clarknova

Goodbye, Coralville.

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:03:23 GMT

Today I called the building manager, a tall thin blond in sunglasses, and told her I was breaking the lease I'd just signed. Twenty minutes later an identical blond drove up in a white Mustang and began to call to a neighbor across the lot.

"See you tomorrow, okay?"

"Huh?"

She repeated herself. "Our appointment's tomorrow, alright? After tomorrow I'm not going to be seeing you anymore." She pronounced the words sharply and clearly, as if talking to an idiot. Which she was.

"Huh."

"But it better be tomorrow, because you won't see me after then."

"Where you goin?"

"On to bigger and better things" she said cryptically, hurrying to her car. Not scared, but hoping to avoid some kind of emotional connection.

Obviously a parole officer.

This kid is one of a gaggle of black folks who moved in to the building across from me. There are four apartments in each building, and all but one are rented by the same large family. There's a gorgeous nursing student in her twenties who drives the nicest car. There's several boys, all muscular, all American, with that deep ghetto accent that comes to them by way of the south, hip hop, and Madison avenue. There's almost as many girls. There's also a middle aged matriarch and patriarch, and one sad old aunt with chemo hair and a the defeated shuffle of long illness.

This kid, this man who will be a boy whatever his age, walks stiffly with his fists thrust in bitter pockets. His shaved head sports a long pink scar across the base of his skull. His jaw juts out in a rictus of mute anger common to people that can't pass for grownup.

"Awe where." He asked again,

"Cedar Rapids!" She said, again a bit too sharp and a bit too cheery.

"Oh." Came the disappointed reply. "You goin home?"

"I don't have a home." A lie even an idiot will pierce on a few hours of reflection.

Four days after the fourth a bang went off near my window like a .48

"Jezus!" I shouted and turned just in time to see petals of embers dropping from a long stem of of a smoke trail, leading back to the kid's hand. A moment later a patrol car flashed its siren and swung up next to him. A fat white cop yelled and shouted and put him across the hood.

The kid had shot the rocket at the family car, a rust-dappled Le Baron the boys keep taking from their mother to go cruise for girls and smoke ganja in. They never let him come along.

The cop quickly realized he had a "special needs" boy on his hands and asked the swarming family who'd given him the firework. The cancerous aunt admitted to it, but of course she hadn't. The cop took in her patchy hair and sagging face and, one stern lecture later, drove away.

Good luck for the kid, seeing as he was on probation.

"Awe But I'll see you after that," his voice unusually soft and friendly.

This chick, no more than 23, was on her way up at last. Her big break. No more tweaky retards in the Coralville suburbs. No more juvie cases. Now it'd be real wire-rippers and gas siphoners and maybe, if she was lucky, an honest to god meth addict. Her resume unfolded like a rap sheet before her reflective alien eyes.

"I'm with the department of corrections. You don't want to see me." Her door slammed. She drove away.

The kid stood on the stoop and watched the empty street for a good long time.

Third person omniscient

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 06:04:04 GMT

A few weeks ago Špela told me about a phenomenon anesthesiologists experience that isn't much discussed outside the hospital.

Occasionally patients under full sedation will recall their operation as if they'd been disembodied observers. This isn't the sort of "I was floating above myself, and then I moved towards a great white light" thing you get with a classical near death experience.

Rather, the patient remembered the operation accurately, but had no fixed point of view. At one moment they might have been watching a doctor, then a nurse walking into another room, observed her prepare something, then seen the clock on the wall, etc. The descriptions are detached and depersonalized, as if they were remembering dreams.

This is rare, but happens frequently enough that every anesthesiologist with a few years under her belt had at least one case of it.

Just thought I'd share.

Slower than a ray of light..

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:29:07 GMT

Occasionally I have chats with my uncle, a retired Methodist minister turned atheist, now in his sunset years. He enjoys watching documentaries on astrophysics and considering the nautre of reality as seen without the beer goggles of dogma. I have more of a background in the sciences, so I can keep him entertained while I ever so discreetly try to convince him he still has a soul.

While explaining special relativity to him, I had a revelation about the phenomenology of time dialation...

Consider the basics: a human monkey traveling at speed X will notice a speedup of time for his brother at a factor equaling the square root of one, minus his percentage of the speed of light.

This is the "twin paradox" and we all know it, even if we don't understand the math. The closer the first monkey gets to lightspeed, the faster time seems to move for everything else. He can take a spin round to the nearest star in a few hours, while his twin suffers the depredations of a decade or more.

This example is meant to describe the reality to the layman. The mantra in both classical and quantum physics is "to really know the reality you have to know the math," but that's not true. Math is the best language we have for expressing it, but it's still just a language. Not the thing in itself.

That people parrot the twin paradox shows this. We think of fractions of the speed of light because we can't imagine what it's like to think, feel and see without a body made of matter. A simple extension of this example could be phrased "what would your experience be if you were made of light?"

The answer is severe: time wouldn't exist at all. As you approach c it slows down exponentially. When you reach 299,792,458 meters a second the motion of time is zero. The self-aware photon generated in Abell 2218 strikes the CCD element of the Subaru telescope in Japan the instant of its birth.

A photon reaches the speed of light as soon as it's kicked out of an excited atom. It ceases to exist the instant it strikes an absorbent object like a camera element. So even if it could be conscious there would be no time for it to experience anything. If you were made of light you would cross those seventy sextillion miles without a moment to think a thought.

Subjectively, you would never have been.

Now imagine you, as a material body, were trying to reach the speed of light. Assuming an infinitely populated universe, all its mass and energy would have to be consumed as fuel for your acceleration. Even your own. With an infinite amount of kinetic energy, nothing to hit on the way, and no observers in other frames of reference to measure your speed, you would be passing through all points of space instantly. With nary a moment between any two of them.

You would be everywhere, and yet you wouldn't be.

So reality is making a trade off. We get time in which to live, grow and die. Perhaps an infinity of it. But we've also got a fantastically high mobility barrier. We are exchanging distance for existence.

Why did no one ever tell us?

Floatsam and Jetsons

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:35:30 GMT

Two weeks after the midwestern floods my town still looks like this:

It's an apt metaphor for my life right now. My apartment was in shambles after three months abroad. My town was trashed. So I'm doing the only thing that seems reasonable: packing everything that will fit in two small cars and moving to Colorado, probably Golden or Boulder.

