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If Trump can say he likes people who weren't captured when talking about POWs, can I say I like presidential candidates who weren't shot at?

(And great, now the hollow Republican chant has shifted from USA! USA! to FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! like folks are throwing hands in a high school cafeteria. And frankly that's the one of the gentler metaphors for what a giant hall full of white dudes screaming in unison for their leader looks like.)

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Chris Fleming on the Power and the Glory of the song Chameleon - too much power in the hands of a middle school jazz band near you.

I used to think emotions "just happened" and were illogical. I was a victim of my own feelings. I finally got curious enough to start challenging those feelings about feelings, and after years of exploring, I learned emotions actually have a very clear set of rules and structures.

Over a decade ago I wrote about learning to decode this language, here's a key part:

Basic Emotion ... Why We Have It
Anger ... To fight against problems
Anticipation ... To look forward and plan
Joy ... To remind us what's important
Trust ... To connect with people who help
Fear ... To protect us from danger
Surprise ... To focus us on new situations
Sadness ... To connect us with those we love
Disgust ... To reject what is unhealthy

via my friend John K Sawers. And the link included this image:

"from @Mansi on IG reminded me of this life changing journey"

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I would add ones too like:

Acceptance ... To cope with an imperfect world
Happiness ... To value what is good

I think those are great reminders about the purpose various emotions carry. I still get hung up on how sometimes - especially the negative or unpleasant emotions like anger or fear - aren't wise enough to recognize the limits they should have. They want the rest of the organism to burn with them. (and sometimes aren't wise but are often deviously clever.)

I've played with the idea that the main counter for an emotion might be another emotion. The urge for Happiness teaming up with Acceptance in telling the urge for Anger to calm the hell down. Maybe when those cross interactions happen early enough, less disruption occurs?

Like I've said, one of my strongest (countering?) emotions is an urge to align myself with a greater good - and I think this emotion is talented, sometimes too talented, at talking down other emotions before they get all fired up. So my personal preferences, my subjective happiness triggers, still matter, but mostly as validated by the idea that everyone should be seeking their individual joys.

I don't know. Is "Acceptance" an emotion in and of itself? I think it's pretty core at the regulation of the other ones. Stopping Anger and Fear from setting everything on fire, stopping Joy from turning us in hedonistic junkies...

Now that I think about it my drive towards Acceptance is really prominent. I can blame it for teaming up with Fear, say, and stopping me from taking too many big swings in life. Also, it lets me be comfortable with and find the cool parts of a much broader swath of people than I would otherwise. Like, I have a surprising number of somewhat incompatible friends, because some of quirks that get under the other's skin in a way that just slides off mine, possibly completely unnoticed...

But most of all maybe Acceptance is the base of that "natural philosophical antidepressent" I seem to be on. It cuts the lows of Fear and Anger. And it doesn't rule out Joy and Happiness, though I do worry it takes the peaks off of some of them...

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Low-key obsessed with this photo of Cora's Bearded Dragon Loki. Something about the textures of the back, leg, and cushion, and the limited palette... Reread Tom Robbins' "Another Roadside Attraction". Like "Still Life with Woodpecker" (which I still rate as one of my all time favorites) it doesn't resonate for me quite as much on rereading, though I love the mystical and evocative squishiness of it all.

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...it had long been [Amanda's] theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.

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When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.

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Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of *degree*. We both have the same basic *form* of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy *über alles*. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and driving an entire civilization insane. Don't spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming.

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Now here was Nearly Normal awakening her. He brought a cucumber sandwich and a half-pint of milk. Good. Food would revive her. The bread slices collapsed like movie-set walls beneath her bite; the mayonnaise squished, the cucumber snapped tartly like the spine of an elf.

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Meanwhile, Ziller was doing a bit of tasting himself. Amanda was melting from the glory of it. She felt like the frosting left on the spoon that iced the Cake of the World.

