a cloud and a vent

i spent 10 hours in a hospital waiting room on wednesday while my father underwent heart surgery. it was an experimental procedure of sorts because it hadn’t been done on the east coast before. the doctor who pioneered the procedure flew in to over-see and a whole group of doctors watched. they video taped it to use as a teaching aid. supposedly in time they’ll be able to perform it in a couple of hours. this time though my father was under anesthesia for over 8 hours. combine that with the pain drugs and he’s having a hard time recovering. anyhow point is i haven’t really been able to focus. been under a bit of a cloud ever since.

preposterous bullshite or potential breakthrough?

what’s missing from this picture? yes, that’s right, the huge ground-cloud from some good ol’ fashioned newtonian friendly thrust. roger shawyer, managing director of the u.k.‘s satellite propulsion research (spr ltd.), has been trying for a few years now to side step the need for such massive raw thrust with tests on a prototype of what could possibly be the worlds first true reactionless drive, called the emdrive. the prototype has been greeted with much

skepticism, reactionless drives essentially being akin to that historical mainstay of quackery- perpetual motion machines. shawyer is not your average backyard junk-heap inventor and though the emdrive completely violates newton’s third law the math of the emdrive’s microwave propulsion is evidently o.k. and the prototype is actually producing thrust. pretty interesting. for more detail on the science check out the stories at eureka and the engineer. what do you think? path to anti-grav volkswagens or more poundage on the dookie pile?

posted by jmorrison on 09/29 | tech & science - space | | permalink
pictures of spring

shunga (??), translated literally as picture of spring, are the category of Japanese ukiyo-e prints dealing with the explicitly erotic. shunga were produced between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century by the “floating world” painters (essentially all the painters of the period, including the masters, since shunga sold so well). Japanese shunga prints were bought for several reasons. One was certainly for the fun of viewing sexually stimulating erotic images. But they served also for the sexual education of young men and women. interesting. here are some links for your viewing pleasure: greg kucera gallery (via), princesstiara’s page, sumisho gallery, ukiyoe gallery, akantiek, degener, and things japanese. obviously nsfw.

posted by jmorrison on 09/27 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
slaves to scale

scale. isn’t it a bitch? always a human at human scale with human scale perceptions. sheesh. at some point in our distant history i suppose our scale must have proven beneficial. you know, big enough to slay a dragon, small enough to live in the belly of a whale if the need arose. or to put it another way- tall enough to see over the high grasses and spot predators, short enough to dwell comfortably in a cave. it seems to me though at some point the story of human history turned into a struggle against our human scale. too big to be able to sustain a population of 8 trillion or see the quark-gluon interaction inside a proton, but too small to poke out a hurricane’s eye or see wether we’ve got any neighbors in the universe so we can wave to them from our front porches. scale’s a bitch i tell you.

posted by jmorrison on 09/26 | lost & found - ideas | | permalink
the blazing post or pretend this isn’t a linkdump

i have taken a casual meandering trip through the internets this morning and come upon many points of interest in my travels. what follows will encompass, in dizzying lack of appropriate depth or detail, all but two of the following subjects (with many more added besides): medieval women, margaret cavendish, tom stoppard, the 4th demension, egyptian rope stretchers, oscar the grouch, the squaring of the circle, pythagorean number symbolism, galileo’s moon drawings, the metaphysical and cavalier poets, samuel smith’s nut brown ale, kepler’s fourth law, map of mars by percival lowell, brunelleschi’s peepshow, the great vowel shift, courtly love, poisons and antidotes in the middle ages, the platonic solids, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Phaal by Edgar Allan Poe. the list could continue but why bother? let’s get on with it…

posted by jmorrison on 09/25 | lost & found - ideas | | permalink
Why China Is Not a Communist Country

This post is the text of an e-mail I sent this evening to bartcop, one of the best liberal websites, a no-bull broadside of satire and vitriol by a self-proclaimed ‘okie with an iq of 65’ who says he could destroy the republicans if he were running the democrats’ campaigns (and i agree). the topic was the folly of george w. bush running up a deficit by borrowing from communist china; but see, although china is a dictatorship, the matter of it still being a communist state is another matter. here’s what i said to bart:

posted by tbuckner on 09/24 | news & views - op ed | | permalink
graphis annual ‘59 part 3

finally got around to scanning some more images so here we present part 3 (see parts1 & 2) of our graphis from years past showcase. this batch is taken mostly from the book jackets and magazine covers sections of the 1958 annual with a few album covers, posters, and even t.v. graphics of the day thrown in. i didn’t include any of the animation plates (sorry ward) because the printing on those pages were off register. this will be the last group from the ‘59 annual. next time we’ll shift to the ‘57. and so without further ado…

posted by jmorrison on 09/23 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
a belated delurker day post + questions for regulars

