watching this comparatively feeble skating performance i imagined that the audience, in order to voice it’s displeasure in a civilized manner, had begun throwing small pillows and plush toys onto the ice which were shaped exactly like human anuses.

as soon as i mentioned this out loud to my girlfriend i realized it could not be true. simultaneously, however, i realized that i’d be infinitely more satisfied, entertained, and amused if it were. and why couldn’t it be? it fits so well.






the anus carries with it a sizable payload of negative associations, which could encapsulate nicely general sentiments of disapproval, and hey, everyone loves to voice their sentiments with squishy little novelty pillows and cute plush toys! imagine it. with one soft, pink anus, tossed at just the right moment, you could say it all:

“you are an asshole”
“man you’re are full of shit”
“your existence makes many people squeamish”
“what you have just said / done is crap”
“what you have just said / done stinks”
“you stink”
etc.

at first i imagined the “throwing of the anus pillow” as an expression of displeasure at sporting events. americans- why dump perfectly good beer (which you’d certainly prefer to dump into your belly) onto the right fielder’s head when you could pelt him with small, soft, human anuses? europeans- why riot and kill 30 people at the “football” match, with all the stamping and crushing, when you can simply smother one another to death humanely with comfy asshole shaped pillows?

then i realized, however, that limiting the “anus bombardment” to sports was too short sighted.






imagine the sound of a volley of anus beanbags thumping against the screen during the closing credits of hollywood’s next television remake / sequel / big budget piece of trash. what a sweet sound it would be.

imagine news footage of the japanese parliament hurling fluffy anus pillows at one another on the floor of the lower house, screaming “???!”

imagine the sight of a stadium concert stage, piled 2 feet deep in pink, frilly anus cushions, when the egomaniacal superstar rockers keep their audience waiting for 50 minutes and then only play a 40 minute set!

imagine a whitehouse press-secretary cowering behind his podium as a fed-up press tossed wave after wave of red, swollen-looking, velvet anuses at his head.

imagine the “nooses through time” float at the next white pride demonstration careening off the parade route because so many plush anuses were lodged in it’s wheel wells.

imagine a single, well aimed anus entering the open mouth of an american idol contestant in mid-earsplitting-warble.

imagine gutters and doorways and sidewalks cluttered with thousands of anuses, of every imaginable shape and size and color, the day after a huge anti-war, anti-wto, anti-torture, anti-spying, political march.

imagine the lobby of the riaa offices completely crammed with stuffed anuses after a flashmob of anus hurlers showed up and let fly.

imagine the satisfaction of waking up one morning and seeing every newspaper cover at the newsstand freezing the same glorious moment in time: an oversized brown anus smacking against the side of president bush’s head, a deep dark wrinkle of which is poking him in his squinty eye.

you see what an exquisite, absurdist world our displeasure could create?






i imagined that helium filled anus balloons could be made for events in the air which one might like to voice displeasure at. likewise weighted, waterproof anuses would be available for events in the sea. perhaps special nerf guns could be fashioned which would shoot nerf-anuses long distances, say into a neighbors yard. drivers in l.a. might shoot one another with them on the freeway. small coaster sized anuses would be printed for more intimate protestations, say on the subway, in the elevator, or at the car dealership. anus stamped stationary would be available for all angry letters to magazines, state representatives, and long distance anus-faxes. asterix keys the world over would get worn down to nothing.

of course, as i thought about it the realization that “plush anuses” don’t grow on trees assailed me, and that the whole enterprise would get quite expensive. i for one would never be able to keep enough of them for all my protestation needs. then the likelihood of epidemic levels of throwing injuries and tennis elbow-type stress disorders sunk-in. might be dangerous. the ambulance-chaser ads on local cable flashed through my mind… “have you been pelted with stuffed anuses? we can help.” i imagined all the washed-up celebrities faking anus attacks to get back into the tabloids, all the gut wrenchingly terrible leno jokes… too much to bear. then i imagined all the “rebellious” kids embracing the anus barrage, all but begging people to thwack them… and i lost hope.

this world was not meant for such as thee soft anus pillow of displeasure! it was not meant to be. it’d never work. i’m sorry for having imagined you. fly away now and lodge yourself in some other poor bastards brain. i can’t bear to think of you… sniff… er… i mean… sigh.

here’s some more from the book’s intro:

handwriting could and should be the most direct personal expression of human visual creativity. the hand that wields the pencil, pen, or brush is stirred so vigorously by the moods, temperament, and even the character of the writer that we are able to distinguish and interpret the features of a man’s writing just as we do his face. creative people feel the urge to go beyond the purely necessary, beyond mere, legibility, and to arrange the letters, words, lines,  and sections into a surface pattern, to enrich them with linear flourishes, the overflow of their high spirits. writing becomes art.

indeed. below are a few of the hundreds of fine examples of the handwriter’s art as collected in the book. (click each for full sized version)




weyess, zurich 1662




grahl, dresden 1670




carpenter, harlem 1620




roelands, vlissigen 1616




hercolani, bologna 1570




pisani, genova 1640




van den velde, haerlem 1621




allais, paris 1648




senault, paris 1667




barbedor, paris 1659




cocker, london 1660




richard clark, portsmouth 1758

they are pretty alright. but we can’t really morn handwriting’s passing can we? on the one hand it’s a shame. the care and artistry of proper handwriting were lovely things. on the other hand i’m grateful to not be compelled to put that same care and artistry into every single bit of writing i do. what a hassle that’d be. imagine a post it reading “gone to the store” intricately inked with a thousand curling flourishes. no thanks. so as with other victims of progress handwriting will now be relegated to the world of the artists alone, which is fine i think, they’ll take good care of it.

if you believe all the statistics we have only the weakest grasp on our language as it, and it’s weakening still. so should a mangled language be interpreted into anything other than pixels and throw-away copy-paper pigment? why should words like “ain’t” and “nucular” get any artistic treatment? emoticons will do just fine for we philistines i think.

first a definition of the tagline (sometimes called straplines):

a tagline is a line that serves to clarify a point or create a dramatic effect; a reiterated phrase or message identified with an individual, group, or commercial product and that resonates strongly with an audience: An ending line, as in a play or joke, which makes a point; a slogan.

it seems to me that as advertising stands today the tagline has lost its way in an orgy of overworked ad-speak and transformed into something commercially impotent, lacking any of the intended resonance whatsoever. taglines change endlessly, with each mutation verging closer and closer to complete meaninglessness, and it would seem consumer opinion in general bears out my feeling here-

a marketing and branding expert with the Byline Group in San Mateo, ca, did a survey on taglines in 2005 which ranked the top 100. the breakdown showed that about 50% of the taglines chosen by consumers for the Top 100 were created in the 1960s and 1970s with each successive decade having a smaller percentage. only 1% came from after the year 2000.

so today’s taglines stink and are in no way shape or form worth the millions that get spent on their formulation. but don’t take this expert and his survey’s word for it, he is after all a minion of ad-hell or a “knight in satan’s service” if you will. instead why not take

word for it.

no? too smart for that?

o.k. how about this, i’ll list a bunch of current taglines which i’ve collected, i’ll judge each, but you can just judge for yourself. sound agreeable? keep in mind these aren’t necessarily the worst of the worst, just the ones i managed to jot down during a few days of t.v. watching-

sprint: yes you can
judgement: can what? bend spoons with my mind? meaningless

am-ex: my life. my card.
judgement: my nausea.

alka seitzer: i can’t believe i ate the whole thing.
judgement: i can’t believe this tagline is so retardedly ill-conceived.

expedia: enjoy your trip
judgement: or how about- “a website.” seriously, why bother?

saab: born from jets
judgement: this is your selling point? comically stupid.

ambien: tomorrow will thank you
judgement: fuck you ambien you arrogant anthropomorphizing assholes.

doctor pepper: one taste and you get it
judgement: get what? i don’t get get it.

hyundai: drive your way
judgement: you mean speeding, drunk, on the wrong side of the road? meaningless.

mcdonalds: i’m loving it
judgement: i’m not loving it, i’m ignoring it.

weight watchers: watch yourself change
judgement: watch your ad campaign tank.

ford: a life in drive
judgement: a car in drive. a life completely unaffected by which shitty tin can i drive. twats.

campbells: possibilities
judgement: and what are those exactly? seriously. a cancer cure? a menage-a-tios? it’s just soup.

verizon: we never stop working for you
judgement: bullshit, and everyone knows it. so shove this tagline up your collective asses.

advil: the every pain reliever
judgement: wrong. dumb. totally forgettable.

boniva: there’s only one
judgement: forget your lame tagline, you deserve special scorn for naming your fucking product “boniva.”

toyota: moving forward
judgement: a less vomitous version of the ford line. still meaningless.

bayer: like no other pain reliever in the world
judgement: uh, ok, that’s what patents are all about right? so i guess it’s true.

citi bank: live richly
judgement: something vaguely condescending about a bank saying “live richly” isn’t there?

cadillac: the comeback of cool
judgement: as everyone above the age of 8 knows any claim on “cool” is an instant negation of cool. sorry.