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As was my custom in such elements I hunkered against the rain, drew my head into my collar, turned my eyes to the street, tensed my footsteps and proceeded in misery. But my hosts, I soon noticed, reacted in quite another way. They strolled calmly and smoothly, their bodies perfectly relaxed. They did not hunch away from the rain but rather glided through it. They directed their faces to it and did not flinch as it drummed their cheeks. They almost reveled in it. Somehow, I found this significant. The Zillers accepted the rain. They were not at odds with it, they did not deny it or combat it; they accepted it and went with it in harmony and ease. I tried it myself. I relaxed my neck and shoulders and turned my gaze into the wet. I let it do to me what it would. Of course, it was not trying to do anything to me. What a silly notion. It was simply falling as rain should, and I a man, another phenomenon of nature, was sharing the space in which it fell. It was much better regarding it that way. I got no wetter than I would have otherwise, and if I did not actually enjoy the wetting, at least I was free of my tension. I could even smile.

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"John Paul, didn't you once do a painting on the inside of a parachute? And then repack the chute? So that the only way anyone could enjoy your painting was to jump out of an airplane and look up at it on the way down? What was the purpose of that?"

"I wanted to test the art lover's commitment. It might be desirable for museums and galleries to devise a similar test."

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Sexuality ringed Amanda the way a penumbra rings a shadow.

(I remember this one, and the spoon line, making a big impression on me in college or shortly thereafter.)

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"You people, that fucking magician, I don't know all it is you've got yourselves into. But you wouldn't be in this mess with your government and with the Church if somebody had raised you with a little guts, if somebody had put the fear of God in you."
"You're talking about the fear of authority."
"Authority. Damn right. You never learned to respect authority."
"In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable." Amanda whipped the custard with a wooden spoon.
"Oh? Our duly constituted authority isn't respectable enough for you."
"The only authority I respect is that one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime."
"You mean God?" "Not necessarily."

Lately I've been thinking on how profoundly anti-authoritarian I am, at least philosophically. The only real authority is the authority of everything.

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"Nothing to lose, Marx, and nothing to gain. Nothing to lose and nothing to gain. A man can be as free and happy as he wants to be because there's nothing to lose and nothing to gain."

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Watching the movie "Tenet". I know its reputation as a confusing movie, but a minute in and I'm already confused... are those weirdly angled Sousaphones? In like a Symphony Orchestra? Maybe a Russian thing?
Old video (in more ways than one) about how VHS tape works. Spoiler - video tape can't move past the heads fast enough for a video signal, and the solution is that the heads themselves rotate as well, thus virtually increasing the length of the tape

(so the issue is how fast you can read the information, not how densely you can pack it in - sort of how I'm amazed at how a whole plethora of TV channels could come on one coaxial cable - or as Homer Simpson put it "*kiss* *kiss* *kiss* How can one little insulated wire bring so much happiness!?")

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But in this time, it's almost like you're afraid. You're afraid to step out and be joyful, you're afraid to kind of affirm the positive and stuff, But I'm telling you it's a big moment in our history... and it's a wonderful time to be barely alive.

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You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here.
Deteriorata. Deteriorata.

Go placidly amid the noise and waste,
And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep.
Rotate your tires.
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
And heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss, and when.
Consider that two wrongs never make a right, but that three do.
Wherever possible, put people on hold.
Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment,
and despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer maintenance.

Remember The Pueblo.
Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate.
Know yourself. If you need help, call the FBI.
Exercise caution in your daily affairs,
Especially with those persons closest to you -
That lemon on your left, for instance.
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls
Would scarcely get your feet wet.
Fall not in love therefore. It will stick to your face.
Gracefully surrender the things of youth: birds, clean air, tuna, Taiwan.
And let not the sands of time get in your lunch.
Hire people with hooks.
For a good time, call 606-4311. Ask for Ken.
Take heart in the bedeepening gloom
That your dog is finally getting enough cheese.
And reflect that whatever fortune may be your lot,
It could only be worse in Milwaukee.

You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.

Therefore, make peace with your god,
Whatever you perceive him to be - hairy thunderer, or cosmic muffin.
With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal,
The world continues to deteriorate.
Give up!

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This image is part of my inkjet printer's built-in print test and I genuinely find it very moving

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I think the way to be a successful human is to not give yourself too many roadblocks to happiness -- and a hot warm tortilla, you know what? Don't think too much about it, just put that right in your mouth.