Do I have a job waiting for me there? Nope. Do I have a place to stay? Nada. I'm just doing it. Screw it. There's supposed to be a good smattering of IT jobs there, I need money badly after my stint in the EU, and Iowa, which is as quiet as the grave has too long been my tomb.

Moving under rough circumstances, after six years in the same apartment is forcing me to cut out every last bit of fat from what passes for my life. My collection. My dragon's hoard of fool's gold. Most of it useless. In the naked light of a flood bulb clamped to the door track of my garage, my nostalgic materialism is exposed for the waste it is. A sham of self-absorbed perambulations. A clutter of physical and psychic detritus that is, in fact, embarrassing. Evidence of the squandering of youth is everywhere: unused camping junk, the useless survival gear, improvised weapons, stolen stepladders, purloined construction tools, and half-finished inventions. Each with it's own little catalog of failed ambitions and forgotten nightmares.

Obviously I was crazy.

The average American has something on the order of 70,000 objects in their home. Contrast this with the 100 or so that the extremely wealthy hunter-gatherer of ten thousand years before carried. I have closer to 700,000 bits of anchoring to jettison, all of which would gt me killed if i was forced to flee a stampede of water buffalo or starving brown bear.

The object that arrested my attention and forced me to write now, when I just spent three months in glorious Štajerska without a single post, is still sitting against the front room door in a state of suspended decision. The green cotton backpack, now ragged and cat-piss-soaked, was found on an abandoned Air Force runway that had become an enormous hippie village one mad Phish-concert night in 1997. It contained a pair of knit mittens, a fifth of Jack Daniels with about five shots left, and a purple baja pullover. I'd just spent seven hours on "Jerry Garcia" acid, been buzzed by a black spaceship, and watched western Civilization bend itself into extremities I hadn't even imagined.

I took this thing everywhere. I named it simply "Poet, bag" and, along with my new baja it was the defining artifact of my self-image of a mendicant soothsayer monk. It was my pillow when I slept on back-alley catwalks in the June chill of Burlington. It carried my stoneware drum to one of the very last Bread and Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circuses (on which Woodstock almost certainly had nothing). Its canvas walls were the container of my ambition to write The Great American Counterculture Epitaph Novel. It carried my yearning to live an unstained nomad absolved of the great murder-guilt at the heart of Anglo civilization. My lone companion in the world that I wished to be in, but not of.

It almost worked for awhile.

That bag is my early twenties. The divine divine madness of youth: the only one I'll ever have. And I'm just about to throw it in the dumpster on a heap of old styrofoam and other darkly buried things that smell like a dead dog's lower gut. Should I give it a decent burial? Should I try to save it though it's all but useless? Do I even care?

Time for bed.

You suck, couchsurfing.com

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:32:06 GMT

Or, rather, your userbase sucks. Especially your London userbase. You're worse than useless really, a total waste of my energy and time.

Here's a suggestion: if you want a date, use adultfriendfinder or the personals. If you want to meet new and interesting people try Meetup.com, FaceBook, or any of the other hundred and one social networking sites out there.

Global travel is a recipe for financial and physical suffering. Couchsurfing's model would be a great idea, very economical and humanistic, if it was about people offering weary wayfarers a refuge that wouldn't bleed their pockets. I'm willing to host a stranger that needs a place to stay, with minimum fuss or demand on them, when I can expect the same from others in the network.

I don't want to force someone to entertain me after they've driven 10 hours across Interstate 80. I don't want to drag them to the Deadwood or the Wig and Pen and demand they buy overpriced booze, or make them stroll around my city seeing the sights when thier eyes are red and thier legs are aching. What kind of grinning prick does that?

Conversely I don't want to galavant around London with you when I'm on the second leg of a grueling 30 hour nightmare of trains, panes, and midnight Greyhounds. I want a place to sleep without London making me broke.

I'm not some Bedouin herdsman that needs to make a camel driver spend five hours chatting in my tent because that's the only way I get news from Cairo. I have the internet. So do you. What are you, a hick? Other humans are not alien and exotic creatures. We've got the same number of chromosomes, the same allele layout. We ache when we're tired, we crave when we're hungry, and we ooze red when pricked. No mysteries.

If you want to crash at my place without being fleeced on your way to someplace else, stop on by. No hassles, no expectations. Just extend the other users the same courtesy.

If you need to get to know new people in the comfort of your own neighborhood, start using your MySpace account. That's what you signed up for.

Young, rich or stupid: pick two. Those are the only conditions under which your life is about the journey. The rest of us are trying to arrive in one piece.

Of course I can't actually put this on my couchsurfing profile. I wouldn't even get the denial replies.

I <3 EU

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:27:18 GMT

This is actually made in Slovenia but I bought it in London. In either place it's ludicrously expensive. So expensive in fact that I'm never going to buy another one. But this is the good stuff.

Just so you know what it looks like.

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:14:32 GMT

Somethin' tells me that any mayor of Kirkwood Missouri got what he had comin'

Welcome to the 21st century!

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 20:03:21 GMT

So I decided to join modernity and get a cell phone. My criteria were that it had to be internationally GSM compliant, and that it run a real OS that I control. I found a very nice deal on a used BlackBerry 7290 on Ebay. It cost only a quarter of the Amazon price, and it's only slghtly used.

The thing's a tank.

I didn't know much about BlackBerries when I bought it, but I knew it was also a PDA, and that appealed. I don't want to carry two slabs of plastic in my pocket, and my old Visor is close to the grave anyway. The latest BB software lets you migrate all of your databases from Palm to Blackberry, which was great. I got a cheap pre-paid service plan from a local cell company, and I thought I was set.

What I didn't know was that RIM didn't give the BlackBerry a standards compliant data protocol. It's got it's own proprietary thing, and if you don't have a plan with one of the big four telcos who support BlackBerry, tough shit. It wasn't designed to be fun, it was designed to be a secure work leash for wage earners, and it does that very well. If you want to use a small, competitively priced carrier, or you don't belong to an office pool, you can't browse. You can't SMS. You can't email. You have a phone with a PDA in it. End of story.