honda: the power of dreams
judgement: oh just go fuck yourself honda. “the power of dreams?” yeah, that’s what your product is all about!

sony: like no other
judgement: means nothing. nothing at all.

the weather channel: bringing weather to life
judgement: nope. actually, taking weather and filtering it through a television which sits in your cozy living room is the opposite. if people want their weather “brought to life” they’ll just go outside. try again.

mercury: new doors open
judgement: christ! i’m sick of this lame double-meaning car thing. enough already. what’s left? a tagline playing on the drive-shaft? “grab your shaft!” these car lines are crappy. enough.

intel: leap ahead
judgement: lame (as is that new logo). engineered obsolescence does not a “leap ahead” make.

walmart: save more. smile more.
judgement: every ad which is not for toothpaste that mentions our smiles is loathsome. this company should be destroyed with extreme prejudice on the smarminess of their tagline alone, never mind their dodgy business practices.

microsoft: your potential. our passion.
judgement: much like the mention of smiles the mention of both “our potential” and “your passion” makes me want to puke. here is my tagline rebuttal: your lumbering, sub-par, monopoly. our tough luck.

smirnoff: clearly
judgement: clearly too self consciously “hip” to be anything other than pathetic. clearly.

at&t: your world, delivered
judgement: i’ll have my world with pepperoni please. thanks.

so there you have it. judge for yourself. do any of these even remotely satisfy the conditions set forth in the term’s definition? are any of these linguistic turds worth the money pumped into them?

i can imagine each and every meeting in which these lumps of crap were unveiled. the knowing glances, the conviction, the excitement! poor, pathetic, decision makers and your utter lack of ability. ah well.

my verdict is this- if you have a company, and the creation of your tagline adds up to more than 2 billable hours, then just forget it, you’ve payed too much. your ad agency’s copy-writers are most likely over-payed hacks who are too busy sniffing coke off satan’s hairy taint to come up with anything even remotely interesting or effective. just let it go. let the tagline die. please?

either that of try this out instead. sure would save you bundles of cash. cash which you could reinvest into helping your customers realize their potential, in broadening their happy smiles, and better caring for their all around well being, the things which you’re evidently most concerned with. profit-smofit right? you guys… i get warm fuzzies just thinking about your truly altruistic concern! c’mear and give me a hug.

anyway. feel free to disagree with me in comments. likewise feel free to agree, to add your own, and glory in that which is an irrational hatred for all things advertising!

quote from the 1977 english edition of the public and private life of animals:

in the public and private life of animals grandville finds another more traditional means of criticizing society and its effect on individuals. he makes use of the illustrated beast-fable, and applies his well-honed caricaturist’s gift to the combination of human and animal characteristics. the human and animal elements are so finely balanced that the animal disguise becomes a forceful expression of human foibles.

grandville’s original audience was prepared to accept what he did because the convention of the beast-fable was thoroughly familiar to them. it is one of the oldest narrative types, and goes back beyond aesop to be lost in the mists of prehistory. but a still more powerful inducement in getting the nineteenth-century french audience to accept the outrageously anti-naturalistic images grandville created was his own past history as a leading caricaturist. even in times when the demands of naturalism have been most insistent, caricature is allowed a special liberty. what was not permissible in “high art:” was perfectly acceptable if the material was presented as being in some way humorous or satirical. it is no accident that most of the leading fantastic illustrators of the mid-nineteenth century had a grounding in political caricature.

see below for some samples of grandville’s work from this beautiful book (click each for the full sized version.)

hope you enjoyed these, and with tales like the flight of a parisian bird in search of a better government, the sorrows of an old toad, the funeral oration of a silkworm, and the philosophic rat the readin in this book ain’t to shabby either. recommended!

so- technorati, the popular ranking / tracking / tagging service which many of us bloggers look to for some insight into our place in the blogoshpere, allows each blog 20 overarching tags with which to sum up general slant and content. each of those 20 tags can be used to search out similar content and serves to place each blog in thematic relation to all the millions of others. the following rankings are by tags which i’ve chosen to sum up the nonist and were taken from technorati yesterday-

first lets get a chunk of the data out of the way in one swoop. for each of the following headings the nonist is ranked as the #1 result:

fiction
humanism
ideas
observations
skeptic
belief

i must say that i find this fairly disconcerting. this means that overall the nonist is the top ranking blog for over a quarter of the 20 tags i’ve chosen to reflect it. if you look closely at the tags you’ll see that most are fairly broad, but i have to ask myself is the nonist really an appropriate choice to represent fiction, humanism, or skepticism in technorati’s cosmos? i try to write a bit of fiction each week, i believe whole heartedly in humanism, and am rather skeptical in general, but i have to believe there are sites with a more focussed viewpoint which people searching for said subjects deserve to see first.

the following results perhaps illustrate this more clearly:

philosophy:
1. tcs daily
2. the nonist

history:
1. Informed Comment
2. urban legends about.com
3. the nonist

books:
1. blogcritics.org
2. pop matters
3. neil gaiman
4. professor brainbridge
5. the nonist

well… certainly i’m interested in looking at most of my chosen content in a philosophical way, i post many items of historical interest i suppose, and i refer to, quote from, and scan books often, but in all these cases the inclusion of the nonist seems somewhat misleading no?

here’s another good example-

arts:
1. the new york review of books
2. the nonist
3. bldgblog

now take that in for a moment. the nonist ranks just below the n.y review of books, which makes sense, but above bldgblog which seems wrong. i can go for days without mentioning the arts at all where as bldgblog is well focussed. the pattern of illusion begins to be evident.

now look at these-

design:
1. kottke.org
12. the nonist
17. design observer

writing:
3. neil gaiman
6. the nonist
16. words for my enjoyment
25. double tongued word wrester
29. if:book

and

science:
1. pharyngula
2. tcs daily
3. the nonist
4. science Blog
5. the panda’s thumb

in the design category i think it’s important to note where design observer falls. to my mind design observer is the most sophisticated and enjoyable site out there focussed on design. it’s arguable whether kottke is actually strongly focussed on design and i can say for sure that the nonist, though design “interested,” is by no measure a blog “about” design. (i do that evil shit all day and would rather not dwell on it.)

in the writing category you’ll notice the crazy cross-section which all sit under it’s umbrella. gaiman who is a world renown author, double tongued word wrester which is a wonderful etymological site, if:book which is broadly focussed on the culture of books, and those other two. now the nonist is at 6 and words for my enjoyment is 16 even though pauly offers a new piece of creative writing every single day without fail (he’s a professional writer after all) and has a very lively readership which masses 25-35 comments regularly on every post. meanwhile the posts here which i would characterize as “writing proper” are consistently the least commented upon. this tells me our readers do not necessarily come here for writing.

in the science category i can’t help but just laugh. pharyngula, science blog, and panda’s thumb, must cringe whenever they see this site’s inclusion among them. they are admirable, serious, sites with a proper science pedigree, where as i manipulate photo’s of darwin, prattle on about space, and post the blurbs i find of interest in the sidebar. how can i be wedged there between them?!

i’ll let you all in on a little secret now which goes a long way toward explaining things-

the nonist is highly ranked on the strength of no more than 3 or 4 extremely popular posts. sure we have a home in many sidebars but not nearly as many as the numbers would seem to reveal. the “nonist public service pamphlet” on blog depression has been, without question, the single biggest key to the sites wider dissemination. but how many of those linking the pamphlet, or following links, have been return visitors? meanwhile our referrer logs continue, months and months on, to show a high concentration of links pointing toward “the erotic coloring book” and “making love in 1975.”  of all the nuggets unearthed and all the original content crafted the fact that these two silly posts continue to draw such a large share of attention, owing entirely to their quasi-sexual content, is, if i’m being honest, disheartening.

in essence this begs the question, how many of the 1,739 links pointing to the nonist represent an actual readership? also, does a blog with a handful of popular posts deserve to rank so high? and finally, is this method of putting blogs in perspective even remotely accurate in representing the actual blog landscape? to that last question i’d have to answer no. at least not from my perspective.

take a look at the ranking for the following tag-

eclectic:
1. boing boing
2. the nonist

in my mind “eclectic” might be the single most accurate tag i use in my technorati account to sum up the nonist, it is nothing if not eclectic, so a ranking of number two on that tag is actually fairly gratifying. searching “eclectic” and being given this result might lead one to draw corollaries however- “ah boing boing is huge, the “nonist” must be comparable somehow…”

but now take a look at those over all linking numbers-
1. boing boing. over all - 67,731 links from 19,764 sites
2. the nonist. over all - 1,739 links from 895 sites

not exactly comparable are they? in truth boing boing is the blogoshpere’s version of a superpower where as the nonist is akin to a small pacific island whose indigenous peoples still wear loincloths and have never seen a porsche, which is to say almost totally unknown. or let me put it into more topical terms- if boing boing were to start a preemptive war against another blog, at best the nonist might be listed among the “coalition of the willing,” not because we have an army, but because we donated a single bomb-sniffing mollusk to the effort.

