sunday reading

it is sunday. it is beautiful here in new york. so many things to do, so many clashing impulses, so many projects awaiting attention… i am having a hard time focusing and a harder time finding anything interesting to share with you, so i have decided to offer up a big heaping pile of writings for you to peruse. i don’t know how many sci-fi readers we have among us here, but i have been enjoying the genre thoroughly of late, coalescent, illium, giles goat-boy… so with that bias in mind here is great big bunch of sunday reading for you in all shapes and sizes.

posted by jmorrison on 02/29 | sights & sounds | | permalink
the cat with hands

a short, strange movie for your viewing pleasure.

posted by jmorrison on 02/27 | sights & sounds | | permalink
miss whitey in little africa

was checking out millionare playboy today and came across their posting of a comic from nineteen seventy, called superman’s girlfriend lois lane. this particular issue… well, no sense in explaining, just see for yourself.

posted by jmorrison on 02/27 | sights & sounds | | permalink
urban archeology

walking the streets in new york its sometimes hard to believe there are any spaces not crammed full of sweaty people, but there are. in amongst the endlessly growing, shifting, towering structures of any city are hidden places. places boarded over, places burnt out, places sold and locked up for 50 years. there are abandoned hospitals, sanitariums, factories, ship yards, hotels…  a quick search of the internet turns up the web sites of folks devoted to finding, exploring, and documenting these forgotten places. here are some.

posted by jmorrison on 02/27 | sights & sounds | | permalink
reminder to you numbskulls out there

IT’S ONLY A FUCKING MOVIE! ok? the passion is a MOVIE, directed by the guy who starred in mad max. alright? yesterday the coming onslaught of “the passion” was front page news in both the post and the daily news. today, opening day, it’s news still.  people are all worked up, pro, opposed, too violent, beautiful, “it made me cry, i’ll never be the same” blah blah blah. i’ll say it one last time for those of you whose heads are so far up your asses you didn’t hear: IT’S A MOVIE. maybe a decent one, maybe not, but one day it will be relegated to the same sorry fate as all others. one day it will be a $9 super saver dvd filed somewhere between paint your wagon and pee wee’s big adventure. one day it will be edited to fit into a u.p.n. time slot and crammed unceremoniously between commercials for tampons, jock-itch cream, and fried chicken. you may not see the possible folly in naming another human as your god, or rigidly following and worshiping a book, but surely you know what a movie is. right?

quasars, black holes, and telescopic clouds of dust, oh my!

crazy article at astrobiology magazine about using a cloud of space gas as a lens for what amounts to a natural telescope fifty light-years long, and using that telescope to peer into a black hole four billion light-years from earth. oh yeah, and there is a quasar mixed up in it all for good measure. evidently it will be the most powerful telescope ever gazed through. to quote: “the new technique promises researchers the ability to resolve details about 10 microarcseconds across - equivalent to seeing a sugar cube on the moon, from earth. neat-o.

posted by jmorrison on 02/24 | tech & science - space | | permalink
10 years gone

10 years ago this week, the 26th to be exact, bill hicks, secular saint, verbal destroyer of the devil’s minions here on earth, died of pancreatic cancer. a bunch of articles are popping up, looking into the man’s legacy and questioning why he has grown more and more popular each passing year. i for one wish he were still around. he would have been able to make the current state of affairs in this country funny. in any case here are two decent articles: the guardian and the bbc. to enjoy some of his material check these two previous posts: 1, and 2.

posted by jmorrison on 02/24 | news & views - people | | permalink
hopeless or hopeful?

should we be optimistic about americas chances for a regime change in the coming election. good article at alternet about just that question.

