Category: Uncategorized

Headline of the week: “Rising Temps, Oceans, and Greenhouse Gas Proof of Weird, Unrelated Happenings” [via bottomquark]

Sergey Goldgaber has become the first person to comment on anything. I feel like I should run around in the streets shouting or something.

A forward from the U-Spaces mailing list (which itself was forwarded from the BOMP list)…

In the 1960’s there was the American psychedelic music scene, and there was the English psychedelic music scene. Were they the same? Let’s compare, shall we?

American: Timothy Leary has all the answers
English: Lewis Carroll has all the answers

American: “Further!”
English: Backwards

American: We want to be treated like adults.
English: We want to be children again.

American: Let’s write a song about the man who sells us drugs
English: Let’s write a song about the man who sells us groceries

American: Long, shaggy hair
English: Long, neatly trimmed hair

American: Dress like everyone else in the movement, visit the thrift shop
English: Dress like everyone else in the movement, visit the boutique

American: Challenge pop music standards
English: Make sure it’s got a nice melody.

American: Hammond organ
English: Harpsichord

American: Electric Kool Aid
English: Tea

American: Hash brownies
English: Biscuits (normal ones)

American: Long, often boring, aimless and chaotic jamming, mostly weird guitar sounds (the guitarist is the icon of our country’s psych movement), loosely centered around a main tune to start and end on…This is our musical depiction of space travel, and it is enhanced by the awesome light show going on above us as we play. We’re The Grateful Dead.
English: Long, often boring, aimless and chaotic jamming, mostly weird guitar sounds (the guitarist is the icon of our country’s psych movement), loosely centered around a main tune to start and end on…This is our musical depiction of space travel, and it is enhanced by the awesome light show going on above us as we play. We’re Pink Floyd.

American: Let’s take a trip to that inner world of our mind… and write a song about it.
English: Let’s take a trip to the park… and write a song about it.

American: LBJ is a drag.
English: Maybe Harold Wilson would like to join us?

American: Psychedelic music is a live performance experience
English: Psychedelic music is a studio thing.

American: On the bus
English: On the morning train

American: Songs about Little Men (the oppressed, the minority, the victims of establishment and anyone else who can’t get their voice heard)
English: Songs about Little Men (trolls, gnomes, fairies, etc.)

Years ago during my SCA days I built a yurt out of some wood moulding and a old Navy practice parachute. Modern yurts have evolved into RVs with toilets, sinks, and solar power (for that all-important net access).

*sigh* Brilliant, cranky, and a teller of tall tales, Lafferty was one of the greatest short story writers in the field (as important as Avram Davidson, and Theodore Sturgeon) Bibliography here. Everyone go read Nine Hundred Grandmothers and Continued On Next Rock right now.

Chandler wrote this in 1948. Things haven’t changed much since…

If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, “In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived “; if you can laugh, and you probably will, at the cast-off jokes from the comedians on the stage, stuff that wasn’t good enough to use on their radio shows; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamour queens (you ought to hear them with four martinis down the hatch); if you can do all these things with grace and pleasure, and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats but not from that awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong, because this sort of vulgarity is part of its inevitable price.

[via The Morning News]

One of the stars of Douglas Adams’ Last Chance To See is making a hopeful comeback. In the past two months, 23 new kakapo chicks were born. At this time last year, there were only 62 kakapos in the world.

Bruce Sterling on the post post-Internet collapse environment…

Graying cyberpunk that I am … all carpal-tunnel and bifocals … I can well remember some weirdo pals in the Information-Wants-to-Be-Free contingent, idly wondering what would happen if the business world ever “discovered the Internet.” Obviously they would buy up every machine in sight and try to make a profit at it. That much was dead obvious, for that was the period’s Reagan-Thatcherite modus operandi. Clearly all us artsy cybergoofballs would have to find some other place to chatter and swap our lies, like, say, faxes or CB radio.

But one scenario was way too far-fetched and idealistic, even for the likes of us. What if it turned out that the Net was just plain too much for business to handle? That it was downright toxic to free enterprise?

500 billion tons of Antarctic ice disintegrates in less than a month. Yup, just keep telling yourself that global warming doesn’t exist. And if it does, it’s your fault for consuming not the fault of MegaCorp, Republicans, etc. [via bottomquark]

Written specifically to counter the book “The Lorax”, by Dr. Seuss, our industry believes “Truax” more closely represents todays forest management than the scenario described by Dr. Seuss.

I am so utterly offended, I don’t know where to start.