the 21st was suggested as “delurker day” by some fellow bloggers and though i missed it i, like every other blogger, am interested to know who all the quiet readers are and what their take on the nonist is. essentially “delurker day” is meant to be a day when the quiet ones lift the veil and say… well anything, introduce themselves, comment on the site, or just let their presence be known. as matt from tattered coat puts it: To a blogger, a comment is like a tip — it shows that what has been written is provocative or intriguing enough to elicit a response. For most of us, that interaction with our readers is what makes blogging worthwhile… So, if you are a lurker, please delurk for a moment. so yes, by all means quiet ones, say hello. don’t be shy. meanwhile…

kaspar vs. the professor of logic

just watched herzog’s every man for himself and god against all or as it’s known here the enigma of kaspar hauser. fine little flick about a fascinating historical footnote the real life kaspar hauser. if you’re not familiar with his story i recommend you check out wild child of europe or the fortean times article on hauser called a new theory. it’s an interesting story though i don’t plan to recount it here. just wanted to share a bit from the film i found amusing.

posted by jmorrison on 09/23 | sights & sounds - film | | permalink
margaret cho is a very bad witch

Margaret cho rules, okay? At least, I think she does and whosoever doesn’t is wrong. So let it be written, so let it be done. However…

This’ll be a short post, as I’m convalescscing today. Props to Margaret Cho, see. She’s funny as hell and hates president bush and all the other people one should hate. For evidence I submit her blog: exhibit a.
.

posted by tbuckner on 09/22 | lost & found - wtf | | permalink
living every day as if it were your last

Popular sentiment holds that for the maximum whoosh!!! zip!!! bang!!! of unbridled happiness you ought to live every day like it’s your last. “you might get hit by a bus tomorrow, so live every day like it’s your last!” bellow the smarties. yeah, swell. There is only one problem with that advice, if the day you are living as if it were your last turns out to not in fact be your last… Well then that unbridled happiness you were shooting for will likely get somewhat dampened by a little thing called repercussions.

stop and start

i’ve meant to post this link for a while but kept forgetting: clips from eastern europe’s masters of stop motion animation. some very nice stuff. old, odd, purty, and interstin’. quote: While these shows are enjoyed by children, the themes are often quite adult… similar to the plays of Shakespeare which are rife with violence and sexual depravity but presented in an intelligent artistic fashion. One of the things that make these traditional puppet shows so fascinating is the old-world craftsmanship… techniques handed down generation after generation using handmade tools. etc, etc. for some more goodies check out stopmotionshorts (click the now showing and archive links) as well as the internet archive.

posted by jmorrison on 09/20 | sights & sounds - film | | permalink
masks

“If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play ? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber ?... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage ? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.” -Erasmus

posted by jmorrison on 09/18 | lost & found | | permalink
gorilla balls or hawk eyes?

just got around to reading the short walton ford piece in men’s vogue. i was sure i’d done a full feature post on ford before, since i love his work, but a quick search proved me wrong. i don’t intend to write a lengthy post now though just wanted to pass on a quote from the magazine i found kind of funny. first off if your not familiar with his work (links: art21, paul kasmin, paul kasmin2, artnet, artnet2, artseen) the artist he’s most often compared to is james audubon for obvious stylistic and thematic similarities. the article mentions this, it’s obligatory, and adds: ford’s accomplishment has been hard to measure. there is just nothing to compare it to: watercolorists have never worked on the scale that he does. they compare his mastery of this most difficult medium to sargent, winslow homer, and georgia o’keefe. fine, but let’s get back to audubon…

posted by jmorrison on 09/17 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
set in infinitely pliable stone

here is something which bothers me. a simple thing really, though it is perhaps the initial miscalculation which compounds itself, moving outward over time, into the infinite array of hypocrisies, contradictions, paradoxes, and cases of near perfect paramnesia we feel assaulted with at this late date in human history. this bothersome crux of things might be summed up with three words organized into two sentence fragments-
“jesus says…” and “god says…”

posted by jmorrison on 09/16 | lost & found - belief | | permalink
the tale of bobo-roshi

so, i felt guilty after rebuffing jaime on the bobo-roshi matter.  the main computer is up again, more or less, and though i’ve been working whaaay too much overtime lately, i owes the nonists a post. so, bearing in mind that it’s been years and years, i will recount, to the best of my recall, the tale of bobo-roshi. first off: if you google the name, most of the hits seem to revolve around a satanist who uses the moniker, and may be the same guy who enjoys encouraging suicide on the internet. this is not the original bobo-roshi…

posted by tbuckner on 09/16 | lost & found - ideas | | permalink
for the old new jacks

came across this the other day and thought any of the older hip hop fans out there would get a kick out of it- the new jack hip hop awards. evidently it was a reaction against the grammys, a sort of online people’s choice for hip hop. it covers 91-98. i read through 93 and was brought back in time. it’s kind of sad to be reminded of the quality the genre once offered but it’s pretty funny too (phat and whack used without even the suggestion of a smirk). anhyow in that this does not exactly make for a juicy post i thought i’d add dreamchimney’s small yo mtv raps video archive as well as james shabazz’s excellent back in the days and a time before crack both of which are well worth the dough. sigh.

posted by jmorrison on 09/15 | sights & sounds - music | | permalink
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