posted by jmorrison on 02/24 | news & views | | permalink
poor man’s time travel

there is a new show currently on view at the museum of the city of new york. it offers views from the many different permutations of new york now lost to us. the new york we’ve heard about but missed by decades and the new york we just barely caught a glimpse of before it disappeared. some great work here from the magnum photographers. one of my favorites is bruce davidson who’s series subway rocks me like a hurricane. his east 100th street work aint too shabby either. if you can’t make it to the show at least check out these 17 pages from the accompanying book. enjoy.

posted by jmorrison on 02/22 | sights & sounds | | permalink
hey, you never know

a short history of the biggest carrot at the end of the longest stick. with shiny pictures here and here.

posted by jmorrison on 02/21 | lost & found | | permalink
piiiigs iiiin spaaaace

when bush announced his grand plans for the future of the space program many people took it with an implied nudge-nudge wink-wink. after all the plans were impossibly expensive, and on the whole (moon-base-this and men-on-mars-that) bordered on downright wrongheaded, especially when the plans came at the cost of losing important scientific programs, like hubble for example. savvy onlookers saw a transparent campaign ploy to bolster gwb’s heavily tarnished image. even more savvy onlookers, looking at the money involved, wondered what the real agenda would be.

posted by jmorrison on 02/21 | news & views - op ed | | permalink
this months champion award

goes to: kazuma kamura. his story begins like this, “as a 14-year-old boy he left his parents and seven brothers and sisters to live with his aunt, but he lost his bearings in the mountains of rural japan. instead of returning home, however, he decided to stay on in the forest, living there for 43 years.” i love this story. how many times have i wished i could just walk off and live in the forest for 43 years? icing on the cake which makes this story perfect? after being arrested, taken in, and given a job, what did the mountain man do with his first paycheck? why buy a television of course.

posted by jmorrison on 02/20 | lost & found - wtf | | permalink
beating severe drug addiction with, what else? a hallucinogen

to be filed under the vast category of things humanity once knew but, for lack of profit margin, has forgotten comes ibogaine, a mild hallucinogen derived from the root of a shrub found in west africa, used for centuries by the people of gabon for medicinal purposes and in tribal initiation ceremonies of the bwiti religion. because of it’s origins it could be alternately filed under, naturally occurring drugs, not synthesized by the pharmaceutical industry, and thus highly illegal. according to one story it was “popular on the streets of new york and san francisco” before it was classified as having no medical benefit in 1970. i’m no terence mckenna, but i’ve never heard of it. anyhow it is touted by at least one doctor and a whole slew of addicts as miraculous, so if your sweating, freezing, wracked with spasms, and feel like your “spine is being crushed by a vise”, you might want to check out this site.

posted by jmorrison on 02/20 | lost & found | | permalink
the real world

an italian photojournalist by the name of A. Raffaele Ciriello, who had covered just about every major conflict of the last ten years was killed in 2002. this site collects nearly his entire body of work, including photos and video. powerful, though some of it is not for the faint of heart.

posted by jmorrison on 02/18 | sights & sounds | | permalink
big this and big that

if the number “w” is valued at below -1 then the phantom force of dark energy will result in the tearing apart of galaxies and the dissolution of atoms, meaning, of course, the extremely violent destruction of the entire universe. sound like science fiction? well, technically it’s not, even though it is science, and is most certainly not fact. it is yet another theory with the comically insufficient word BIG in it. the big rip.

posted by jmorrison on 02/18 | tech & science - theory | | permalink
Searching 3,307,998,701 web pages

libraries, google, the web as information wasteland, intelligent agents, semantics, the future. interesting article about all of the above.

posted by jmorrison on 02/17 | lost & found - ideas | | permalink
addicted to love serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and endogenous opioids

ah love. the poets and philosophers have wrestled with its shape and effects for time immemorial. emerson, ovid, shakespeare, st. augustine, byron, tennyson, wilde, danielle steele… all have looked deeply within themselves and lucidly at those beside them, coming forth with apt metaphors and pentameter framed pearls of wisdom, but alas, they did not have magnetic resonance scanners and gene therapy so their conclusions must be moot. right?

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