I need alternate firmware, or some kind of third-party app that fixes the problem, but there isn't one. Thinking about OSS third party firmwares and how those projects usually go, I realized there would never be one. There's a pretty regular development cycle for firmwares in general. It goes like this:

1. Device ships with house OS: adequate, but limited. Manufacturer will release several upgrades over the next 18 months, ignoring all outside developments.

2. Hobbyist A builds a Linux distro as proof of concept. Barely boots on a few models.

3. Hobbyist B writes thier own distro. Has a few features. Device performs some of its original functions. Project ends here.

4. Developer A, in a spirit of competition, revives old project. Others contribute and project becomes popular. New firmware replicates most but not all of manufacturer's features. One or two new, kinky options added.

5. Manufacturer abandons product.

6. Hobbyist A announces radical, sweeping plan for superior functionality, vast array of apps, world domination.

7. Hobbyist A abandons project back at stage four. Third-party distros never live up to original vendor firmware.

8. New platform is released: repeat.

That platform has to be ubiquitous before it even enters the cycle. LynkSys routers are a good example. There just aren't enough BlackBerries out there, or, rather, there aren't enough unlocked BlackBerries out there in the hands of geeks. If I had a Nokia it might be a different story. But then I wouldn't have the problem in the first place.

Oh well. At least it's a good, solid phone.

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:43:40 GMT

Yesterday I downloaded Falling Down, the classic Joel Schumacher film whose poster tagline read: “The adventures of an ordinary man at war with the everyday world.” As the movie progresses, however, the veneer of his normality is peeled back, and a deeply disturbed personality is revealed.

I hadn't noticed it when I watched it in the theater, but seeing it again, the film has a strong and unmistakable subtext of Infanticide. Or technically fillicide, since the children threatened are just over the age of one. Regardless, a hidden theme is the death of helpless children, and this enthymeme is a driving force of the story.

The infanticidal motive of D-Fens (Michael Douglas), while unconscious to himself, is fairly obvious. He threatens his ex-wife with death for "insulting" him, and when he finally catches up with her and their daughter on the pier, he makes a cracked, disjointed comment to his child as he embraces her:"they're not going to take [you away from me?] anymore". Implication of being joined forever in death etc. Then, in the climatic scene, Detective Pendergast (Robert Duvall) confronts D-Fens with the idea that he planned to kill his own family. Douglas reacts with horror, as if stunned by the nightmarish truth of his motivations.

That's Douglas's character. Then you have the Detective.

During the same climax he reveals that his own daughter died at two, and his wife, who's portrayed as unstable and manipulative during the course of the film, didn't want to have children. Motherhood was her sacrifice for him. He then expresses his doubt over the diagnosis, remarking that his daughter seemed far too old to die of "infant death.. syndrome."

Falling Down was released in 1993, about the same time that the nature of SIDS was being questioned by psychology and law enforcement. High profile murder cases were conducted against parents of SIDS victims, and many went to prison. Medical professionals had come to believe unexplained child deaths were actually cases of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, wherein one or both parents harms a child for the attention and sympathy of doctors and nurses. In in 2003 many of these cases were overturned as railroadings spurred by mass hysteria. In 1993, however, any well-read screenwriter might have the idea that an unstable, emotionally needy housewife could kill an unwanted child and get away with it.

These aren't the only places in the film where the theme emerges. In the drive-by shooting, D-Fens is unhurt, but one of the innocents in the line of fire is a woman pushing a baby carriage. While only the mother is shown shot, the danger to the baby is the greatest dramatic tension in the scene. In another scene Detective Pendergast is plying the gang girl Angelina with questions about the number of guns in the bag Douglas took from her boyfriend. “All the guns in the fucking world” she tells him, after which the camera cuts to a helpless little girl being wheeled down the corridor on a hospital gurney. Never mind the scene is occurring in a police station, not a hospital. Schumacher found it so important to suggest children in peril that this incongruous detail had to be added for dramatic effect.

It's an old movie now: over thirteen years. The fact that I saw it at 18 dates me pretty succinctly. While it's doubtful this theme was unconscious for the makers of the film, it certainly remained so for nearly all of its viewers at the time. A pedant might have taken exception to my use of “enthymeme” in the second paragraph, but really the murder of a child is an enthymeme, and one so subtle that no viewer was overtly aware of it. To paraphrase Duvall's speech: “My wife was never cut out for motherhood; our child died mysteriously; [therefore she killed our child]”. He then goes on to accuse the antagonist of planning his own daughter's murder. Even though Douglas's soul-searching performance makes it clear the Detective is right, no one I discussed the movie with in the 90's saw this aspect of his psychosis. The character was our hero, or anti-hero, which is the same thing.

Maybe because, rather than in spite of it, but that's another essay.

A dainty, precious cosom

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 06:23:12 GMT

I've often wondered why magnifying photography is called "macro" when the opposite prefix is, by all lexical account, the most appropriate.

At any rate, today turned out to be an excellent day for some naturalist macro shots.

Well some weren't close-ups, but what the hell.

'enry 'iggins oh my!

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:16:35 GMT

My woman gave me an opportunity to do something I excel at: other people's homework. She's facing a Physiology exam this week, and suddenly had an accumulation of English busywork dumped in her lap. She's a great English speaker, and a fine writer, and the work was remedial. She just didn't have the time, so I volunteered.

It was a lot of fun, especially the thought of handing in work an order of magnitude more advanced than expected. One of the assignments was to write a fictitious dialog between yourself and a medical professor, during a lecture.

[Professor Higgins:] Now, this brings me to the subject of Maternal Impression: the understanding that nervous traumas experienced by a mother during pregnancy are physically manifested by the growing fetus in the form of curious defects. For example, a woman who becomes ill of eating strawberries might give birth to a baby with a strawberry-shaped birthmark. A woman whom is frightened by a mouse might have a child with a club foot, shriveled almost as if in effigy of a rodent's body. In the case of John Merrick, that poor unfortunate soul whose case is now quite famous in the fields of natural philosophy, his mother was nearly trammeled to death by an elephant, escaped from an itinerant circus. Hence his nearly-complete malformation after the aspect of an anthropomorphic elephant.

[Myself:] Doctor Higgins?

[Professor Higgins:] Yes my dear?

[Myself:] Is this theory in any way related to Lamarckian Heredity?

