climb without oxygen

"Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past"

2009-10-03T22:28:00.000-07:00

It's from The Daily Telegraph, though it sounds a lot like an Onion headline.

I have mixed feelings about it. I don't want him in what is technically MY tribe, but on the other hand it would hurt him a lot more than it would hurt me. A whole lot more. Haha.

Nothing like self-hating to really bring out the maximum dickishness in a person.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past
A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

Very Unclear on What This Is

2009-09-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

I drew this on my whiteboard at work to explain something to someone,
and now have no clue what it was about. I have to assume that "T"
signifies me.

I enjoy it in spite of or because it's completely mystifying.

Lovesick Bin Laden

2009-09-19T21:52:00.000-07:00

Google Books is maybe, perhaps, now the best thing I've ever seen. Not only are there tons of books to read online, there's also decades of back issues of numerous fine periodicals.

Weekly World News, courtesy of Google Books

Mas Carne

2009-09-16T22:14:00.001-07:00

\t : iPhone->you

Overheard, Sac and Fillmore

2009-09-07T22:19:00.000-07:00

Go ahead and have one. I just got a big tin of ROI tan, but I picked these up since I'm passing through town.

I'm having to stay in national parks cause that's where you're allowed to have a dog. I'm in state parks too but like if they catch me with the dog what are they going to do? If I'm in the middle of the park, I'm just going to keep walking anyhow and I'll just ask them to give me a ride. I'll just get out quicker if they want to drive me.

I'm working my ass off to keep it all together. I was working four seventeens and three eights, It's okay. It strengthens you, makes you a warrior. I was in Santa Cruz working 2 jobs cause that was the only way to keep it together. I was living in this camper and like over a 2 day period everything just came apart around me. I could have stayed there and rebuilt or gone anywhere and rebuilt. It didn't matter where I was. If you've got nothing you've got nothing everywhere, right?

I'm moving to New Orleans. I can't stick around here. I've got thousands of dollars of shit in California. In Massachusetts too. I'd be okay to pay it but fuck, I can make it just barely anyhow. I can barely motivate enough. If I'm scraping along at the bottom I could give them some money but then I'd just barely get by. I could send them 500 dollars a month but then I'd be living small just to pay off some asshole. All that bullshit cause some asshole pulls me over for something I didn't even-- and I'm not going to pay some asshole and not be able to get by.

I'd rather do something good, help out, like work with children or something, rather than be paying assholes.

Vinyasa (all levels)

2009-09-05T18:54:00.001-07:00

Full of heart. What is heart? Bend and breath. Thread the needle. Lift your navel, engage your Core. Strong leg. Heart lifted to the sky. What it is heart? Are we being literal, symbolic, or both? Both I'd guess. Yoga is full of double entendres and cosmic allusions. Use your lower back. Don't use your lower back. Use your core strength. Take the strain off of your lower back. Breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. Ahhhhhhhhhhgh. Engage your belly. Sit back on your Sit Bones. Warrior I, Warrior II, Warrior III. Sounds like an awful movie franchise, with a lead actor who went on to brief stardom in a bigger budget, but still bad movie that didn't do particularly well and then descended to obscurity. He didn't star in the execrable Warrior IV, or the TV series named just Warrior, which actually turned out to be pretty good in a campy kind of way. Outside, babies scream, ambulances scream, people drink and slouch. In here, we breathe, live in our bodies and drip drip drip sweat. Do I want to drink tonight, after class? What about this teacher? She totally likes to party, despite all this chanting and purity stuff. I guarantee it.

Separated At Birth

2009-09-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

Gene Simmons

Mommar Ghaddafi

2009-08-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

My Graphics at OpenProcessing

2009-08-25T23:13:00.000-07:00

Processing is a piece of software that easily write small graphical applications using what is basically the Java language. It makes it fun to cross the programming / art barrier.

Lots of people around the world are doing neat stuff with it. OpenProcessing.org provides a searchable gallery for Programming portfolios. I've got mine up too. Check it out.

Litter Robot (As seen on TV)

2009-08-18T22:14:00.000-07:00

District 9 and Other Grimy and Troubling Movies That Make Excellent Use of Filth and Grime

2009-08-18T21:34:00.001-07:00

District 9 - This is a really well done movie. Like all of the best science fiction, it's heavy on allegory: insect like humanoid aliens arrive on earth and are put into refugee camps, which become shanty-town slums. Eventually the humans tire of these wretched creatures, who they regard as inferior. An oppressive, technocratic millitary-buearucratic complex represents the humans. Given that the setting is Johnanesburg, South Africa, calling it allegory might be an understatement.

But, so what. The important thing is that the use of garbage is amazing. Much of the film takes place in District 9, the alien slum, which is mostly refuse, ramshackle structures, burning refuse, and dust. The main character is pale, sweaty, weasly, and inept and becomes grimier, more injured, and more bandaged during the story.

