease?
Yes.
But sometimes it gets replaced....

and for the biggest news of all
This looks to be one amazing film....

No words necessary. I think Scorsese did it again...

More drivel about culture, media, and art to come.... stay tuned.

HIATUS

2009-06-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

DAILY SHANE on BREAK till JULY

Surprise: New Yorkers kill more when they're hot

2009-06-19T10:31:00.000-07:00

After looking at the statistics and patterns of homicides between 2003 and 2008 the New York Times reports that most murders occur between June and September and to be incredibly specific

September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.

The most important trend involving murder in New York has been the enormous decline in killings over the last 15 years, to levels not seen since the early 1960s.

Still, hundreds of people are killed every year in the city, and The Times’s findings provide insights about who is killed in New York, as well as who does the killing, where murders occur and why.

Women are less likely to be victims or attackers

Brooklyn is the most likely place to be killed

More often than not, the weapon of choice is a firearm.

Read the full article --> here <--

So next time you piss someone off in Brooklyn on a hot sat. night-- run.

Subway Stories 1

2009-06-18T05:47:00.000-07:00

She sat next to her friend, the one with the ring on her finger, and smiled. She was full of hate and resentment.

Santa Feels Economic Crunch: Elves Get Hungry

2009-06-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

Reindeer herds in global decline
Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

Reindeer and caribou numbers are plummeting around the world.

The first global review of their status has found that populations are declining almost everywhere they live, from Alaska and Canada, to Greenland, Scandinavia and Russia.

The iconic deer is vital to indigenous peoples around the circumpolar north.

"When we discovered that many herds of reindeer also were declining we decided to compile a comprehensive survey to see if this indeed was a global pattern," says Vors.

The scientists were shocked to discover that 34 of the herds were declining, while no data existed for 16 more. Only eight herds were increasing in number. Many herds had been declining for a decade or more.

"We were surprised at the ubiquity of the decline," says Vors.

The scale of the problem is shown by a map upon which the researchers plotted their data, which is published in Global Change Biology.

Reindeer and caribou numbers worldwide: red denotes herds in decline, green indicates those on the increase and dark grey means no data is available. Reindeer and caribou do not range in areas coloured light grey

"Seeing that sea of red was a sobering moment," Vors says.

Read full article from BBC NEWS: HERE

© BBC MMIX

Female baboons exploit chaperones

2009-06-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

So it seems that men and women CAN just be friends.... well at least if you're a baboon.

The BBC reports that:

Male and female baboons form platonic friendships, where sex is off the menu.

Having a caring friend around seems to greatly benefit the females and their infants, as both are harassed less by other baboons when in the company of their male pal.

But why the males choose to be platonic friends remains a mystery.

Male and females of a few species of monkey, including baboons, macaques and others are known to form so-called 'friendships', where particular males and females will spend a lot of time in each other's company.

These friendships are often strictly platonic, and don't seem to involve sex. But no-one knows why they occur.

So Nguyen's team investigated whether these chaperone males were actually fathering infants with their female friends. Half of all the male chaperones did turn out to be the father of the infant whose mother they befriended.

That is highly surprising in one respect, because each of the females mated with multiple males around the time they conceived. "But of these potential dads, only the genetic dads became friends," says Nguyen.

"To my knowledge, human males cannot tell their own offspring from unrelated offspring, but somehow baboon dads can tell."

But the study revealed an even bigger surprise.

"Half of the friends were not genetic fathers. But these guys weren't even potential fathers, that is, they didn't even mate with the female when she conceived the infant, and these guys didn't receive mating benefits."

"So we really don't know what these guys got out of the friendship, other than maybe spending time with a mum and a new baby and having other females seeing this."

The suggestion here is that by chaperoning a female in a platonic relationship, a male might advertise his parental skills to other females, who then might consider him a worthy partner. But as yet, there's no evidence for this or any other reason why males become chaperones.

However, for the females, the benefits of having a chaperone are clear.

"We found direct evidence that friendships provided a social benefit to mothers and infants," says Nguyen.

"We found that mother-infant pairs who spent a lot of time with their male friends received a lot less harassment from other females in the group, and the infants cried a lot less too, than pairs who spent less time hanging out with their male friends. This could translate into big gains for infants who may be more likely to survive infancy, as harassment can lead to injury," she says.

"It was especially exciting when I looked and saw what a huge difference having a friend around means for the mother and infant. We've long suspected that mother-infant pairs got some social benefit from the male friends, but this benefit had never before been documented."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8097000/8097545.stm

Published: 2009/06/16 09:11:23 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Mona Lisa ... er. smile?

2009-06-15T09:51:00.001-07:00

Nude, Mona Lisa-like painting surfaces
Documents suggest work at least based on similar work by da Vinci
By Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery Channel
updated 12:52 p.m. ET, Fri., June 12, 2009

Leonardo da Vinci, in a Renaissance version of Mad Magazine, may have painted his famous Mona Lisa in a number of ways, including nude. Now, a painting has surfaced that looks much like the original, sparking debate over just how far the master took his iconic painting.

The newly revealed painting, hidden for almost a century within the wood wall of a private library, shows a portrait of a half-naked woman with clear links to the famous (and clothed) Mona Lisa.

The work, which documents suggest was at least based on never-seen similar work by da Vinci, is now on exhibit at the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, where da Vinci was born in 1452.

The lady in the portrait does not exactly resemble the original Mona Lisa, but there is little doubt it has parallels with the painting hanging at the Louvre museum in Paris.

"The frontal look, the position of the hands, the spatial conception of the landscape, with columns at the sides, show a clear link with the Mona Lisa's iconographic theme," Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the museum, told Discovery News.

The naked portrait once belonged to Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch (1763-1839) and was ensconced within the wood walls of Fesch's private library for nearly a century, before trading more hands within the Napoleon family.

An art lover, the Cardinal owned an impressive collection of artworks, including da Vinci's "St. Jerome" (now in the Vatican gallery), which he discovered in pieces in the Roman shops of a second-hand dealer.

A note dating to 1845 records that the Cardinal bought "the portrait of the Mona Lisa, mistress of Francis I, by Leonardo da Vinci," from the Rospigliosis, a rich aristocratic Roman family.

After changing hands at the death of the Cardinal, the portrait was possibly bought by Napoleon III, and finally landed in the private collection of Count Giuseppe Primoli, a descendant of Luciano Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother.

The documentation from the painting's original purchase is not enough to verify the work is by da Vinci, himself. The nude portrait will now undergo scientific and artistic investigations in an attempt to date the work and determine its author. Even if it is not by da Vinci (and it likely isn't, experts say), it may be based on a lost original by the artist himself.

"I think it is very likely that Leonardo da Vinci conceived a naked Mona Lisa," leading da Vinci scholar Carlo Pedretti, director of the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, told Discovery News.

Indeed, several other claims of unclothed Mona Lisa's have been made over the years, pointing to the theory that da Vinci might have had fun with the famous image he had created around 1503-1506.

"There are at least six nude versions which are very close to da Vinci's hand. All are attributed to the da Vinci school. The most likely scenario is that his followers got inspired by a now-lost original," Vezzosi said.

According to Vezzosi, the original naked Mona might have been part of a series of erotic portraits by da Vinci and his pupils, which were never really shown because they were considered inappropriate.

Called "Monna Vanna," the topless versions of the Mona Lisa are indeed often considered the portraits of a court mistress or prostitute.

Nevertheless, these paintings inspired nudes by other artists, including Raphaello's 1518 portrait of his mistress, "The Baker Girl."

"Our quest for naked Mona Lisa's continues. We are now on the tracks of another interesting version in Las Vegas," Vezzosi said.
© 2009 Discovery Channel

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31320879/ns/technology_and_science-science/

MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2009 MSNBC.com

New York Observation 1

2009-06-14T21:23:00.000-07:00

The guy who works selling fruit at the fruit stand on the corner is overly smug. He sells me green bananas. Smug bastard.

Finally some helpful legislation...

2009-06-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

Congress is trying to pass very important legislation... no, not health care... They want to limit the volume of TV ads.... Maybe you wont have to hit mute or lunge for the remote on commercial breaks anymore...

Under a proposal to be taken up Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission would squelch ad volumes to the average decibels of the TV show during which they appear.

Currently, TV ads can't be louder than the loudest peak in a show, said David Perry, the chairman of the broadcast production committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies in New York. Ads often seem louder to viewers, he added, because a program's volume peak rarely comes just before an ad.

the ad agency association's spokesman on the matter, agreed that broadcasters should set their own loudness standards.

"Congress will inevitably make it more messy than it needs to be," he said. "It's like going after a fly with a pistol."

Britain set similar restrictions on loud ads last year.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

Summer Reading

2009-06-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

Dan Brown is the literary equivalent of Coldplay. This is indeed a compliment to Coldplay.... Seriously have some standards. If you want to read something entertaining and not necessarily overly written there are plenty of crime/thriller writers who can and have written much better books than Dan Brown.

For anyone who says Dan Brown is a good writer, tell me why all his international characters sound exactly the same on the page?

Anyway what about Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Ian Rankin, Clive Barker, Lawrence Block, Jeff Lindsey.... These are just thrillers....

Anyone who lives in New York or is in relationship or has a pulse should read

Sylvia by Leonard Michaels

Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Bukowski, Welsh, Baer, Charlie Huston are some of my favorites for fiction but lets say you like twilight....