[Professor Higgins:] Ah, a very good question. I'm glad you asked me. The ideas are similar, but disparate. In Lamarckian inheritance, the child will take on the traits that the mother acquired in her youth. For example, if she was raised poorly, and became lazy or a drunkard, the child will similarly be indolent and intemperate. If she was given to melancholy, the child will inherit her despondent disposition. If she suffered from tendonitis, the child might find its hands or wrists deformed. Do you see the difference?

[Myself:] I'm not sure. Are you saying that in the former it is a sudden, and passing phenomena that causes the trait to appear in the child, but in the later it's a matter of ingrained habit?

[Professor Higgins:] Precisely.

[Myself:] Thank you, professor.

[Professor Higgins:] My pleasure. As I was saying, Maternal Impression can have a number of effects. Indeed, the catalog of them staggers the imagination. For example, a woman who is burned by scalding tea might have a child with harelip. A mother pricked by a pin will find her child possesses a mole in an analogous location. A pregnant woman forced to listen to a dull lecture might have a child who is either deaf or inattentive, depending on the length of the lecture and the severity of the boredom.

[Myself:] Oh doctor! What if she was struck with a dictionary by a drunken husband! Would the child have a dictionary-shaped bookmark?

[Professor Higgins:] I believe in that case the bookmark would be in the shape of the husband, according to the principle of primary causation.

[Myself:] Oh, I see.

[Professor Higgins:] Can you think of any other examples?

[Myself:] Uhmmm, perhaps a woman bit on the arse by a zebra would have a child with posterior stripes?

[Professor Higgins:] Very nearly, but your example is still a little off. Can you tell me why?

[Myself:] I'm afraid I can't.

[Professor Higgins:] Think again of the principle of primary causation.

[Myself:] Oh, are you saying that the baby might have tooth prints on its bum? Or will it have teeth like a zebra?

[Professor Higgins:] Your first intuition was correct. For him to have equine dentition she would necessarily have had to been bitten on the mouth. Or perhaps forced to kiss a zebra by a depraved zookeeper. One more example.

[Myself:] How about.. a.. a pair of bow legs caused by an especially strenuous horseback ride while out on an archery expedition!

[Professor Higgins:] An excellent example indeed. I am always pleased to see my pupils exercising their powers of reason.

[Myself:] Thank you professor.

[Professor Higgins:] Now, as I was was saying, the causes of fetal deformations due to Maternal Impression are myriad and seemingly mysterious, but can be explained with a modicum of analysis. For example, a mother who was particularity disturbed by the wood grain of a rowboat's gunwale....

Here the lecture continued, but I soon fell asleep.

I've realized, however, that the only things my writing style is suited for are parodies of 18th century science. Otherwise I come off as a pretentious Lord Fauntleroy.

This is what you get when you spend a month reading about Neoplatonism in the time of Justinian.

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 16:17:21 GMT

The Lamentation of St. Cyril

Pious Hypatia
Virgin Queen

How could I have so mean
to loose on you blind Peter's hatred
a sacral, brutal, euthanasia

irony that reputation stuck
when it was only me you wouldn't fuck.

Sore-sur-er

Fri, 18 May 2007 07:39:53 GMT

Half a glass of cheap wine and thirty eight minutes after midnight, my eyes blur, my mind wanders from a treatise on the letters of Psudeo-Dionysus, and I fantasize about an alternate reality in which Carlos Castaneda had never been born.

And my heart is lifted.

For those who are still fans, it's high time you too faced the truth. Carlos was a fraud, plain and simple. He's been quietly, but meticulously debunked in nearly every detail. From his own personal chronology to his uncited sources, his writings are riddled with plagiarism and fantasy. His private story is one of not only corruption (in the form of a marketing engine named Cleargreen that sold kitschy workout videos) but also of madness. Hidden behind the veil of success and grafted respectability he became a dark cult leader, as capricious and lustful as any Koresh, Jones, or Applewhite. His personal legacy was wasted lives, deluded minds, and the group suicide of his inner circle.

The story has been well told by others and I won't go into it here. Try this if you want to be disillusioned.

And apart from the charges above, he left the English-speaking public with an equally tragic legacy. His cosmology carried the ring of truth and authority. As well it should have. He lifted it from only the finest philosophical and ethnographic authors, and masterfully wove it into his own phony narrative. Not just phony, but dismal and despairing. What was the ultimate proposition of his philosophy after all? That the extinction of the spirit could only be forestalled by the abandonment and betrayal of family and friends. That children suck the life from parents (some parents I know would facetiously agree), and the only escape from death was to kill them.

In a time of metaphysical searching and radical questioning of first principles, Casteneda's books stood out as a beacon to thousands of seekers. His influence sculpted the new age movement in countless ways. Many dumped their lovers and loved ones only to take up the banner of his distorted doctrine; his cosmogony of spiritual extermination and chosen cadres. A vision of a zero sum universe. How easily that led into the egoistic, shallow spirituality of the disco era and points beyond.

So in my parallel earth where Carlos became a minor poet, or wrote children's books, or cracked his skull in a bicycle accident in 1952, what were we spared and what did we gain? Perhaps a less greedy, muddy world. One where the psychedelic mystics perhaps read one or two original works on alchemy or shaman ism. A world where Jung might've been more popular on the back of the toilet tank. Where perhaps Plato or Paracelsus wold have sold more reprints. Where Eckhart would have eked out a little more renown.

Of course it's ridiculous to blame Casteneda for the coke craze of the seventies, or the yuppie Reaganite cunts. But perhaps those social trends would have been a little less pronounced. Just that much less kitschy. And modern theosophy and metaphysical movements would have been that much less polluted. The water much, much less muddied.

Maybe I'm turning into some kind of 17th century medievalist but the dangers of False Doctrine are more apparent to me the more I think about the "mexican waiter". Perhaps I should start carving my own rack.

According to Cleargreen video director Bruce Wagner, Castaneda's cohort Carol Tiggs made the following statement:

“There's a song Don Juan thought was beautiful – he said the lyricist nearly got it right. Don Juan substitute one word to make it perfect. He put in freedom where the songwriter had written love.”

Any comment on that would be redundant.

In Slippage, Veritas.