now you might be thinking that i’m being unfairly (or even insincerely) self-deprecating with all this, but really i’m just trying to illustrate a point. if services like technorati (each blogger has his favored service) are not in fact representative of the landscape and the numbers themselves don’t really signify much concretely, then what is the purpose? or more specifically, why do bloggers watch over the rankings and numbers and referrer logs so closely?

when the nonist was at it’s ranking peak, somewhere around 400 overall on technorati, things were no different than they are today, when we have dropped down to around 800 (and still falling). the experience from my point of view was (with the exception of a few months worth of higher hosting bills) the same. this precipitous rise and subsequent fall did not effect the site in any palpable way. so why then do i continue to look at the numbers? why do i still check technorati each morning and my referrer logs a couple times each day? simple- because the illusion of accomplishment which the numbers provide is the only reflection of success or failure available to me.

i have no advertising on the site, so i can not gauge popularity or achievement by my ad-sense revenue. i do not offer a specific product or service, the sale and popularity of which i could look to as a reflection of my efforts. i have not as of yet tried to parlay the site’s (possible) popularity into any other opportunities. in short i do not have at my disposal any of the traditional measuring sticks with which to gauge accomplishment.

where as the creators of sites which, directly or indirectly, take in profits can look to them as a marker, i am obliged to look at traffic like a store owner who does not actually sell anything so instead reviews the security camera footage from above the front door a few times a day to be sure someone showed up. services like technorati offer bloggers like me (of which there are millions) a point of reference, illusory though it may ultimately be.

these are not complaints, merely observations. i could after all load up the site with ads. that’s my prerogative. but i’ve chosen not to. which brings me back to points i’ve touched on many times already, both satirically and sincerely.

why do we blog?

what do we hope to accomplish?

how will we know when we’ve succeeded?

i’m willing to bet that the lion’s share of those blogging right now have no idea why they blog. having started out of curiosity they are now simply compelled. if asked they might answer “because it’s fun!” though i’d have to retort that if the popularity of the “blog depression pamphlet” proved anything it’s that blogging is not always fun. it’s work. so again i ask, why do we blog?

the highly successful “superpowers” of blogging likely don’t ask the question anymore. there’s no need. they probably don’t bother to check their stats and referrers nearly as often either. (can you imagine cory or mark over of boing boing waking up each morning and logging on to technorati to see if anyone has linked them? haha. i can’t.) they have concrete evidence of their success which make the illusory popularity contest of technorati and similar services superfluous. perhaps for the “non-profits” that is the ultimate badge of success- disinterest in rank.

for the rest of us though the illusion is all we have by way of external reward. for me personally comments, emails, involvement, and conversation of any kind is the highest reward, but failing those at least i can see when someone in poland thought enough of a post to link it. that’s gratifying as well. the act of compulsively looking to technorati proves i’m not quite a success. on the other hand the numbers there seem to imply that neither is this enterprise unsuccessful.  of course i’m a realist, and the crazy tag rankings above which place us in with pharyngula, kottke, neil gaiman, the panda’s thumb, the n.y review of books, and boing boing, actually diminish my pleasure a bit because i know that, appearances aside, we are not at that level of popularity. we are in fact a small blog with a modest readership which can use all the help it can get. which is to say those monoliths listed are

our peers, gratifying though the illusion may be.

lastly let me just leave you with this bit of tagging zen, take from it what you will-

as of yesterday technorati offered the following rankings:

truth
1. the brad blog
2. the nonist

lies
1. the nonist

No point dragging out a long story when there is really nothing more to it than selecting a toothsome pastry, carrying it home in a waxen paper bag, and freezing as I was about to take a bite:






For there, before my eyes, a miracle: a danish with the image of muhammad.

emerson.

when i was a lad, and rattled, as lads are, with crazy tsunamis of hormonal emotion, i was fortunate enough to come upon a volume of emerson’s essays which i promptly rescued from the dusty library shelves. that same book sits beside me at this very moment, complete with adolescent pencil lines shakily underscoring portions of 19th century wisdom which seemed especially resonant. one essay which bears a larger than average portion of these marks is the 1841 essay titled love.

many people seem to look back on their adolescent emotions as invalid, being somehow negated by the more mature emotions which come after. i disagree. yes, they were naive in comparison. yes lessons are learned and wisdom begins to accrue casting a comical and even embarrassing light over what came before, but as i see it those emotions were no less real, and no less valid, they were simply experienced by a different person, a you who no longer walks the earth.

reading emerson’s essay on love at that earlier point of my life was most akin, i suspect, to reading a travel guide for a country i had not yet visited. his characterizations framed for me what love was supposed to be, even if i was at the time stretching adolescent versions over the framework. puppy love, infatuations, crushes, for me they were all emersonian somehow, for better or worse. now that i have visited said country, and live there everyday, i still find that he characterized love quite nicely.

judge for yourself. here are a few of the bits i underlined (and no doubt quoted in many a hastily passed note)-

no man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone.

and when the day was not long enough, but the night, too, must be consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

so… it’s a bit saccharine for modern tastes perhaps, (o.k. a lot saccharine,) but then i first read it when i was 13 (not yet packed with bile and frozen in “cool”) and today, well, it’s valentines day, and i’m trying to not be a cynical sourpuss, so cut me some slack on that point.

if you’d like to read the whole essay it’s here.

otherwise let me just say happy valentine’s day to my baby girl miller, and to all the rest of you beloved sourpusses as well. if we’ve gotta put up with this pink heart-shaped teddy bear shit at least we can make the best of it eh? could do worse than a little serving of good ol’ ralph.

(click for full size version)

if it doesn’t have a beeping whosit or a flashing doohickey then the kids just don’t care so perhaps this flashy computer rendering of darwin will get through to the a.d.d. addled brains of our youth eh? nothing like some top-notch tech wizardry to grab the whippersnappers attention with! am i right? 

also here’s last years entry in case you missed it…






so a happy belated darwin day to all and to all best wished for your continued evolution.

Transmittal Letter
In response to: NIAC Phase 1 Call for Proposals, CP 06-01

Good day!
I am not affiliated officially with any entity in the aerospace field; I am a letter carrier with the U.S. Postal Service, that’s all. I am in no position to do anything with any contract awarded in the NIAC process; for this reason you will find no cost proposal attached. I am simply taking advantage of this uncommon opportunity to pass along several ideas I’ve been pondering, in the thought that you may actually find something in them you can use. In at least one case (that of Robotic Docking Tunnels) there is a company which is a logical party to contact about further research, as you will see.

4 Technical Proposals
I propose here four separate concepts for space flight and space industry, from technically simple yet untried, to technically demanding and large in scale.  If one theme runs through these ideas it might be expressed as “Biological design principles in unexpected places.”
1. Robotic Docking Tunnels.
2. Telepresence/Virtual Reality Force-Feedback System with strength augmentation and physical record/playback
3. Orbiting Fuel Farms And Water From Ceres
4. ‘Honeypot Ant’ Manned Spacecraft Design Concept

Yours,
Tom Buckner
(personal info)

1. Robotic Docking Tunnels
I don’t know whether anyone else has given flexible, self-guided docking tunnels much thought, but it seems they may soon be easy and cheap to build. Docking mechanisms could be at least partly flexible and muscle-fiber actuated, rather than rigid and mechanically complex, so that damage might not render mechanism unusable, and could be placed at the end of flexible tunnels (picture a vacuum cleaner with its hoses and rotating couplings; apply this idea to docking bays). Two flexible docking tunnels could have simple guidance aids, such as infrared lights and IR detectors, aligned so that two docked tunnels will have an IR detector directly over an opposed IR light; given the docking command the two tunnels automatically align as the robotic mechanism moves the detector toward the light. The basic idea here is very, very off-the-shelf. Twenty-odd dollars will get you a robot that can see well enough to follow a line:

Line Tracking Mouse
http://www.robotstore.com/catalog/display.asp?pid=686

Eighty dollars will get you a simple light-seeker:
http://www.hobbyengineering.com/H1187.html

A couple of hundred dollars will get you an OctoBot Survivor robot that rolls about and then seeks and docks with its power station:
http://www.robotstore.com/octobot.asp

This demonstrates that the electronic brain of the docking tunnels can be a cheap throwaway unit. If the electronics board goes, you could have ten more in the parts drawer. The hose could bend via segmentation and musclewire. The rotating couplings could be moved mechanically or by musclewire, or couplings might be obviated by using muslewire to torsion the whole tunnel (this gives less than full rotation, but that may be something you can live without; two actively seeking docking mechanisms would not necessarily need to rotate 360 degrees). Alternately, carbon nanofiber could be both muscle and skin (for another such use of nanofiber, see section below on orbiting fuel farms). The tunnel might be configured like an accordion, or like an elephant’s trunk.

