note to self

i had the misfortune of needing to attend a funeral this weekend. a beloved uncle whom i used to play batman with when i was a kid, tying towels on like capes, passed away after being riddled with cancer. i don’t have a great memory but i remember these batman episodes because there are pictures. we looked happy the two of us. later, when i was old enough to be a possession coveting little swine, i would slip small stacks of comics, chris claremont’s x-men, Sienkiewicz covered new mutants, miller’s daredevil, and of course g.i. joe, into some cheap magazine and essentially steal from him at his corner store. i remember this because i was later told he knew about it all along. my mother and brother and i stayed at pete’s for a stretch after the couple who lived above us in our apartment building set the place on fire while freebasing in their bed. they tried to put the fire out with glasses of water rather than call the fire department. my uncle and aunt kindly put us up, gave me a soft bed and secure environment to have my resulting nightmares in. that’s another story i guess.

every god-damned night!? on the telephone?

was sorting through some papers and came across this short, quasi-fictional, piece about telemarketers and their evil genius, entitled you ridiculous people, by the one and only matthew monteleone. thought i’d share it. enjoy.

posted by jmorrison on 10/30 | piss & vinegar - fiction | | permalink
workers of the world, relax.

i have a secret. i don’t share it often. not out of shame exactly but more a simple lack of satisfactory coherence. it is a messy, disorganized, half understood secret, composed mostly of vague romantic notions and retroactive suppositions. essentially i’m jealous of the people who lived in the far past. yes that’s right, i am jealous of the people who i’ve been taught i ought to pity. those without the miracles of modern medicine, those without the comforts and high standard of living the industrial revolution afforded. those people with shorter life expectancies. those people who’s lives were dangerous and difficult. it sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? well maybe it is. as i’ve said, i tend not to express these vague feelings. but the fact remains, they surface.

thinking machine

came across this fun art/tech thingamabob today. play chess against this java applet and “see it’s thoughts” as it reasons out each move. from the site: “the artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer’s thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.” pretty cool.

rewrite the science books, revisit the fairy tales

well, the discovery of a incredibly odd tableaux in some indonesian limestone caves have lead to what i, for one, would consider a bombshell almost as full of bombshelly goodness as the recent lip synching flap on saturday night live (talentless, manufactured, pop stars lip synching?! that’s crazy talk!) what researchers found amounts to nothing less than a separate lineage of intelligent hominid who lived not only somewhere in the far reaches of prehistory, but as recently as 12,000 years ago. which is to say, along side of us. since the initial find, which those on site unfortunately dubbed “the hobbit”, the researchers have found the remains of six other individuals from the same species.

posted by jmorrison on 10/27 | tech & science - bio | | permalink
earthbound

today the cassini spacecraft made it’s first fly by of saturn’s largest moon, titan. “long hidden behind a thick veil of haze, titan, the only known moon with an atmosphere, is ready for its close-up. this visit may settle intense speculation about whether this moon of saturn harbors oceans of liquid methane and ethane beneath its coat of clouds.” in january cassini will drop Huygens onto titan’s surface for an even closer view, and evidently a listen. the spacecraft is fitted with a special microphone for just this purpose. “the sound of alien thunder, the patter of methane rain and the crunch (or splash) of a landing, all might be heard as Huygens descends to the surface of Titan.” you know…

posted by jmorrison on 10/27 | piss & vinegar | | permalink
mike combs. one part familiar, one part unknowable.

from a long line of long island baymen and decoy carvers, the sculptor mike combs has been bringing his distinctive view of man and nature to us for a little over a decade now. known for his intricate hand carved pieces, statements on hunting, fetishism, evolution, and man’s effect on the environment, mike has exhibited with some of the biggest names in contemporary art, and yet i’m willing to bet some of you are still not familiar with his work. with that in mind i decided to sit down and talk with mike for a while about his family, his work, and what lies ahead. the results of that conversation are as follows-

posted by jmorrison on 10/24 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
neo-cons, get your rocks off

we all knew neo-cons had a tainted view of reality, but the fantasy life of bushites is filthy indeed. check out the quicktime movie. “you forgot poland!” hahahahaha. other video formats as well as images, etc, can be found at the home page. li(v)e girls.com.

posted by jmorrison on 10/23 | lost & found | | permalink
simulated brain flies simulated plane

“a university of florida scientist has grown a living brain that can fly a simulated plane” why, you may very well ask? why do swaths of puny humans continually try to climb mount everest? because life is long and boring and there’s not all that much to do really once you’ve rented the whole run of futurama on dvd. in any case this guy’s a scientist and doing frankenshit like this, probing and unlocking the mysteries of the brain, well, it’s his job.

posted by jmorrison on 10/23 | tech & science - bio | | permalink
strandbeesten

dutch artist theo jansen makes some really fascinating work. begining with a functional ufo that he flew over the dutch town of delft in the 80’s he’s moved on to what he calls strandbeesten, translated as beach animals. they are pretty amazing. modled in the computer and adhering to an evolutionary design principle (namely whatever works is reproduced in the next generation) these large scale sculptures utilize wind power to “roam” the beaches. you have to watch the video’s to get a sense of them. not much out there to be read about him (in english at least), but i did find this one bit of artspeak on the subject. thanks to rich for the link.