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 09:01:59 GMT

On Friday there was an interesting debate between Kerry and Newt Gingrich on Global Warming, and what the policy solution should be. Kerry advocated a Cap-N-Trade plan, which is flawed at best. Newt advocated.. well. He didn't advocate anything at all. And very strenuously. Free Market blah blah blah and faeries will cool the planet with their wings.

There was an interesting moment, during which he was suggesting x-prize style rewards for new solutions to ignore, when he suddenly tipped his hand. Let's listen shall we?

300k

I think that about sums it up.

First against the wall, etc.

$5.25

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 06:11:21 GMT

Two 10/100xT NICs, two older Soundblasters, one PCI VGA card, one internal ZIP 100, one 28.8kbps modem, two Maxtors totaling 14GB, one Ubuntu CD.

I love the University surplus!

Too long; Didn't write.

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 02:09:18 GMT

Googling for stock photos of Lacanian philosopher Slovoj Žižek, I came across this satircal shop, which I found fascinating. As a political cartoon it contains, almost as if a deliberate specimen, the key elements necessary for a deMausian psychohistorical critique.

Note the following:

1. Satirized subject depicted as a baby.

2. Reduced to even further infancy is his marxism, which is here represented as an image of Stalin printed on his bib. Žižek's philosophy is a child's mess, literally his excess: his waste. Unrealistic sputum.

3. The "reality" of his ideology (portrayed as Vietcong millitamen) is shadowy and dangerous. Murderous and brutal. With his bare back exposed to the sinister soldiers and thier phallic AK-47s, there is the added suggestion of anal rape. The proverbial "stab in the back".

This is no coincidence. If we understand Žižek's marxism in its essence: a demand for freedom from the strictures of postindustrial culture, the objection to it becomes clear. In the reactionary fantasy of the cartoonist, all resistance to arbitrary athority is the crying of a spolied, ridiculous baby. The realization of this struggle -growth and independence- are terrible dangers. The Vietnamese rebels represent the ultimate danger: that the child, not its parents, will control its own destiny.

In reality of course, assuming no language barriers, the Vietcong gurellias would be on freindly terms with Žižek, and vice versa. Both are in politcal agreement. The danger shown here is to the cartoonists' need for parental athority.

Slovenia is now in a slowly tighetning fist of a beuracratic, neoliberal totolitarianism. It is nearly impossible for a citizen to abide by every civil and tax regulation (60% income tax, 20% sales tax, 10% rental tax, 20% property tax) but the peanlties for disobeying the rules are draconian fines that can only be paid by a stint in jail. To maintain a culturally-mandated apprearance of affluence most slovenes are in deep debt. The sword of damacles hangs over every citizen. If the wrong beuracrat were to find out exactly how you were cheating..

Žižek's discontent with the nature of postindustrial consumer society, its demand that citizens uphold a pretense of wealth whilst handing over all thier money to the state, is perfectly natural under these circumstances. Much as the Vietnamese rejection of French and American colonialism was. It is not Žižek and the Vietcong that the photoshop cartoonist finds ludicrous and frightening: it is antagonism to towards the state/parent athority.

I always knew Jerry Pournelle was an overrated hack, a pale key-pounder basking in the glow of Niven's reflected prowess, but now I have it confirmed beyond a shadow. No, I didn't force myself to read Lucifer's Hammer. I just caught him playing World of Warcraft. That's all the confirmation I needed.

After a haiatus of two months, I logged into my Second Life account to see if anything had changed. Silly me. It was the same engine with new bugs. But at my usual entry point I found a developer wiling away his time between speaking engagements at a con. He bragged that he was sitting next to some famous geek visionaries. The conversation went like this:

(Spoiler: Kurt Vonnegut isn't really dead)

Sean Linden: Jerry Pournelle is on my right playing World of Warcraft and Rocket Sellers is across from me and Jimbo Perhaps is on my left
Me: Those are some tall claims, sir.
Guido Auer: Hola Clarknova, how are you?
Me: I am well.
Me: If you get the chance, feel free to tell Jerry Pournelle that he's little more than a hack without the bennefical influence of Larry Niven.
Sean Linden: Larry Niven is here too
Me: As I'm sure is Issac asimov and Harlan Ellison
Me: and no doubt Fidel Castro.
Guido Auer: haha
Me: Give Kurt Vonnegut my regards.
Sean Linden: Umm he's dead
Guido Auer: Who they are, a Linden Lab owners?
Sean Linden: No they're science fiction writers
Sean Linden: http://flickr.com/photos/kg6cvv/432106545/
Sean Linden: in case you didn't believe me
Me: Write "I am Sean Linden" on Pournelle's forehead and post a pic of it.
Sean Linden: Umm no
Me: Then your tall claims are just that, sir. Your employer lends you no magical guarantee of credibility
Me: Name droppers are rarely truthful.
Sean Linden: ok I'll photograph him with you in the picture
Me: I'll believe it when I see it.
Sean Linden: ok it'll take a minute or so to email it to flickr from my phone
Me: Mmm.
Me: You've been here all day.
Me: May I ask why?
Sean Linden: Yeah I'm at a conference and bored
Me: My fiancé is currently at a con in Croatia. I am, unfortunately, on cheese-making duty.
Me: Your boredom is not something I empathize with. My apologies.
Guido Auer: Hey, I want know something.
Sean Linden: I don't know anything!
Guido Auer: ...
Guido Auer: But.. you're a Linden you must be know something!
Clarknova Helvetic laughs
Sean Linden: Damn this camera sucks
Sean Linden: http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=432144789&size=o
Sean Linden: btw, John Carmack is across the room from me
Me: The name is unfamiliar.
Sean Linden: Clarknova: The guy who wrote Doom
Me: Ah. Please bill him for my wasted youth.
Guido Auer: That all people ara playin' SL right now?
Me: Well, it IS the favored mmorpg of the intelligentsia. Especially those over 40.
Guido Auer: hahaha
Me: They like to imagine that they're "wired into" the zietgeist or something.
Me: If you're moving a sprite around with your name above it you're not being swept aside by modernity.
Guido Auer: LOL
Guido Auer: Where are you legs Clark?
Me: They're stuck through this crate.
Etc...

