Synchronicity

I finish reading bell hooks' "Eating the Other" and what do I find on the Internets but this:



Polish rappers appropriating Indian beats and instruments, and presenting their music in a video that gives a wildly exoticized (re)presentation of South Asian people. The youtube comments, at least the ones in English, gush about the creativity and originality of the music. I wonder what the ones in Polish say. I also wonder what extent the English praise is boosted by the doubly exotic position of the music from the point of view of an English-speaking audience.

Just short thoughts and sharing.

Guess where this photo came from

Well? What do you think?

It wasn't the space shuttle or the space station.

Not a military spy satellite or plane.

Not a commercial satellite.

Not the concord.

Not Spaceship One.

This picture was taken by SABLE-3 (the Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment 3) a nikon coolpix digital camera lashed to a weather balloon by a bunch of Canadian amateur radio hobbyists. They reached an altitude of 120,000 feet, and took that picture - showing the curvature of the earth, the thin blue haze of the atmosphere, and the cold black of space - with over-the-counter and DIY built equipment, and what must have been a relatively modest budget. Certainly no more than many other middle-class folks plow into boats and sporting gear.

I think that's pretty cool.

Naomi Klein on "Shock Capitalism"

A short film to promoter her new book. Looks interesting.

A True Name, A Name To Conjour With

There is a line from Neuromancer, I can't remember it exactly. Case is talking about names with one of the AIs, Neuromancer probably. At some point the idea comes up that if Case had the AI's name, he could wield some power over it.

An idea Gibson probably gleaned from watching early computer operators playing with command line interfaces on old time-share mainframes. The operator traces a thin green string of characters in an arcane language, maybe something like "ls -al|grep config," unreadable to those who have not been trained in the art, across a black screen, and in response to his utterance, his magic spell, the machine-demon jumps to life, does the bidding of its master. A magic language for postmodernity. Words made electrons made actions. A semiotic conundrum.

And nothing new. After all, in the beginning there was the Word...

Command lines are buried now, lost behind the flash of modern graphical operating systems. Windows, especially, has only the faintest traces of old DOS - its command line ancestor - left. My little MacBook, with its spiffy OSX, actually has a bit more command line there if one should want it, and it even responds to incantions in UNIX, the same ancient magical tongue (more or less) that the mainframe operators of yore summoned their creatures with. But I rarely invoke this feature. The graphical age does all I need it to. Sometimes I play with the command line, just for fun. Just for the feeling (an illusion, in my case) of having "bare metal" mastery over my machine.

But the age of Google has brought about a new form of the Digital True Name. The search string. Take for example, my search this evening for a long lost old friend. I tried to google his real name, but to no avail. Then several pseudonyms I knew him to write fiction under. Still, no dice. Finally, I entered the name of an old cable access television show he and another friend had produced, long ago.

And there he was, or at least, some aspect of him, conjured into being by my utterance of his name. One of his names. The right one. He had, as I suspected he would, succumbed to the temptation of dropping his old cable access show onto YouTube. He had also uploaded some more recent work.

So, despite the years and miles between us, despite our long ago falling out, despite my terrible suspicion that sending any message to him would just reveal there was nothing for us to say to each other anymore, I was able tonight to see the current face and hear the current voice of my old friend. Just by guessing the right name to call him by.

McLuhan said that communications technology would both "extend" our nervous systems and expose us to "auto-amputation" of senses and other capacities not carried by the media we relied on for this extension. I am reminded by this by my episode with my old friend tonight, and even more so by my experience lately with some more recent friends, who have just moved some distance away and thus retreated into the electronic ghost-hood that characterizes long-distance friendships in our electronic age.

I'm grateful for the "magic" technology that allows us to remain, at least in some tenuous way, linked to each other, but at the same time frustrated by the high-speed, instrumental, capitalist system that seems to insist that we must all remain in constant motion, always shedding our friends, never having the chance to build lasting communities, if we wish to "succeed."

What to do about it, though, is a question I can't find a search string to answer.

Belated Video Blog

Its ain't real time, but here is the story of my trip across the southwest, as told in video clips!

Being Creative

On a regular basis is hard. Without fail, even those who are the best at it have bad days. When one of my favorites, like Garrison Keillor, has a string of bad days - or even just "less than perfect" days - it gets me down, because I worry that maybe that source of beauty that I loved, their creativity, may be in decline (because of old age perhaps) and maybe it will never come back.

With Keillor, however, my worry was clearly misplaced. His latest column for Salon.com
knocks it clear out of the park, a welcome change from his last few at bats, which had been a little lackluster IMHO.

The best part, his handy inversion of the usual logic of illegal immigration. I'd been looking for as tidy a way to do this for awhile now. He writes:

"[Karl Rove's] last big assignment was to get the immigration bill passed. It failed in large part because Congress is tired of Mr. Rove and his boy-genius high-handedness. Instead, Homeland Security announced a new crackdown on illegal immigrants, which aroused protests from farmers who said that 70 percent of farmworkers today are illegal -- a stunning fact, if true: Most of the people who pick our beans and tomatoes are men and women forced to sneak across the border, and why? Because they're a security threat? No. So that we can get them cheap, that's why."

Exactly. The usual rhetoric sneers at undocumented immigrants for wanting to "jump to the front of the line" of folks waiting to get into the United States. No one ever seems to ask why there is such a long and complicated line in the first place.

Summer Wrap-Up

Classes start in 3 weeks. I have to work for those 3 weeks if I want to be ready, so vacation is basically over. But what a summer vacation! In the last 30 days I have:

Traveled almost 9,000 miles by road.

Visited the following states:

Indiana
Illinois
Missouri
Arkansas
Texas
New Mexico
Arizona
Colorado
Nebraska
Iowa
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Delaware
New York
Connecticut
New Jersey

Crossed or visited the following water bodies:

Mississippi River
Arkansas River
Pecos River
Red River
Rio Grande
San Antonio River
Missouri River
Seneca Lake
Hudson River
Susquehanna River
Atlantic Ocean
Long Island Sound

Reconnected with some old friends.

And, last but not least, I've started dating a remarkable young woman.

Now I just need to do all the work I was going to do during my "quiet summer."

Last On The Trip Post : Gallup

I've had a great time these last two weeks. The last few days have been amazing. I can't post much now, I've gotta crash out here at the Gallup Super 8 (on historic route 66!) so we can start back for home eeeearly in the morning. I'll post more pics and other stuff soon, probably the week after next. I have some things to attend to this next week :) Good things.

Here's one picture from our time in Arizona to tide you over.

Update: Trip Cyber-connectedness

I went ahead and upgraded to a flickr pro account. Lots more pictures coming up. I also managed to massage youtube into accepting a video upload today, so I have a few videos to share. They are silly, but folks might like 'em.

On the Trip Post 5: Las Cruces and New Mexico Adventures

The image above is about the best representation I was able to make of what I'm looking at right now, sunrise over the valley where Las Cruces, New Mexico is located. The picture is lousy, the actual view is insanely better. Waking up to this the last two mornings has been a real treat.

The climate here is also a treat, after San Antonio's muggy oppression. The air here is dry, and feels comfortable well into the 90s. At night, things cool off dramatically, and there is a breeze off the valley. It's quite wonderful.