While I haven't read it so I can't automatically put it in the crap pile I will say that

Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

is brilliant.
Seriously brilliant. Coming from someone who doesn't like the Charlotte Bronte, I seriously enjoyed this novel page to page. The format/tone is deceiving. Clark uses the social novel in an almost satirical way and really sucks you in to a fully realized world and lets you swim around in her words.
So jump in and get soaked in good writing.

Stephen King's Dark Tower Series comprises a total of 7 books (plenty of books to keep the story going without becoming redundant for copious amounts of summer/beach entertainment. ) that in my opinion outdoes any other series out there. Sorry JK Rowling but you write for a different audience. The Dark Tower series is part fantasy, part spaghetti western, part horror, part thriller, with allusions to pop culture, myth, and all pulled together by GASP... good writing.

"I can't believe that someone could write such trite and expository dialogue" said Shane gasping with exasperation.

Urban Dictionary Fun

2009-06-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

So when you get home from rehearsal at 1am and are killing time waiting to fall asleep, try looking up your name at urban dictionary.com

Here is the definition of shane
1. Shane

A word derived from a Greek "San" one of three of the modern day symbols considered obsolete in the Greek language. The name was given to the children of those who were considered "criminally genius". Also considered to be one of the few names that can effect the owner's personality over their lifetime in a aesthetically pleasing but deeply malicious way. Perceived by the Romans to be the only name "combining good and evil to create balance and perfection."

"Shane... it flows off the tongue like silk."
"When you scream "Shane!" it vibrates your body right down the middle... wow try it."

2.An English derivitive of the irish name sean, which is an Irish form of John meaning "God's gracious gift."

Shane is a very popular variant of the name Sean in Northern Ireland in memory of Shane O'Neill whose forces won notable victories over the armies of Queen Elizabeth 1st in the sixteenth century.
his name is Shane

Shane is God's gracious gift

.....
AND NUMBER 10

10. A pastey white bitch.

They cant all be good.....

Back to serious news tomorrow...

Get angry when hungry? Blame low serotonin

2009-06-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

Read full article here

Brain chemical is key for keeping aggression in check, study finds

LONDON - Serotonin, the brain chemical linked to mood, plays a key role in regulating emotions such as aggression, British researchers said on Thursday.

Serotonin, the nerve-signaling chemical targeted by many antidepressants, appears to keep aggressive social responses in check, Molly Crockett, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge and colleagues reported in the journal Science.

The chemical’s precise role in impulse control has been controversial but this study is one of the first to actually show a causal link, Crockett said.
“Because we directly manipulated serotonin levels and observed an effect on behavior we can say there is a causal link between serotonin and aggressive responses,” Crockett said in a telephone interview.

Their research also helps explain why some people become combative or aggressive when hungry because the essential amino acid needed for the body to create serotonin is only obtained through diet.

The team used this knowledge to manipulate serotonin levels in 20 healthy volunteers who were then asked to play a situation game that tested their responses to fair and unfair offers of money.

People with lower serotonin levels were far more likely to deprive other players of money, even though they lost out as well, as a way to punish the person who made the offer, the researchers said.
“It is an anger-driven response,” Crockett said.

This knowledge could help doctors treat people with depression and anxiety disorders by teaching them ways to regulate emotions during decision making, especially in social situations, she added.

PIRATE PRESIDENT IN 08?

2009-06-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

Swedish pirates capture EU seat

OHHHHHHHH that kind of pirate.... well those women selling dvds in grand central deserve a voice too I guess....

Sweden's Pirate Party has won a seat in the European Parliament.

The group - which campaigned on reformation of copyright and patent law - secured 7.1% of the Swedish vote.

The result puts the Pirate Party in fifth place, behind the Social Democrats, Greens, Liberals and the Moderate Party.

Rickard Falkvinge, the party leader, told the BBC the win was "gigantic" and that they were now negotiating with four different EU Parliamentary groups.

"Last night, we gained political credibility," said Mr Falkvinge.

"People were not taken in by the establishment and we got political trust from the citizens."

The profile of the Pirate Party and issues surrounding copyright law have dominated headlines in Sweden over the past few months.

Rallying cry

In April, a court in Sweden sentenced the four men behind The Pirate Bay, the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, to a year in jail and ordered them to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

Mr Falkvinge said it had played a significant role in getting them the vote.

“ Many people just don't see illegal file-sharing as a crime, however hard the media industries try to persuade the public that it's just as bad as shoplifting ”
Rory Cellan-Jones BBC technology correspondent

"The establishment is trying to prevent control of knowledge and culture slipping from their grasp.

"When the Pirate Bay got hit, people realised the wolf was outside the front door.

"That happened one month before the ballot opened, so it had quite a rallying effect," he said.

Parties within the European Parliament tend to join one of the big voting blocs, otherwise their MEP can become marginalised.

Mr Falkvinge said they were still considering their position.

"We're looking at four different EU Parliament groups," he said.

"However, we're probably going to join either the Green block or the ALDE group."

The biggest loser in Sweden's election was the eurosceptic June List party, which saw its share of the vote fall by more than 10 points to 3.6% of the vote. The Left Party also saw its vote halved to 5.6%.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/8089102.stm

Published: 2009/06/08 11:24:36 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Gay Penguin Pair Raising Chick

2009-06-08T20:58:00.000-07:00

So it seems that mother nature and science didn't get the memo about bringing about the end of civilization.... hmmmm maybe anyone who argues that Gay marriage isn't natural should change the definition of natural from occurring in nature to uh... well what occurs in nature that's convenient to our belief system...

Males incubated abandoned egg for a month and continue to care for chick
Image: Male penguin parents
Focke Strangmann / AP
Two male Humboldt penguins cautiously guard the entrance to their cave in the "Zoo am Meer" zoological park in Bremerhaven, northern Germany.

BERLIN - A German zoo says a pair of gay male penguins are raising a chick from an egg abandoned by its parents.

Bremerhaven zoo veterinarian Joachim Schoene says the egg was placed in the male penguins' nest after its parents rejected it in late April. The males incubated it for some 30 days before it hatched and have continued to care for it. The chick's gender is not yet known.

Schoene said the male birds, named Z and Vielpunkt, are one of three same-sex pairs among the zoo's 20 Humboldt penguins that have attempted to mate.
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here

Homosexual behavior has been documented in many animal species.

The zoo said in a statement on its Web site Thursday that "sex and coupling in our world don't always have something to do with reproduction."

Just A Little Reminder...

2009-06-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

Some People's Daily Mission Is
Simply To
P*SS YOU OFF.

CIRQUE DU ROMEO AND JULIET

2009-06-06T04:30:00.000-07:00

A timeless tale of star crossed love told like never before...
With a dramatic mix of aerial circus acts, contemporary dance and classical ballet.

Featuring choreography by Brice Mousset, Francois Perron, Ivo Gueorguiev, Deborah Wingert, Matt Baker, and Jehan

June 13 at 8 pm
June 14 at 2 pm
at
Manhattan Movement & Arts Center
248 West 60th St.
(between Amsterdam & West End)

Call 212.787.1178 for to make a reservation
$10 in advance
$15 at the door

Visit manhattanmovement.com for more info

2009-06-05T05:51:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS
Tickled apes yield laughter clue

WATCH APE LAUGHTER--CLICK HERE

New research has given credence to the idea that laughter evolved in a common ancestor of the great apes and humans.

Researchers tickled 22 young apes and three humans and acoustically analysed the laughing sounds that resulted.

Though the vocalisations varied, the team found that the patterns of changes fit with evolutionary splits in the human and ape family tree.

The research in Current Biology also suggests that gorillas and bonobos have some control over their breathing.

Primate researchers have long guessed that many of the social behaviours that are seen in humans have a basis in our primate lineage.

Studies have noted that vocalisations that some apes make while being tickled are similar to those made when they are playing, and acoustically they share some characteristics with human laughter.

"We have various findings showing that human laughter is deeply rooted in human biology, because, for example, it's present in various cultures, in deaf and blind children," explained Marina Davila-Ross of the University of Portsmouth, the lead author of the study.

"So there have been many claims that these vocalisations have a pre-human basis."

To put the idea on a firmer footing, Dr Davila-Ross made more than 800 recordings of the tickle-induced laughter of the apes and infants.

Many of the characteristics of the actual frequencies in the recordings - such as the central and peak frequencies, and the variability of the frequencies within each laugh - were similar across all the subjects.

The differences among the subjects, however, showed how they may indicate a common ancestor. Chimpanzees and bonobos - our closest relatives of the group tended, like the humans, to have longer series of laughs, each made up of shorter calls.

Another component is in the role that the voice plays in the sound of a laugh.

"When humans laugh, they voice stable sounds: that means the vocal folds are moving in a very regular synchronised way," Dr Davila-Ross explained. "We found these acoustic properties also in bonobos."

Orangutans, by comparison, had fewer "vibration regimes" - meaning they could get fewer tones from their vocal cords.

Because the sounds of the most closely related apes matched most closely in the analysis of the laughter, the researchers believe the work is proof of laughter's shared evolutionary origin, followed by adaptation to its form in the species we see today.

"There's a lot of research that has been going on, but this is the first study that has conducted the phylogenetic approach to measure these acoustics and relate them to one another," Dr Davila-Ross.