The movie is heavy on special effects, which are all the more effective because of all of the garbage. Contrast is everything. Garbage really pulls its weight here.

Brazil - District 9 reminded me a lot of Brazil. Both have oppressive regimes which are part technological and slick, and part decrepit and grimy, and completely broken. The main characters are hapless weaklings sucked into grave circumstances.

Think ducts, that scene with the mother and her friends who have all had too much plastic surgery and are basically decaying lumps, and that crazy shot of a truck barreling down a highway encased in billboards, beyond which is only wasteland.

Pi - Ah, what a boost grime can give a simple story. Mostly set in an obsessed genius's closet-like New York apartment, the movie is harshly lit and shot in black and white. Bare lightbulbs, migraines, computer parts. The man becomes indistinguishable from the computer he is constructing.

Pretty much, the movie is about filth. True, there's some stuff about Kabala, numbers, and Wall Street, but really it's about being an art student and living in a squalid joint and feeling dirty and really ALIVE.

Tetsuo, Iron Man - I'll be honest. I couldn't finish this movie, though doing so has been on my list for years. The story is nothing more than a man wishing to become a machine. Calling it a story is an overstatement. Pretty much, this crazed looking Japanese guy makes himself into a machine. He attaches machinery, wires, buckets of goo to his body and gradually replaces everything biological with something mechanical.

The movie is mostly household items: brooms, buckets of paint, power tools. Making use of ordinary stuff and creating a compelling story is about the best thing there is.

I don't want to give anything away, but the part where's he on a date with a pretty woman and his Unit (which he's turned into a giant drill) comes smashing and spinning through a table, is a highly effective use of grimy nastiness. It's also the point at which I had to abandon watching. That should tell you how GOOD it is.

Soothing Relief for Vampire Skin

2009-08-15T20:45:00.003-07:00

Pleasure in Vegas is relentless. Upbeat music plays constantly. The
air is hot or cool as you wish. Magically, alcohol intoxicates but
does not incapacitate. People stream by, slender, beautiful, ugly,
man, woman, mascara, cleavage, fat, white, dark skinned wearing
couture or t-shirts from their last trip to Wyoming, carrying a Gucci
bag or a half-killed bottle of Bud lite. Long term planning withers
and dies. You think only of the next instant or you grind to a halt,
standing in stoned contentment.

Today's Vegas is beautifully designed and elaborately decorated. Some
of it is beautiful: jellyfish glass flowers growing from scalloped
ceilings, synchronized fountains dancing to music. Earlier casino
architecture strove to destroy all traces of the outside world by
blocking windows and killing natural light. Time withers from the
lack of clocks and a state of perpetual twilight and dawn. Our
internal clocks' rhythms die. Evaporating along with the primitive
brain's functions seasons and days fade.

Modern casinos filter the sun through latticework and leaves. Escape,
they say. There is the exit. Leave when you want. But you stay. Inside
is pleasure. Outside is the sun exfoliating vampire skin (and in Vegas
we are all vampires), polluted traffic, grimy men dispensing flimsy
booklets of women offering sexual collisions for the cost of a phone
call. Inside, the gilded ages of kings and empires.

Judgement requires imagining the possible, the good, and the bad.
Vegas destroys judgement by destroying imagination. You do not imagine
good things, but simply expect them. The envronment offers to ooze
them as it does the soft lighting and cool air. Odds are a suckers
game. Risk is not dead but vague.

At any given moment in Vegas, there is no danger, only pleasure. There
has never been danger nor will there ever be danger. Danger is not on
the horizon because there is no horizon.

\t : iPhone->you

Hypervigilant Nirvana

2009-08-15T20:45:00.001-07:00

To protect against things going wrong I like to practice
hypervigilance: watching out danger. Also, magical thinking: imagining
the worst to prevent or at least prepare for it. Therapists will work
hard to disabuse one of this sort of bad thinking. So does Vegas,
destroying hypervigilance by destroying danger. Therefore Vegas is
therapy..

There is no future because there is no time. You live completely in
the now. Your senses focus on this moment. As the Buddha promised and
Buddhism and million modern gurus promise, the moment of absolutely
present awareness creates Nirvana.

Clearly, Vegas is Nirvana.

\t : iPhone->you

The black windows of las Vegas hotels

2009-08-14T21:12:00.000-07:00

Modern Vegas hotels have windows with superior energy efficient
coatings, which prevent the sun from turning the buildings into giant
ovens. The coatings allow no interior light to escape. At night, while
the structures are bathed in spot lighting, the windows remain solid
black.

The effect is creepy. A Greco-Roman temple stretched sixty stories and a
quarter mile long is covered in hundreds of windows, all of them
black. A Parisian row house with Mansard roofs sitting six hundred
feet in the air has only dark windows. The hotels wear architectural
styles that connote power and culture, but contain no one.

The blackness contasts with the strip's flashing lights, four story
televisions, endless cars, and stoilling people. People disappear into
the hotels. Where do they go?