The drive out here was fun. East Texas was neat, but still looked somewhat familiar. The trees and foliage weren't the same, but there were plenty of trees and foliage. Once you cross the hills west of San Antonio and head into West Texas, however, things become more arid and the flora becomes the sort of scrubby desert plant life you expect from the stereotypical "west." We also saw our share of mountains and canyons. That drive is fairly well documented on the flickr page.

Yesterday we took a side roadtrip and went up to Roswell, New Mexico - site of the supposed 1947 alien saucer crash. They were having a convention to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the crash, and there were lots of brightly costumed folks about. We also stopped in White Sands to see the national monument and missile base there, and in Alamagordo so I could buy a T-shirt with the name of the first Atom Bomb test site on it. I posted a few pictures of that trip on Flickr, but I'm running out of bandwidth on my flickr account!

Today is Carlsbad Caverns and El Paso, Texas. El Paso is of interest because it is closely connected with its counterpart city immediately across the border, Juarez, Mexico - so it becomes a site to investigate US/Mexican relations and Chicana border culture. Carlsbad is mostly of interest because it is home to a species of massive, man-eating bats. I am unafraid, however, because I am extremely brave.

On the Trip Post 4: Finishing Up San Antonio

We leave San Antonio, Texas in the Morning to drive to Las Cruces, New Mexico. We've decided to take a smaller highway and stay off Interstate 10, the better to see some area towns and sights. Our new route bounces us off the US/Mexico Border several times, which is appropriate for a class devoted to the study of border culture. I'm looking forward to the trip. Some more pictures of San Antonio are up on my Flickr, mostly they show the Spanish Missions here. I'll be uploading more, sending pictures to Flickr through these KOA wireless connections is like sending them through a tin-can telephone. Some key moments here in San Antonio:

-Hanging out with Chicano artist Joe Lopez, checking out his studio and his work and hearing his stories about growing up here and becoming an artist. Then heading out with him and a friend to a local restaurant where they served about the greatest chicken-fried steak ever.

-The constant presence of flights of egrets, which always seem to arrange themselves in these staggered V formations, like a checkmark, in the sky especially at dusk.

-Watching a rock band composed of 3 anglo air-force master sergeants, in full dress uniform no less, play "867-5309" to a crowd of folks from the west-side Barrio here before the fireworks on the fourth of July.

Fun stuff. More as soon as I have connectivity again.

On the Trip Post 3: A bit more from San Antonio

Check the flickr for a whole bunch more photos from here in San Antonio, Texas. Normally I try to do a bit of photoshop work before I upload and clean things up a bit. No time for that now. I just thought I would share.

Most of the photos in that set show the students checking out Say Si!, an after-school community art program here. It was a really interesting program and the man introducing the students to it, a former student of one of our faculty, was really great and friendly and informative. I also took some shots of an interesting looking factory that I think was producing sugar for the pioneer sugar company.

After that, we brought the guys to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, where we talked about resisting war and oppression with some of the folks there. Esperanza is a center for the queer community here, and that was a bit of a challenge for some of our kids who come from rural communities, but it was a great experience and really broadened their horizons.

After that we went by the San Antonio Riverwalk, which was crap, but I did see the worst lounge act ever at this silly "Irish Pub" there. Mike L., if you are reading this, he was like some bizarro world version of you playing the piano.

On the Trip Post 2: Briefly from San Antonio

For Chris, who likes pictures of plants.

More Soon.

On the Trip Post 1: Driving West

I took a lot of pictures from the car, but uploading files here at the San Antonio KOA rather taxes the limited wireless internet connection I have access to. Also, many of them are crap, as pictures taken from a moving vehicle so often are. Here is one kinda decent shot of the mighty Mississippi, as we crossed it near Cairo, Illinois.



Otherwise it has been an uneventful trip thus far. We covered parts of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas during our drive, which took up 20 of the last 48 hours. The interstate never changes. The strip-mall that effectively extends from Austin to San Antonio could easily have been mistaken for a strip mall anywhere else. I do find it kind of cool that the radio stations have gone from the "w" prefix to the "k" prefix, thus indicating we are officially in "the west." But mostly that just shows that I am a nerd.

Today is our first day checking stuff out in San Antonio. More updates to follow.

Pre-trip pics

Checking Out Gordon's Place 2.jpg
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

We haven't left yet, but here's my first trip post. Here's some of our students, getting to know one another and exploring the still-under-construction home of one of the professors on the trip. More pictures on my flickr.

And One More

I just want to post this one so I can find it for my own reference. Often, when I explain to my students that I expect their writing to tell me not just WHAT they think, but their reasoning in reaching those thoughts I will exclaim, in the voice of a seasame street cowboy "I wanna know why!" And then I'll end up explaining this sketch to them, and looking like a dork. At least now I know I remembered the sketch properly.

Not on the road yet

Just sitting at home, watchin' the youtubes. Here's a classic seasame street sketch.



I suppose the appropriation of reggae and the use of a faux-Carribean Black dialect "de" for "the" makes this part of America's long history of minstrelsy. Muppet-face, shall we call it? But, on the plus side, Ernie has the whole neighborhood in the bathtub with him! Pretty transgressive sexuality that.

I mean think about it. This was a mid 80s early 90s sketch if I remember correctly. Certainly part of the Sesame Street line up of my generation's youth. What was the fad of our college years?

Yeah, you guessed it, foam-dance parties... coincidence, I think not!

Watch This Space

I'll be on the road from June 30-July 15, driving a van for an undergraduate class taking a trip to the southwest. Stay tuned for pics and text (and maybe video) on my roadtrip.

Useful Exemplar

In my Ethnic Studies class, I teach my students that "Race is a social construct." That's basically all I try to teach them. It takes most of a semester to explain those five words. Mostly they mean that society tries to use biology to explain differences between people that are actually imposed on them by the social structure itself. Getting the student's to believe that and see how it happens is what takes the time. In a commencement speech this weekend, Gloria Steinem provided a useful example of the socially-constructed nature of the related concept of Gender. I think its a pretty good one.

"In my generation, we were asked by the Smith vocational office how many words we could type a minute, a question that was never asked of then all-male students at Harvard or Princeton. Female-only typing was rationalized by supposedly greater female verbal skills, attention to detail, smaller fingers, goodness knows what, but the public imagination just didn’t include male typists, certainly not Ivy League-educated ones.

Now computers have come along, and "typing" is "keyboarding." Suddenly, voila! --- men can type! Gives you faith in men’s ability to change, doesn’t it?"

---Gloria Steinem at Smith College:

I especially like her use of the term "public imagination" here. Shows how the way a group of people's shared means for imagining the world has a real impact on how that world happens.

The Problem With June

This was not, as they say, a productive weekend. That's the problem with June. Finding motivation. A month with fair weather is a month with contentment too close at hand, easy peace too readily available. I've spent the last four days reading easy, fun books of no academic use to me whatsoever (namely, Philip Pullman's excellent "His Dark Materials" series) listening to music (often Richard Buckner's "Dents and Shells"), riding my bike, and staring up at the sky. Quizzes have gone ungraded, research projects have stalled in their forward progress. Instead, I watched a turkey vulture and a pair of swallows circle into the sky on the updraft from the parking lot, and followed the story of a young girl's adventures with witches and armored bears. It felt good, but I know there's so much more I have to do if I want to make a difference, or even a living.

