Ladd Observatory, Providence

Chris Perridas has been blogging about H.P. Lovecraft and his time in Providence, Rhode Island and his post today featured the Ladd Observatory. Originally built in 1891, Lovecraft used to hang out there quite a bit:

Ladd remains a living museum of 19th century astronomy practices, complete with creaking staircases and a pleasantly musty attic smell.”

“Some of those rooms, like the one that houses the old transit telescopes, haven’t been fully renovated. As the door creaks open, visitors are greeted by a blast of cold air. The lights don’t work, but Targan shows groups around anyway, with the aid of a flashlight, pointing out how the telescopes were used to keep time by tracing the stars along the sky’s meridian. In the dark, with various strange-looking contraptions covered in dark sheets, the building has a certain haunted house-quality, and indeed, Ladd is said to be haunted by at least one ghost — that of noted Providence fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft. “Did he ever come here?” a visitor asks. “Are you kidding?” Jackson says. “He had a key to the place.” As a teenager, Lovecraft displayed a keen interest in the skies, even writing regular articles about astronomy for Providence newspapers. And he enjoyed the run of the observatory, thanks to then-director Winslow Upton, a friend of the Lovecraft family.”

I took a mini-Lovecraftian tour of Providence on my Loop The USA road trip in 1994 and fell in love with the little observatory the second I saw it.

Ladd Observatory

I have my doubts that the swing set out front can ward off Eldrich Horrors, but maybe that’s how you summon Them in the first place.

Picture & Movie Of The Month

September 10, 1967: a lovely night for an upscale dinner and cabaret show in Stockholm, Sweden. What’s the show tonight? Some underground band from Britain calling themselves The Pink Floyd…

pfloyd_stockholm67dinner.jpg

I can only imagine the hilarity that resulted…

Next is what happens when 100 people suddenly start chasing you:

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(via Brain Damage and TV In Japan)

One more phone post

I couldn’t let this screamingly hilarious quote from Cingular exec Glenn Lurie go by without comment…

While “there are bad guys out there that unlock phones,” Lurie said, Apple and Cingular are taking unspecified steps to make the phone more difficult to unlock and use on other GSM carriers in the US.

Bad guys like, oh, Nokia who sell unlocked phones directly. I’m still convinced that in the medium-to-long term Cingular will end up being the overall loser.

Robert Anton Wilson R.I.P.

Robert Anton Wilson was pretty much responsible for a lot of things (Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, secret societies, Church Of The SubGenius, giant squid, the MC5) that have entertained/enlightened me over the years. One of the few times I ever went out of my way to get a book signed was to have Wilson sign my copy of the Illuminatus trilogy. In return he made me a Discordian Pope.

As reported all around the Web recently, Wilson had been in pretty ill health and this morning he finally passed away. The last post on his blog being:

Various medical authorities swarm in and out of here predicting I have between two days and two months to live. I think they are guessing. I remain cheerful and unimpressed. I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying.

Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.

RAW

There are two stories that immediately come to mind. One of them I was mixed up with and the other one I wasn’t.

In 1991 or 1992, there was an event at the Masonic Temple on Wilshire here in Los Angeles called “Millennial Madness.” As part of the festivities, Wilson directed a live-action game entitled “The Conspiracy Game” (or something close to that). No one really knew what the game was going to be like, much less what the context was, or what would even constitute a victory condition. Even then, that’s assuming that such a game could even be “won.”

Anyway, me and a confederate figured that it would be endlessly fun and worthwhile to hack it. Earlier that day we printed up “game effect cards” which contained official-looking instructions to do things like:

  • Walk like Richard Nixon on psychotropic drugs
  • BE HYPERACTIVE!
  • Channel *Zontar* the extragalatic alien entity
  • Feel their “eyes” upon you
  • Fight for truth, justice, and the American Way!
  • Talk like Donald Duck on Prozac
  • Sing a song!
  • ANGST!
  • Conduct a funeral mass for Oscar The Grouch
  • Act alternative!
  • Summon Cthulhu
  • Scheme! Don’t let others keep you from your God-given right to be a megalomaniac!
  • Don’t worry, and be happy!
  • Pray
  • Howl at the moon (or at anyone else)

The cards stated how long the game effect should last and to pass the along to someone else once the effect expired. The two of us dressed up like M.I.B.s, acted as most authoritative as we could, and went to town…

Mild pandemonium resulted. People weren’t sure what was going on with the real game, but the game effect cards were circulating everywhere. Adding to the chaos, we handed out floppy discs instructing people to “do not let this out of your sight until you make contact with your controlling agent. Your controller will notify you with a sign at the appropriate time.” Given the cryptic nature of the game to begin with, no one was really sure what was going on except that a couple hundred people were experiencing multiple levels of weapons-grade confusion. In conclusion: job well done.

We decided that the high point of the evening was when someone gave the “Talk like Donald Duck on prozac” card to Wilson himself, and he did it!