In fact, most of the basic design work for such a tunnel has happened, except with milk instead of air:
http://www.nature.com/news/2003/030310/pf/030310-5_pf.html

This 2003 article describes a teat-seeking robot, “modelled on an elephant’s trunk,” developed in Great Britain. Quote: “Dairy farmers of the future may sleep safe in the knowledge that an udder-friendly robot is doing the day’s milking. “The idea is to replace farmers’ hands and allow cows to milk themselves whenever they fancy,” says engineer Bruce Davies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. Davies’ company IceRobotics has just received a £98,000 (US$157,000) grant from Britain’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to develop its rubbery manipulator - the ‘continuum activator’ - into a flexible, teat-seeking robotic arm.”

Their website,  http://www.icerobotics.co.uk/ has a bit more on the specs and contact info. According to a PDF report on this site, http://www.automaticmilking.nl/ , at least 700 dairy farms in Europe are using this type of equipment in 2005. You could probably do a consortium with IceRobotics and skunkwork a good docking-tunnel system in a matter of months.

Interestingly, a docking tunnel with manipulators at its end can replace the Canada type arm as well! With such an adaptation, an astronaut in shirt sleeves could use a manual station at the business end of the tunnel, in effect going to the business end of the ‘arm’ without having to suit up.

2. Telepresence/Virtual Reality Force-Feedback System with strength augmentation and physical record/playback
1. Overview
2. Some Design Details
3. Some New Uses

1. Overview
Present force-feedback telepresence systems (those of which I am aware) are still somewhat primitive in terms of immersiveness. Even very expensive and specialized ones consist of a sort of harness for the arm, articulated with but not actually enclosing the arm, hand or fingers. Since I wrote the first version of this essay, the military has come closer to fielding an exoskeleton designed primarily to augment strength, but it does not, in itself, seem to offer the sophisticated utility of the idea I proposed in Spring 2001 (the paper was not widely disseminated, but I did manage to get a copy into Marvin Minsky’s hands in June of that year, at a Discover Magazine awards show in New York; perhaps others read it after he did; he found no obvious flaws in it then).

I propose a novel usage of some old technology everyone has seen, with a layer of new components. This design is simple in essence but must become more complex as full immersion is approached. Early models probably must be custom-fitted and no doubt expensive to build but I am confident that CAD-CAM techniques will bring this situation into line.

The old technology is the articulated suit of armor. As in days of old, a well-fitting suit can follow the contours of the wearer’s body yet bend at each joint. A good approach to fabrication might involve scanning the wearer in a body suit with orientation marks (sequins, anyone?) These readings could then be used as in current laser-hardened resin prototyping, creating a complete set of plates covering the body from fingertip to toe. These may be mounted on a tight-fitting, flexible fabric base (Spandex! Shudders.) The result would be a set of several separate garments forming a whole, as in old armor, typically breastplate and torso, arm pieces, gauntlets, leggings, etc.

Nothing odd so far: now we add muscles. To do this, we need attachments at the ends of all plates so that musclewire (such as Dynalloy, Inc.‘s Flexinol™ wire) or biomimetic/artificial muscle (see http://www.unm.edu/~amri/ for Artificial Muscle Research Institute at the University of New Mexico) may be added to duplicate the actions of the body’s own muscles. The muscle wires may be on the inside of the plate or the outside, as design needs dictate. As in the body both flexors and extensors are needed in all appropriate locations. That is to say that some musclewires will open the fingers, some close them into a fist. Some will bend the arm, some straighten it. It will be seen that an artificial muscle will tend to augment the muscle directly below it or resist the muscle which opposes that one.

2. Some Design Details
If the plates must be custom-designed for each wearer, it will become necessary to standardize attachment points on the suit (Dynalloy’s barrel-crimp-at-both-ends option, for example.) This might be served by equally standard power-supply/control wiring. A wide range of muscle-wires would be needed, in a range of lengths and thicknesses from very short wires at the fingers all the way to large bundles at the thighs.

It may be that a suit made almost entirely of muscles with no articulated skeleton can be made to work; still, one expects that it would need to be fitted closely to the wearer’s dimensions.

Ultimately a fabrication system should be fully automated, proceeding from a body scan to generation of custom plates, their attachment to the flexible base garments, and the addition of appropriate muscles and wiring according to a database of measurements to give the proper range of motion. Obviously, a particular muscle (say, a biceps) from a person four feet tall cannot be the same as a biceps for one six and a half feet tall.

So far, the force-feedback system is different from present models mainly in the way it encloses the body. But with some consideration of how it behaves in use, we can see ways to extend it to realms of employment that go beyond what we have seen in demonstration.

We do not need to recreate every single skeletal muscle in the human body to get reasonably near fully immersive force-feedback. Even so, a full suit will probably incorporate perhaps two hundred discrete muscles (each hand needs about three dozen, half flexors and half extensors.) Each muscle would be a bundle of smaller musclewires (Flexinol™ wires capable of lifting two kilograms are currently available, so a major muscle capable of lifting fifty kilos must be fabricated from twenty-five such wires.) Since a human can only generate about a fifth of a horsepower, the basic suit might be able to run on household AC current; making adequate power portable and safe might be a large portion of the design challenge.
Each muscle can be controlled as if it were an individual ‘note’ in a MIDI instrument (in fact, I believe MIDI files can be created to control the suit!)

Let me illustrate how this might work.

Musical Instrument Digital Interface has been around for about twenty years and is thus mature and well-known technology. In a MIDI file, a synthesizer such as that in your computer’s sound card can play a given number of voices at a time, assigned to a different number of instruments. A typical MIDI file may have sixteen ‘tracks’ with different instruments assigned to them; each note might be assigned to a different frequency to be played by an oscillator or wavetable sample. Each note is played at a certain moment, at a certain volume, with a strong or weak attack, and may be short or long (the Sustain parameter.) More complex events are coded as a series of note events so that a note can bend, be sustained, etc.

Consider instead that each track covers a muscle group, and each note is assigned to a particular muscle. The ‘volume’ parameter may tell the muscle to contract a little, or to its maximum contraction. The ‘attack’ parameter can tell it to contract gradually or suddenly. The ‘sustain’ parameter would tell the muscle whether to release or stay contracted. All the wires in the bundle might act in unison or separately depending on control needs; one good way to get the current to them might be by using printed control circuits to close the contact with a sandwiched conductive layer (this is like many a keyboard or other control pad, except in reverse and with more electrical current.)

One final point: just as a MIDI musical instrument can record the finest nuances of a musical performance, so muscle suit might be equipped with small sensors (such as piezoelectric elements in the muscle attachment sockets) that record the movements of the wearer. A fully orchestrated song a few minutes long can be encoded in a MIDI file of only 200 kilobytes, and I suspect that MIDI code can contain all the information to record and control every movement the human body can make with similarly small files. This should not surprise us since human musical performances are in essence an expression of muscle movement, and in a sense we are simply turning the movement-to-music conversion backward. I will return to this idea under the following section on New Uses.

It can be seen that there are several modes of behavior for the suit, depending on our requirements:
A. Simple force-feedback. In this mode, the wearer moves freely through VR space (using the good old 3D goggles) and meets resistance from objects in that space. This is done by contracting the opposite muscle from that which the wearer is exerting. If I squeeze a virtual lemon, for example, I am applying force mainly through the flexors that close my hand. The suit must therefore contract the extensors on the outer surface of my hand to counteract my motion to the appropriate degree.

B. Force-amplification, the opposite of force-feedback. The same suit can counteract the wearer’s movements or detect and amplify these movements by simply being instructed to contract the corresponding muscle or the opposing one. A suit in this mode will increase the wearer’s strength to a degree dictated by the contractile strength of the musclewires and the rigidity of the suit plates. It may be necessary to use less muscle strength than the suit can generate to avoid injury to the wearer or others, either by using weaker musclewires or by imposing limits in the software signal.

C. Recording movement. This might involve instructing all muscles to contract gently so as to take up slack, and recording the degree, timing, speed of contraction they encounter.

D. Replaying recorded movement. In this mode, the wearer might learn to ‘go limp’ and let the suit move in accord with a performance that was recorded before.

E. Any combination of the above.

3. Some New Uses
Uses we have already seen for force-feedback arms include surgical procedures and other VR and gaming activities. I will close by mentioning some new uses I have considered.

A. Truly immersive VR and gaming, etc. Instead of moving a joystick, one actually climbs cliffs or swings a sword about. Obvious.

B. Strength amplification. This opens up a whole class of uses. One might:
Use for heavy lifting, in jobs that are now backbreaking but where no appropriate equipment exists; or as a replacement for current equipment that is far more cumbersome.

Use as a wheelchair replacement, enabling walking in those who have limited muscle strength; direct neural control might later enable use for para/quadriplegics. This application is expanded on in item F below.

Other uses may open up, depending on the portability of the power supplies that must accompany a mobile suit.

C. Telepresence. Again, obvious. Humanoid rescue robots may be remotely controlled (within time-lag limits, of course). Military and hazardous-duty uses abound. Exploring the surface of an uninviting environment such as Io or Venus via telepresence from a safe, shielded spacecraft in orbit only a fraction of a light-second away would be the next best thing to walking there. Doing the same thing from Earth would be more like looking over an AIBO’s shoulder and making suggestions that won’t be carried out for hours, while it wanders around trying not to fall off a cliff. Still, this seems feasible too.