In any event, the upside is this, I am reminded again that anyone who needs more than a meal, a book, a sycamore tree and a decent sunset to feel happy is just stark nuts. Which is important to remember, as it suggests the world is currently being run by people who are absolutely batshit insane.

I Love Penny Arcade

If you don't read it already, and you have any interest in comics, video games, or the interwebz, read Penny-Arcade.

Frankly, I'm not sure anyone with any of those interests doesn't already read Penny Arcade. I mean, with material like this, how could you not?

I Had Posted

An obscenity-filled rant commemorating the death of hate-monger Jerry Faldwell, wishing him a variety of tortures in the afterlife and calling himself and his mother a variety of terrible names.

But now, I am sitting with my front door open, watching the first big thunderstorm of the year sweep into my little ohio town to the (very appropriate) accompaniment of Tom Wait's Rain Dogs, and my prior post seems rather childish, and not terribly useful. I have removed it.

A man has died. He wasn't a very nice man. We all die someday.

hi ho

For now, there are thunderstorms.

Notes on "Notes on A Scandal"

I wasn't terribly well prepared for last year's Oscars. When the award ceremony rolled around, I had only seen "The Departed" and a few minor movies nominated for tech awards. As it was the night of Scorsese finally getting his due, I was able to follow along somewhat. However, I was particularly intrigued by the clips of the Judi Dench / Cate Blanchett vehicle, "Notes on a Scandal," which took me completely by surprise... I hadn't seen it even advertised. I watched it tonight, and was fairly pleased.

SPOILER ALLERGY WARNING - REMAINDER OF THIS MESSAGE MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS OR HAVE BEEN PROCESSED ON EQUIPMENT THAT ALSO PROCESSES MESSAGES CONTAINING SPOILERS OR TREE NUTS

Annyway. I thought Judi Dench was just terrific. She really brought her character to life and made you see her the way she sees herself, later in the movie, when it becomes clear that the rest of the world thinks of her as a silly old crone, this comes as a genuine surprise (though obvious once you think of it). I suppose the way her character threatens to resurrect a certain stereotype of the predatory lesbian is very problematic, though at the same time I think the movie shows her character with enough complexity to disrupt the simple stereotype. I also found the way the film took her "impossible desire," if you will, seriously to be brave and interesting. I must confess, I was rather cheering for her because A) Judi Dench on Cate Blanchett action seemed really hot in an odd sort of way and B)because I had some sympathy for her desire for the unattainable, and her frustration at being trapped in a body that made it difficult for others to understand her desire and take it seriously.

And then, I suppose, there is the issue of class. This movie reminded me quite a bit of Fowles' The Collector in its portrayal of a sort of nightmare of the predatory lower class monster, morlock-like, stalking the upperclass, though I think Notes on a Scandal does a better job of indicting the upper-middle class for its own decadence and snobbery. Again, I think the complexity for Dench's character and the sympathy she evokes does a lot to defuse the stereotype. Issues of exploitation proper are absent, though perhaps outside the scope of the picture...

But, yeah, all in all, I really liked it.

Apology Note to Future Generation

Yeah, so... here's the thing. We broke:

-the Ozone Layer
-the Carbon Cycle
-the Ocean
-Honeybees
- [FILL IN ADDITIONAL WORLD CRISES AS NEEDED]

Hey, we also poisoned women's breast milk with persistent organic toxins, but that's not broken you know, babies can still drink it, it might just... you know... cause cancer or destroy their endocrine system later in life. But it also might not! Anyway, all this stuff is our bad. We feel just terrible. Really, geez, what boneheads right?

Anyway, we made a whole bunch of pictures of cats with silly captions and we hope that makes it up to you. I mean, at least we didn't fuck up the tectonic plates!

I mean, you know... yet...

Awwwwwwwwwww

Lookit frog and ladybug and their happy picnic lunch. I wish I had a Picnic lunch. Stupid essay.

WARNING: END OF SEMESTER HAS EFFECTIVELY LOBOTOMIZED ANDY!

The Depth of my Convictions

So I'm working on this paper on radical democracy and contemporary American politics. At about the same time I've transitioned over to using a google portal homepage pretty extensively. Thus abandoning my resistance to using such tools as they are closed-source, server side applications that entice users to abandon distributed, democratic internet practices for ultimately controlled, corporate spaces and tools (blogger, sadly, is another of these tools). What should I be doing, to be consistent between rhetoric and practice? Using my own webspace to participate in open source tool-building and internet-enabled participatory culture... but no, watch my theory and practice diverge. Ack.

And you know what really hooked me? Its pathetic. Google lets you theme your homepage with a little cartoon picture that changes to reflect your local time and weather. My choice this cute little froggy and ladybug seen pictured above toasting marshmellows by the fire. Of course, you have to reveal your zip code to your friends at google for the picture to synchronize correctly. This is the price google paid me to surrender information to the grand network subject formation process: a cartoon of a cute little froggy and a ladybug.

Aren't I a badass motherfucker of a revolutionary?

The saddest part of all? My emotional reaction to cartoon froggy and ladybug is one of adoration and tenderness. I love big brother. Why, I have always loved big brother...

Signing off from the electronic high frontier of hypocrisy,

Greatest Thing I Invented Today

The peanut-butter banana strawberry smoothy:

1 medium banana
1 cup vanilla soy milk
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp creamy peanut butter
3/4 cup frozen strawberries

add banana, sugar, peanut-butter and soy milk to blender. Blend until smooth. Add strawberries. Blend in pulses to break up the berries, then blend until smooth. Super good. mmmmmmmm....

Behold my New Flickr goodness... erm nearly goodness

Flatcar Piece 1
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures.

I've started a Flickr account for the express purpose of posting pictures of the freight trains that roll on by my apartment. I've got the first few pictures up, focusing on graffiti on the cars, since my first attempts at digital photography were too bad for anything more subtle (I really want to eventually capture the interesting rust and age on the some of these big boxcars and tank-cars). This, I think, is the best of my first few pics... check 'em out!

Kurt Vonnegut is Dead

Hi-Ho. Boing Boing has a collection of Vonnegut-related web stuff, by way of remembrance. I read about all of Vonnegut's work between my 15th and 20th year. His prose is still with me, I'll drop the imperative "Listen" into the body of an e-mail to indicate something that I feel must not be missed.

Vonnegut is most likely the ultimate source of my instinct - still somewhat operational after all the theory tried to train it out of me - that any complex system of belief is rationalization, that is bullshit, and that the truth is likely to be brutally simple. Most importantly, he taught me that we're all dying - whatever baroque fantasies we have constructed to convince ourselves otherwise notwithstanding - and that that probably ought to compel us to try to be kind to one another.

I'll miss you, Mr. Rosewater.

What do we do about the horror before us now?

So I'm watching the 1954 original cut of Godzilla, the non-Raymond Burr cut, Japanese with English subtitles and it gets to the part where they're trying to talk the scientist who invented the Oxygen Destroyer into letting them use his invention as a weapon against Godzilla. And the scientist gives an impassioned speech about how they can't do such a thing, because the Oxygen Destroyer would become another horrible superweapon in the hands of the world's politicians. And the leading man takes it all in, and seems pretty moved, and then says to the scientist: "But what do we do about the horror before us now? Do we just let it happen?"