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[At MIT in the 1950s] there was a Tech Model Train Club, where they had the people who were like "let's look at the top of the table, and make the models, and make the trains and make the things and everything pretty!" and then there were the people who were like "let's look at the bottom of the table there where all the switches are, and the electronics, and do all the tinkering" - and that kind of divide between "I'm looking at the flavor", vs "I'm looking at the systems"... FF Tactics is like the hard-core systems game.

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apolloinrealtime.org/11/ Wow. And to think...50 years. Man, our relationship with space is sad. It's just a challenge we're not up for, and so we'll sit here til an asteroid takes us out, unless the climate gets us first.

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from The Atlantic The 2019 Artistic-Swimming World Championships

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Just finished all the available levels of "Mr. Bullet", a pretty decent little puzzle game for smartphones. Each level is a tiny puzzle, where you play a shooter doing fancy trick shots (with lots of cartoony blood). Then they have variants where you throw grenades, or have to NOT hit hostages, or where finally you're not longer magically invisible to your own bullets. Each puzzle is so bite size, and none of them are too grindingly difficult, that it's a great pick up and play and then put down game. The model of "free with commercials, or a couple of bucks to just play" seems pretty decent to me.
Melissa and Me in a view from inside Alicja Kwade's TunnelTeller at The Crane Estate in Ipswich- took the tour of the great house and rambled around the grounds yesterday, with Kristin and Dave and her mom Nancy who took the photo. You could easily recreate the James Bond gun barrel opening! Man, do I love this.

Real Time: Schiphol Clock from Maarten Baas on Vimeo.

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Thomas Bergeron and Atlantic Brass Quintet did a Brass Mob Somerville playing the kind of minmalist experiment piece In C

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Remember in one of the debates when Trump and Clinton were asked to say something nice about the other, and Clinton said Trump's children prove his character? It took 10 months for that burn to manifest but the payoff was worth it.

A while back James Harvey posted a link to Prince on the piano riffing on "So High" - at 18 minutes it's longer than I'd put in my music collection, but it's good.

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Accept the things you cannot change:
the bleating clock,
the nightly go
--dog leash in tow--
around the block,

neural chemistry,
patchy hair,
a longing stare
and X-ray eye,

and the niggling fact
that things will stay
roughly this way,
to be exact.

Forgive the things you cannot have:
the supple bod,
taut undergrads,
a nicer pad,
long chats with God,

an older name,
your peers' respect,
the oll korrect,
unbridled fame,

a sense of ease
in your own skin,
a lighter burden
by degrees.

The life you'd swap for on the train
(sight unseen)
is much like yours
though it appears
more green.

So, why this pain
that shorts the breath
and spoils your health?
You grow serene--

not yet, but after
your will resigns
a few more times
with heavy laughter.

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LOL Trump. Why is public radio playing his VP like its news not propaganda? Also I love how he says he's going back over the years to look at the Middle East, starting with Clinton, and some how skips 2000-2008? LOLOLOL, Republicans.

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Pokemon Go is also terrific if you enjoy having your workday constantly interrupted by imaginary bats, like Hunter S. Thompson.

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So I've been noticing more music missing from iTunes :-( Luckily I have both some old archives and even the mojo to parse out what old stuff might be missing, but it's a super-pain. My devblog: parsing itunes Library.xml into json Rebekah​ is lending me the book "Set This House in Order", about people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiple-Personality). I got to googling about the reality of it, since it is making such a compelling work of fiction. This Natasha Tracy article talking about it also made the claim that "All Mental Illness is an Amplification of Normal Behavior" and now I'm thinking about that claim.

It's not a new thought for me: almost ten years ago - http://kirk.is/2006/06/14/ - I got to musing about "shadow syndromes" in general, and this kind of spectrum thinking, and the conditions I felt some kind of possible affinity with...and the issue of the line between self-coddling, excuse-making half-assed self-diagnosis and legitimate chances for empathy that goes beyond mere sympathy.

Getting back to the "All Mental Illness is Amplification" claim... trying to definitively say when a quantitative distinction becomes a qualitative difference is a bit of a mug's game, I suppose. And I suppose there's a danger of having LESS sympathy if we start to say to someone who is suffering with mental illness "oh, buck up, everyone has that, you just have it a bit worse."