D. Recording and Replay. This is an intriguing unexplored possibility.
Do you know how it feels to play Rachmaninoff’s infamous Third Piano Concerto or dance like Janet Jackson? If persons of talent consent to be recorded, the exact sequence of movements can be replayed while you wear the suit.

A new surgeon might feel exactly how an experienced surgeon performed an especially challenging maneuver, enhancing present methods. If the new da Vinci system does not record and play back movement, for example, it should; for that system, it would probably be a minor software tweak

More than this, the possibility of such direct learning may be amplified by new memory-enhancing drugs such as those called CREB activators. Such substances may (for a few hours) enable the brain to soak up input like a sponge. If such substances work in humans, this may represent a radical new wrinkle in the learning process. One might take the drug and spend the next two hours in VR tying knots, for example, and afterward be as knot-wise as any old sailor. One might master a musical instrument in a few weeks, a new aircraft in a couple of days. Any task which requires muscle-learning seems a natural for this. They may prevent memory loss as well, and I would think they will be out of the labs and onto the black market in about five minutes. I want some ASAP.

It might be best to use less than full mechanical force in this context so than the limbs are guided rather than forced to the point of possible injury. Since this may result in sloppy results early in the learning curve, it might help to represent the image (via VR software) fed back to the wearer through the VR stereoscopic goggles as if it had performed the action perfectly. That way the wearer sees the correct movements and can try to fall into sync with them. Since this alters proprioception, and since the brain gradually adjusts to such related illusions as image-inverting goggles, it would be unwise to overuse this mode. One might, in extreme overuse, ‘learn’ that motion does not necessarily match vision, and be disoriented in the ‘real’ world.

I can also foresee use of this aspect in conjunction with law enforcement so that (in addition to strength amplification and training) a complete record of an officer’s movements may be available as evidence, providing that records are protected from tampering afterward.

E. Physical Therapy. This would involve programming in various range-of-motion exercises as are presently done by human physical therapists. The suit would need to be programmed not to overextend motion so as to cause further injury, perhaps by attenuating pressure when a preset resistance is met. The same sort of program might be used for basic yoga training, tai chi, etc.

F. Assisted Locomotion. In this usage the suit (or a partial version) acts in the stead of a wheelchair for paralyzed or weakened individuals. It would be best for such a person to acquire a suit while the limbs are still limber and able to move freely with it, as prolonged immobility tends to lead to tightening of muscles and shortening of tendons, combated with painful difficulty by physical therapy. If an injured person uses an assistive suit as soon as possible, normal range of motion should be easier to maintain, along with avoidance of such related problems as pressure sores (decubitus), lower-extremity edema and other circulatory problems, and chronic constipation. The human body is simply not designed to remain immobile. Also, use of an assistive suit obviates most accessibility issues. Furthermore, the suit may be considered cost-effective in comparison with present mobility tools if the cost of treating these other problems is factored in; even a garden-variety wheelchair costs hundreds of dollars.

G. Fitness Exercise. In this usage, the wire muscles are calibrated by the software to offer resistance to the wearer’s movements.

One might own a virtual weight set, virtual swimming pool, etc. The suit might encourage perfect form by resisting much more strongly any motions contrary to the desired form. For example, a virtual golf swing may be completely unimpeded along the optimum path, with pressure applied to any deviation. This might feel the way a gyroscope feels when held in the hand, resisting movements that alter the axis of rotation.

One last usage which I find intriguing is for astronauts on long-term missions to wear the suit (minus gauntlet) more or less full-time while in flight. Instead of being forced to spend time on exercise bikes and other equipment, the astronauts would go about their normal routine wearing suits calibrated so as to resist movement in a way which simulates gravity. The software settings would treat an imaginary axis perpendicular to the hips as vertical and offer resistance to all movements in accord with an imaginary gravity source below. This could even be set higher than normal part of the time. Possibly the suit can combat the pooling of fluids in lower extremities as well, by rhythmic squeezing, and the suit might prove more effective in conserving bone mass and muscle tone than current exercise regimes have shown themselves to be.

In time it may be possible for the suit to be somewhat self-adjusting. Improved proprioceptive sensors might detect the body’s contours while the plates themselves (in smaller segments perhaps joined by musclewires) might expand or contract to fit, then become rigid. It may even be possible for a nonrigid version to achieve the same ends through properly controlled contraction, inflatable sleeves, or other means not yet devised.

I will add only one more observation: every use I have mentioned above is applicable to the same basic suit design. If sensors and muscle movement achieve adequate accuracy, one need only change the software to serve every single one of these roles.

3. Orbiting Fuel Farms And Water From Ceres
I started thinking about this architecture only recently, when I heard how much water there is on Ceres. You could mine Cerean water using solar power grids, extraction equipment and mass drivers. First off, it’s my understanding that Ceres, in the asteroid belt, is just close enough to the sun for solar power to work reasonably well; solar collectors could be augmented by very large mirrors made from advanced films as used in solar sails. The energy requirement might be so massive as to necessitate shipping impractical amounts of powerplant, but I remain optimistic that very large and lightweight photovoltaics can be made, considering that it appears possible to manufacture extremely light carbon nanofiber that might prove suitable for such large-scale solar power needs and perform other valuable functions in the same architecture, as mentioned in the following quote from an Eurekalert press release on work done at U.T. Dallas at this URL:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-08/uota-utd081505.php

Quote: ” The nanotube sheets can be made so thin that a square kilometer of solar sail would weigh only 30 kilograms…. The nanotube sheets combine high transparency with high electronic conductivity, are highly flexible and provide giant gravimetric surface areas, which has enabled the team to demonstrate their use as electrodes for bright organic light emitting diodes for displays and as solar cells for light harvesting. Electrodes that can be reversibly deformed over 100 percent without losing electrical conductivity are needed for high stroke artificial muscles, and the Science article describes a simple method that makes this possible for the nanotube sheets.”

Mining equipment such as drills and conveyors might be run non-electrically by solar-heated steam or by steam-generated electricity if this works better than photovoltaics or microwave power transmission. Once extracted, water or other materials would be melted, poured into containers for space flight (or perhaps they could survive vacuum as plain chunks of ice?) It would then be fired from mass drivers to distant locations where needed. Obviously, this is an adaptation of Gerard K. O’Neill’s plan for using lunar mass drivers to loft moon rock for building colonies, but adapted to a different resource from a different location, sent to a greater variety of locations.

It’s well known that our moon (Luna) has about 1/6 Earth gravity on its surface; if you weigh 150 pounds here, on the moon you weigh 25 pounds on the moon, with a diameter of 2160 miles. The surface gravity of the 580 mile wide asteroid Ceres is a bit less than 1/6th that of the moon. On Ceres you’d weigh four pounds. A gallon of water here weighs 8.31 pounds; on the moon, about twenty-two ounces; on Ceres, less than 3/12 ounces. A mass driver on Ceres need accelerate its cargo only 1431 mph to achieve escape velocity; for an electric mass driver, this is a trivial speed; and a fifty gallon drum of water would weigh just 10.8 pounds there, or a bit more than what a gallon weighs here.

Although the escape velocity of Ceres is low, even payloads accelerated to the limits of a mass driver’s capability will take far, far longer to get somewhere useful than the original O’Neill proposal, which only involved Earth-Moon distances; nevertheless, this may not be reason to abandon the idea altogether. By analogy, a Ceres mass-driver ‘pipeline’ is very long, and there’s a great time lag before anything comes out the other end; but once started, it could be steady. How long would Moon colonies take before using up all the estimated 6.6 billion tons of water in the polar regions? How long would Mars terraforming take, and might it be accelerated by Cerean methane?

It would be interesting to study exactly how much a mass driver on Ceres could fire away, with momentum to carry it along a precisely calculated course to destinations around the solar system where water is needed.  That fifty gallon drum of water weighs as much as light bowling ball, and gets its kick from a technology that moves trains. Perhaps much larger containers can be moved. As each water container passes out of sight, it joins a stream of containers which will be intercepted by catchers in space or, conceivably, one could simply pepper a chosen spot on the moon with ice chunks to be dug out and used there. Intriguingly, ‘Ceres Evolution and Current State: A Summary,’ by Tom McCord and Christophe Sotin, suggests enough methane and other volatiles and useful compounds to consider separating them and shipping them across the solar system as raw materials, or as fuel; or, as just mentioned, one might even entertain raining methane down on Mars to employ greenhouse gases in the service of terraforming.

http://www-spc.igpp.ucla.edu/dawn/newsletter/html/20030822/ceres_evolution.html

But here’s another destination for ice and volatiles: orbiting fuel farms for interplanetary missions. Using solar power to electrolyze water gives oxygen and hydrogen which may be used together or separately to power space craft. Or one might have a robotic industry on Ceres to refine deuterium and tritium from Cerean water, and send that out when there was enough to use. Hydrogen, oxygen, water, or breathable air might all be contained in ‘balloons’ of the same nanotube material mentioned before. These could be very simple structures almost reminiscent of honeypot ants in overall design functions: very large, strong bags filled with gas or liquid, with docking attachments so that they could then be strapped to a spaceship assembled in orbit, and pumping systems that be as simple as squeezing the envelope via another useful property mentioned in the U.T. Dallas article, the potential of such nanotube sheets to contract as artificial muscles: the skin could itself squeeze its contents out on command like a bladder. The filled balloon tanks might just as easily be sent elsewhere in the solar system if needed, for instance to ferry fuel to satellites or colonies needing fuel to stay in position.