And this is how I feel about liberal modernity these days. We know its failings and its horrors. We know about alienation and exploitation and imperialism and all the rest. But in the face of the rise of the terror of the anti-modern extremist right, a threat only liberal modernity seems prepared to face...

What do we do about the horror before us now?

The Next Thing Stumbleupon Brought Me

The photography out there on the intarwebz is pretty amazing. Check this out.

The First Thing Stumbleupon brought me

Somekinda halo type thing.

I think its kinda neat.

I'd include it in the post but that seems to break blogger. Y'all will just have to click the link.

30 Second Review of The Getaway

I like Peckinpah for his style and his composition. Not so much for his story lines or characterization. The, um, spousal abuse in his movies is, shall we say, problematic. Seriously, every movie of his I've seen features a "wife gets smacked around 'cause she needed it" scene. Not cool.

Also a "wife fucks bad guy right in front of husband and loves it because women is whores and can't be trusted" scene. Eeeeesh.

On a more positive, but nevertheless sorta weird, note the young Sally Struthers was kinda hot....

That's a Good Mash Up

Hard Day's Night...

OF THE LIVING DEAD!

Baudrillard's laughter...

I was going to post something the day Baudrillard died, but then I forgot. Every so often though, you see something like this and you just know 'ol Jean is laughing back at you somewhere for every time you laughed at one of his far out theories.

I guess I should explain what that is, exactly. Its a clip from an upcoming showtime series to be based on the NPR program "This American Life". It tells the story of how toy TV cameras caught on as a fad at an elementary school, finally culminating in students standing by as one of their fellows is beaten up, dutifully "documenting" the fight with their fake TV cameras. Playing the part of the "disinterested journalist" even though all they had were props.

So the representation becomes the performance becomes the reality becomes the representation.
World without end
Amen.

Did the childrens really need to learn this?

In this segment, cookie monster teaches the children of the world an important lesson: museum exhibits are not for eating. I shit you not.

HEEEEERRREE FISHY FISHY FISHY

I still do this if I end up fishing.

Holy Crap

This cover of Springsteen's "Thunder Road" is frickin' amazing. Check that link while you can, its all kinds of illegal, but I just had to share it with y'all.

I happened to hear the song on WBER, my favorite radio station ever in all of history. It's a little community college station out of Rochester, New York that you used to be able to tune in where I grew up if you tilted the antenna just so. When I went off to college in Binghamton, New York I moved out of range of my beloved BER. My friend and sometime roomate (ever hear about those nightmare college roomies, yeah, that was um, me actually) Scott hailed from Rochester and shared my love of the station and missed it just as I did. We used to plot weird schemes to loft high-gain antennas on surplus weather balloons and pick it up that way as a way to pass the time in freshman physics. The balloons never got off the ground, but now I can pick up WBER's high-bandwidth stream on my wireless laptop as long as I have internet connectivity. Brave new world. The sound is slightly better than it used to be on the tilted just so FM receiver back home.

In other news, this cover renders "Thunder Road" eminently a cappella singable, much to the chagrin of my neighbors. :)

For all my Cat Loving Readers

I bring you Nora, Piano prodigy.



As always, this was on BoingBoing.

Level 3 Snow Emergency! Oh Noes!

We had some snow. And some wind. Snow + Wind looks like this:





This is the windward side of my building.












And this is the leeward side. Some may recognize my gold Taurus in the middle there. I got the wrong parking spot, I guess.










I found this outside my door. After I cleared the snow out of the door jamb.

On a Cold Enough Night, A Window Becomes a Porthole

Looking out on a hostile world -

Notes on A Lost Country

I was in the media library of the Ethnic Studies department where I teach when I noticed on the shelf a book that had been important to me as a young adult, but that I had recently all but forgotten - Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's War Day.

I picked it up and re-read it, of course, finding something else to read just like I always do when I should be doing my reading for courses or teaching.

Reading it again was surreal on two levels. First, the book itself is written in a faux-journalist style. The authors write from the point of view of themselves on a road trip through a post-nuclear-war America in what would be their future (the book was written in 1983, the characters within it write from the point of view of 1992, discussing the events leading up to and resulting from a nuclear war in 1988) and includes various chapters made up in the format of interviews of people living in post war America, as well as government documents describing such elements of the war's aftermath as nuclear fall-out patterns. As a whole, I found the style fairly convincing, the whole thing really does read like some kind of document dropped, a la Borges, into our reality from some alternate historical time-line. A monograph of a time that never was - but, with the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads for half a century, was still very real in our collective unconscious. It certainly was in mine.

It was that personal connection that made re-reading the book doubly strange. Nuclear war hung heavy in my mind as a young man, both as a terror and a hope. My utter repulsion at the notion of having to grow up, get a job, become a productive member of society doing as I was told was such that the bomb seemed a tantalizing alternative - that the boring world I was doomed to grow up and into might be washed away in a sudden flash of nuclear fire, replaced by a existence at once simpler and more romantic. A world where derelict buildings and vehicles could be claimed at will, where (my naive young self imagined) a sort of techno-pastoralism would reign - high tech ruins and happy farmers.

Even then, I knew this was unrealistic, but the image was still a powerful one. It is not, I realize upon my re-reading of Warday, the image Warday gives of post-war existence (which it painstakingly renders the hardships of) but the images of Warday shaped my vision of postwar existence. It contains a scene set in a partially bombed New York (in the novel, the set of bombs meant for New York misses and strikes Queens and Brooklyn) that I realized I had lifted for the first short story I had ever written (which imagined three friends living a post-apocalyptic pastoral existence setting out to see the ruins of New York). That story would morph into a story I would tell to an ex-girlfriend in the middle of the night when she would turn to me, half asleep and ask me to tell her a story (as one gets asked when one identifies oneself as a fiction writer). The night-time story (about friends living a pastoral existence raising vegetables in the ruins of a wasted New York) would be included in, ironically enough, the last story I ever wrote.

Like the image of ruined New York many other things in the novel, I realized, were landmarks in my memory. Great prominent image features, always at least dimly visible in my mind.

Visible, but transformed since I first knew them. The book was, for me, an artifact from another lost country, that of my own childhood. Strange and a little sad to stumble upon.

I was wistful about that for a day or so, the loss of childhood, of certain ideas about the world and myself, of the girl I used to tell that story to. But then something else happened. Something very mundane, really. I was out late at night, returning a video, all bundeled up against the cold, with my high-tech ipod playing the new Shins album in my ear, and the snow was powdery and sparkling and bright...

and it just struck me: It's a good thing the bombs never fell.

I have a job I take some satisfaction in, I have my little apartment, my recipes, my friends, my library, all privileges to be sure, but

It's a good thing the bombs never fell.

Now let's just hope we get past this peak oil thing without burning the place down.