As I get older I feel like I'm a bit more aware of my way of interacting with the world. I still struggle with seeing myself as others see me, the whole "problem of other minds" shtick. And sometimes I'm worried maybe I'm not that much more aware, I'm just remember the more recent bits of awareness better than the stuff in the past.

It'll be fun to watch my parade of friends kids, some of them virtual nieces nephews, as they run into this stuff for themselves. Maybe too I'll learn a little more about myself, and how I looked to my elders as the unbearably precocious punk kid I was, and maybe there will even be a chance to help these kids mold themselves in ways that will foster their own self growth. I'm a pretty crappy environmentalist, but why is 4 the baseline number of napkins some people grab at dunkies? Two I can almost understand but just how messy are people planning to be?

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JP Porchfest in the Boston Metro... that's the event I've been making the website for as of late

Father Edmund begins the meeting by asking us some personal questions about ourselves. He does not seem put off by the fact that we are living in sin. Nor does he seem to care that I am Jewish. In fact, he asks if we would like to incorporate Jewish wedding traditions into our service. The only Jewish wedding tradition I know is where you stomp on the wineglass. Can we do that one? He says of course we can. What about jumping the broom, like black people do? He says he's not sure if that would be appropriate.

from Gregory Benford's "Matter's End" :

To be awakened by a soft breeze. A brushing presence, sliding cloth... He sensed her sari as a luminous fog. Moonlight streaming through a lopsided window cast shimmering auras through the cloth as she loomed above him. Reached for him. Lightly flung away his sticky bedclothes.

"I--"

A soft hand covered his mouth, bringing a heady savor of ripe earth. His senses ran out of him and into the surrounding dark, coiling in air as he took her weight. She was surprisingly light, though thick-waisted, her breasts like teacups compared to the full curves of her hips. His hands slid and pressed, finding a delightful slithering moisture all over her, a sheen of vibrancy. Her sari evaporated , The high planes of her face caught vagrant blades of moonlight, and he saw a curious tentative, expectant expression there as she wrapped him in soft pressures. Her mouth did not so much kiss his as enclose it, formulating an argument of sweet rivulets that trickled into his porous self. She slipped into place atop him, a slick clasp that melted him up into her, a perfect fit, slick with dark insistence. He closed his eyes, but the glow diffused through his eyelids, and he could see her hair fanning through the air like motion underwater, her luxuriant weight bucking, trembling as her nails scratched his shoulders, musk rising smoky from them both. A silky muscle milked him at each heart-thump. Her velvet mass orbited around their fulcrum, bearing down with feathery demands, and he remembered brass icons, gaudy Indian posters, and felt above him Kali strumming in fevered darkness. She locked legs around him, squeezing him up into her surprisingly hard muscles, grinding, drawing forth, pushing back. She cried out with great heaves and lungfuls of the thickening air, mouth going slack beneath hooded eyes, and he shot sharply up into her, a convulsion that poured out all the knotted aches in him, delivering them into the tumbled steamy earth--

Going through my book collection I found the scifi collection of short stories "Full Spectrum 3" ... I don't remember much about them, but this sex scene has stuck with me since I read it in 1994 or so-- especially the line about the teacups, though I had misremembered it as "her teacup hips".

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman_series - man, Scientology's secret backstory woulda been so much more if it was E. E. "Doc" Smith and not L. Ron Hubbard.

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http://devastatingexplosions.com/ A good site for all your explode-y needs.

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Amber's Corn Find: Microwave 3-4 minutes in husk. Chop off cm from wide end, grab+squeeze thin end. Husk+silk slides right off. Delicious!

I wasn't concerned with geopolitical events, international affairs, cultural anomalies, or hygiene. I had set off to find myself, but most of the time I was so stoned I was lucky if I could find my shoes.

But I wasn't alone. I was part of an entire generation in search of meaning. It was a generation so starved for understanding we were able to read significance into Donovan lyrics. We didn't have a clue as to what was going on. In fact we greeted each other with the very question: "What's going on, man? What's happening?"

We didn't say, "Nice to see you," or "How have you been?" like people with a non-crumbling value system. We wanted to know what was happening.

"What's happening, bro?" But nobody knew. It was the question of the decade.

"What it is." That's the best answer you could get. What the hell kind of answer is that?