Just prior to the Millennial Madness prank, Wilson was interviewed on a late-night radio talk show here in L.A. One caller asked him if he knew anything about Disneyland being laid-out in a geomantic pattern – similar to how the Washington D.C. street layout contains Masonic symbols. Wilson said that he hadn’t heard of anything like that but related a story of a friend of his who every year would take LSD just before going into Disneyland. When he would peak, the guy would go into the room with the animatronic Mickey Mouse and ask Mickey philosophical questions and what he should do for the next year. Mickey would reply. Wilson observed “here’s a guy whose God is visible, tangible, and responds to questioning. I think he’s very lucky.”

Keep the lasagna flying indeed. Ewige Blumenkraft!

One more iPhone post

Some late night thoughts on the iPhone…

This is only Apple’s second major consumer electronic release and an initial Cingular-exclusive release means that Apple has to support only one network/data plan. If Apple had just sold the phone as is, a zillion people with more money than sense would snap it up, wonder why it didn’t work with Sprint/Verizon/AlfredENewmanTel and then compose two zillion web pages about how Apple’s iPhone sucks it.

A similar situation occurred with the roll-out of the iPod. At first, iPods were Mac-only and only later rolled out to Windows after having gone through a generation of improvement.

My gut tells me that Apple will open iPhones up to any carrier with iPhone rev. 2. My gut also wants an iPhone, but not enough to compromise my current set-up with an unlocked Nokia 6682 (works anywhere! use any SIM card!) and T-Mobile’s service.

Let the Apple Phone backlash begin

I love the new phone, but I’ve got questions…

  • No tactile surface on the phone makes me wonder how well non-line-of-sight dialing will work. I’ve griped about this before.
  • Cingular as the service provider? At least my T-Mobile contract will have expired by the time the phone ships.
  • Locking the phone to Cingular (if in fact that’s the case) sticks in my craw. What happens if I visit another country and I want to put a prepaid SIM card in it?
  • How come Yahoo can push out IMAP email to it, but can’t get it’s own new mail client to work in Safari?
  • For that matter, why can’t .Mac push email out to it?
  • I wonder how soon DarwinPorts builds will be available on it. Having a phone-portable version of Wireshark would be significantly awesome.
  • With all the sharing/collaborative stuff that’s supposed to be included into Leopard Server, I can see this being a direct replacement for corporate Exchange/Blackberry servers. I’m envisioning an “Allow iPhone Connections” checkbox in Leopard Server Admin. A million network admins will stand up and applaud if this happens.
  • Sucks to be RIM, Palm, and Nokia right now.

Equally as important, but not mentioned in the keynote at all is the new Airport base station. You can connect a USB hard drive to it and have an instant media server.

Strange Days…

Gas smells in NYC. Killer bees in New Orleans. Dead birds in Austin. Encephalitis outbreak in Rhode Island. UFO sighting over O’Hare.

Still, I think my favorite weird/unexplained story is from Antarctica (via The Adventure Blog). Team N2I is busy kite-skiing to the Southern Pole Of Inaccessibility – the point in Antarctica that is the furthest from the surrounding ocean. This point hasn’t been visited since 1958 yet last week the team encountered tracks:

It was here we began to make serious ground – only to be stopped in our tracks…..by tracks! Henry who was leading noticed that there was a line of disturbance in the ice. Slowing down as it was hard in the poor visibility (simular to whiteout conditions whilst skiing) to make out whether it was a crevase or not, he was amazed to find there were 3 massive sets of caterpillar tracks stretching into the distance. They apeared relatively fresh – not more than a day or so. This is an absolute mystery as there are no bases in the area we are crossing and have heard no reports of any activity in this rarely visited part of the Antaractic – especially when considering how far out from the coast we are.

Someone down there joyriding in the snow cat? Or Something/one Else?

Domo arigato, Mr. Ando

Millions of students around the world raise their bowls in respect.

Momofuku Ando, the Japanese inventor of instant noodles, has died, according to Nissin Food Products Co, the company he founded. He was 96.

Ando died of a heart attack on Friday, Nissin said in a statement today on its corporate website.

He was born in Taiwan in 1910, when the island was under Japanese colonial rule. He moved to Japan in 1933, according to Japan’s daily Mainichi newspaper.

Faced with food shortages in post Second World War Japan, Ando developed the idea that a quality, convenient noodle product would help feed the masses. He founded Nissin in 1948.

In 1958 Chicken Ramen, the first instant noodle product, was introduced after many trials. Following its success, the company continued to add innovative products, including Cup Noodle in 1971.

I rent a storage unit across the street from the Nissin plant in Irvine. Always thought it was a good omen…

James Burke’s Day The Universe Changed podcast

Much like Carl Sagan, James Burke‘s books and TV shows are things that I’ll always automatically stop for. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, if Burke is covering it – it’ll be worth your time. His famous Connections series are usually playing on the Science Channel, but his series The Day The Universe Changed is much harder to find. That is until now, as the series is now being podcasted.