This is what happens when I read too much Gibson

I get his narrative voice stuck in my head, and I start hearing it narrate my life, like this:

Changing the Batteries in My Digital Camera:

He notices the little icon flash up on the Canons rear LCD, a red pixellated thing that was apparently meant to suggest a battery in some abstract sense. Probably designed by committee, he thinks, focus-grouped to ensure maximum communicative potential across the 7 or 8 linguistic families Canon planned on marketing this little hunk of plastic to. He walks to the kitchen, pops the tiny battery cover cap open to reveal the twin silver nickel-hydride rechargeable batteries nestled next to the blue plastic of the camera's gigabyte memory card. Chuckles to himself as he remembers the day, almost fifteen years ago now, when he had scraped together $200 of Christmas money and weekly allowance to buy four megabytes of system RAM for his old 80486 PC - a putty colored aluminum box the size and weight of a microwave oven - remembers walking into the ozone smelling electronics store in the strip mall by the China Wok restaurant, walking out with the two green memory modules studded with black rectangular chips as big as a thumbnail, gold plated contacts shining in the winter sun. What, he wonders, would the boy who had just payed $50 a megabyte for giant sticks of system RAM would say if he could somehow let him know that in the near future (how near was it though, really, those fifteen years were his whole life, after all) you could pick up a neatly bubble-packaged bit of blue plastic containing a gigabyte of as-yet undeveloped memory technology for 40 bucks? Probably something along the lines of, you've gotta be shitting me, mister.
Which, he realizes as the long silver batteries land with a muted metal thunk on the countertop, is an appropriate thing to think now - given that he's just blown his last set of rechargeables with a video assignment due in just a few hours. Somewhere in his mess of a junk drawer he knows he has a last pair of alkalines stashed away for an emergency of just this nature. A few seconds rifling through the various small tools and pack-rat hoarded detrius: four small screwdrivers; a washer he found on the railroad tracks, warped and bent by the passing train; a neon-yellow super-high-bounce ball of the sort he used to buy from coin-op prize machines because a certain someone had this geeky, adorable fascination with them; and he's found the batteries - classic copper on black colors shining like the herald of some chivalrous centipede. Slotting them into the Canon, he knows he has only a few minutes of video capture before they give out - its designers had traded energy economy for parts economy, drove down the price point of their hardware while sticking the buyer with the price of consumables, caveat emptor he supposed. Still, it was better than nothing in a pinch.

My Narcissistic Use of Imaging Technology Continues

Today, for your viewing pleasure, a movie of the Midnight Train to My house. Well, it goes to my house if you ride the Freights and are willing to jump off while the train is cruising at a fairly good clip.

Some Pictures of my Favorite Tree

Documenting where I live

Some pics from the new digital camera. Lets see if ol' blogger renders them reasonably well, if I need a flickr account.

My apartment complex.









The rail-line outside the window. Fun when I'm awake. Not always so much when I'm asleep.

Trading Spaces : My Apartment

More Silliness resulting from MacBook's video camera. Now I have a Canon Digital Camera as well, so expect silliness from that.

Did what I think just happened just happen?

If this video embed won't play in the blog, but rather takes you to youtube to watch the video by default, then yes, what I think just happened (YouTube stopped allowing embeds to play in the context they are placed it) just happened.

-Then again, if it will play - and it appears it will - then I guess YouTube has done no such thing. I wonder what the deal is with this clip of the Colbert Report at Daily Kos?

Total Capture

Of late, I've been a busy little research Bee.

Where research = watching youtube, that is.

Oh, and stuff on media economics, that too!

Anyway, it gets me thinking about this back-of-the-envelope bullshit sort of speculative social theory of mine. I would posit that, as a society, we are moving closer and closer to a day when everyone is always on video, and that video is always viewable by anyone, anywhere. We'll never really get there of course, we're just getting closer and closer at an accelerating rate. I call the imaginary state where everyone is always being recorded "Total Capture" because I think it sounds sexy.

Anyway, you can see why youtube, everyones favorite emergent cyborg-indexed searchable video retrieval system would get me thinking about this. Here's another thing I think is neat and related to the idea that I return to from time to time: Google discoverable webcameras. I just love 'em... its like a treasure hunt! Maybe you find some kind of Korean office building or maybe a Pool Hall or a mall parking lot.

Bert and Ernie

I still think of this sketch whenever I come across a long chain of substitutions.

More Zombie Andy

Lookit! :)

Zombie!

Another wacky Halloween Party, another wacky Halloween costume. Here's me, amongst the ranks of the Undead!

It cost too much, staying human.

Bruce Sterling's entry in wired's "Sci-Fi Story in six words" contest. I like it.

Here's a couple attempts of my own:

-Sorry, children, we loved our monster
-The ruins will never be believed

Words that pop

Literally via good ol' Boing Boing, an article on the (in)famous czech plastic explosive Semtex. I closes on the thought that part of the mystique of Semtex might be due to the poetry of the name itself.

it does feel good rolling off the tongue. SEM-TEX. Two syllables. One soft, one hard. It has a science-fiction look with an acidic old-tech twist.

Ah, the poetry of technology. Hard-edged and sparkly. It's a big part of what I love about Gibson. Here are some more favorite tech words for me.

-manifold
-twisted pair
-CCD
-cordite
-implosion device
-jacketed hollow point
-sub-sonic
-transaxle
-magnetron
-phenobarbitol
-methamphatmine
-fiber line
-quanta
-packet loss
-topology
-photon
-phoneme
-nominal yield
-electromagnetic pulse
-positron emission tomography
-neutron moderator
-magnesium
-tungsten
-polycarbonate
-scanline
-throttle body
-Near IR
-stardrive

And last, but hardly least, everyone's fav from Neuromancer

-mycotoxin

anyone else have unlikely fun words to add? (Just in case this one hasn't gotten me on enough watch lists.)

Sometimes I Love BLDGBLOG just for the titles

I mean, really, how do you beat something like:
BLDGBLOG: The Transgondwanan Supermountain
for poetry? I mean, there is dada spam I suppose, but that's about it.

This is well within the capacity of even the smallest nuclear nation.... you know

North Korea claims to have gone nuclear.

Call me a bad man, but my first thought is to wonder about the impact on domestic politics here in the states. Will this hurt Republican candidates for congress and senate, by suggesting to the American people that current policies are making the world a more dangerous place? Or will it help said candidates, by getting the people's minds off of GOP congressmen who bugger 16 years old boys.

UPDATE: CNN international just gave their timeline of "how we got to this point" thusly:

-George Bush calls N. Korea part of "Axis of Evil"
-Everything goes to shit
-Blah Blah, crap with a Bank in Macau
-BOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!

One wonders if such sentiment will make it into the domestic CNN feed.

Mandatory Glimour Girls Post

I can't believe they knocked up Lane. Fuckers. And if Lorelai + Christopher is the end-state of the show I may have to throw something rotten at Amy Sherman Palladino (Sp?).

Oh, and can I, as a male watcher of both Gilmour Girls and Veronica Mars, just say how annoying this "American Eagle Aerie" ad campaign, where they have clips of meticulously selected "average teen-age girls" pretending to watch the show along with you in the commercial breaks, is? Talk about making assumptions about your audience.