ANOTHER CLIP--CLICK HERE

One surprising finding was that gorillas and bonobos had bouts of laughter that lasted as much as three times the length of their breathing cycle - suggesting that they exerted some control over their breathing in the process.

Robert Barton, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Durham, called the research "fun, but not all that surprising". He said that there have long been suspicions of a shared evolutionary basis for laughter, in a concept researchers call homology.

"It's widely accepted that these emotional expressions are homologous - people have looked at laughter in social contexts in terms of play faces and vocalisations, but no-one has worked specifically on tickle-induced laughter before.

"It's certainly less surprising than the alternative, which would be that it evolved separately and independently in each group," he told BBC News.

"What I think is the interesting question is the function of the behaviour in the different species, and whether it's functionally the same - that would be fascinating," he said.

Dr Davila-Ross said that the answer to that question interested her group as well, and that she is conducting further experiments to address the question.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8083230.stm

Published: 2009/06/04 16:56:07 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Imagination is dead.

2009-06-04T04:49:00.000-07:00

What happens to kids? Teaching I get to see lots of little kids. They are funny imaginative, unafraid, and they speak their minds... well most of them. Then what happens? Because I look at these kids and then I look at my peers and older human beings most of whom are unimaginative, afraid, and barely ever voice an original thought (assuming they have them).

So what happens? It could be the parents, it could be society, which includes the educational system coupled with whats portrayed on the media. What kills a child's sense of wonder and the absurd. Is it just manufactured toys and stories? The need to play with certain characters from certain movies means all kids start telling the same stories the same way killing imagination. JIM HENSON IS DEAD. Bummer.

"Dad, What's a Muppet?"
"A creature with wit, social commentary, and positive messages"
"Are you a muppet?"
"I wish."

Anyway this isn't a thing about the positive messages in the muppets its about something that makes kids mindless drones who stop making up their own stories to consuming the mindless stupid crap that is easily marketed and merchandise. I'm sorry but highschool musical and hannah montana and the jonas bros can all go--- well let's just stop there and say they can all go.

Long story short if you get the chance to play with a kid or be near a kid who's playing (that you know) encourage them to make up their own games to tell their own stories. Maybe or just notice their lack of imagination and weep for dead muppets.

U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally

2009-06-03T04:45:00.000-07:00

U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: June 2, 2009 in THE NEW YORK TIMES

The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.

The publication of the document was revealed Monday in an online newsletter devoted to issues of federal secrecy. That publicity set off a debate among nuclear experts about what dangers, if any, the disclosures posed. It also prompted a flurry of investigations in Washington into why the document had been made public.

On Tuesday evening, after inquiries from The New York Times, the document was withdrawn from a Government Printing Office Web site.

Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly.

“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former Director of Central Intelligence and deputy secretary of defense who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”

But David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said information that shows where nuclear fuels are stored “can provide thieves or terrorists inside information that can help them seize the material, which is why that kind of data is not given out.”

The information, considered sensitive but not classified, was assembled for transmission later this year to the International Atomic Energy Agency as part of a process by which the United States is opening itself up to stricter inspections in hopes that foreign countries, especially Iran and other states believed to be clandestinely developing nuclear arms, will do likewise.

President Obama sent the document to Congress on May 5 for Congressional review and possible revision, and the Government Printing Office subsequently posted the draft declaration on its Web site.

As of Tuesday evening, the reasons for that action remained a mystery. On its cover, the document attributes its publication to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. But Lynne Weil, the committee spokeswoman, said the committee “neither published it nor had control over its publication.”

Gary Somerset, a spokesman for the printing office, said it had “produced” the document “under normal operating procedures” but had now removed it from its Web site pending further review.

The document contains no military information about the nation’s stockpile of nuclear arms, or about the facilities and programs that guard such weapons. Rather, it presents what appears to be an exhaustive listing of the sites that comprise the nation’s civilian nuclear complex, which stretches coast to coast and includes nuclear reactors and highly sensitive sites at weapon laboratories.

Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, revealed the existence of the document Monday in “Secrecy News,” an electronic newsletter he publishes on the Web.

Mr. Aftergood expressed bafflement at its disclosure, calling it “a one-stop shop for information on U.S. nuclear programs.”

In his letter of transmittal to Congress, Mr. Obama characterized the information as “sensitive but unclassified” and said that all the information that the United States gathered to comply with the advanced protocol “shall be exempt from disclosure” under the Freedom of Information Act.

The report details the locations of hundreds of nuclear sites and activities. Each page is marked across the top “Highly Confidential Safeguards Sensitive” in capital letters, with the exception of pages that detailed additional information like site maps. In his transmittal letter, Mr. Obama said the cautionary language was a classification category of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors.

The agency, in Vienna, is a unit of the United Nations whose mandate is to enforce a global treaty that tries to keep civilian nuclear programs from engaging in secret military work.

In recent years, it has sought to gain wide adherence to a set of strict inspection rules, known formally as the additional protocol. The rules give the agency powerful new rights to poke its nose beyond known nuclear sites into factories, storage areas, laboratories and anywhere else that a nation might be preparing to flex its nuclear muscle. The United States signed the agreement in 1998 but only recently moved forward with carrying it out.

The report lists many particulars about nuclear programs and facilities at the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories — Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia — as well as dozens of other federal and private nuclear sites.

One of the most serious disclosures appears to center on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which houses the Y-12 National Security Complex, a sprawling site ringed by barbed wire and armed guards. It calls itself the nation’s “Fort Knox” for highly enriched uranium, a main fuel of nuclear arms.

The report lists “Tube Vault 16, East Storage Array,” as a prospective site for nuclear inspection. It said the site, in Building 9720-5, contains highly enriched uranium for “long-term storage.”

An attached map shows the exact location of Tube Vault 16 along a hallway and its orientation in relation to geographic north, although not its location in the Y-12 complex.

Tube vaults are typically cylinders embedded in concrete that prevent the accidental formation of critical masses of highly enriched uranium that could undergo bursts of nuclear fission, known as a criticality incident. According to federal reports, a typical tube vault can hold up to 44 tons of highly enriched uranium in 200 tubes. Motion detectors and television cameras typically monitor each vault.

Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist in the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington that tracks atomic arsenals, called the document harmless. “It’s a better listing than anything I’ve seen” of the nation’s civilian nuclear complex, Mr. Cochran said. “But it’s no national-security breach. It confirms what’s already out there and adds a bit more information.”

Seven reasons to stop listening to Coldplay

2009-06-02T04:30:00.000-07:00

Seriously just stop listening to coldplay... just stop try some of these on for size

God - The Gents

HENCHMEN

More eyecandy of coming celluloid gems

2009-06-01T04:55:00.000-07:00

The Goods Redband Trailer - watch more funny videos

Not enough good naturing maiming in today's entertainment media

2009-05-31T05:16:00.000-07:00

Seriously they just don't make em like they used to

The kazoo is still cooler.

2009-05-30T06:48:00.000-07:00

This thing is ridiculous. Does size matter? Can I play this on the subway at rush hour for spare change? Is the ricola guy threatened?

BBC NEWS
'Lost' music instrument recreated
By Pallab Ghosh
Science Correspondent, BBC News

New software has enabled researchers to recreate a long forgotten musical instrument called the Lituus.

The 2.4m (8ft) -long trumpet-like instrument was played in Ancient Rome but fell out of use some 300 years ago.

Bach's motet (a choral musical composition) "O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht" was one of the last pieces of music written for the Lituus.

Now, for the first time, this 18th Century composition has been played as it should have been heard.

Researchers from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the University of Edinburgh collaborated on the study.

Performed by the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (SCB) the Lituus produced a piercing trumpet-like sound interleaving with the vocals.

Until now, no one had a clear idea of what this instrument looked or sounded like.

But researchers at Edinburgh University developed a system that enabled them to design the Lituus from the best guesses of its shape and range of notes.

The result was a 2.4m (8ft) -long thin straight horn, with a flared bell at the end.

Hard to play

It is an unwieldy instrument with a limited tonal range that is hard to play. But played well, it gives Bach's motet a haunting feel that couldn't be reproduced by modern instruments.

The software was originally developed by a PhD student Dr Alistair Braden to improve the design of modern brass instruments.

But Dr Braden and his supervisor Professor Murray Campbell, were approached by a Swiss-based music conservatoire specialising in early music, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, to help them recreate the Lituus - even though no one alive today has heard, played or even seen a picture of this forgotten instrument.

SCB gave the Edinburgh team their expert thoughts on what the Lituus may have been like in terms of the notes it produced, its tonal quality and how it might have been played.

They also provided cross-section diagrams of instruments they believed to be similar to the Lituus.

"The software used this data to design an elegant, usable instrument with the required acoustic and tonal qualities," says Professor Campbell.

"The key was to ensure that the design we generated would not only sound right but look right as well."

He added: "Crucially, the final design produced by the software could have been made by a manufacturer in Bach's time without too much difficulty."

SCB has now used Edinburgh's designs to build two identical examples of the long-lost instrument.

Both were used in an experimental performance of "O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht" in Switzerland earlier this year.

Written by Bach in the 1730s, it is thought that this is now the only piece of music in existence that specifies the use of the Lituus - and has almost certainly not been performed using this instrument since Bach's time.