According to Pournelle's blog he's attending a meeting of the "Sapce Access Society", which is a sort of koffee klatch that bemoans how we're not all living in moon bubbles yet. Just the sort thing aging science fiction authors might do with thier time. That and play MMORPGs.

This explains why the SL player Jimbo Perhaps was there. Or rather was hanging around in-game, waiting for a LindenLabs employee to show off his work. He's a collaborator on the SL International Spaceflight Museum, which is the the kind of game content that made me love Second Life. It's essentially an open gamespace that has scale models of all the historically important spacecraft: everything from Von Braun's first little toy to the Apollo launch system. An impossibility in reality, but only about five month's worth of work with SecondLife's building tools.

The fact that a LindenLabs game developer had to be there to show it off -that it takes a developer to make sure the thing doesn't crash when you really need it- is one of the frustrations that made me hate Second Life. It's why I stopped playing after about a month. Once you get done with the sightseeing, the game bugs and the ubiquitous Furries make building anything or talking to anyone more irritating than your time is worth.

In Second Life my avatar is a short, fat, elderly man in a tuxedo. This helps me evade bans for being a smartass.

Zagreb Technica (backdated)

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 02:08:28 GMT

Again, Špela and I were talking about going somewhere, and then Peter and Tanja dropped us a line a few minutes later saying that they were headed that way. This time it was the city of Zagreb in Croatia, where Tanja's nephew was having a birthday party. Špela and I wanted to see the Nikola Tesla exhibits at the National Technical Museum, so it worked out perfectly.

I don't know anything about this church. From the look it's medieval, but it must have been re-roofed in 1990. Most modern building materials like roof tiles are made to match the old styles. This looks like ceramic tile, but it could easily be vinyl.

This was the sign announcing the border station. I found the coincidental homophone amusing. Because we were leaving the EU our documents were barely glanced at. When we reentered Slovenia by train, however, the cars were searched outside by no less than six customs officers and boarded by many more. Spela observed that the EU isn't as fascist as the US in the civil rights sense, but it's equally repressive in the bureaucratic sense.

We stopped at this rest station shortly before the border checkpoint. As you can see, the Balkan mountains are very similar to the US eastern ranges like the Alleghenys and Appalachians. We exchanged our money here. Croatian merchants will take Euros, but they don't like it.

These are Kuna, which translates to “ferrets”. The coins have other animals on them, so it's two ferrets to the trout, and one bear for five ferrets. This is about fifty bucks.

This is a typical Balkan village. There's a church in the middle, an inn, some houses, and the countryside. You can find similar in any country. Better than suburbs, don't you think?

There's also a lot of modern construction going on. The highway expansions are really marring the landscape, just like they do in the US.

This is an old socialist factory built by the former Yugoslav government. There are a lot of these in Slovenia and the Balkans, and like this one, most are abandoned.

Croatia still bears scars from the war with Serbia in the 1990s. Wether from munitions or economic depression, most of Zagreb looks a bit chipped and frayed.

Us waiting for the tram to take us downtown.

Zagreb has an extensive tram system, even more so than San Fransisco. No two trams look alike, either.

Zagreb literally means “to carry water” and the city draws that name from a myth about this well. The story goes that a knight was traveling through an arid land (which Croatia is not), and asked a peasant girl for help. She brought him water from this well. So the knight named the place “carry water”. Either I'm missing something, or this is a very stupid story about a very stupid knight.

Another gothic Cathedral.

To get to the museum you have to go down Nikola Tesla street..

..and pass by Nikola's Statue..

..and maybe linger a bit.

A payphone I snapped for 2600 Magazine.

The Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalishte or Croatian National Theater building is truly beautiful.

Saint George picking on children.

The Croatians are very appreciative of Roosevelt and Hoover for their aid in reconstruction after WWII. Not far from Iowa City where I live, a bronze statue of Isis, gifted by grateful Croat artists, graces the grounds of the Hoover Presidential Library. Trg means “square”, making this Roosevelt Square.

Unfortunately we got there when the Tesla exhibit was being renovated, so this giant secondary coil was all I got to see of the replicas of his inventions. Actually, there was some confusion here. I recognized this as the coil I saw on the website of the Serbian Tesla museum, which is where I really thought I was going. As both the Croatian and Serbian museums contain exact replicas, they look identical. It was only when I got home that I saw we'd gone to a different museum. Serbia and Croatia have a rivalry about who owns the Tesla legacy, so both claim him as a national hero, and both claim to have The Tesla museum. Slovenia borders Croatia, so Spela assumed I meant this one.

The Muzej is built over an old coal mine, which was being excavated as far back as the middle ages. If you come earlier in the afternoon they give tours of the less dangerous sections.

SRETNO! means “Good Luck!”. Note the hopeful portrait of the Mary to the left.

There were a lot of old engines, transformers and turbines here. It reminded me of exhibits in the Smithsonain Arts and Industries museum, only the manufacturer's names on the iron were in Slavic.

This sort of waterwheel mill was used up until very recently. Spela's grandmother worked in a mill like this one before WWII.

The transportation exhibition...

This was part of an exhibit on the benefits of nuclear power. The videos and poster panels are made in exactly the same style that American pro-nuke propaganda was, and this stuff was probably produced concurrently. Almost as if there was a nuclear industry ad consultant working for both capitalist and communist governments who were ostensibly at odds over the nuclear issue. Hmm...

A collection of apiaries dating back to medieval times.

Zagreb Technica (backdated)

After we got kicked out we took the train home. It was too dark and rainy to take any pictures then, but I took these when we came back to Maribor.

People don't like thier president here, either

A memorial to the Partisan war against the Nazis. If the Slovene partisans heard the Germans were coming they'd break camp and take up better positions. If they heard the Italians were coming, they'd play another hand of cards first.

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The Story of Carniola (backdated)

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 01:57:41 GMT

This is Shpela with my bags when we got off the train from Austria. The coach-class cars in the train fold down to make traveller's beds. We were both exhausted, but too keyed up to sleep. Instead we looked up at the ceiling and made loud jokes in german about nazis and gas chambers. This earned me a particularly hard look from a woman in the next cabin.

Schadenfreude macht frei, meine Frau!