Hard Negative Ads

The Republicans have gone hard negative against Ted Strickland, the democratic candidate for governor here in Ohio. Strickland has been consistently ahead of the Republican candidate by a number well outside of the margin of error (often in excess of 10%). Here are some of the nasty, homophobic ads:





This hyperbolic set of "values ads" reeks of desperation. Both use text on the screen that warp voting against institutionalized discrimination into voting against "marriage." Apparently Ted Strickland is in favor of eliminating marriage, replacing it with wild sex parties, at which attendance will be mandatory, all across Ohio.

Besides showing just how desperate the republicans are in this race (You NEVER try an ad like this unless you have no other choice... the risk of boomerang is just too high) and show just how ugly the GOP gets when its cornered, these ads make me wonder about something. They play to identity, othering homosexuals. This is designed to fire their base of course... why is their base not fired? Part of it must be the Ohio GOP scandals, but those should be dragging down Mike DeWine as well, shouldn't they? But DeWine is neck and neck with his democratic counterpart.

Could it be... race? Could white, rural Ohio (I assume this is the GOP base here... it is everywhere else) just not be interested in coming out for Ken Blackwell, the African-American candidate the Republicans are running? Could these ads hope to encourage Ohio voters to think of themselves, not as white (or black, since the GOP has been hoping to make inroads among African-American voters for awhile) but rather as straight and "Christian"?

William Easterly

William Easterly's new book The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Help the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good is getting quite a bit of attention of late, including this piece by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Review of Books.

Just from what I've gleaned from the various reviews, there seemed to be a variety of potential critiques one could make of this book. I find some of them more satisfying than others. Easterly is definately pro-capitalism, and the burden of responsibility his market-liberal ideology places on the poor certainly sounds like something most scholars in my field would find distasteful (a common quote given from the book is how attaching a token fee to mosquito nets, rather than giving them out for free, increased the percentage of people who used the nets they obtained, Easterly - or his source, it isn't clear - infers this is because the fee made net recipients "value" the nets). His central claim, however, seems to be that aid agencies should use best possible practices to target their spending (including, very importantly, listening to the expertise of the people they are tasked with helping) and the dollars spent should be evaluated objectively to evaluate how well they work. I understand the potential problems with this (who is "objective"? what questions will they ask? what assumptions about the goals will they make?), but I think it has some merit. I admit I can't speak for folks in the field of aid, but if its anything like my own field - academe - there may be a need to admit that wishes aren't horses. We need to find out if what we are doing is actually doing any good. I've read too many "revolutionary theories" that never lead to any revolutionary social change. Or even meaningful reform. Dreaming a new reality is a necessary step to creating a new reality, but it is not a sufficent step. We must know what methods will succeed in realizing our dreams.

That rant out of the way... here's a critique of Easterly's logic I find fairly compelling. Why is it only the poor and those spending money to help the poor who need to be evaluated? I suppose in Easterly's mind aid agencies are spending "someone else's money" and thus need oversight... but the west's wealth was gained via colonial exploitation. Is it really fair to evaluate only those who would try to give it back? Shouldn't there be some thought to "evaluating" how the wealthy and powerful spend "their" money, and what the social consequences of that might be? Or would that be an unthinkable intrusion on our precious "consumer freedom?"

Two Quick Things

-I do not recommend Thai Kitchen instant pad thai in a box. Oh, Pad Thai kits in a box - the kind you make on the stove - are great, I swear by 'em. And Thai Kitchen makes many other fine products, such as their red curry paste. Very tasty. But Pad Thai cannot be made in your microwave. In all fairness, I knew that before I bought it, but seriously how cool would microwave Pad Thai be if it actually worked? So I tried. I tried and I failed. What did Condoleeza Rice do about making Pad Thai in the microwave? Nothing.

-Do any Math nerds out there know what it means for the relationship between two variables to be "curvilinear"?

Diebold AccuVote-TS Security Demonstration

Everyone needs to see this. Many of you probably already have. Hella compelling video by Professors out of Princeton showing just how easy it is to hack a diebold voting machine.

Better, clearer, higher resolution video, along with the full paper detailing the findings of the research team can be found here: LINK

Youtube isn't all drugs and Jihad

Perhaps some folks were turned off by my recent youtube posts. They weren't exactly safe for work, or small children. As a bit of a change of pace (not quite a unicorn chaser, but close) here is a sample of a totally sweet (and hilarious) set of french language short cartoons I recently discovered on there. I don't speak french, but I think its funny.

Blogging right now

Pizza at my apartment. This silliness will end when the novelty of my macbook wears off.

Phun with Bluebook

I'm spending today converting an essay from last semester from Chicago-style citations (favored by historians) to Bluebook-style citations (favored by legal practitioners and scholars) so I can submit it to the journal Communication Law and Policy as my chair has advised me to do.

I've sometimes joked that some towns have bad road signs because they don't want to make it easy for strangers to navigate the town. "If you was from here you'd know where you was, if you ain't then go home." Bluebook seems somewhat the same way. Why on earth would one subsititute "U. Pa. L. Rev." for "University of Pennsylvania Law Review" except to obscure and mystify things for those without training in the law?

Guardian Article

The guardian read through the statements of inmates about to be executed on Death Row. The article on it is here. (Found, like so many other things, via BoingBoing).

The distaste of a British newspaper at bloody American barbarians and their savage practices is palpable. Understandable, but a shame really, since for me this reduces the utility of an article like this as a teaching tool. My undergraduates would read the distate as anti-american bias and dismiss the content as coming from an unreliable source. They have been trained to do this very well, and it is a difficult habit to break them of (especially if one doesn't wish to simply reverse the polarity of their bias and turn them into slavish, name-droppy, latte-liberal trendheads)

The power of the excerpts really speaks for itself. The ultimate Other, the capital murderer, heard in his or her own voice. I would hope, at least, that some of them might find the humanity in these words obvious and compelling. That's probably naivete on my part.

How can I teach them, I wonder, that the monsters they have been taught to hate are all just people?

Reading Boing Boing

So you don't have to. They just linked to Bruce Sterling's new story over at New Scientist: LINK.

I get down on Sterling sometimes, because I feel like he can sometimes be better in touch with technology than humanity. Stories like Distraction, for example, can tend towards over-simplistic characterization, even while they paint a thought-provoking (if cartoonish) vision of a future political and economic system. I suppose this story isn't terribly long on characterization either, but it is short enough that imagination can fill in the blanks. I really like it. I think it handily sums up a whole set of fears about the possibilities of the internet, that much vaulted space of freedom, becoming a space of control.

If I have a criticism, it is this: does this story still frame the issue at hand as a choice between negative freedom and control? Sterling does a good job of bringing in elements that focus on issues of creative expression - the protagonist's banned hobby of graffiti, for example - but there still seems to be a dichotomy of the "mommy state" vs "the electronic frontier." How do we create space of freedom that are not spaces of privilege, as so many spaces of freedom have historically been?

You Tube In Iraq

The following link goes to a you tube video of what appears to be a visual record made by iraqi insurgents of sniper attacks made on US troops. The video may be an authentic record of such attacks, or it may be a doctored video attempting to show what appear to be attacks for propaganda purposes. I can't tell. It's a very disturbing piece of footage, if you haven't garnerned that from my description thus far. I post it here for 2 reasons.