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[Reading Billboard] "'Delicious harmony. Made for you. Asian Salad @ McDondald's' Why does that sound vaguely racist to me?"
"It's just using an ethnic stereotype. It's not like they said "Asian Salad: Delicious, Good at Math."

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Fine that Netflix is raising prices, but not allowing "unlimited streaming" to combine with "limited DVDs" to be on one plan is bullshit.

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http://blog.wordnik.com/attention-all-muggles-and-squibs - the words of harry potter
--The 2053 nuclear tests conducted

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Ah, that old math spiritual, "Just a Random Walk with Thee"

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The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ArIj236UHs&feature=youtu.be&a - Study like a scholar, scholar! This Old Spice is pretty great.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2260617/ - cool, India invented a new currency symbol for the Rupee (scroll near bottom)

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Heh, May 29 I missed noting the 10th Anniversary of my "Mundane" (i.e. personal, boring) daily journal - set to make sure that each day left at least a digital footprint...

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http://ajaxload.info/ - awesome "throbber busy animation" generator, pick the template and the color...

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The view outside my job's warroom area is kind of mezmorizing!

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I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull

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The last drop of 90s Arcade Competitive Spirit that I know of is The Downtown Crossing Gamestop: Street Fighter 4 and Smash Brothers.

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Near Faneuil Hall, an excellent faux-statue bellydancer

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Ariana drew the sailboat, I colored, then added the skull and crossbones at Jose's request:
A note of passing: WBCN is going away. I wasn't here in Boston early enough, or generally cool enough, to really get some of its big milestones, or how it will be missed. Post-divorce, I found Howard Stern in the morning weirdly cathartic, and then it always seemed strange to be the place to go for Patriots radio broadcasts...

Anyway, I've recently had my interest reawakened in the cartoonist Shary Flenniken, especially her Trots and Bonnie, and its fun kind of Little-Nemo-in-Slumberland-tinged sexiness. This caused me to try emailing her, and we've corresponded a little.

(A lovely mild thrill when an artist you've seen in mainstream, non-virtual publications turns out to be accessible via e-mail and happy to chat a bit! It reminds me of my dad's scheme to send self-addressed postcards to authors asking whether they sign and send back their own works mailed to them... the trick with the postcard was, very often he'd get at least a signature on the card, even if they declined to autograph the work.)

She mentioned a DVD with medium-quality scans of all the National Lampoon issues, so I ordered that, in part to see her work, and in part to see if I could find an issue I remember finding semi-stashed away by my dad... (Turns out it was the December 1982 issue. I was probably attracted by the big ET lampoon on the cover, but it was the mildly lascivious (you know what? Livacious should TOTALLY be a word) pseudo-centerfold of Mrs. Clause reclining in front of horny elves (as Santa was making his rounds) that has stuck in my mind 26 years later.)

Anyway, this advertisement is from the December 1980 issue of National Lampoon. (I'm not sure if it was a localized ad or if it appeared nationwide.) Reading the old magazines is weird, the mix of cigarette, booze, stereo, and cologne ads is so different from today's world that sometimes I'm not sure which ads were real and which were the parodies. (Plus that mention that 70s habit of ads with big paragraphs of text. I kind of like that, actually. I think the style lasted longer in the UK.)

...And RIP, WBCN.

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In the context of science, nouns are just exceptionally slow verbs.

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http://dutycyclegenerator.com/ - Neil Baldwin made music for the NES in the 80s and 90s, he talks about the process, and there are little widgets to hear the songs he made.

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http://www.adn.com/2835/story/864687.html -huge mystery blob in Alask. Are these the oiliens from x-files? "What was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers"

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INTERVIEWER: How intelligent are dinosaurs?
DINOSAUR RACER 2: We're probably not going to win any prizes, but if you think about it, neither are you.

Stayed up (well, mostly) through all 15 innings of the All-Star game. Kind of crazy to see that, almost every extra inning had a feeling like "this could be it!", including the bases loaded a few different times. Red Sox coach Francona, heading up the AL, was about out of pitchers, and was determined not to overuse Scott Kazmir who had recently pitched a long game for close divisional rivals Tampa Bay... After him? "There was nobody else," [Francona] said. "Maybe (Tampa Bay Rays third baseman Evan) Longoria. He's got a good curveball."