The major components of this overall architecture would include:
On Ceres: 1. Solar power collectors and storage.
2. Mining, processing, and packaging equipment.
3. Mass driver, able to be aimed with extreme accuracy.

In Earth orbit: 1. Catchers.
2. Solar power collectors and storage.
3. Electrolysis and separation equipment.
4. Balloon tanks for storage and transport.
5. Orbital fuel depots/shipyards where balloon tanks are mated to otherwise completed Honeypot-Ant ships.

4. ‘Honeypot Ant’ Manned Spacecraft Design Concept
Like the Cerean water mining concept, this is so recent I haven’t had much time to consider it in detail, so simply consider it as a starting point for discussion: if we assume sources for fuel and water outside Earth’s gravity well (or a space elevator ferrying up such materials cheaply) and widespread of superstrong carbon-nanotube materials, we can consider a radically different way of building manned long-mission spacecraft.

It is not only the fuel tanks which can be made from nanotube sheets; why not let the crew quarters also be gigantic balloons, rather than tiny metal capsules? It might prove possible using very high-strength materials to dispense with metal or moon rock as radiation shielding, instead using water. Such a design might resemble O’Neill colony designs, though initially at least on a smaller scale, with the crew quarters spinning for artificial gravity. Inside the nanofiber skin would be water at least several feet deep, and living quarters within (‘above’) that. If a small meteor punctures the skin, one would plug it from inside just as one would put a drain stopper into a sink. In addition, mirrors could gather sunlight onto the exterior of the crew quarters for seaweed/algae in the water (the nanotube sheets made at U.T. Dallas being transparent, at least in some wavelengths) and thus providing a natural air-cleaning system. Sewage might be treated the same way; the key is to make the water/photosynthesis biomass large enough to handle the human crew’s needs easily.

The ship itself might begin as little more than a frame, with engines, fuel tanks, instrumentation and crew quarters added, and much of its structural strength derived from a minimal mass of carbon. This implies that very little of its total mass need necessarily be built and hauled up from Earth.

this might be a bit embarrassing if “you” actually existed.

but i do exists! and how dare you insinuate otherwise?!

well, then, by all means prove it. you have the floor.

look at me! i’m tearing a phone book in half! i’m going over niagara falls in a barrel! i’m stomping on an ant! yeah, i’m crushing an ant under my heel. ask him whether i exist or not!

ah yes. that machine which is your body… it would seem a great ally when seeking to prove your existence- but then we’re not really talking about your bones and spleen and nostril hairs here are we? or do you consider your physicality to be interchangeable with your “self”?

well, not exactly…

good. because while you are running for office and reading poetry and murdering a stranger in an alleyway, your body is busy with other matters, like keeping your blood oxygenated, doling out nutrients, and making sure you don’t walk into any blazing fires; that kind of thing. truth be told, your body is probably not all that interested in the trifles “you” are. your body’s got work to do. “you” probably just get in the way more times than not.

but here i am! right here in front of you. isn’t that proof enough?

you are not solid and discrete you realize of course? but rather a near-infintely divisible collection of processes and smaller units. likewise what you consider your body is just such a smaller unit in processes larger than yourself. in trying to prop up your physicality as proof of anything you may as well call a carbon molecule, a dust mite, a bacteria colony, some oxygen, and a pool of bile to the witness stand. none of them would be able to prove that the “you” we are referring to exists.

i think! if i think then i am!

that is an oddity isn’t it? with all the work your brain is doing to coordinate the many functions and processes at work in your body, with all the attention it must pay to just keep you from killing yourself it’s a wonder it has any space to spare for, well, “you.” if we’re being totally honest we must admit that whole swaths of what the “self” is up to in the ol’ noggin is not strictly necessary on a biological level don’t we? so maybe your onto something. perhaps the degree to which your concerns diverge from the biological imperative of your physicality influences the degree to which “you” exist?

ha! see?

of course by that logic suicides would be the pinnacle of existence and they are, well, dead…

listen, arguing that something does not exist presupposes that existence itself exists as a viable option. if that’s the case and things can indeed exist then why not “me”?

ah. you’ve got me there haven’t you smarty pants? o.k. i’ll admit it the question of existence is a semantic one, or at least that’s what my dynamo of hubris tells me. it’s a language game. which is to say that though engaging in a discussion on the subject may be interesting, the conclusions arrived at change exactly nothing.

for example if a think tank of ontologists, neurologists, anthropologists, and poets fed their notions into a computer the size of a football stadium, capable of a zillion terra flops per second, and that computer managed to prove beyond mathematical doubt that “you” did not, could not, exist… well, you’d still have to frantically search out a bathroom after a large coffee and cinnabon in the mall’s food-court tipped your bowels decidedly toward full.

so what are you saying? i do exist?

no. what i’m saying is that you should relax and stop worrying about it because whether you “exist” or not makes zero difference one way or the other. you’re still obliged to wake up each morning and navigate the shared delusion we’ve agreed to call reality. there’s no getting around it. call the experience whatever “you” like.

___________________________________________

this piece was written for a feature going on at the huge entity.

dan, the excruciatingly large entity in charge over there, asked a group of folks to contribute pieces on the subject of reasons “you” don’t exist.

this entry of mine is rather silly compared to the others compiled so i recommend you head over there and find out more reasons “you” could not possibly exist. go on you ego maniacs! get over there and take your medicine!

in my horror i began tearing at my hair and wailing. i loaded my pistol while tears streamed down my cheeks. they wouldn’t take me or my kittens alive! in a moment of lucidity i turned on the television to see if a signal was still coming through… perhaps the emergency broadcasting system would be sounding… perhaps surviving government officials would be offering instructions… well… all i can say is thank god for the t.v. news! for six straight hours i sat rapt while they explained to me that the white stuff was called “snow” and that it sometimes fell from the sky during a period they called “winter.” they talked of nothing else. i put my pistol away and kissed the television screen. thank you t.v. news, whatever would i do without you?

first off i ought to note that though each of these artists is featured in vitamin d not all of the work below will actually be drawing in the stricktest sense. some won’t be drawing at all. i’ve just used the book as a jumping off point. enjoy-

marcel dzama





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(click for full size version)
for more of marcel’s work see here, here, and here.

mark lombardi






for an explanation of what exactly lombardi is up to with these and some more examples see here and here.

arturo herrera










for more of arturo’s work see here and here.

frank magnotta






for some more of frank’s work see here and here.

amy cutler

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(click for full size version)
for more of amy’s work see here, here, and here.

ernesto caivano


(full size here)




(full size here)




(full size here)
for more of ernesto’s kick ass work see here and here. for a bit of explaination see here.

paul noble










for more of paul’s work see here, here, here, and here.

scott teplin














for more of scott’s work look no further than his own site which offers a huge amount of his work for your oggling pleasure.

some other artists you might like to check out who are featured in the book are:
yun-fei ji (more here)
simon evans
Kerstin Kartscher (more here and here)
and matt greene

though they are all represented in the book i did not include the work of matthew ritchie, Shahzia Sikander, Zak Smith, John Currin, or Julie Mehretu since i’ve posted on all of them here in the past.

if you’d like to explore further here is the full list of vitamin d artists.