This is the "Plauge Siren", a memorial to the victims of the Black Death in the 1300's. Saints surround a gilded Virgin on the pillar. The paving stones of the plaza were cut during the rule of the Roman Empire, but have been reset in prettier patterns since then. Occupation by invading powers have generally lifted the standard of living for Slovenes each time troops arrived. For example, most Slovenians hadn't tasted sugar or coffee before the German army showed up in 1941. It was just the thing about thier neighbors disappearing they didn't appreciate...

I really like romanesque cathedral architecture, so I convinced Shpela to show me some.

This cathedral, dedicated to Mary (who else?), became the seat of the Bishop of Ponikva in 1859. It's full of all sorts of interesting things that didn't come out well because I wasn't interested in spending the entire day shooting it. As you can see, it's still decorated for Christmas.

Bishop Anton Martin Slomšek (1800 - 1862) was one of the hundreds of people cannoized by John Paul II. He's a culture hero for arcane maunvers in church politics and promoting the Slovene language. He's buried a few meters away in this little chanclery. This window is startlingly out of place; crafted four years ago, but the only addition newer than 100.

Shpela looking cute and blurry.

This is the Universiy of Maribor where she attends the medical college. Thirty seconds after taking this picture we sucessfully dodged a classmate of hers and a professor of computer science she owed a paper to. She informed me that the professor won't be there next year because the students can't stand him. Unlike U.S. universities, a poor performance review by the students isn't a disregarded formality. Here they get fired for them.

This hillside vineyard is visible from the city center. About half of all aerable land in Slovenia is in vineyards. Even so, thier wine consumption is so high that they have to import the difference. There's no such thing as a four-year Slovene vintage.

A view of the Drava river, which divides the older northern half of the city from the newer south side.

This grafitti is funny if you know how it's pronounced and what it means:

"Yansha (the president) is to Bush as MacDonald's is to Tush (a chain store that sells useless junk)"

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I Had A Dream.

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 01:59:43 GMT

In this dream I was a familiar guest in a house at the edge of a country road. A comfortable distance from the house, also next to the road, stood a tree. This tree had started its existence as a normal deciduous dicot, much like an oak or elm, but as it aged it evolved into something wondrous strange.

The long limbs of this tree were flexible, and mostly naked of twigs or branches, each ending in only small tufts of stems. The limbs projected from the large, symmetrical trunk in perfect columns. As the tree twisted back and forth slowly, like a gymnast warming up, all twenty or so branches rotated and waved in perfect synchrony: like flagella in an invisible current.

Encircling the upper nodes of the trunk were rings of eyes, which gave it an omni-directional survey of the countryside. This tree was conscious: a gestalt mind comprised of its own vegetable intelligence and a handful of humans that had merged with it bodily decades before. Although monstrous to look at, it was partially telepathic, and those who communed with it found themselves in the presence of a being of immense beauty, wisdom, and joy. As its limbs rippled gracefully the combined spirits of merged beings moved in concert; dancing. The freedom of their expanded awareness was a song of sustained ecstasy. While still retaining wholeness unto themselves, they were somehow the embodiment of all living things on earth. Or at least all within their considerable psychic purview. A demigod of strange beauty. An ascendant being that demanded no tribute, no worship, and shared a single love with all it knew.

I wanted to merge with the tree as well. I wrapped my arms around its wide trunk, and for a few moments felt myself being taken up, my consciousness spreading with its branches, my sight radiating outward in all directions. Gently the vision faded. I opened my eyes, still clinging to it in the same place. It was not my time, my humanity was not needed today. Like a sagacious diplomat it told me this without letting me notice my disappointment. I could help in another way, if I wished.

I was standing in the house, near the kitchen window, attending to some domestic affair. As the most fantastic creature on Earth I knew the tree was always in danger of some marauding Gilgamesh, but the inevitability of it did not feel imminent when the blue pickup pulled up to the side of the road and the two, clean young hicks stepped out. I saw instantly that it was too late. Before I made it to them they had their chainsaw all the way through the trunk. The tree toppled in a silent crash.

I wasn't even shocked. I barely waited for the two men in their denim and toques to shrug out thier inarticulate explanations. The first one I bent back against the bumper with my foot until his tenth vertebrae shattered. The other I caught out in the field somewhere. His death was so perfunctory I don't even remember it. Perhaps I used the chainsaw he was carrying. If I felt rage it was muted, like the grinding of a tectonic plate through a mile of earth. If justice was done it was a small thing, immaterial as an ant. The loss of the miracle was so enormous even the crime of its murder was invisible in the shadow.

I think I should start taking melatonin again.

Depression of Morbidity

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:00:56 GMT

I attended a funeral of a family friend two days ago; my mom’s old college roommate. A series of strokes caused by untreated blood clotting had damaged her brain and other internal organs, paralyzing and stupefying her, as well as killing her immune system.

My mom took charge of her nursing arrangements after the first stroke three years ago. A series of nightmare stories about callous relatives and predatory, incompetent doctors followed. Don’t get weak in America unless you have a loving family and a close friend in the medical profession. If you’re an old maid you’re fucked.

Seeing her body in the casket was more of a shock than I expected. I’ve been to a few funerals: both grandmothers, a great aunt, my godfather, and one for an old man I was passing by and attended on a whim. None of them ever affected me, or at least not like this. The embalming techniques are much better –if the adjective "better" really applies- and instead of looking like a wax model of our friend, she looked like herself. Only the gray pall of morbidity made her appear strange, and I found myself unable to step close.

The last time I saw her alive was in the nursing home, three years ago, before she became “a vegetable”. The strokes had rendered her mostly paralyzed, and almost entirely aphasic. I didn’t remember the word aphasic then, and didn’t know how the affliction worked. All I knew was that when she looked at me, it was with her entire, intact personality, gazing through a prison of flesh.

My mom and dad were loyal visitors, and once a week they brought her ice cream and wheeled her around the building. Mom was in deep denial about her suffering, and patronized her to the point of abuse. When faced with sadness or any other unpleasant emotion my mother hardens, like a nurse in a combat zone. Distancing herself from her friends’ anguish made it bearable, but to maintain the distance she had to treat her like a naughty six year old with down’s syndrome.