"Sophisticated computer modelling software has a huge role to play in the way we make music in the future," comments Professor Campbell.

The software also opens up the possibility that brass instruments could be customised more closely to the needs of individual players in the future - catering more closely for the differing needs of jazz, classical and other players all over the world.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8075223.stm

Published: 2009/05/30 13:10:53 GMT

© BBC MMIX

PROMO TEASER

2009-05-30T04:27:00.000-07:00

Tivo the Revo.

2009-05-29T05:36:00.000-07:00

Let's televise the revolution
sell DIY kits
personalize the movement
On demand
rewind
watch at your convenience
In a year or so-- f*!# that, next season
DVD box set
5 hours of behind the scenes footage

arm the masses
imagine churches stockpiling weapons
manufacturing a counter revolution
We need a culture war
arm the masses
No casualties but dead ideas
wounded and limping beliefs struggling
to climb out of the trenches
Let's carpet bomb the lot
but not salt the earth
we'll see what grows back

Best Western Eden

2009-05-28T05:54:00.000-07:00

There were no clocks in the hotel. Anywhere. In the States, every hotel room, no matter how crappy, has at least a clock radio. He was glad to have packed the old Timex. It was the wind up kind. No batteries and it ticked something awful. When he woke up confused and wet with sweat from deep sleep, somewhere between very late and God-forsaken early, the only sound to be heard was the watch. It sounded like the tip of a pencil being tapped against linoleum. A six hour time difference can really screw around with a person’s inner clock.

No matter what country, no matter what time zone, he always had the same dream. His eyes and mouth are sealed shut and he is trekking his way across a chasm filled landscape that resembled a mass desert grave. Naked and scared shitless, he stumbles across a cobra or whatever type of snake he’d last seen that crazy Australian man poke with a sick on the television. The snake slithers up him and sinks its fangs into his palm and wrist. The snake does not release its hold until he’s fallen into one of the holes which could be vertical graves. As he was loses the use of his hand, his breath, his life, he wakes up. The last two nights he had woken up alone and lost. Thank God for the ancient Timex.  

The room was smaller than certain walk-in closets. Standing on one leg, using the wall for support, he could lift the other leg up to form a human letter K and reach clear across the width of the entire room. He'd caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, contorted like he was caught in an invisible spider web and laughed at the ridiculousness of everything. The room was like a walk-in closet with sink, shitter, and a shower enclosed as well. Still he was able to room by himself. His room back in the states was unidentifiable as a livable habitat. Clothes, papers, books and Cd's littered the floor, covered furniture, and engulfed the lighting fixtures, as though the clutter itself was its own new breed of foliage. The undergrowth spreading and returning things to their natural state. The only way to determine if a specific article of clothing was wearable or not was by smell. 

His nose was still full of her smell. In the last 48 hours, like a virus, she had invaded his being but more intensely so, she had invaded his nostrils, the left one being a slightly different shape than the right one.

It flattened out. Family Defect. She still smelled like- He sat on the window sill, looking at the view. Not entirely true. The window sill was only about a foot and a half by three inches, so he just sort of leaned up against it, face pressed against the cool glass. Using his tired mouth and slightly deformed nostril he made foggy amoebas of condensation appear and disappear with sighs. This breathtaking view was of a brick wall less than a foot away. If he gazed up and a little to the right, he could peer into the hallway of the floor above. If he really strained his vision and kept his face mashed against the cold glass at the most extreme angle, the river was visible. If his ear was pressed to the glass he heard the thumping subwoofers from Sinners, the nightclub next door. He had come expecting an authentic inn or European Bed and Breakfast type of establishment. They put him and the rest of the group up in the Best Western Eden.  

He’d spent many nights crashing on floors and couches back in the States. Most memorable was the time when he was unable to leave an unusually nice house he was staying at without setting off the alarm. Neither could he figure out how to turn on the television, which never would have fit in the hotel room he was in now. So try as he might to turn on the tube and kill his brain till someone woke up, there were just too many remotes. So he sat, waiting for some to wake up and let him out after so kindly letting him in. The situation he’s in now isn’t quite the same, here, in Amsterdam, he had a bed. 
A bed, no matter how small, beat the floor. He knew how to use this television, although it was of no use to him. Everything was dubbed. Watching West Side Story or Catdog in Dutch was like being stuck in the nightmare of a Salvador Dali. He could also leave anytime he wanted to. Except now-- 
He wanted to escape. The door: it had no alarm. He wanted to sleep. The bed: small, occupied. The single, but more accurately described as half, bed was inhabited by a female. The girl: Blondie, short. She had some distinct but not striking features. She was opinionated to the point of ignorance. Her views were so far to the right, they had to be wrong.  That was what bothered him the most. 
No. 
That was second on the list. 
NO. 
Third.  
Second place was reserved for the phone calls she had made to his room. He should have unplugged the phone but the Timex had no alarm and the wake up call was his only way of ensuring that he had enough time to drink enough coffee in order to make it to the theater coherent.   We now return to the best walk in closet in the west.
 
The phone was still plugged in. He forgot to wind the Timex. His body was telling him it was time to sleep. ANYWHERE. SOMEWHERE. His mind, however, would not allow him to look at the bed. Brick wall it was.

She was a nice girl, the sleeping suburbanite was, but she was without a discernible smell. She was without a discernible laugh. Thoughts of the virus flooded him like a relapsing fever. Like shingles had made his skin burn, she had created a spot for herself inside him. Under his skin, inside his torso, under the muscles, behind the ribs, she nestled between two lungs, right next to his heart. Most importantly, the olfactory memory still burned in his nostrils. She should be in the bed now, not Blondie. 

NO.
 
He should be in the bed. Alone. Asleep. That wasn’t the case. All the women were asleep. He was sure the men were too, but the thought never entered his mind. He looked at the unwound Timex. 3:48 AM. He strained to see a silver sliver of the river. Then he looked at the brick wall and wondered what had caused those stains, one of which could have been Abraham Lincoln. It could have been the self-educated President had it been as early as it was and the observer of the stain was as tired as he was. It was that early and he was that tired so it was as it was. He looked down and saw the 50 Euros on the nightstand, the corners being weighed down by the static Timex. That money had topped the night’s list of grievances. Like an unwound watch in a strange time zone. He could find no plausible use for it. Maybe- He’d buy the virus a present before he left, never to see her again.
 
No.
 
Maybe He’d buy his girlfriend something nice to take back home to her in the States.
 
No.
 
His mom? Maybe- 
It was women who started all of this; a woman who had started him. Women kicked HIM out of Eden. But it was man who had to give in: If not to the phone calls, if not to the lust, then to the money. Anything bought with those Euros, however, would be stained. It would be a reminder of the temptation. 

He doubted if Adam was ever able to enjoy apple pie again. 

That money was a waste, Maybe-- He should buy drinks and try to forget it all.
 
Hell No.

 He should buy coffee to make up for the night lost. 

Maybe-

 First he should put pants on. He was sitting, well, leaning against the window sill, in gray boxer briefs, bought by a woman and probably made by a woman, a woman living in Taiwan. He should have been wearing something with cartoon characters on them or at least bright colors. 

When he met the group for the first time in the lobby of the Best Western Eden, they thought he was a European man. He sat writing postcards, as though it was what he did every morning at that time. That day he had merely been a boy in costume, a boy, posing as someone who belonged where he sat. He fooled everyone. 

WAKE UP.
GOOD MOURNING.
GET OUT. 

Morning came, night floated down the river. He finished breakfast and walked into the lobby. It was full of people fresh off the plane. An Eden full of Adams. They’d find out soon enough. He walked out into the street and as he walked along the river he knew.  

He would get over the virus; build an immunity. 
He would spend the money. 
He would return to the States. 
He would go forth, be fruitful, and multiply.

Things you NEED to own RIGHT NOW! BUY BUY BUY!

2009-05-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

Do you own crap that was bought at three am from smiling, scary people on TV? Well here's a list of patents that actually exist. People thought they were good ideas then they thought people would want to buy them. Think about this but not too much.

Top 10 useless inventions

To inspire nominations for the Landfill Prize, here’s our list of the 19th and 20th centuries’ most unnecessary inventions
scream silencer

by John Naish

READ ARTICLE FROM TIMES ONLINE
What’s the most useless, pointless, resource-wasting consumer gadget that you have seen, bought or been given in the past 12 months?That’s the question at the heart of the first annual Landfill prize, which has already attracted a host of nominations, including automatic cucumber peelers, hi-spec plug-in air fresheners and a £150 electric toothbrush.

Today’s consumer society has become astonishingly adept at inventing pointless, hopeless, resource-sucking gizmos, but let’s not pretend we have a monopoly on this. Since the Victorian era, some of humankind’s most creative brains have kept themselves busy creating answers for needs that didn’t exist and solutions that are more cumbersome than the problems they promised to tackle. To inspire nominations for the Landfill Prize, here’s our list of the 19th and 20th centurys’ most pathetic, unnecessary and patently daft inventions.