D-L Alvarez, Francis Alÿs, Ryoko Aoki, Kaoru Arima, Silvia Bächli, Devendra Banhart, Anna Barriball, Shannon Bool, Michaël Borremans, Andrea Bowers, Jesse Bransford, Fernando Bryce, Cai Guo-Qiang, Ernesto Caivano, Los Carpinteros, Raimond Chaves, Sandra Cinto, Russell Crotty, Roberto Cuoghi, John Currin, Amy Cutler, Jeff Davis, Tacita Dean, Trisha Donnelly, Marlene Dumas, Sam Durant, Marcel Dzama, Memed Erdener, Simon Evans, Simon Faithfull, Spencer Finch, Urs Fischer, Roland Flexner, Ellen Gallagher, Matt Greene, Joseph Grigely, Anna Sigmond Gudmundsdottir, Daniel Guzman, Sebastian Hammwöhner, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Björn Hegardt, Arturo Herrera, Nobuya Hoki, Christian Holstad, Huang Yong Ping, Dean Hughes, Gareth James, Yun-Fei Ji, Chris Johanson, Kerstin Kartscher, William Kentridge, Toba Khedoori, Dr. Lakra, Michael Landy, Ricardo Lanzarini, Graham Little, Mark Lombardi, Mindaugas Lukosaitis, Marco Maggi, Frank Magnotta, Mark Manders,Yuri Masnyj, Dominic McGill, Julie Mehretu, Jean-François Moriceau and Petra Mrzyk, Claudia and Julia Müller, Dave Muller,Vik Muniz, David Musgrave, Wangechi Mutu, Yoshitomo Nara, Paul Noble, Jockum Nordström, Glexis Novoa, Roman Ondák, Robyn O’Neil, Gabriel Orozco, Pavel Pepperstein, Peter Peri, Dan Perjovschi, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, Chloe Piene, Fernando Renes, Robin Rhode, Matthew Ritchie, Frances Richardson, Serse, Silke Schatz, Anne-Marie Schneider, Steven Shearer, David Shrigley, Simone Shubuck, James Siena, Shahzia Sikander, Lucy Skaer, Torsten Slama, Josh Smith, Zak Smith, Nedko Solakov, Hayley Tompkins, Susan Turcot, Banks Violette, Amelie von Wulffen, Kara Walker, Olav Westphalen, Richard Wright, Katharina Wulff, Daniel Zeller

hope you found something you liked.

why is it that we so often call up the loud / up-beat / aggressive / driving music first thing in the morning? do we want to jolt ourselves into consciousness? are we offering ourselves up to the familiar hooks hoping they’ll dig in and drag us into the day? do we need the emotional kick like the sonic equivalent of caffeine? i know that in my case each morning i tend to go directly to my hip-hop playlist. it’s loud, obnoxious, familiar, and ultimately mindless. somehow it seems to offer just the right rhythm for weaving confidently through the morning commuter-crush. the synthetic bravado, pumped directly into the reptile center of my brain, allows me to face the thousand vile train-strangers each morning. it provides a crest for my smoldering dawn-hour hatred to ride on. but is this brainless strut any way to start a day? or to end one?

for the last couple of weeks i’ve forced myself to change this behavior, by-passing the hip-hop, the glitch, the funk, the rock, in favor of my “shhhh” playlist. it’s all drawn-out melodies and introspection. the effect is palpable. where as before i was a toe-tapping automaton ziging and zaging through my morning route in a convincing illusion of purposeful sentience, now i am like a quivering new-born snail, soft and vulnerable, with the predators weaving patterns all around me. i’ve slowed down. i actually notice the sun coming through the trees of central park. i see the fog swallowing whole swaths of the skyline. i even occasionally think thoughts.

what a different experience it is fostering quiet and encouraging lucidity both first thing in the morning and at the end of the workday. the streets are not merely obstacle-dotted footpaths but are instead infused with sadness and dappled with intriguing shadows. the crowds on the subway are not only undulating herds to dodge and despise but oddly touching human tableaus as well. in short- things are somehow more interesting.

so, dear text skimmers, what in the hell am i trying to say? i’m saying that casting off the defensive morning posture has been enjoyable. i’m saying that being a raw, exposed nerve out there on the streets, like a writhing downed power-wire, feels good.

as such i thought i’d offer the particular alchemusical concoction i’ve come up with for effective aural damping.

______________________________

archer prewit - gerroa songs / white sky

six organs of admittance- dark noontide / for octavio paz

pullman- turnstyles & junkpiles

codeine- the white birch

bonnie prince billy- i see a darkness

songs ohia- ghost tropic / the lioness

chico freeman- spirit sensitive

simon joyner- the lousy dance

john frusciante- niandra lades and usually just a t-shirt

van morrison- astral weeks

dirty three- she has no strings apollo / whatever you love you are

lonnie liston smith- visions of a new world

miles davis- kind of blue

mogwai- come on die young

tom waits- closing time

charles mingus- mingus plays piano

spiritualized- laser guided melodies

godspeed you black emporer- Yanqui U.X.O.

do make say think- & yet & yet

usef lateef- the centaur and the pheonix

idyll swords- ll

king crimson- islands
______________________________

i know it’s a strange mixture but there you have it. stir liberally, spice to taste, and it makes for an interesting commute.

actually, i’d love to hear some recommendations to add in this general vein. i’m open. feel free.

in the 1950’s and 1960’s brazil was experiencing the complex transition from a conservative and agriculture-based society to a modern, industrialized nation. during this transition old and new mindsets existed simultaneously, and nowhere was this more evident than in attitudes toward sex. for instance there was a public demand for sex education (and sexually stimulating) material but very little was in circulation owing to the tradition of severe censorship from both the church and the state. meanwhile, though the people may have been interested in educating themselves about their own sexuality, the priests of the catholic church were still including mental retardation, madness, and death as side effects of masturbation in their sermons against it. at this point the only legally available “erotica” were the photographs of miss brazil candidates in o cruzeiro, the brazilian equivalent of time or life magazines.






in brazilian society at this time middle class boys were most likely to have their sexual initiation with the young maids of the house, under the cynical compliance of their church-going parents, just like the slave masters of only three or four generations earlier. their only other option were the brothels where “boys became men, and men became infected.” sweden and denmark were considered in the popular imagination to be paradises of sexual liberty simply because they happened to be the origin of of the very few smuggled pornographic publications. (france and poland were similarly romanticized due to the influx of prostitutes from these countries during the economic booms of coffee, rubber, and cocoa.) in any case brazil itself was decidedly repressed.






sexuality was schizophrenically divided between the house, a territory of respect for conventions and religion, where sex was a taboo subjugated by the routines of tradition, and “real” life, where all practices were allowed and all fantasies were possible. as a result it was common for men to have multiple families, one official and others economically supported but unrecognized. women, meanwhile, had no erotica available to them save the italian soap opera’s of the day, and few sexual options other than being an official wife, an unofficial wife, or a prostitute.






it was into this climate that carlos zefiro (and his soon to emerge legion of imitators) began clandestinely flooding the country with inexpensive, often poorly drawn, pornographic comics, printed on cheap paper, with rudimentary printing techniques. they were called, ironically, catecismos, which means “small prayer booklets” and they were immediately a popular phenomenon. despite exposing their creators (and possessors) to the risks of draconian legislation they were eagerly snatched up by teenagers and adults alike in “special” magazine stands. more than just being popular smut zefiro’s penny porn was, in a real sense, the only source of sexual information available to an whole generation of brazilians.






as mentioned earlier “zafiro” was a pseudonym (based on “zephyr” the messenger of eros in greek mythology.) his real identity was the subject of passionate debate right from the his first publication in 1958. 30 years later zafiro ended the debate when the “underground lone ranger” of porn revealed himself as a shy, civil servant, grandfather in his seventies named jose carlos aguiar caminha. recognition of his works had grown in the sexually permissive modern age and impostors had begun cropping up trying to cash in. when finally admitting authorship caminha explained simply that the modest income his comics brought in was essential in supporting his family and he had to come forward to safeguard it. he died not many years after in 1994.

*most the previous was culled and reshaped from an essay in the chapbook called carlos zefiro: unknown soldier of liberty and irreverence. by jean r.d. guimaraes.






i understand that in seeking to legitimize a “low” art form such as this a case for some deeper cultural significance must be made, but for my part i have to say that the “noble, fighting against the severe censorship from both church and the state” angle might be a bit overstated. the book contains two full zefiro stories as well as one of an imitator, and, well, they are truly filthy. (the samples i’ve included here are by no means representative) from these and what i’ve seen elsewhere it seems that priests lifting their frocks to expose long curving boners figure prominently, as well as all manner of macho sex fantasy. now, don’t get me wrong, priest boner’s don’t negate any possible cultural significance, but i can’t help but think that sometimes smut is just that- smut, gloriously filthy, beloved, and against the grain though it may be.






for more on the man and his “culturally significant” filth see this tribute page (in Portuguese).

for more images see here.

