August 2008
yesterday Ultralight Backpacking: The “Why” and the “How”. ‘Exploring the wilderness with an extreme minimum of equipment.’ This makes me want to go walkabout. 1 Comment
Wed 27th
If you need to appear on an internet list to know whether you’re someone’s friend, you may have problems a computer can’t solve.
Tue 26th
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
— Banksy, Brandalism
(from Brehaut) 0 Comments
Mon 25th
There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy - smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.
But - and this is the thing - success does not work both ways. Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous
Feeling Self-Conscious
Wild, Unsupported Theory: every species on our planet has some form of consciousness. We just don’t have the tests or means of communication to figure that out yet. [300 words]
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Thu 21st Food + Photography = Food Porn Daily (SFW) 0 Comments
Thu 21st
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What is not part of ourselves does not bother us.
Thu 21st
After reading the passages, all participants completed a survey on their belief in free will. Then comes the inspired part of the experiment. Participants were told to complete 20 arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that when the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen, too. The participants were told that no one would know whether they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.
The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! (That is, they pressed the space bar less often than the other participants.) Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.
— Scientific American, Free Will vs. the Programmed Brain (via Mind Hacks)
The Cavern: 16. The Man in the Valley
Melissa and the others woke with the light the next morning, but no-one was in any real hurry to rise. Daniel rolled his sleeping bag over to the fireplace and poked the fire back into life, throwing another ruined strut onto it. [2030 words]
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Mon 18th
Me as I would have appeared in yearbooks of (L–R) 1974, ‘76, ‘80, and ‘94. David Grohl on the left, David Schwimmer on the right. Make your own at yearbookyourself.com (via Kottke.) 1 Comment
Sat 16th Wondermark Lite.: #434; In which there is Taunting of Larry the Language Nerd. 1 Comment
Liquid Salivary Gratitude
The results of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Bad Fiction Contest are in…
The mongrel dog began to lick her cheek voraciously with his sopping wet tongue, so wide and flat and soft, a miniature pink fleshy cape soaked through and oozing with liquid salivary gratitude; after all, she had rescued him from the clutches of Bernard, the curmudgeonly one-eyed dogcatcher, whose own tongue — she remembered vividly the tongues of all her lovers — was coarse and lethargic, like a slug in a sandpaper trenchcoat.
Be sure to check out the “Vile Puns” section. The winner of “Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award”:
Upon discovering that Miles Black, the famous phrenologist from Yorkshire was going to take up yodeling to lonely goats in Bali, James White decided to balance four planks of wood on a beer keg and call it an abstract work of art in the style of a famous fourteenth-century architect, just going to prove that people will read any old garbage if they think there will be a good pun at the end of it.
(…and of course I was very, very drunk.)
Thu 14th My colleagues Tim and Matt rabbit on about modern Christchurch architecture. Lots of concrete squares and triangles. 10 Comments
Thu 14th After the death of Nurit Peled-Elhanan‘s 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, in a Palestinian suicide bomber’s attack in 1997, she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza:
My little girl was murdered because she was an Israeli by a young man who was humiliated, oppressed and desperate to the point of suicide and murder, just because he was a Palestinian. Now their blood is mixed on the stones of Jerusalem that have long been indifferent to children’s blood. We, who were not wise enough to free our children from the grip of hate and racism before they found their final rest, need to look at their mutilated bodies and innocent faces, and ask ourselves, with the poetesse Anna Akhmatova, Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of their cheek?
Enjoy the Unspectacle
Clothes are clean enough to wear if they don’t particularly smell when I pick them up off my floor.
I eat too much junk food. Like, waaay too much. Occasionally I eat my entire daily recommended calorie allowance in potato chips.
Sometimes I pick movies based solely on the number of warnings on the rating label. Nine times out of ten they’re complete crap. Related: sometimes I watch movies with my finger on the 16x-scan-forward button.
Most of my crazy-alternative lifestyle choices are just because I got sick of something. Getting rid of my bed? Sick of no space in my bedroom. Losing the car? Sick of paying maintenance and insurance for something I hardly used.
Sometimes I do slightly OCD-like things. If given the chance, I will spend far too much time rearranging small items by various different taxonomies, like colour, size or shape. I also like to pick aesthetically-pleasing paths across paved (tiled) or cracked areas, which sometimes looks like I’m doing a little dance. However, I can stop anytime I want. And I only get a little irritated when people mess up my pleasing arrangements.
Wed 13th
Last Sunday, pastor Irwin Alton, 62, preached against several specific sins during his sermon. Some people in the audience gasped with recognition.
“When he talked about skipping mid-week service to go to the lake, and buying a new boat when you haven’t tithed, I felt nailed to my pew,” said one man. “It was like the Holy Spirit was speaking right to me.”
But it wasn’t the Holy Spirit — it was the man’s own blog where he had posted photos of himself and his buddies on his new boat on a Wednesday evening.
Pastor Alton, who cultivates a reputation as a computer illiterate techno-phobe, is actually an avid reader of MySpace pages, blogs and personal websites of the people in his congregation.
“I appear, shall we say, un-hip,” he says. “Therein lies my advantage.”
Tue 12th Saul Williams again, talking about his vegan diet:
Some might argue that artists are a race or species apart from the common person. Yet we all identify with the teachings of Gandhi, the genius of Einstein, the art of Leonardo Da Vinci, Picasso, Rembrandt and the talent and compassion of living artists like Alice Walker, Will Smith, The Mars Volta, Dead Prez, Prince and countless others. Some of us choose to emulate their styles, their fashion, their career choices, but why not their diets? If our brightest most celebrated stars all have this one thing in common why are we so slow in connecting the dots for ourselves? Perhaps the biggest issue at hand is not what our cars run on, but essentially what do we run on? The fact is that factory farms are the number one users of crude oil, not cars. That’s basically what it takes to kill approximately one million chickens per hour (just in the US). More than half of our water supply goes to feed animals being fattened for slaughter. The methane gases that contribute to global warming are produced majorly by cow farts in factory farms, not to mention the amount of fossil fuels needed to create just one pound of beef.
Yep. You doing the math? Basically if we shifted our compassion towards animals, the domino effect would heal the planet. We’d no longer be cutting down rain forests to create more space for cows to graze, we’d stop depleting the ocean of the necessary (keyword: necessary) food chains that our eco system depends on, diseases including many cancers, heart disease, obesity, and others which find their root in the food/toxins we ingest would slowly disappear as would our taste for violence.
(See also Wikipedia’s list of notable people who are vegans or vegetarians. It’s pretty huge.) 4 Comments
Tue 12th
I received a lot of questions from some about why I would allow my song ‘List of Demands’ to be used in a Nike campaign. Ironically, half of the people now reading this post never heard of me until that commercial aired. That, indeed, was one of my reasons for allowing it. A small circle of poets and conscious do-gooders are not enough to effect the change necessary to shift our planet in peril. We must enlist people from all walks of life, people not accustomed to questioning the norm, people who may simply want to dance uninterrupted without message or slogan. I see no glory in ‘preaching to the converted’. Furthermore, I believe fully in the power of music and have branded my work with it’s own conscientious stamp and stomp of attitude fueled to steal the show in the face of the nonsensical. Quite simply, it was clear to me that people would not be rushing to the store to buy Nikes after seeing that commercial, but rather rushing to youtube or itunes to hear or download the song. I even imagined those who would be rushing to blogs to question how I could allow this to happen and the subsequent discussion of the ethical treatment of factory workers and how new minds would be informed and enlisted in the struggle for ethical change.
— Saul Williams
Sat 9th
when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.
Oh. Shit. 4 Comments