1. The combined plow and gun
Patent no 35600, issued 1862

Rather than turn your sword into a ploughshare, why not combine your plough with a medium-sized artillery piece? It’s bound to be so much more effective than shouting “get orf moi land” at errant ramblers. Or, as the American inventor claimed, “Its utility is unquestionable, especially when used in border localities, subject to savage feuds and guerrilla warfare. In times of danger may be used in the field, ready charged with its deadly missiles of ball or grape. The share serves to anchor it firmly in the ground and enables it to resist the recoil, while the hand levers furnish convenient means of giving it the proper direction.” Why don’t the perpetually bickering Archers have one?

2. Device for waking persons from sleep
Patent no 256265, issued 1882

Sometimes, an alarm clock just isn’t quite enough for rousing heavy sleepers to face the day. So why not hang an array of weights on a frame above the snoozer’s head and, with the help of clockwork machinery, drop them upon their head until they wake? “When they fall it will strike a light blow, sufficient to awaken the sleeper, but not heavy enough to cause pain,” assures the inventor. Surely it’s just bound to cause stubborn sleepers simply to pull the duvet over their heads.

3. Balloon propelled by eagles or vultures
Patent no 863087, issued 1887

First, catch your eagle or vulture. Then attach the large bird to a balloon cupola, point its beak in desired direction, then sit back, relax and enjoy the in-flight snacks and movie. There’s a kind of simple genius to this idea, but a few potential snags make themselves apparent. Yes, there will be protests by animal lovers, but perhaps more pertinent is the fact that large birds of prey or carrion are notoriously uncooperative in matters of providing predictable and directable propulsion. Oh, and won’t they peck holes in the balloon?

4. Method of preserving the dead
Patent no 748284, issued 1903

Having trouble finding a suitable memorial for your loved one? How about having them permanently encased in glass? Herkimer J. Karkowski, the New Yorker who devised this tidy and decorative form of body-disposal seems to have been rather less squeamish than the average mourner. He believed that bereaved people would love nothing more than seeing their departed hermetically encased within a block of transparent glass, and thus “maintained for an indefinite period in a perfect and lifelike condition”. If an entire glass-encased relative might take up too much parlour-space, Karkowski suggested just having their head done. An attractive adornment to any mantelpiece. Or a handy doorstop? Glazed looks all round.

5. Moustache and lip guards
Patent no GB191127119, issued 1912

Oh the Edwardians and their moustaches: the damned hairy things seemed to be ever getting in the way, catching fire or becoming unattractively damp and potentially infected. To prevent this last problem, Fritz Baudisch filed a British patent to stop beards and moustaches getting moistened while drinking. His gadget consisted simply of a protective antiseptic paper disk that could be adapted to be folded over the edge of any drinking-vessel. Then, of course, it got damp and filled the toper’s facial hair with papier mache. Drat.

6. Water-filled brassiere
Patent no US4734078, issued 1988

All the mental effort expended on the mid 20th-century’s most famous innovations – the First and Second World Wars – seems to have fixed many inventors’ wilder imaginations on the straightforward business of creating new killing machines, thus draining their eccentric energy for several decades. It is only in the 1980s that we see a true return to form, with the creation of impractical and useless gadgetry like this – a sort of Wonderbra meets Waterworld. The American Inventor, James Moreau, explains it best (if it can be explained): “A brassiere which surrounds the breasts with water, so that a buoyant force provides improved and independent support for each breast. A transparent version is suggested for those who wish to make a fashion statement.” Even Madonna seems to have passed on that latter suggestion.

7. Sound-muffler for covering the mouth
Patent no 4834212, issued 1989

It’s the invention that really makes you want to scream – but no one will hear you. Moira and Frank Figone a couple from Belmont, California, created this face-tube device to enable purchasers to “Yell or scream without disturbing others, allowing them to vent built-up anger and frustration.” In this fiendishly basic design, the interior of the flat-bottomed muffler tube is coated with sound-absorbing foam. But here’s the clever bit: a microphone can be included to pick up a some sound and activate a light display or meter, “giving the user immediate visual feedback as to the intensity of sound produced”. Because otherwise, you’d never know, eh?

8. A glove for courting
Patent application no GB2221607, issued 1990

In the world of invention, romance is never dead. Just complicated. Terry King’s innovation aimed to assist couples who wish to maintain precious palm-to-palm contact while holding hands on cold days. It’s a pair of gloves knitted together into a single glove with a common palm section, but two separate sets of fingers. Bless. However, if you and your lovey-dove find yourselves running blissfully together through a frosty meadow and encounter a tree, the result could be distinctly face-mushingly tragic if you run either side of the trunk. That’s at least one good reason why the courting glove doesn’t seem to have caught on.

9. Alarm-equipped fork
US patent 5,421,089, issued 1995

Are you a manic masticator or a superfast food shoveller? The cutlery creators Nicole Dubus and Springfield Susan have come up with the just answer for you: a fork with a built in timer and alarm. The timer’s circuitry is connected to the handle of the fork and buzzes or lights up after a preset time, ensuring that eaters leave sufficient space between forkfulls for chewing 32 healthy times before swallowing. A must for business lunches and candlelit dinners.

10. The trouser-cushion
UK patent application No GB2267208, 1993

You may need to sit down for this one. British inventor Michael Bayley decided to put an end to standing nightmares by creating portable seat that you wear on a waist-belt. OK, it’s a somewhat convoluted version of having a cushion with a loop that goes through your belt. “The seat cushion is pivotable between a stowed position and a seating position in which it hangs down so that you can sit on it,” says the patent application. I can see one possible practical use: musical chairs, though you may get beaten to death by indignant toddlers.

Nuclear War, Zombies, Aliens, and Weird Fish

2009-05-26T12:45:00.001-07:00

Want proof the world is going to hell in a handbasket?

WAR

One day after its nuclear test drew angry and widespread condemnation, North Korea continued to defy the international community on Tuesday by test-firing two more short-range missiles, a South Korean government official said.

The missile firings came just hours after South Korea said it would join an American-led operation to stop the global trafficking in weapons of mass destruction, an action the North has previously said it would consider a declaration of war.

North Korea appeared unfazed by the world’s condemnation, which included strong rebukes from allies such as China and Russia. In Tuesday’s editions of Rodong, its main party newspaper, Pyongyang declared that it was “fully ready for battle” against the United States, accusing President Obama of “following in the footsteps of the previous Bush administration’s reckless policy of militarily stifling North Korea.”

North Korea has a history of flouting such international condemnation, especially recently: It launched a long-range rocket on April 5 despite international calls for restraint; quit nuclear negotiations; restarted its nuclear plants, and threatened more nuclear and long-range missile tests.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

While the threat of nuclear war is just that, a threat because execution would result in mutually assured destruction... There's weirder shit out there. I'm talking about

ZOMBIES

Yes ZOMBIE (ants)
Sort of... it's kind of a natural pesticide

It sounds like something out of science fiction: zombie fire ants. But it’s all too real.

Fire ants wander aimlessly away from the mound.

Eventually their heads fall off, and they die.

The strange part is that researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M’s AgriLife Extension Service say making "zombies" out of fire ants is a good thing.

"It’s a tool — they’re not going to completely wipe out the fire ant, but it’s a way to control their population."

The tool is the tiny phorid fly, native to a region of South America where the fire ants in Texas originated.

The flies "dive-bomb" the fire ants and lay eggs. The maggot that hatches inside the ant eats away at the brain, and the ant starts exhibiting what some might say is zombie-like behavior.

"At some point, the ant gets up and starts wandering," said Rob Plowes, a research associate at UT.

The maggot eventually migrates into the ant’s head, but Plowes said he "wouldn’t use the word 'control’ to describe what is happening. There is no brain left in the ant, and the ant just starts wandering aimlessly. This wandering stage goes on for about two weeks."

About a month after the egg is laid, the ant’s head falls off and the fly emerges ready to attack any foraging ants away from the mound and lay eggs.

Plowes said fire ants are "very aware" of these tiny flies, and it only takes a few to cause the ants to modify their behavior.

"Just one or two flies can control movement or above-ground activity," Plowes said. "It’s kind of like a medieval activity where you’re putting a castle under siege."

READ FULL ARTICLE

So just imagine that the military attempts to stop nuclear war by developing this same technique to work on humans. Introducing a parasitic maggot into the brain of the enemy forcing it to wander around aimlessly until it's head falls off. Of course to be truly affective these zombies should probably attack and destroy everything around them.... Once this results in both governments nuking their zombie populations

We should look for.....

BETTER LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS

Ever since the war on science er terror.... er.. scary terrifying science went out the window with the burning bush and we have begun to look back to research and scientific exploration space is back in play.

A serious search for extraterrestrial life

By Faye Flam

Astronomers are starting to zero in on Earth-like worlds orbiting other stars. Some of the more recent finds even look potentially habitable.

In the last 13 years, astronomers have used such remote-sending tools to catalog more than 300 planets outside the solar system.

The first such planets were many times bigger than our own, but progressively smaller ones have been turning up. In March, NASA launched a satellite called Kepler, which is seeking subtle changes in starlight that indicate the presence of little specks the size of Earth.

In the future, astronomers envision observing even more subtle changes in starlight to analyze the atmospheres of such planets.

The lineup of ambitious projects was causing plenty of excited chatter among scientists this month when they met at Baltimore's Space Telescope Sciences Institute for a symposium titled, "The Search for Life in the Universe."

Not only was NASA spending hundreds of millions to comb the galaxy for other worlds and to analyze them, but respectable astronomers, biologists, and geologists could now talk seriously about alien life.