-to again show the diversity of stuff going on on you tube

-in the hopes of getting the assistance of my friend Ben (who knows some Arabic) in reading the titles on the video, which I'm curious about

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0sEn6IO7TE

More Found on You Tube

This kid manages to cram at least 2 seperate violations of copyright, and a depiction of illegal drug use into his video. Watch it while you can... I think its an interesting example of some of the productive stuff going on right now.



It will be interesting to see what happens if Universal goes ahead with the planned legal action against You Tube it announced today. If they try to follow Mgm v Grokster and argue that the You Tube business model promotes infringement, when many of the infringers on You Tube, like our Boba Fett enamored friend here, are not simply passing around copies of songs (as on tradtional p2p) but creating something out of existing media it could be a very interesting, very important test of the Grokster rule. (Note: the sentence I just wrote is a mockery of proper grammer. Meh. I'm blogging.)

My Screwed Up Video Camera

The Isight on my macbook isn't working right.




This is what I see whenever I turn it on. Once the image becomes normal, it stays that way... until you stop and then restart the camera. I'm hoping to have it fixed soon, but for now I thought I'd share, in part because its kinda fun to watch.

More Fun Stuff on the Internet

The Royal Society has published the whole of their journal archive on the internet, and their going to allow free access to it until December (then the bastards will charge an insane subscription fee to see it).

The really fun part?

The Royal Society Archive goes back to 1665.

Even if you are still dangerously limited to elite groups, I still <3 you, Internet

So my reading for my globalization and media class for today was interesting. It basically suggested that there wasn't just one "digital divide," but rather, several of them. Old v. Young, Upper v. Working Class, Urban v. Rural. It was rather dismissive of the internet as a medium for social change, as it saw these divides as creating a sort of veneer of young, upper class, internet connected urbanites. There was little evidence, the reading suggested, of mass mobilization of anyone via internet.

These are all empirical claims I really need to do more checking up on (has anyone seen a decent map of IP space onto real space? Does such a thing exist? One suspects google or someone has one squirreled away somewhere, but they ain't sharing it.) But anecdotally, they seem to hold. The internet darlings have had a hard time gaining traction in American electoral politics thus far (though, maybe, possibly, Lamont is a sign of a beginning of a shift there), and even internet boosters like Benkler seem to rely on only a few examples of fairly small scale mobilization (eg. the Diebold e-mail case).

Here's the thing though... I'm thinking about all this while sitting in a public place, having a cup of coffee, with a 5 pound machine on the table in front of me happily humming along on wireless internet. I'm flipping through a book I'm interested in and I'm trying to find where I can get ahold of some of the stuff referenced in the footnotes. The library index at my University isn't cutting it, we don't have the documents I'm looking for. So I try a google search for the title. Lo and behold, the document I wanted was a policy brief for the house science committee... and the house has handily transferred those (at least for the last decade or so, though I was also able to get Vannevar Bush's brief from 1945 in HTML from the national science foundation) to .pdf and released them onto the internet. My little 5 pound notebook gives me (and anyone else with one) the ability to access, from any number of places, decades worth of government documentation that might have been otherwise inaccessible even to someone in my University library.

With all the potential that gives us to put many eyes on the (legal) code... surely we can do something.

At least I hope so.

Sez Who the Internets are for Elites?

I mean, I love the Internets and I'm just an average Joe, chilling in a coffeeshop, with my MacBook and my fluffy espresso drink.

Just an average, blue collar guy, just look at my shirt!

Yep, that's me... salt of the earth Andy.

Things that ran on recharagable batteries

In my apartment Circa 2003: 0

Today: 5

2 Beard Trimmers
Cell Phone
Ipod
Macbook

Found on Youtube

One hopes its real, after the whole lonelygirl115 affair (which was, i thought, fairly transparent), but this is fairly interesting:



The web's collection of weird video fragments is starting to reach a sort of critical-mass of interestingness.

Internet Dating + Foucault

My Internet Communities class is doing a segment on Internet Dating, I suppose its a valid enough subject - the use of the internet to find mates, to form kinship relations... these are the things communities do, yes?

But I'm having a hard time getting over my distaste. I'm a country boy, and, truth be told, a bit of a prude. Reading about clever, pretty urbanites engaging in a seemingly endless internet-enabled hook-up party leaves just kinda pisses me off. The amount to which that pissed-offedness is actually jealousy is anybody's guess. But, nevertheless, I feel compelled to dream up theoretical support for my predjudice. Doesn't everyone.

Here's the thing: wasn't the hope vested by so many in desire as a revolutionary force based on its potential to encourage links between people and thus to shatter hierarchy? To encourage you to look across the cell at your neighbor in the panopticon, rather than gaze back at the tower, ever wary of its presence, and its promise of violent retribution for those who did not exercise proper discipline.

But this thing we've built out of desire, spinning us all into brands, into advertisements, into clusters of definitive "facts" flying in close formation... its as if the panopticon has been turned into omniopticon the gaze of all applied against all, meeting in the middle, so that in effect it is desire itself that now occupies the tower.

And desire is ravenous, and her sister is despair.

The House Burger

Graduate Student Food meets graduate student video blogging. I understand this is not exactly thrilling content... I'm just trying out the technology at my disposal.

Consumer News

Oh yeah, I also recently purchased a Macbook. It's all kinds of pretty.

Wealth of Networks?

I read Yochi Benkler's excellent Wealth of Networks for an independent study this summer and since then I've been thinking quite a bit about his ideas on emerging forms of distributed production. One note often scrawled in the margins of my copy of Benkler's book is the constant question "Who Benefits?" (often in huge, emphatic capital letters, messily underlined, with 4 or 5 question marks). Sure you can break down huge, complex tasks into small modules that can be worked on collaboratively by network-connected individuals, but how can we be sure that the collaborators reap the rewards of their efforts?

Since then I've been noticing news stories like this one: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/02/google_uses_game_to_.html

that interest me along those lines. It seems Google is using user inputs derived from a sort of game to help generate tag information for sorting images. This article on OReilly sums up my own reactions pretty well

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/09/google_image_labeler_bionic_so.html

Basically, is a project like this one, where many folks collaborate and contribute (all for, just as Benkler predicted, non-monetary compensation) but it seems to me pretty clear that it is Google that gets the lions share of the benefit from the resulting work, really the sort of thing those of us interested in the radical potential of distributed production are looking for?

Page of the Day

Heavens Above

No, I haven't suddenly found religion, it's a really cool page that will compute predictions for visible satellite passes over your location, along with day-to-day starcharts and planetary locations and stuff. I just watched the lacrosse-4 Radar reconnaisance satellite fly over my house, which is extra cool because it officially doesn't exist.

And another thing

Of course, despite my comments on the good parts of the CNN coverage (namely CNN's ability to put a person and a camera on any street corner in the world and put the image on your TV set in realtime) I have to admit a lot of it is crap. But I keep watching it anyway, despite the fact that I could get most of the information from my beloved web, which I'm rapidly focusing on as a center for my future scholarship (go go information society Andy!). Why is this?

I suspect that part of the draw of TV in a time like this is the illusion of presence. The CNN talking head in my living room, even if he or she is just repeating the same headline from 5 or 10 minutes ago, gives me the feeling that I am in the loop. That there is this person here, who will tell me if anything happens, and that that same person is being relied on by the important and the powerful. Therefore, I too am informed, important and powerful.