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?
-William Shakespeare

Civilization is hideously fragile. there’s not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.  -C. P. Snow

i don’t believe in evil, i believe in horror. in nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror, the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots. -isak dinesen

the world goes whispering to its own
“this anguish pierces to the bone;”
and tender friends go sighing round,
“what love can ever cure this wound?”
my days go on, my days go on,
-e.b. browning

a considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside., that is, they are actually already dead. it is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. if we knew what a number of these people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror. -george gurdjief

we all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. but our task is not to unleash them upon the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. -albert camus

part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. i not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. -c.s.lewis

modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. it is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it. -vaclav havel

a despairing humanity is not merely an unhappy humanity; it is an ugly humanity.. ugly in its own eyes - dwarfed, diminished, stunted, and self-loathing. these are the buried sources of world war and despotic collectivism, of scapegoat hatred and exploitation. ugly hates beautiful,, hates gentle, hates loving, hates life. there is a politics of despair. -theodore roszak

when i die i want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in dublin. -j.p.dunleavy

we are close to dead. there are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium: they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. the sense of a long last night over civilization is back again. -norman mailer

dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives. -elisabeth kuber-ross

if man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? -stanley kubrick

the whole race is a poet who writes down propositions of its fate. -wallace stevens

the freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult to access. people who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent are seen daily on the newsstands, on tv, in the subways. hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair. -susan sontag

i’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. that’s deep enough. what do you want- an adorable pancreas? -jean kerr.

men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. here is the real enemy of our people: our own selves dehumanized into “the masses.” and where is the david who can slay this giant? -lillian smith

life is like sanskrit read to a pony. -lou reed

He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you. -Friedrich Nietzsche

a lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind. -john cheever

the usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scarp. -cynthia ozick

we are all born mad, some remain so. -samuel beckett

in an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis. -quentin crisp

the human head is bigger than the globe. it conceives itself as containing more. it can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. it starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. the human head is monstrous. -gunter grass

man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is. -albert camus

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

when the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand. -john cheever

the lives of happy people are dense with their own doings - crowded, active thick… but the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands are few. -larry mcmurty

one of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relationship to life without intermission. -w.h. auden

Considered physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually reduces his strength. The effect of ugliness can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever anyone feels depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with ugliness. -Friedrich Nietzsche

i seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it. -Salvador dali

It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men. -Jean-Paul Sartre

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in
armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
-Allen Ginsberg

*all images from les monstres de la renaissance à l’âge classique.

it had only been 36 years since the trend first took hold on the world wide web, and yet in those 36 years humanity’s pantheon of gods had reached numbers far exceeding anything ever seen before.

initially the idea had been put forward as an defensive tactic; a way to counter what many saw as a troubling redoubling of religious influence over secular society. the old gods were making inroads into politics and law by routes most people had thought demolished a century before. progress seemed to cease everywhere one looked. in america, “jesus” worshippers were running rampant everywhere, ramming their views down people’s throats like a great groaning porn star with a cock made of hypocrisy. the middle east, meanwhile, was a violent, misogynistic, snuff-film starring allah and his trusty thug mohammed. in other areas, there were other gods. most were variations on a theme- arrogant, power hungry in the short-term, and prone to fetishizing humanity’s destruction in the long. it was frightening.

so, on some site (no one remembers where) in the early part of 2006, an idea was floated: why not flood the market with gods?

if a small group of gods, each laying claim to ultimate truth, individually held enough market share as to make power struggles and violence between them inevitable, then what could be done? the fond wish that humanity would eventually abandon its creation myths in favor of systematized rational inquiry into the natural world had long since proven itself a pipe dream. humanity was not ready to relinquish its gods and might never be. in such an atmosphere it seemed that the only method left to effectively reduce the dangerous influence of the old gods was to create enough new ones to weaken their power base; to effectively dilute the potency of each in a cloudy solution of concentrated divinity. the ideal way to do this, argued the forgotten spark-plug “blogger,” was to advocate a personal god for each and every human on planet earth.

the world wide web at that time was a hotbed of discussion, ideas shot through it like a broccoli spear through an anorexic’s digestive tract. arguments ensued about just how this might be accomplished. obviously the proposition of having one’s own god must be made attractive enough to draw proponents. non-religious peoples would sign on, it was thought, because it would be a means to challenge the dominant religions on their own turf as it were. simply by exercising a right which agnostics and atheists felt they had no use for, they’d be able to even the playing field.

converting peoples who already had a religious affiliation would be more difficult of course. some said it was not necessary to do so, that were all the “new-godders” to hang together in the political sphere, utilizing their newfound “moral” clout, they’d do well enough. others said adults were lost causes and the best tactic was to appeal to the rebellious, open-minded, creative disposition of the young. “why follow your grandma’s stodgy old god when you can create your own? with a mohawk if you like!” still others argued that the pocketbook was king. after all, if tax exemptions could be dangled as a carrot, many people would suddenly become very interested in exercising their inalienable rights to worship.

in order for such an idea to be effective on any level, these new gods would have to be recognized under the law, each one with its own church and its own congregation. the key then, it was widely agreed, would be to challenge the legal precedents involved in defining just what a church was. to exploit the often misappropriated ideals of religious tolerance, societies diminished belief in absolute truth, and the cultural love of litigation unilaterally, in a barrage of 1st amendment “shock and awe,” was the strategy.

the idea caught fire. allies popped up all over the place. lawyers found the legal questions at work of interest, having to argue over church zoning, constitutional rights, exemptions for newly consecrated religious ceremonies, the exact numbers required for a congregation, what constituted a “religious service.” etc. creative people were enthralled with the idea of birthing gods. painters birthed abstract deities with conceptual titles. poets spoke in tongues. authors embraced the allegory again, and protagonists became increasingly divine. software engineers sought ways to automate large chunks of the process, creating automatic “bible” authoring software which seized on a handful of key-words, online quizzes for official ordination, god-casts of ritual ceremonies, i.m. confessionals, generative applets to “evolve” a god’s visage, etc. philosophers mulled over the implications endlessly. new-agers drew up new charts, created new decks, and detected new, powerful, energies. most surprisingly many religious sects championed the idea in the courts, seeing an opportunity to strengthen their own footing. eventually, like hungry dogs nose-distance from a slaughterhouse, politicians began to smell a constituency.

within 10 years the “personal god” idea went from an internet meme to a full fledged movement.

now, 36 years on, the spiritual landscape is nearly unrecognizable. a few key supreme court victories forced the government in the united states to choose between offering tax breaks and drug exemptions to everyone with a church (a number at that time approaching the millions) or changing the laws all together. they opted, of course, to do away with tax breaks for churches. likewise the draconian drug laws were scrapped in favor of legalization and taxation because it was impossible to legislate effectively when every religious ceremony had its own set of sacred substances. the old thorny pledge of allegiance controversy was solved with the addition of a humble letter “s” to produce the phrase “under gods,” a solution which was symptomatic of the climate in general.

the initial motive for the “personal god” movement became obscured eventually in that scholars began arguing for it on its spiritual merits alone. “each person is equally as qualified to discern exactly what god is, and thus each ought to feel secure in their own conception of him. let no man impose his own god on you!” the argument went, and people responded. “you can keep your god, i’ve got my own!” read many a bumper sticker and t-shirt. freed from the negative, accusatory, brow-beating tactics of earlier religions, people were able to approach god in a truly personal and creative way.

though many still chose jesus, or followed muhammad, or swore their oaths to other old gods, their market share was dramatically reduced and they were trending downward each year. their following remained large compared to that of other individual gods, but as a percentage of the pantheon, they were significantly outnumbered. excluding them, roughly one “personal god” was worshiped per every 43 households worldwide according to last years u.n. census. 

today business cards regularly include a line like “high magistrate of the golden church of zool” right beneath “accountant.”

today those pharmaceutical ad’s with butterflies and rolling fields (which seemed so nonsensical a few decades ago) having been re-purposed for “god-mothering” hallucinogenics, make perfect sense.

today it is sometimes said that “if you worship a vengeful god when you’re young you’re heartless, if you worship a bacchanalian god when you’re old you’re brainless.”

today at age 13, every citizen is free to choose a god from the world-wide pantheon, or create their own for inclusion. every year sees a score of new gods born while others fall away into the archives. affiliations shift endlessly. if you choose to birth your own god, as many people do, the process is as follows:

you are encouraged to spend a week or so seeking inspiration into the nature of your deity. you can use any of the many tools available to assist you in this- the drugs, the algorithms, the d.n.a tests, the brain-scans, the histories- then you simply log-on and the world wide pantheon walks you through all the steps of creating your god, uploading it’s visage, registering your church, writing your doctrine, codifying your ceremonies, and opening up your coffers. the system then inserts your god into the appropriate place in the pantheon depending on doctrinal relationships to the others. the whole process takes less than an hour. once your god is in the system, a confirmation email is sent to you, and upon activation your license activated. all that remains is to worship your god and see how your church fares.

an interesting by-product of all this are the manifestation markets. at some point the realization struck that conceiving so many new gods each year dramatically increased the odds of eventually hitting upon one or more which were in fact real, which is to say corporeal, who acted upon humanity in a measurable way. speculation began first with the miracles market (which due to its subjective nature eventually mutated into more of a “fantasy football league” for deities), and later with the manifestations market. any manifestation thought to be connected to an existing deity was reported to the world- wide pantheon and went up on the big board. most manifestations were tangential at best, but even minor fluctuations of the market could help influence a particular god’s following.

which brings us back to me.

this morning a bi-pedal elk with platinum antlers entered a liquor store in rahway, new jersey, and announced nonchalantly, to a stunned cashier, that his name was elroy. he dropped two c-note’s on the counter and walked out with a case of bushmills irish whiskey. the security camera footage hit the web less than an hour afterward. link-text screamed “little known prophesy from tiny american sect comes to pass! whole thing captured on video!” when news reached the manifestation market it went crazy. pay-pal tithes redirected on the fly, e-prayers filed past an aggressive spam filter piling into a usually empty in-box, and membership in the “most honorable and inebriated sect of elroy” skyrocketed, making me, in effect, the exalted prophet and high priest of the single largest and most beloved religion on planet earth. my lifetime supply of irish whiskey, courtesy of the bushmills company, began arriving not long after.

“holy shit” indeed.