Life-detection ideas were thrown around that were, while not easy, at least technologically feasible.

"Why is this interesting?" asked biologist Chris McKay of California's NASA-Ames Research Center. "We have the possibility of a second Genesis. We can have comparative biochemistry," he said, meaning that nature might use alternative ways to construct living things.

Even alien pond scum would change everything about our understanding of life and our place in the universe. We could take it apart and see how it replicated, what it ate, how it evolved.

Scientists have trouble defining life because all living things on Earth use the same building blocks. Is it life if it doesn't involve carbon? What if it doesn't have some equivalent of DNA?

"We use the Justice Potter Stewart definition," said McKay, recalling the famous definition of pornography: We'll know it when we see it.

But is there anything alive up there?

The biologists at the Baltimore meeting were optimistic. Life is tougher than anyone thought. Chemical traces of past life show it goes back at least 3.5 billion years into Earth's 4.6 billion-year existence.

Life may go back further. "This is a key fact," said NASA's McKay. As soon as the planet became remotely habitable, it was taken over by microbes.

The one necessary feature that everyone agreed on was liquid water. There's plenty of water out there, but for any of it to condense or melt into a liquid, a planet would have to orbit at just the right distance from its star.

A few years ago, James Kasting of Pennsylvania State University helped calculate what astronomers have come to know as the "habitable zone" around other stars. That's a distance that would make conditions somewhat cooler than Venus, and at least as warm as Mars.

A few of the known exoplanets fall in the habitable zone, including one recently announced super earth 12 light-years away. Kepler could find more. But ultimately the scientists are after something bigger: actual alien life.

At the meeting, Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger asked the scientists to imagine how we would detect life on Earth if our planet's exact twin were orbiting a star light-years away. "We would see this tiny point of light - this speckle of light - but there's a lot of information we can actually get from that," she said.

The key is in the atmospheres, said Penn State's Kasting. Our planet's atmosphere is full of oxygen and methane that can't easily be explained by any nonliving chemical process, he said. If we could detect that, we'd have a good case.

The Hubble's instruments have analyzed the atmospheres around several giant planets as they pass in front of their stars. With its repair, which astronauts completed this month, scientists plan to use it to study more.

It will take more elaborate space telescopes - or perhaps whole fleets of them - to analyze atmospheres with planets the size of Earth. All this is on the drawing board.

The gases wouldn't tell us what type of life was out there - whether it could take the form of intelligent beings, for example. It could be mostly weeds, or pond scum, or slime molds, or something we can't even imagine because we've never seen it.

But even that would go a long way toward explaining what life on this planet is all about, what it's doing here, and how it fits into this vast universe of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.

READ FULL ARTICLE

WEIRD FISH

And if you wonder what alien life would look like here's some weird ass fish that are found in earth oceans

Dracula fish

Discovered: Burma
Documented: 2009

It's not big and it's not pretty, but Danionella dracula is certainly unique.

The transparent 17-millimetre-long "Dracula fish" is the only member of the 3700-strong Cypriniformes group to have vampire-like fangs on its top and bottom jaws, which the males use to impress each other and to settle squabbles over territory.

The discovery of these fangs was something of a surprise because the Cypriniformes lost their teeth about 50 million years ago, says Danionella expert Ralf Britz of the Natural History Museum in London.

So did the Dracula fish manage to keep its teeth while all around were losing theirs? Er, no. Instead, it evolved something new.

What look like teeth are actually bone which has grown into curved spikes that poke through the skin.

By comparing the Dracula fish's DNA with that of zebrafish and other members of the family, Britz estimates that the bony fangs evolved within 30 million years of the family losing its true teeth.

(Image: The Natural History Museum, London)

Psychedelic frogfish

Discovered: Indonesia
Documented: 2009

When the psychedelic frogfish, Histiophryne psychedelica, turned up at a popular dive site off Ambon Island, Indonesia, in January 2008, it posed something of a mystery. How had a brightly coloured, 8-centimetre-long fish managed to stay hidden for so long in such well-trodden waters?

Then, in June, it caused another stir, when all of the 12 or so individuals disappeared without trace. But not before a team led by Theodore Pietsch from the University of Washington in Seattle had noted several brand new behaviours (Copeia, 2009, no 1, p 37).

Perhaps the oddest was that it seems to dislike swimming. Like other frogfish, it "walks" along the reef on its long, leg-like pectoral fins, but when startled it does something unique.

While other species swim to safety, H. psychedelica escapes by jet propulsion, squirting water out of gill-like openings towards the back of its body as it pushes off the bottom with its fins. This, says one diver who observed it, makes it look rather like "an inflated rubber ball bouncing along the bottom".

The new species also hunts differently. All the other 325 known species of anglerfish, the group to which frogfish belong, sit in the open and attract prey with a lure.

H. psychedelica has no lure. Instead, it hunts by squeezing itself into tiny crevices where small fish hide.

Finally, while other species of frogfish change colour to match the coral they are sitting on, H. psychedelica stays true to its name whatever the background, sporting mind-bending swirls of orange, white and blue.

The psychedelic frogfish is still missing, presumed hiding. With diving companies desperately seeking what was briefly their star attraction, we may yet find out where it came from and why it has taken such a different evolutionary path from its cousins.

(Image: David Hall / Seaphotos.com)

I ... CAN... SEE... IT'S... EYES?
The fish with a cockpit head

Discovered: California, 1939
Described: 2009

The 15-centimetre-long deep-sea barreleye fish Macropinna microstoma was discovered 70 years ago off the California coast. Until recently, though, little was known about it, as all known specimens were dead and damaged after being brought up in fishing nets.

This year, however, Bruce Robison from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California has collected the first footage of a live M. microstoma, filmed 600 to 800 metres down. They also collected a live specimen to study on the surface.

For the first time, researchers were able to see a delicate, transparent, fluid-filled dome on the fish's head, which completely encloses its bright green eyes.

The eyes were already known to face upwards to search for food through the gloom, but the live specimens revealed that once it has spotted food, it can swivel its eyes forward and swim straight upwards to catch it.

(Image: 2004 MBARI)

Okay well make sure to stock pile up on duct tape, napalm, freeze dried ice cream, shotgun shells, rocket fuel, and peach schnapps. You should be fine.

High Culture Low Art

2009-05-25T08:19:00.001-07:00

When I say that culture has generally hit a low. That low culture is what is acceptable to the masses.... It seems cynical but I offer this comparison of CARTOONS

1950

Rabbit of Seville, featuring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd (1950) @ Yahoo! Video

2009

Ok. I admit I laugh at both. Family guy is hysterical but they reference other TV shows. All pop culture is now self referential. Regardless of how obscure and hilarious some family guy references are my point remains the same.

Although here's Robot Chicken's operatic version of Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan....
which I guess falls somewhere in between but not really.

It's About Time

2009-05-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports that The State Department will offer equal benefits and protections to same-sex partners of American diplomats, according to an internal memorandum Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sent last week to an association of gay and lesbian Foreign Service officers.

Well it's about damn time.

As individual states fight for the right for citizens to be in monogamous committed relationships the State is finally doing something about it.

We can only hope the rest of the US follows suit and decides that the sanctity of marriage can only exist if people who want to get married are allowed to. Homophobia is a 21st century anachronism.

It seems as though the religious right in this country really need to get their priorities in line. Selfish Americans think that closing Gitmo, opposing Obamba's speech at Notre Dame, and making sure there are no tits or curse words on TV is way more important than things like uh Human Rights. Civil Liberties yes but basic human rights all over the world are being trampled.

Then again celebrity rehab and making sure chickens have enough living room space is obviously way more important.

Let people live their damn lives. They aren't hurting anyone and American culture and the moral fiber of the country won't be harmed anymore than it already is. Culture collapsed a while ago and the moral fabric well.... turn on your tv. Better yet turn it off.

READ FULL ARTICLE

AN IMPORTANT LIFESAVING ANNOUNCEMENT

2009-05-23T22:33:00.000-07:00

Shut off your computer and go outside. It's a beautiful day.

I'm Not Dead Yet

2009-05-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

THIS POST WAS INSPIRED BY THE BRILLIANT PLAY "EXIT THE KING" PERFORMED AND CO-TRANSLATED BY THE EQUALLY BRILLIANT GEOFFREY RUSH.... REMINDING US ALL THAT EVERYTHING FADES AND AS THE MOUNTAINS CRUMBLE AND WE PASS INTO THE ABYSS THAT DEATH IS UNNATURAL AND NO ONE WANTS TO DO IT BUT IT WILL HAPPEN TO US ALL AND ALL REIGNS MUST COME TO AN END....

BUT JUST IN CASE YOU AREN'T DEAD YET

Safety coffins
"All I desire for my own burial is not to be buried alive".

Lord Chesterfield. Letter to his daughter-in-law, March 16, 1769.
"Have me decently buried, but do not let my body be put into a vault in less than two days after I am dead".

dying request of George Washington.
"The earth is suffocating .... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive".

last words of composer, Frédéric Chopin.