It was disturbing to watch. I knew my mom was doing her best, but it was only slightly better than nothing. Our friend kept looking into my eyes, with an expression that I couldn’t articulate any better than she, but felt palpably. I realize now that she wanted me to help, to communicate that she wasn’t stupid or uncomprehending. I had the urge to say something like this at the time, but my mom was so committed to her Florence Nightingale fantasy that any attempt to get her to stop would have resulted in some kind of breakdown, and probably a fight. Instead I looked back at her, thinking but not saying “I know you’re there, I can see you too. And I’m in here, looking back at you.” Both of us trapped.

Eventually her misery was too painful to share, and her expression was starting to turn accusatory, so I looked away while my mom spoon-fed her the last of the sundae (peanut butter cup with butterfinger chunks). The part of my brain that imposes bullshit Reader’s Digest narrative line on uncomfortable realities kept feeding me phrases like “..and as I looked in to her eyes I saw that she was telling me to live, live while you can!”.

I almost wish I’d been raised in a media free bubble, like one of those immunodeficient children, so I wouldn’t have this grotesque tripe inside me. My folks insisted “her mind was gone” during the months preceding her death, but it probably wasn’t. There’s no way to express this better, really: I made a lame attempt at telling them the woman was still intelligent, it didn’t work, and our old friend spent her last years tortured by the inability of other people to cope with their feelings and treat her like a human. In a set of photos taken six months ago you can clearly see it: friends with strained smiles, trying to pretend everything is okay, and Loah looking off into the distance in exhausted, bitter misery.

“Someone just shoot me” says my brain’s cliché center. Of course no one will be shooting anybody. What gerontologists optimistically call compression of morbidity is our only hope.

Dead center.

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 08:14:04 GMT

Let us not forget why we, the allies of the center left, won this election.

We did not win because the nation changed its mind and suddenly chose to support progressive causes: social justice. No, we "won" because the logical consequences of an insanity half this nation demanded have become too dramatic to ignore. It is not peace they want, it is the retoric of "punishment" that drove them to the polls. Punishment and cruelty; only now against their own (and isn't it always against their own, really?). Barbarism is still the motivation. Only the object of their perpetual wrath has shifted. And their current caprice cannot be expected to last until 2008.

So let us not "reach out" to the right wing factions, as so many democrats are proposing. They have no hand of friendship for us. Let us instead cut the tether and push off.. leave them far, far behind. Ignore their gibbering for as long as the system will allow.

Ironically, the only solution to the right wing problem is the one they first engineered for us: the camps, the gas, the ovens. Let us do that then. Let us not shy from the brutal work of making a better world. Let us be honest with ourselves. Otherwise we've only got two years.

Treecycle

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 20:52:29 GMT

I'm a member of Freecycle, a series of regional mailing lists people use to give away their white elephants to anyone who can be bothered to come pick them up, and where people make requests for secondhands they need. It usually goes something like:

OFFER: old rusty bed frame, needs working casters.
OFFER: broken red ryder child's pull cart.
OFFER: set of 1960's Jack Daniels whiskey bottles.

WANTED: brand new cell phone.
WANTED: Gucci purse.
WANTED: used car, less than 4k miles.

Today Gtalk popped up its usual email alert from the group, with the first 22 characters of the body. It read: "RE: blah blah freecycle blah blah OFFER: early childhood.."

On comrade! On citizen!

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 04:17:57 GMT

There's a lot to be said for Stalinism in Our Time. Twentieth century nations without consumerist "liberties" are free of various problems that plague westerners today. Here are seven policies for the modern dictator new to the reigns of power to enact. Some are taken directly from glories of other regimes, notably those of Castro, Tito, and Chairman Mao.

1) Mandatory blood donation for all citizens. In modern capitalist countries, blood is in incredibly short supply at hospitals. This has created an entire vampiric industry around draining the poor of thier plasma, platelets, and other cells. It drives up the cost of health care, and preys on the weakest. If all citizens were required to donate one unit once a month the shortage would disappear. As all donated blood would be screened for disease, this would have the added advantage of keeping the masses free of blood-borne illness. As a goodwill gesture surpluses would be donated to struggling nations like the United States.

2) 4 hours a week of forced labor in community gardens. Not only would this help bolster the food supply, but it would also directly connect each individual with the land. It would also give everyone a common experience. People tend to resent forced labor, and perhaps this resentment would make it a misery, but at least it would be a shared misery. 4 hours a week is very little to ask. Most American consumers waste that in a day on frivolous, soul-crushing activities like television viewing or online gaming. To make it even cushier, work details would be scaled back or canceled during the winter months.

3) Free medical care & mandatory physical exams. In Castro's Cuba, the people aren't allowed to be sick. This is good policy. If the doctor sees signs of preventable illness, she will have the full authority of the state to modify the patient's behavior. If she can send you to a Siberian fat camp for a year, just the threat will be enough to keep most people slim.

4) Prohibition of all junk food. The executives of Nestle will be executed by flamethrower. Advertisers on the Hostess payroll will be fed alive to crocidiles like so many bloody ding dongs. People will only eat fresh meat and produce, or properly canned and salted preserves. In addition, it will be illegal to sell or trade food of any kind for a profit of more than 2%, and it will be illegal to sell the food from community gardens (it may be traded with other communities for goods as long as there is a surplus).

5) Rationing of all commodities. Just think: no more obesity, no more oil crisis, less pollution, less materialism-related violence. Overconsumption and overuse will be just bad memories.

6) One-child policy. China was doing splendidly in this regard. They've been infected with the Capitalist virus --comrade Stalin's fears proved all too true-- but it needs to be resurrected everywhere else. Along with this comes free contraception, sex education, and abortions.

7) Mandatory psychedelic use for everyone over 15. There is only one moment, and it is now. All pretenses are transparent. There is only one ideology that means anything: the felt presence of immediate experience. No is one watching your show. The Universe is infinite love and your internal dialog means nothing. Wouldn't it be nice to force this down everyone's throats, finally and at last? Fuck'em if they can't take a joke.

President Putin? I'm talking to YOU, baby.

Don't come around here no more.

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:18:50 GMT

Harrrrrvest time!

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 22:02:42 GMT

Get your pumpkins now! The harvest was weak this year, and most stores will be out soon.

Demeter's bounty knows no bounds, however, and she's happily provided a diversity of cucurbitaceous delights for the coinoisseur. All of this will become soup, even the beer.