As much as I like any critter with the word “pod” in it’s name, just knowing that these things are crawling around down there makes me never want to go diving at all. Not. At. All.
[via Neatorama]
Hitting the global reset button
What would happen if people disappeared off the earth? The New Scientist investigates…
All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilization ever lived here.
Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilization, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.
And then Sterling digs up that Gulf Of Cambay sunken city story from a couple years ago. Four years later, there’s no apparent conclusion to the story, so it’s something for the same file cabinet as the Bimini Road. Putting both stories together makes me wonder just how many times this has happened before, going back 70 million years or so when one sauropod asked his buddy if that comet was worth worrying about. Because you need more things to worry about, here’s NASA’s Asteroid Comet Impact Hazard page.
Tower Records
I honestly don’t remember the last time I bought a record (for sake of discussion here, I’ll denote all possible audio delivery media systems as “records”) at Tower Records. Cynics and self-professed new media experts will naturally suggest that was the problem with the “Records” part of Tower: Tower didn’t establish a 21st century identity, Tower’s business was too archaic, Tower closed it’s eyes and pretended that it would all go away, Tower was the stereotype guy-lost-in-desert with the vultures of iTunes and Amoeba circling overhead, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
As with everyone else that’s blogging about Tower this week, I spent GDP-sized cash at Tower and contributed mightily to altering the earth’s rotation from the movement of vinyl from Tower to home. My home base from 1981 through 1986 was Tower Records in El Toro – not the new one near Laguna Hills Mall, but the old store in the Rockfield/El Toro Blvd. strip mall. If El Toro was sold out of something then another one (Brea, West Covina, Sunset Blvd. were my favorite substitutes) might have it and after all – they are all open until midnight!
I’m not bemoaning the loss of Tower, but it’s worth a blog post because Tower was one of the last remnants of 1970s rock-and-roll culture. Despite all attempts to modernize (remember “Tower Alternative?”), that bright yellow bag with the narrow fonts was as iconic of that era as Licorice Pizza, priority ticket wrist bands, giant wall-sized airbrushed album art, the movies FM and Roadie, satin tour jackets, and giant KMET-sized “Whoo-Yas.” Hell, I remember when Tower El Toro still had a head shop (hidden behind a curtain, as if it was porn or something). Other things I remember fondly about Tower are:
- Finding an original copy of Pink Floyd’s “Point Me At The Sky” 7″ for $3.
- The secret parking lot behind Tower El Toro, where much closer parking spaces were available.
- Random in-store concerts: The Dream Syndicate (see below) and the Meat Puppets were my faves.
- Whoever it was that kept playing Roxy Music’s Avalon at twenty minutes until closing time.
- Whoever it was that kept playing Roxy Music’s Avalon at twenty minutes until closing time.
- The day when Rush’s Hold Your Fire and Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason were released on the same day. Every loner rocker in South O.C. was in Tower that morning.
- The outstanding zine selection in most every Tower.
The last time I bought something at a Tower was a copy of Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up And Start Again, which is basically a catalog of everything that I bought at Tower Records twenty-five years ago. “What goes around” I suppose…
Photo of The Dream Syndicate playing at Tower Records El Toro in 1982. If memory serves, I’m standing somewhere behind and to the left the cameraman. I had no idea this was even filmed until I ran across the DVD at Fingerprints a couple weeks ago. Gotta love those prices back then.
Futurists Gone Wild: The Fiat rooftop test track
It’s one of those pieces of cultural knowledge that I could kick myself for not knowing already (there’s a lot: case in point, I hadn’t seen Rebel Without A Cause until a couple months ago), especially since it’s on top of the intersection of three lines of CKB-bait: machine age art movements, architecture, and automobiles.
In 1921 the Fiat company built a new factory in Lingotto, Turin, and to maintain compatibility with the proper Italian-futurist manifestos of the time, a test track was built on the roof…
(photo from the New York Times Archive obviously)
Raw materials for cars would enter on the first floor with the assembly line continuing upwards in a spiral until the finished Fiats exited on the roof where the test track was. Reminds me of Steve Jobs’ dream factory: a beachfront site that would process the sand into silicon and output fully-formed PCs at the other end.
After reading about the factory in Banham’s Theory And Design In The First Machine Age, I concluded that there was just no way something so awesomely absurd could still exist. Bzzt! The Lingotto factory is still around and was repurposed into a conference and sports center complete with a swank hotel. (Google map link)
Back to the future, forward into the past
Shagadelic baby! I hope they can get the folks who put together Encounter at LAX to handle the interiors for the spaceport terminal.
I have to wonder though. Is 21st century space travel already a post-ironic retro event? Most of these private space efforts have been kick-started by memories of old “Man Into Space” documentaries and irritation at NASA’s endless stream of broken promises, so I shouldn’t be surprised that “the future” as it’s being constructed now resembles the future as we remembered it being. Nostalgia, but nostalgia for events that haven’t yet occurred. It’s an odd sense of temporal displacement, like going from the classic ’60s Mustang to the current retro-Mustang without all the stuff in between. All those Derek Meddings and Roger Dean designs were supposed to be art, not actual blueprints.
i like it. I’ll bet the folks on the ISS are jealous.
Bridge To Nowhere
The “Bridge To Nowhere” is another one of those oddball LA knowledge artifacts like the old Nike missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains and the sunken city of San Pedro. I haven’t been up to the bridge since the 80s (and didn’t take any pictures), but Metroblogging LA fills in the details and links to the requisite Flickr picture set.
What’s missing is the requisite Google Map link, so here you go.
Mr. Rogers: Jedi mind control master
In 1969 the US Senate had a hearing on funding the newly developed Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The proposed endowment was $20 million, but President Nixon wanted it cut in half because of the spending going on in the Vietnam War. This is an video clip of the exchange between Mr. Rogers and Senator Pastore, head of the hearing. Senator Pastore starts out very abrasive and by the time Mr. Rogers is done talking, Senator Pastore’s inner child has heard Mr. Rogers and agreed with him.
[youtube]3Sd7TcVH670[/youtube]
Optimus Mini Three
The Optimus Mini Three looks kinda cool – a three button keyboard with tiny organic LCD screens as the buttons. Sure it’s gimmicky, but it, er, pushes all the correct nerd buttons.
If I had one though (and this is completely contingent about there being Mac drivers for it – which don’t exist yet), I’d program it to display a random selection of display graphics from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I always dug those screens in the background that displayed cryptic status reports for “ATM” or “NAV.”
Extra! Extra!
I’ve had a variety of jobs over the years: fax machine repairman, auto deliverer, corporate spy, and various combinations of IT wrangler and network garbage collector. Couple months ago I added “television extra” to the list and here I am as “fifth guy from the left” (the tall one with his right arm in the air) in last night’s episode of Cold Case.
Madison Avenue meets MKULTRA
Dick Destiny notices that the CIA has been running recruitment advertisements on television, specifically King Of The Hill. I’ve seen the same commercials… running on VH-1’s The Drug Years show.
Apparently their irony sense is still impaired, or VH-1 has a better sense of humor than I thought.