Fear of premature burial was widespread in 18th and 19th century Europe, leading to the invention of the safety coffin. Over thirty different designs were patented in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. The common element was a mechanism for allowing the 'dead' to communicate with people above ground. Many designs included ropes which, when pulled, would ring the church bell, or a purpose-mounted bell. Others replaced the bell with a raiseable flag, a powerful fire cracker or a pyrotechnic rocket. Some included a shovel, a ladder and a supply of food and water. An essential element, which was overlooked in some designs, was a breathing tube to provide air and occasionally even sustenance.

In 1822, Dr Adolf Gutsmuth of Seehausen, Altmark, demonstrated his design by having himself buried alive, whereupon he "stayed underground for several hours and had a meal of soup, beer, and sausages served through the coffin's feeding tube"

Although several designs were built and sold, there is no indication that any dead person was ever buried in a safety coffin. Most models had sufficient design flaws to suggest that they would have been unlikely to have worked properly if they had actually been used.

For example the models that required ropes to be tied directly to the arms and legs, so that the alarm was raised upon any sign of movement of the deceased, would all have been triggered by the natural movements of the limbs that occur as the body putrefies and bloats. Safety coffins are still available today. As recently as 1995 an Italian Fabrizio Caselli invented a model that includes an emergency alarm, two-way microphone/speaker, a torch, oxygen tank, heartbeat sensor and heart stimulator.
Design for Safety Coffin
Design for Safety Coffin. Dr Johann Taberger Der Scheintod Hanover 1829.

Improved Burial Case
Improved Burial Case. Patent No. 81,437 Franz Vester, Newark, New Jersey. August 25, 1868.
USA Patents Office

The security coffin designed by Dr Johann Gottfried Taberger in 1829 alerted a cemetery night watchman by a bell which was activated by a rope connected to strings attached to the hands, feet and head of the 'corpse'. The bell housing prevented the alarm from sounding by wind or birds landing on it. The design of the tube prevented rain water from wetting the 'corpse', and contained mesh to stop nuisance insects. On the event of the bell sounding, a second tube was to be inserted at the foot of the coffin and air pumped through with a bellows.

The patent for another safety coffin the 'Vester Burial Case' states "The nature of this invention consists of placing on the lid of the coffin, and directly over the face of the body laid therein, a square tube, which extends from the coffin up through and over the surface of the grave, said tube containing a ladder and a cord, one end of said cord being placed in the hand of the person laid in the coffin, and the other being attached to a bell on the top of the square tube, so that, should a person be interred ere life is extinct, he can, on recovery to consciousness, ascend from the grave and the coffin by the ladder; or, if not able to ascend by said ladder, ring the bell, thereby giving an alarm, and thus save himself from premature burial and death; and, if on inspection, life is extinct, the tube is withdrawn, the sliding door closed, and the tube used for a similar purpose."
Further information

* Jan Bondeson. Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. W.W. Norton & Company; 2001. ISBN: 039304906X

from http://www.deathonline.net/what_is/safety.cfm

MEN ARE ON THE VERGE OF EXTINCTION

2009-05-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

Men are on the road to extinction as their genes shrink and slowly fade away, medical students heard today.

A researcher in human sex chromosomes said the male Y chromosome was dying and could run out within the next five million years.

But Professor Jennifer Graves said men may follow the path of a type of rodent which still manages to reproduce despite not having the vital genes that make up the Y chromosome.

She told medical students at the annual outreach public lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSI) a second species of human beings could even be born in the future.

“You need a Y chromosome to be male,” said Prof Graves.

“Three hundred million years ago the Y chromosome had about 1,400 genes on it, and now it’s only got 45 left, so at this rate we’re going to run out of genes on the Y chromosome in about five million years.

“The Y chromosome is dying and the big question is what happens then.”

The male Y chromosome has a gene (SRY) which switches on the development of testis and pumps out male hormones that determine maleness.

In her lecture, entitled The Decline and Fall of the Y Chromosome and the Future of Men, Prof Graves discussed the disappearance of the Y chromosome and the implications for humans.

She said it was not known what would happen once the Y chromosome disappeared.

“Humans can’t become parthenogenetic, like some lizards, because several vital genes must come from the male,” she continued.

“But the good news is that certain rodent species – the mole voles of Eastern Europe and the country rats of Japan – have no Y chromosome and no SRY gene.

“Yet there are still plenty of healthy male mole voles and country rats running around. Some other gene must have taken over the job and we’d like to know what that gene is.”

The scientist said there were several candidate genes which could take over from SRY, adding whichever one did take over was sheer chance.

“It is even possible that two or more different sex-determination systems based on different genes could arise in different populations,” she added.

“These could no longer reproduce with each other, leading to two different species of humans.”

The work of Prof Graves, of the Australian National University, Canberra, on the past evolution of sex determination has paved the way for developments in diagnosis of gender disorders and gender-related disease in humans.

Professor Brian Harvey, director of research at RCSI, said he was delighted to have a scientist of Prof Graves’ calibre speaking at this year’s lecture.

“Not only is Professor Graves a world-renowned scientist, but she also has the ability to convert difficult scientific concepts into language non-scientists can grasp and help bring science to life,” he added.

Read more: "Men on road to extinction | BreakingNews.ie" -
READ FULL ARTICLE

Hooray for Hollywood

2009-05-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

UPCOMING AND RECENTLY RELEASED FILMS TO PEEP A GANDER AT WITH YOUR EYEBALLS

BTW Dan Akroyd confirmed that coming soon... Ghostbusters 3..... just saying

Le Singe Monte Une Bicyclette

2009-05-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

A man rode his rusty Schwinn down the tree lined, suburban street, early in the morning. It was cloudy and cool. He was naked. It was a banana seat bike. He always said he rode this way because he like to feel the wind against his shins. I reminded him shorts would do the trick, even spants, but he just scoffed and pulled a wheelie. The neighbors didn't mind. Only the paper boy was up that early, anyway. It's actually quite sight to see a man riding a banana seat bicycle, while reading the paper. On odd numbered days he would smoke his pipe during the morning ride. Unless of course it was a leap year, then it was a cigarette and a unicycle. All of this was done without the modern convenience of clothes. Now, believe me when I say, he was far from a nudist or a naturist. In fact, if you were to ask him his views on such folks, he'd spew a string of expletives that would make a sailor blush. Our cyclist believed in the usual higher powers, journalism, and pastries. However, like most well informed citizens was distrustful of cats, shopping carts, and left socks, accusing them of attempting to pass for the right. This is turn confusing his shoes, so forth and so on.  
For so many years had this man been riding his bicycle in the morning that he could do it with his eyes shut, had it been possible to read the daily news in such a fashion. His pipe, this being the 3rd of the April year of our lord 2006, was letting off puffs of sweet smelling tobacco from behind the paper, giving him the look of a locomotive. When on this dreary morning, it began to drizzle. 
"It's like all the angels of heaven are spitting on all the cats of this world, good riddance" he grumbled. 
Quick as a whip the old man folded up his newspaper into a pointed captain's hat and placed it on his head.  
"Wouldn't want to catch a cold, would we Sammy?" he proclaimed. 
Now, I'm not sure if the man's name is Sam, or if the bike's name is Sam, or if my name is Sam, but he has a point, none the less. 
The old man wheelied through the puddles singing a song that began like happy birthday and ended like The Who’s "Baba O’Riely” and he was without a care in the world. As he rounded the corner onto his street, already being 2 minutes late for toast, he was struck by a lime green Volkswagen minibus, and sent sprawling onto the lawn. 
The paper hat was in the gladiolas, the pipe was in the mailbox, and somehow the banana seat made it to the roof of the car port. The old man was on his back, looking at the rain falling straight down. The paper boy rushed over. 
"You alright, mate?" 
"--" 
"Sir? You alright? If you die, they'll sure as fuck fire me." 
"--" 
"Hello? Aw Christmas and crackers, I killed the naked bastard-" 
The old man muttered something that sounded like "Bears fly kites." 
"I beg your pardon?" asked the paperboy. 
"Where is my pipe?" repeated the old man. 
The paper boy ran about looking for the old man's pipe grumbling about his job, a girlfriend's birthday, and seeing the old man's shame. He looked in the gladiolas, he looked up to the roof, and as he was about to shove the remaining papers in the mailbox and bugger off, he found the pipe and returned it to Sammy, or whoever was still on the grass, motionless. The old man great fully accepted the pipe and pulled out a bag of tobacco, packed the pipe and began smoking.  "Where did you get that?" asked the paperboy in shock, referring to the bag of tobacco that seemed to appear out of thin air. 
"From the tobacconist" said the old man. 
"Right, right. Well then, if you're all set, I'll be off." 
"Out here in the fields. I fought for my meals. I get my back into my living I don't need to fight. To prove I'm right. I don't need to be foooorgiven!" sang the old man as the paperboy hopped in the rectangular limey looking vehicle and sped off.
The old man was left smoking and singing in the rain. 
The moral of the story is make sure you put your socks on the right feet, be on time for toast, and the falling rain won't hurt you, it only exists to piss off cats.

PIGS IN SPAAAAAAAACE

2009-05-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

Egypt slaughtered 300,00 plus pigs even though they have had no reported cases of swine flu NOR is the disease spread by pigs. So what that the majority of the population doesn't eat pork and the pig farmers are the religious minority.

Meanwhile Notre Dame treats Obama like the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad... The news would have you believe that legislation to improve health care, equal rights for all Americans, the environment, and workers will turn us all into card carrying pinko commie hippies, pink triangles on our sleeves, letting the king of England steal your guns.

