1) scientists are divided about bush’s proposed moonbase. this just struck me as funny somehow, i mean, i know it’s it’s a real possibility but just seeing the word moonbase used in the context of real news and not a retro science fiction book makes me laugh.

2) on creating an interplanetary internet. again, seems that these people are dead serious, but i can’t help but think they are putting the cart a long way in front of the horse on this one.

3) sky ear. not sure whether this really qualifies as space news but it struck me as so… goofy almost, i had to post it. “Sky Ear will be a one-night event in which a glowing “cloud” of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky”. as a piece of conceptual art with all the balloons changing color and stuff… sure might be pretty, but if there is even a bit of wind up there they are going to call in and hear “sshshshshshshhshhhhhhshs”. more info here.

4) testing the fabric of space and time. nasa is set to send “gravity probe b” an unnamed satellite, into earth orbit to do some super high tech hocus pocus etc etc. to test some of einsteins theories. check out some quicktime goodies about the probe and it’s mission here.

5) party like it’s 1961 russia. “On April 12, space advocates will mark the fourth annual Yuri’s Night, a global celebration of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute orbit around the Earth in 1961. The founders hope that a show of global unity toward a common goal, space exploration, will move the planet away from current military preoccupations to something more constructive.” awww yeah baby.

ok, that’s all. bye bye.

since becoming aware of christo i have felt a begrudging respect for his work. sure, it is basically an exercise in logistics and spectacle, but at its best his work can also be surprisingly elegant, and yes, dare i say it, even beautiful. this new piece as planned, however, is far from elegant and conceptually shoddy. evidently i am not the only one who thinks so. found this on a site called forgotten delights-

What message will The Gates convey? None at all. If you examine every fiber of the million square feet of fabric, you won’t be a nanometer closer to knowing what sort of person you’d like to be, what you should focus on, what sort of world you’d like to live in. Prominent art historians and critics at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and The New York Times haven’t even tried to proclaim any meaning in The Gates. They merely assert that it will draw attention to Central Park. “It might work and it’s not permanent, so why not give it a shot?” asked the publisher of the New York Observer. The twenty-year controversy over whether to allow The Gates to be erected in Central Park was driven largely by fears of the work’s environmental impact. In fact, there’s a much more basic reason for rejecting the project: the lack of any impact on the minds of those seeing it. If it conveys no message, it isn’t art. And if it isn’t art, why allow it in the Park? We might just as well grant permission to The Picket Fences or The Discarded Taxi-Bumpers. If you want to enjoy art in Central Park, do your best to avoid Christo’s giant slalom poles. Instead, seek out the dozens of figurative sculptures scattered through the Park, from Duke Ellington to the Delacorte Clock, from the Maine Monument to Samuel Morse, from Still Hunt to the Untermeyer Fountain. Like genuine works of art ever since the caveman’s time, these have the potential to speak to you - to inspire, provoke and amuse you in a way that Christo’s Gates never will.

the author might go a little far in saying so flatly it isn’t art. i’ve long ago resigned myself to the pointlessness of the what is and what is not art argument. it’s enough to just take someone’s word that his pile of rotting fish, or his room of hard to detect smells is indeed art, just a spectacularly terrible piece of it. all subjective. aside from that little glob of bile though i agree with their approximation. it has no specific ties to the site, a site which you’d think would be rife with things to explore, and as such falls very short. it just does not have the elegance of a running fence or the “wow” of a wrapped reichstag, or the unexpectedness of a valley curtain. 

to be honest, i wish the city had not given it the green light at all. central park is one of the few places in new york you can go to escape the meaningless, ugly spectacle. central park should not be gussied up. it should not be crowded with vertical lines and orange fabric. it’s unexpected nooks and crannies should not be homogenized with 8,000 identical “gateways”. and for god sake it should not be turned into any more of a tourist attraction than it already is! instead of this cristo piece i would far prefer phony pamphlets handed out to each and every arriving visitor explaining that central park is now a biohazard and should be avoided at all cost. an even quieter, more peaceful, more secluded park… now that would be beautiful.

anyhow, to look on the bright side of (what appears to be) bad art, it’s only up for two weeks and those weeks are in the middle of february, when i will most likely be holed up in my quiet, peaceful, secluded apartment.

1) on arch enemies.

in the course of your life you will undoubtedly find MANY people repellent, idiotic, and despicable. it’s only natural. unfortunately they will not ALL be total strangers who you make snap judgments on because of, say, the pace at which they walk, or the way they pronounce the word coupon, and then never see again. many of them will be people you are forced to interact with on a daily basis. these are the ones i wish to warn you about. your natural inclination will be to make grand pronouncements about your undying hatred for them, vowing perhaps to humiliate and destroy them. let me be the first to hazard you against the naming of arch enemies young copernicus.  it is an extremely unsatisfying path. it is folly, that simple. now don’t misunderstand, there is nothing wrong with despising the numbskulls your forced to interact with. whether it is at school, or church, or work all of us have people around us who we’d like to spit on, but can’t, either because we are parched or they are on fire. i hazard you against it rather because it is inevitable that at some point you will find yourself, in an elevator, or narrow hallway, exchanging pleasantries with the very person whose existence you have railed against. it happens to the best of us. it feels awful and in my opinion is corrosive to the soul. in some rare cases you might even get past the empty pleasantries and have, against all odds, a real conversation with your arch enemy. this eventuality is in essence why i am warning you, because 8 times out of 10 you find he’s “not such a bad guy”, or that he’s actually a decent human being. a simple fact of life is that reconciling is a peculiarly potent pleasure for humans, and as such, naming an arch enemy is basically tempting fate to draw an annoying person straight toward you. so to put it simply young copernicus, despise as little and as quietly as you can manage.