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Video of the Moment

--JZ sent me this (err, vaguely PG13ish) video: Sales Guy vs Web Dude. It gets so many delicious details right, from the sneaky passing of blame to random pressure tactics and overall idiocy... favorite line: "There's no way to go back. You can't arrange them by penis."

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Link of the Moment
Weirdly compelling, the last 50 photos posted to LJ. Nice eclectic variety...

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Sports radio guys can't stop talking about how much home run derbies suck. Pshaw!

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My fear and loathing of tv commercials for prescription medicine is almost balanced by the ridiculous and often embarrassing disclaimers.

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Wow. A bad call at 2nd base (a tag that wasn't) in the bottom of the 11th may be the game decider. Baseball needs frickin' replays.

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Surprised that no one knows exactly how the "Rebel Yell" of the US Civil War sounded. No one thought to ask before all the vets died? One thing I noticed in Chicago... I love helping couples and larger groups all get in the photo by volunteering to take the picture using their camera. But it can be a little awkward to offer, because you're a stranger and they don't know if you're a camera-stealing nutter or what. Still, when I'm on the other side of that equation, I think the small risk of camera theft is worth not having the "gee, there are no shots of us together" after the trip.

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Video Game Anecdote of the Moment

Ok yeah, I see what you're saying. In fact one of the best experiences I ever had with a Metroid game was when I used to take drugs, and I was playing Metroid Prime thinking it was the most beautiful game I'd ever played; I was tumbling through glittering ice cavern after glittering ice cavern, not knowing where I was going, not even caring that I'd probably never find my way back to where I was originally going. So much of the game seemed to be open to me to explore and yet it would take so long to make sense of it. Just as I thought I'd got out of one chasm I'd fall down another one, getting ever deeper into the labyrinth.

Then I realised I was just climbing our of and falling into the same hole over and over again. Don't do drugs, kids.

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Optical Illusion of the Moment

--"Out of Focus" by Akiyoshi, via this Boingboing zen pieace. I have never seen my monitor look so deep! Try moving your head back and forth.

So yesterday I went to a small reunion-ish bbq for people from Event Zero. It was hosted by Patrick, who lives near Davis Square where they were having their ArtBeart festival, music, food, and lots of booths of local artists and craftsfolk. Ksenia and I explored there a bit. I learned that the Someday Cafe is in danger, which bummed me out. But they had a bubble gum machine thing that dispensed cool buttons for 50 cents a pop. That was put there by shuddemup.com (Some of the buttons shown here.) I love small art dispensed from vending machines. I got a cropped comic panel with a viking going "Flee! Flee!"

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Hedbergism of the Moment

I rent a lot of cars, 'cause I go on the road, and when I drive a rental car, I don't know what's going on with them, right. So a lot of times I'll drive for like ten miles with the emergency brake on. That doesn't say a lot for me, but it really doesn't say a lot for the emergency brake. It's really not an emergency brake, it's an emergency 'make the car smell funny' lever.

Been there done that...actually had a Cheech and Chong-seeming-moment coming back over the border from Canada with smoke pouring from the rental minivan.

Thus endeth the week of Mitch Hedberg quotes!

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Link of the Moment
Boingboing had a link to some galleries of Ghost Rooms, where sometimes you see the remnants of a floor and ceiling hanging off what is now the side of a building.

I remember seeing something like that, in Salamanca, NY (funny name, given how the links are Spanish...) When they were tearing down the old parsonage, or whatever you call the house where the priests live. There was a bathroom cracked open to the sky, with the tub and toilet still there, and I remember thinking (must have been around 7 at the time) that it was kind of intimate thing thrust open to the world.

Photos of the Moment
So I started loading up kirkjerk.com/mortals.be with the stuff I would've been posting here had the site not been down...came up with some fun links in the interim.

• Jesus, it's like the Illuminati sprouted a Housewares Department.

  I wonder how big an impact it has on people like me who pretty much stick with basics from Old Navy. (Like I quoted in...Yikes, 2000 -- "nobody sells any damn normal shirts anymore"
• Via Bill, it's the top 10 Dumb Moments in Sci-Fi Cinema (and why they generally don't matter that much.)