So between the pandemics, the threat of nuclear war, the moral disintegration, and the second red scare who has time to worry about the fact that American culture is now defined by Beyonce Knowles in a feature length cat fight, or the real house wives of new jersey. I am in mourning for art, culture, and mass taste. I cry for the ignorance of Americans who want to deny monogamous relationships to committed couples who could bring sanctity back to marriage.

Tell me what to fear and keep it manageable. Wear your masks, throw your hot dogs into the bon fire, say your prayers, and eat your vegetables.

Speaking of fear....
This article from the BBC should get you thinking that maybe its normal to want to scream from the windows "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"

Are we all capable of violence?

By Diene Petterle

It was one of the thorniest questions of the 20th Century and it remains a conundrum today. Are all "ordinary" people potentially violent?

The human race is both appalled and fascinated by violence. Man's aggression spans the globe - from terrorist attacks to guerrilla wars to gang-related crime.

It is everywhere, and it binds all nations and races together. But where does it begin? Do we learn it or is it something instinctive?

Most of us think of ourselves as calm and peaceful people.

We're brought up to try and resolve all conflict peaceably and tend to think that violence is something that "other" people commit, not ourselves. But is it?

Is it possible that you, or your mother or daughter or son, could ever be driven to commit a dreadful crime? Do we have that level of violence in ourselves?

The answer is yes.

Contrary to popular belief, we are born violent. Until the age of three, our impulses run riot. There is no stopping the urges which come from the emotional centre in our brains.

But as we grow up, we start to develop the part of the brain that allows us to control our aggression - the pre-frontal cortex. Yet crucially, how well this control mechanism works depends on our experiences.

Festival of violence

Being taught to share and take turns rather than resolve conflict with violence actually changes the physical structure of the brain and therefore makes us less aggressive.

But trying to resolve conflict peaceably is not something all cultures subscribe to. In the Bolivian Andes, one tribe settles disputes which arise over the year in an annual festival of violence, known as the Tinku.

The way people with no history of violence committed atrocities during World War II has provoked much discussion

Their warrior tradition dictates that men, women and even children should learn to fight and deaths are not unheard of.

Neuroscientist Maria Couppis argues that their brains are different from the norm because they were socialised to resolve conflicts this way.

This suggests that although we are all born with a violent potential, our upbringing and the environment play a key part in creating violence controls in our brain.

Not only are we born violent, we are also chemically programmed to love it. Inside the brain a pleasure-inducing chemical called dopamine is released when we fight.

Dopamine informs the brain that we're having a good time. But the problem doesn't stop there - the rush we get from dopamine can get us physically addicted to violence. The more we have it, the more we want it.

Primeval pleasure

Danny Brown, a former hooligan, knows better than most just how far one can go to get this "hit". He was sent to prison for stabbing a rival fan but even that didn't stop him. The rush of hooliganism was too strong to resist.

"I was never into drinking or drugs. Fighting was my heroin."

It's only when your violent impulses are triggered that you realise you are out of control

Prof Charles Golden

Fighting is a primeval pleasure controlled by the frontal part of the brain. But how easy is it for us to lose control? Crimes of passion are an everyday occurrence and perpetrators often don't know what came over them. How is this explained? What is it that drives them to lose it?

Neuro-psychology expert Prof Charles Golden says we can all easily lose control and commit an extreme act of violence. All we need is for there to be a breakdown in the pre-frontal cortex and that can be triggered by anything from a car accident or repeated blows to the head in a game of rugby.

In fact, physical injury is not the only way to cause the cortex to shut down. Depression, alcohol abuse, drugs, lack of sleep and even the natural ageing process can all injure our violence controls.

Control mechanisms

"One of my patients is a priest," says Prof Golden. "He spent all his life helping people and one day he had a car accident. In the hospital, the doctors sent him home saying he was completely fine.

"For a month he didn't notice anything was wrong. But then he had a fight with his wife and completely lost it. He very nearly killed her. So much so that she left him straight away.

Many are forced into violent action and desensitised

"The scary thing is that in your everyday life you just don't notice there's anything wrong. It's only when your violent impulses are triggered that you realise you are out of control. But by then it's probably too late."

It's hard to accept that we're born violent, that we enjoy it, and that all our control mechanisms can easily be broken.

But if we think about why most people get killed, it isn't because of a crime of passion or a sudden rush of violence - it is because of war and genocide. It is because someone deliberately decided to kill another person.

Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier in the Sudan, has personal experience of how a traumatic experience can lead you to deliberately want to kill another human being.

He had a healthy and happy childhood until one day war tore his hopes for a normal life. His mother disappeared, his village was burnt down and he lost everything he had.

Justified aggression

He became convinced that the people who did this to him deserved to die, and joined the rebel army. With them, he killed and tortured many people.

He is now trying to re-build his life and share with the world the idea that violence only creates more violence.

Emmanuel Jal's experience is extreme. But how extreme does a situation need to be for you or I to be convinced that violence is justified against another person?

Sometimes violence is explained by alcohol consumption or other factors

Most of us can imagine that if someone harmed our children or loved ones, we might engage in violence. But could we ever harm someone who hasn't caused us any harm, merely because of an idea or ideology?

The much-cited Milgram experiment of 1961 suggests the answer might be yes. Members of the public were asked to give a shock to a "volunteer" every time they got an answer from a multiple questions test wrong. The shocks were to be increased incrementally, up until the lethal 450v shock.

What the participants didn't know was that the "volunteer" was acting and hadn't been receiving shocks. But still two-thirds were prepared to deliver the "fatal" 450v shock because of the supervision of a white-coated authority figure.

The experiment has often been used as the proof that we are all capable of violence within a certain framework. We struggle to accept this, but the science seems to suggest we are wrong.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8043688.stm

This is what we do those who threaten our power

2009-05-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 17.33 GMT on Monday 9 March 2009. It was last updated at 15.20 BST on Wednesday 15 April 2009.

Santino, a 31-year-old male at Furuvik zoo, may be the first animal to exhibit an unambiguous ability to plan for the future, a behaviour many scientists argue is unique to humans. Forward planning takes considerable cognitive skills, because it requires an animal to envisage future events it will have to deal with.

Santino would get agitated when the first groups of visitors arrived at his enclosure in the morning, and would start hurling stones at the spectators. When the zookeepers investigated, they found that, while the zoo was closed, Santino had been busy making piles of ammunition, and returned to them to resupply.

To catch the chimp in action, one zookeeper hid in a room overlooking the enclosure and observed the ape's behaviour before the zoo gates opened each morning. She saw Santino dragging stones from a protective moat that surrounded his island home, before placing them in piles. Further covert surveillance of the ape revealed he spent some time tapping areas of concrete floor with his fist. Occasionally, the animal would thump harder, releasing chunks of concrete that he broke into rough discs.

A survey of the enclosure showed that Santino made piles of ammunition only on the quarter of the island's shore that faced the visiting crowds.

Since becoming aware of the issue, zookeepers have removed hundreds of caches of stones from the island and have observed Santino gathering stones and putting them in piles at least 50 times. Santino's attempts to fashion concrete discs has been recorded 18 times, according to a report in Current Biology.

Staff at the zoo coped with Santino's antics by warning visitors when he was getting agitated, and erected a fence to try to contain the projectiles. Cognitive scientist Mathias Osvath, the author of the study, believes that such complex forward planning suggests Santino can anticipate future events and is able to devise ways of dealing with them. In this situation, he is trying to get the crowds to move on.

"Forward planning like this is supposed to be uniquely human; it implies a consciousness that is very special, that you can close your eyes you can see this inner world," he said. "Many apes throw objects, but the novelty with Santino is that he makes caches of these missiles while he is fully calm and only throws them much later on.

"We are not alone in the world within. There are other creatures who have this special consciousness that is said to be uniquely human."

Osvath interviewed zookeepers at Furuvik and examined records of the chimp's behaviour. He found that Santino only gathered rocks and made concrete missiles when the zoo was closed. He gave up the behaviour completely when the zoo was shut over the winter.

The zookeepers recently decided that an operation was the best way of controlling Santino's behaviour.

"They have castrated the poor guy. They hope that his hormone levels will decrease and that will make him less prone to throw stones. He's already getting fatter and he likes to play much more now than before. Being agitated isn't good for him," said Osvath.

So much for evolution. Turns out Bob Barker was just interested in keeping the animals from rising up against us.

Ground Zero

2009-05-16T21:49:00.000-07:00

Let's start fresh. I look forward to the day when society breaks down and we either return to the barter system or a gift society.

I will eventually be working on posting information regarding my new video editing business.

For now the last ASEID PERFORMANCE is Sunday May 17th @ 2pm, Dicapo opera theater. Tix available at the door.
www.aseid.org

Also keep an eye out for Cirque Romeo and Juliet next month at MMAC.

My name is Shane. I am a creative professional. I am allergic to soy. To quote Charles Bukowski it's not that I hate people I just feel better when they are not around. Sometimes you have to pee in the sink. Keep your life in perspective. A man can go years without getting laid but can die in a week without a bowel movement. Buk knew his stuff. I merely wonder why women wear animal prints or people talk about the weather. How do Eskimos french kiss?

For all this and more check back. Same bat time. Same bat channel.
High ho silver away.