2) on the insatiable urge to write poetry

four words: don’t bother writing it. two more words: yours stinks. sorry to be the one to break it to you champ. but don’t be too glum, everyone’s pretty much stinks nowadays. try short stories, or better yet, grant proposals.

3) on toilet side prayer.

when you get older you will do stupid things. it’s a fact of life. you might naively swallow 5 juice glasses full of johnny walker red. or you might let some kind of testosterone laden peer pressure drive you to keep filling plastic cups with cheap beer even though the very act of gripping a cup has long since become an impossible challenge to your motor skills. it has happened to me, and yes, it has even happened to your father (somewhere there is a video tape with some none too pretty proof of it). let me then make this ABSOLUTELY clear. praying to god when you are earth shakingly inebriated does not help you. it simply doesn’t. no matter what good deeds you attempt to barter with, no matter what improbable moral transformations you promise to make, it WILL NOT change anything. you have made your terrible mistake, and so you must live with it. so save your slurred and shaky promises to never drink again, and put all of your remaining energy into fending off your friends who will be coming at you with felt tipped markers and buzzing hair trimmers. you’ll thank me later.

4) on threatening letters from creditors

they can use all the bold type they want, threaten all kinds of outlandish punishments, but remember, creditors do not have the legal authority to administer lethal injection, and unless you received your loan as cash in a brown envelope in a back alley, they can’t do you physical harm. so pay when you are damn well ready. sure you may never be able to buy your own house or a car, but that’s o.k. your father is a big shot lawyer, he can hook you up.

5) on the rumors that your grandad is a mobster.

after many years of straddling the fence on this one, i am inclined, finally, to believe your parents. your father’s father is not a mafia don. he is a decent, hardworking, upstanding family man. ok?

6) on your middle name being found out

whilst you are being mercilessly administered indian burns and noogies by big kids with mustard stains on their shirts, just try and remember, you are named after a genius. that’s more than any tom, dick, or jaime can say! you might wonder “why would my infinitely cruel school chums ever find out my middle name?” well young copernicus, because at some point i will be in the same general vicinity as you and your cohorts, and though the name GianCarlo may make you sound moody and mysterious to all the little middle-school bitties, i, for one, will never call you by any other name than your astonishingly cool middle name. so get ready pal.

ok, youngest of all nonists, i’ll leave it there for now. i have more to share of course, but don’t want to hog the mic.

now readers, fellow nonists, honorary aunts and uncles, it’s your turn to offer some wisdom…

c’mon… offer wisdom i said!!

don’t make me give you all indian burns…

i searched for more scholarly worked on the subject and came up empty. most google results for boredom are blogs advertising boredom as impetus (ultra-snore-zzzzzzz) and sites full of crappy time killing games. boredom breeding boredom.

i tend to be of the opinion boredom is a luxury, and in the modern world it has risen to scourge levels because that is what the modern world is all about, luxury, free time, wealth, passive entertainment, etc. our world is one of raised living standards and extend life spans. nice. but it is also one which as a by product has divorced us from the reality of animal survival and social interaction. it has abstracted the basic aims and processes of life to the point that we are only passively involved in our own survival… we have the time, and more reason than ever to ask “why am i here?!” anyhow, i can’t provide a deep examination of it’s causes, but boredom, like every state of mind, is personal and as such is best examined, i’d say, through the thoughts of those that experience it, thus:   

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face. - Jean Baudrillard

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty, his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure. - Aldous Huxley

Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom’s the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you’ve got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that’s terribly exciting or he’ll come along and nibble your brain. - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Boredom: the desire for desires. - Leo Tolstoy

The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life. - Henry Miller

The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. - Eugene Delacroix

Boredom is ... a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. - Bertrand Russell

Someone’s boring me. I think it’s me. - Dylan Thomas

Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run? - Samuel Beckett (or…)

The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils. - Samuel Beckett

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man. - William Shakespeare

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.- Norman Mailer

Sundays kill more men than bombs. - Charles Bukowski

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. - H. L. Mencken

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always. - Guy Debord

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. - Soren Kierkegaard

Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain. - Friedrich Nietzsche (or…)

In compensation for considerable disgust, despondency, and boredom, such as living in solitude without friends, books, duties, or passions necessarily entails, we are given those quarter-hours of deepest communion with ourselves and nature. Those who completely barricade themselves from boredom, barricade themselves from themselves as well: they will never get to drink the most refreshingly potent draught from the their own innermost fountain. - - Friedrich Nietzsche

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do. - Heraclitus

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It’s a symptom of security.- Eugene Ionesco

This Ennui, for which we Saxons had no name, this word of France has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art. - John A. Locke

I hate small towns because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do. - Lenny Bruce

Love fed fat soon turns to boredom. - Ovid

If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. - Henry David Thoreau

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. - Blaise Pascal

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right. - Gustave Flaubert

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. - Susan Sontag

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom…Make no mistake; all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S. - William S. Burroughs

painting bores me like everything else. Unfortunately, painting is one of the activities—it is bound up in the series of activities—that seems to change almost nothing in life, the same habits are always recurring. - Rene Magritte

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying? - John Berger

The cure for boredom is curiosity.There is no cure for curiosity. - Dorothy Parker

When I get real bored, I like to drive down town and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I’m leaving. - Steven Wright

so, uh… there you have it.