posted by jmorrison on 10/22 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
neal stephenson speaks (and speaks, and speaks)

i know for certain there are a few neal stephenson fans counted among the readership here, so if you happened to miss it here is the interview he did over at slashdot. of particular interest to some of you may be the question posed about the standard high/low culture dichotomy science fiction writers (among many

others) have to continually contend with. it’s obvious this is a question he’s given thought to before because his answer is only a few hundred pages shorter than his last baroque cycle book. yikes! didn’t help that the questioner said jackie collins gets more respect as a writer. other interesting tid bits there as well. check it out.

posted by jmorrison on 10/22 | news & views - people | | permalink
8 billion miles and a long way to go

launched in 1972 and 1973 respectively the pioneer 10 and 11 missions were two of the most fruitful missions ever carried out by the united states space program. they hold many firsts among their impressive list of accomplishments. first spacecraft to jupiter. first spacecraft to saturn. between them they carried out a long list of never before possible experiments, collecting literally piles of new data on the two planets, as well as some of jupiter’s moons. they went on to capture two more important distinctions. first man made objects to leave our solar system, and for a long while, they were the earth made objects furthest away from earth. with that eventual distinction in mind the designers attached a sort of post card to the pioneer spacecraft. namely the now famous “pioneer plaque” (which you can see in full by clicking the thumbnail). now over 30 years after their launch, having finally lost both signals, both spacecraft continue to contribute to humanities understanding. in particular the understanding that we don’t know shit.

posted by jmorrison on 10/22 | tech & science - space | | permalink
world beard and moustache championships

“grown men were reduced to hairy jelly, some rising long before dawn in their desperation to wax, tweak and blow-dry massive whiskers into the stuff of legend. ‘I’m very nervous - i didn’t sleep last night,” said one contestant, bristling with nerves.” listen up nonists! the next championship is less than a year off so get growing! (wink wink) check out the beard and moustache categories to see where your fuz might best fit. then check out the gallery of contestants and champions to see what your up against. stiff competition but it reamins a dream of mine to one day see a nonist capture a championship in the fu-manchu category.

posted by jmorrison on 10/20 | lost & found - wtf | | permalink
chuck palahniuk’s guts

a while back i read a story at the telegraph about how people, lots of people, were passing out at chuck palahniuk readings. you know, the guy who wrote fight club. sounded silly to me. i’ve been to readings; many, many readings. that’s not intended as some kind of misguided badge of intellectual accomplishment. quite the opposite. i worked at a bookstore and so had the misfortune of attending a whole slew of extremely awkward literary assemblies. they are like a small scale shared hallucination where in the midst of every kind of banal distraction insisting the opposite (screaming children, cheap folding chairs, plastic cups, scornful employees, beeping security doors, stuttering p.a. systems, tilted cardboard podiums, and quite often utterly uncharismatic readers, alternately mumbling, rushing, or laughably self important) all in attendance sit in hushed revery stubbornly attempting to summon from the ether a meaningful / hilarious / intriguing, and life enriching experience. perhaps i had the misfortune of a long string of shitty readings, but from my experience i had to suspect any and all fainting spells were due to cheap wine, recirculated air, and boredom. yesterday i came across the chuck palahniuk short story which illicited these visceral reactions. it’s called guts and it’s both silly and filthy. it’s a story of experimental childhood masterbations gone awry with a topping of, well… guts. after reading it i can imagine listeners walking out, getting turned off or bored and wandering away, but fainting? did he use visual aids?

posted by jmorrison on 10/20 | sights & sounds - books | | permalink
reading the november entrails

i came across this article at buzzflash which i found entertaining. ostensibly about the “born-again” rapture seeking aspect of george w’s presidency (from the article, “superstitious hogwash was entertaining at first, but by the time we figured out that members of congress and the bush white house had actually powwowed with end times zealots, even comedians found it decidedly unfunny. thomas jefferson said the book of revelations was the ravings of a lunatic. george bush organizes his foreign policy around it”), it offers alternate means by which to read the entrails for prophetic insights.

posted by jmorrison on 10/16 | lost & found - belief | | permalink
i want my sci-tv

well, not really “want” with an exclamation point or anything. after all the creators of the science network do hold up c-span as their inspirational beacon. a station that though important and very useful in theory, i’ve never watched more than ten minutes of at a stretch. the down and dirty of government ought to visible but filibustering can make for some pretty uninspired television, on par, lets say, with a yule-log. in any case wired has a story about this fledgling network’s first bit of programming, a simposium on stem cell research which “hopes to elucidate the complicated matter of embryonic stem cells for regular folks.” unfortunately as of now TSN is not really a television station as such, just a group of scientists with good intentions. all of the programs listed in their programs section are only “proposed” at this point. the stem cell symposium was aired though if you don’t get the university of california television network, you won’t be seeing it on your television screen. if you have any interest in it you can see it in it’s entirety via web cast. i for one have faith that the dullest and most obtuse scientific programming would still have more to teach us, than the most exciting political rhetoric. i wish them luck.

pirates and emporers

possibly the best school house rock homage ever created.  from the creator, ” while critics decry the united states’ current brand of military and economic imperialism as dangerously unprecedented, great powers have been throwing their weight around like schoolyard bullies since st. augustine’s time. this playful but pointed cartoon shows that while uncle sam has been an especially bad apple of late, he’s following a pattern of bad behavior which goes back decades”. no excuse of course, but very well done. i esspecially appreciate the bit about “freedom fighters.” check it out.

posted by jmorrison on 10/15 | sights & sounds | | permalink
page 1 of 2 pages  1 2 >