• And it looks to me as though everyone in Civilization is operating heavy machinery every day, by our standards. That time when the guy stops at the barber for a shave, I bet it is with the atomic clipper, which by a million tiny rays of incomprehensibly powerful fourth-order radiation annihilates the hair microscopically straight down to the root. So horrific were the energies concentrated upon every follicle, that it not only was vapourised, but each particle was individually propelled into nega-space without leaving even one atom of vapour to trouble the hair's owner; and yet the energies were in perfect balance - the customer being shaved felt not even the slightest sensation of warmth upon the skin - as, indeed, he would not feel it if the balancing bar were misaligned, and the Titanic force misdirected to blow his head into tiny pieces, and, a moment later too small to measure, the barber shop and the entire city, also. Yet such was the reputation of the Engineers of Civilization that not once had this happened anywhere on the planet!

• Buck Truck, The Rappin' Trucker is about as bad as it sounds, but was kind of an interesting insight into a different subculture.
• If you want your childhood corrupted forever...DECEPTICONSORT is nothing but Transformer porn. Weird. I mean, do robots like that even need thingies?
• The Onion's A.V. Club offers Hollyblog, "A helpful guide to celebrity web logs".
• This kinda disturbing story about Middle Eastern men behaving oddly on an airplane was poo-poo'd by the Metafilter folk who pointed to a Ann Coulter swing, but I admit I'd be freaked out a bit if I saw the events as described. That's the thing...the American populous is told to keep our eyes open for suspcious stuff, but we have NO idea what's really suspicous.
• Porn minus the People. Odd stuff...pretty seedy though sometimes it's hard to explain quite why.

Article of the Moment
Slate.com has William Saletan pretty nicely going into depth on what I was ranting about the other day, Bush's amazing attempts to spread the blame on the whole Iraq/African Iranium hoax and convince us that we want to "move on". What a spineless hypocritcal wuss. (the site's "chatterbox" has more lies from this year.)

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Links of the Moment
Nothing too astounding, but Pixel Zen is a set of links to some fun little pixel-based stuff.

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Quote of the Moment

There were also a number of low points, such as Khrushchev's visit to the Soviet Union's first openly "alternative" art exhibition, where he mocked the artists who had dared to defy the canons of social realism ("if that's supposed to be a woman, then you're a faggot").

More guestbook talk... Bozo13, you can still be "shellshocked" by recent events even if you're not completely surprised by them. People thought there were some fundamental shifts in the business cycle with rise of the 'Net-- and there have been some important changes, just not as fundamental as some people had assumed.

Don't know what that "old chap" stuff is in the entry before that.

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Links of the Moment
Picking up from yesterday's asian oddity theme...we had a friend read my mushy just-so story Yee and Lan at our wedding and we're slated to read it at our friends' ceremony. I was looking around on Google and found it posted 12 places, often unattributed, including a translation into Chinese! You can put the URL http://www.es123.com/sl1/sl01/47.htm into the translation form at babelfish (having it translate "Chinese to English") and see how Wang Shen Xuan did. It seems a pretty straight forward translation (at least as far as I can tell through al the babelfish engrish), though it specifies "Milky Way" when I wanted to imply it could be a more distant Galaxy...anyway, I like the retranslation of the final paragraph:

Why is this on our this star, when two people mutual love, they so intensely like loving opposite party, frequently can give the opposite party ring, this is for commemorate Yee and the Lan planet love.

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Spam of the Moment
Got some SPAM from from "Online Psychic" with the subject "Your Questions..." With a header like that, I was kind of disappointed that it didn't take the next step and tell me what the questions actually were. Cut flowers are kind of weird...I mean they're alive, but not really, sort of like big old undead zombie flowers roaming our mantelpieces.

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Cosmic Zits

"But what about self-esteem?"
"Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you're a pimple [on the ass-end of creation] and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace--and maybe even glory."

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Fishy Files?
Something on your Windows machine you want to keep from prying eyes? Blowfish Advanced CS is good encryption with an OK UI. By default it uses the highly regarded "Blowfish" algorithm, but you can set it to use a number of others as well. It's not as good as it could be, since by default it makes encrypted files that are named the same as the originals, plus a ".BFA" extension, so it's not good at hiding the fact that you are hiding something, but over all it's a good deal, a quality freeware product.