Continuous festivity contrasts with total abandonment. The blackness
is that of the desert surrounding the city, the limits of prosperity
and good luck.

\t : iPhone->you

Vegas

2009-08-13T13:51:00.001-07:00

Vegas is hot. Outside, blasts of heat must be the result of industry,
because nature does not exert this kind of cruelty. Inside, music
pounds and tobacco smoke lingers. This Vegas is more hospitable than
the one we visited six years ago. More shops for those of modest
means, Starbucks, unobstructed ways through hotels that do not include
their casinos.

Last night, we pitched forward on rails toward a thousand feet of open
air. The empty, black shell of the incomplete and perhaps never to be
finished Fontainbleu hotel was square in our sight, a monolith of ill
omen. Cranes were silently folded over rusting skeletons of girders.
Hissing pistons cradled us and dangled us over busy lights.

The view from the Stratosphere is worth at least one thing: seeing the
artificial horizon where the city's lights stop abruptly at absolute
blackness. City, and then absolute nothing. We appeared to float on a
giant disk in space. Dry lighting exploded in the mountains and for an
instant rocky silhouettes revealed a world outside of this one.

Tourists ramble, prowl. Shouting at craps, staggering with drinks,
swaggering in suits, fake breasts the size of cabbages and beyond, the
grizzled and vacant pressing slot machine buttons with all the
excitement of a patient waiting for the dentist.

The zombie apocalypse is ever around the corner here. In walled towers
the rich suckle on fruit liquors and feast on endless buffet slurry.
Outside, wild eyed indigents sweat in the oven heat, dreaming of their
own pleasures. Eventually, the desolate foreclosure suburbs, and the
sudden, desert, with its unknown predators and cannibal savages.

\t : iPhone->you

Free Cake!

2009-08-04T12:18:00.001-07:00

On work kitchen table:

Looking all day at things we don't remember

2009-07-28T22:57:00.001-07:00

My father-in-law once got frustrated with his Mac because he didn't know what the hell the hard drive icon was. I explained to him that the drawing of a rectangular aluminum box was a hard drive. He said "How would I know that?"

What happens when the icons in our computers are only of things we've never seen. This word processing program has the image of a 3 1/4" "floppy" disk for the save function. No one uses floppy disks any more. Those 3 1/4" disks weren't even floppy. Who knows what that is? My Mac has a magnifying glass in the corner for the Spotlight search. I know what it is. In my house growing up, we had the compact OED, which has crazy small type and comes with a magnifying glass. How many kids still handle magnifying glasses?

Magnifying something in my life means clicking the zoom icon (a magnifying glass) in a program. I no longer think of a thing that you hold above small type, or over paper or ants (I didn't do the ants thing more than once, I think), but of an image you click.

As less and less of our lives become digital, we stop using physical objects, and lose the sources of the metaphors for our digital lives.

Bum Pits

2009-07-25T21:10:00.001-07:00

Women on TV are advertising the BumPits, a fashion accessory that adds loft to a woman's hair.

The effect is vaguely that of a cephalic growth, or hydrocephalic condition. Since this is Moon Landing Week (Happy 40th!), there's been lots of 60's footage of Astronauts' wives in living rooms. My now days old image of the footage is that the women of that era also had fashionable hair lumps. Sadly, my memory was flawed.

Flat, flat hair. It occurred to me that maybe the source of my false memories was the movie version of Apollo 13. Bingo! It was.

Such is Hollywood's tendency to glamorize. So, in fact, the women in that movie did have bumped up heads. But actually, much less than did Tom Hanks. And his was natural...Or was it?

Where are my BumpIts For Men? Where is my prosthetic forehead?

Galling and Appalling

2009-07-24T23:43:00.000-07:00

Under Contract

2009-07-03T23:04:00.001-07:00

Cheese Cut Block

2009-07-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

Portrait of pie

2009-06-20T00:14:00.000-07:00

Twitter: It's Not Just for What You Had For Breakfast, Anymore

2009-06-16T21:58:00.001-07:00

Just when you thought Twitter was completely useless (yahoo news)

"They've cut off telephone, e-mail, texting, and for foreign press issued a letter saying nobody can report without permission…Twitter is the one thing being used. It’s a sign of crackdown. They don’t want people outside Iran to see what’s going on there."

As the embattled regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejadseemingly cuts off Iran from the rest of the world, Iranians are working around the restrictions by blogging, posting to Facebook, and organizing protests on Twitter.

When Santa Barbara has its two big forest fires in the last year, Twitter was amazing for real time updates.

#IranElection is the hot tag.

First Oracle/Sun joke

2009-06-03T10:34:00.000-07:00

David Geary just made a joke in a demo about Sun's address soon being
Redwood City. That's the first joke I've heard about the verboten topic.

Oracle is the Lord Voldemort of JavaOne 09

\t : iPhone->you

JavaOne Sandwiches

2009-06-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

Free lunch!