We new-media types probably need to consider that.

CNN and Such

I've been watching the CNN coverage of the recent events in the mid-east pretty incessantly over the last few days, in part because I'm a junky for that sort of thing, in part because I have a buddy currently in Beirut and I'm concerned for his safety.

If you're reading this Ben, stay safe dude... keep away from the blowing up stuff.

Anyway, CNN's coverage has been pretty damn brilliant, and that's coming from someone who is a committed who is a committed old media critic and new media buff. They've been stressing the superiority of their coverage during the broadcast, which is kinda tasteless, but they've been doing a good job of covering news feeds from all sides and presenting a variety of images, as well as doing stuff like sending their Gaza City bureau down the street into a Gaza City bodega to interview the shopkeeper... which was a really interesting image/discussion.

One can't help but think the competition from the web, and from ideologically based platforms like fox news hasn't pressed them to make the best possible use of their resources for global coverage... the results (while still suffering from many old-media framing problems) are fascinating to watch.

Yeah, so, I did a geeky thing

Sometimes I wonder why I'm in the humanities. Like for example, while we were watching the last minutes of regular play during the world cup final my friend Colin absent-mindedly wondered if there was any way you could humanly make it to Europe by the time overtime concluded. About 30 minutes.

Those of you who have known me for awhile probably see where this is going.

Folks suggested the Concorde, or various fighter jets, but it quickly became apparent that those were way too slow. Even the fastest Air-breathing aircraft (the SR-71 and the XB-70, both retired, both with a top speed of about Mach 3) would take 2 hours to cover the 4000 miles between here and Europe. I suggested the Space Shuttle, since I knew orbital velocity took you around the world in 90 minutes. There were questions about acceleration and deceleration times. The issue was dropped.

Well, dropped by everyone else. Something in my tortured nerdy brain had to know... could you get to Europe in half an hour with exisiting technology? Could it be done?

So I continued to think about it. After some reflection I remembered reading somewhere that Intercontinental Ballistic Missles could do that sort of distance in about half an hour... and sure enough this sez a Minuteman could do 8000 miles (more than we need) in about 2060 seconds (30 minutes, give or take). Of course it also tells us the re-entry vehicle hits the ground at 7,000 miles an hour. Owie. (What the fact that the fastest way of getting between two points on the earth's surface ever built is a delivery system for thermonuclear weapons says about the human race is left as an exercise for the reader.)

But nonetheless, clearly this points the way to go, the fastest way between two points on the earth's surface is to launch yourself 50km up, past the atmosphere, and then boost yourself onto a parabolic, sub-orbital path that will land you where you need to go. The only question is, could you survive re-entry?

So I cracked open the old physics textbooks, looked up the section on parabolic motion, and tried my best to figure it out. According to my (very rough) calculations, launching yourself at a 54.6 degree angle at a velocity 5407.44 meters per second ought to put you on a parabolic path that will cover about 3500 miles in 30 minutes. (I allowed 500 miles for boost and re-entry) Since you will re-enter the atmosphere 50 km at this same 54.6 degree angle, trig sez you have about 200km of Atmosphere to bleed off you re-entry velocity in. That works out to an average deceleration load of about 7.5 gs for a little over a minute. Which this says is human survivable. Of course, that's not really how it would happen, but since that's the average load, I'm going to assume you could work out some way to manage the load so that it doesn't squish you, since people can survive stronger loads for short periods.

All this computed, I downloaded Orbiter a free (as in beer) space simulator, and ran my computed trajectory in an unobtanium fueled imaginary ship they have for beginners. Sure enough, my parabolic path took me from florida to western europe in about half an hour. But when I re-entered the atmosphere, my glider shaped ship skipped off! I went flying on another parabola that took me well out over russia... and quit the simulator.

That only supports my intuition that you probably wouldn't want a winged vessel to fly this flight path with. The shuttle, after all, makes huge S-shaped turns in the upper atmosphere to bleed off speed so it can use its wings to land. That takes too much time. No, if anything could fly the Ohio-France express mission, it's a Soyuz capsule.

So, if you had a Soyuz fueled and ready, you might be able to do it IF (and this is a big if) a Soyuz booster could actually generate enough thrust to put the Capsule onto the parabolic trajectory I described. Since the booster is designed to boost the capsule into orbit, this seems likely to me, but my rocket fantasy kick is wearing off and I need to get back to reading about the cultural implications of the information society (as is my actual vocation) so I can't take the time to look up the info on the booster and find out for sure.

But hey, if any of you want to... break a leg.

This was my geek of the week moment.

What am I listening to?

Sometimes people want to know what I listen to. Often I draw a blank, perhaps because Itunes has largely automated my listening process. Fortunately, Itunes also makes it trivial to recover a list of my recent musical selections. For the record (and as a memory aid for the next time somebody asks) here are some artists I've been listening to:

The Rapture
The Bravery
The Bloc Party
Sleater-Kinney
Pinback
Catherine Wheel
Tegan and Sara
Metric
The Wolf Parade
The Rakes
The Tragically Hip
The American Analog Set
Al Green
Aimee Mann
Sufjan Stevens
Ben Kweller
The Decemberists
The Arcade Fire
Richard Buckner
The Fruit Bats
Crooked Finger
Calla

And Many More

Whiteboy Trickster Gods -- Or, The Cultural Work of Van Wilder

So, I ended up watching Van Wilder on Comedy Central this afternoon. Its a fairly typical example of the late-nineties early oughts genre of wacky college adventure movies. Grandsons of Animal House, if you will. Same basic premise... happy slackers overcome the unaccountable hatred of their more responsible peers, and in the process win over their women via demonstrating that happy slackers are in touch with a sort of happiness lost to uptight overachievers in their quest for square accomplishment.

PCU would be another exemplar of the genre... and there were others... their names currently escape me.

The universe presented by such movies is interesting on a number of levels. It presents an interesting sort of utopian fantasy environment... a place where a variety of difficult questions need not be resolved. An ethnically diverse place, but one lacking any acknowledgement of the history of racism and the politics of racial oppression. A place in which women are simultaneously presented as accessible sexual objects and as independent, career minded people.

But I think an even more difficult question is being dodged.

See, the character of Van Wilder, like other characters within his genre, is a sort of "whiteboy trickster god" a beautiful, charming, member of the white upper class who has chosen to revel in the material culture of late capitalism and share its bounty with his equally beautiful multi-ethnic friends, rather than become a part of his father's class of uptight oppressor-types who make everything such a drag. Van Wilder's rival, equally ubiquitous throughout the genre, is an aspiring member of this uptight oppressor class, whom Van Wilder defeats through his wit, and the help of his uniformly capable, happy friends.

As a mythology it seems to value rebellion and happiness over obedience and accumulation... which is probably why I find such movies so attractive. But it elides something important.

The material ease that nurtures us whiteboy trickster gods was built by the uptight oppressor class. Its continuation is dependent on their continued extraction from time and the bodies of the opressed "ever more useful forces" of production. If there is to be real change we will be asked to make to make a more difficult choice than simply that of walking away from the role of uptight oppressor. If we want to realize a just world, one in which chinese workers are not slaves to machines for 15 hours a day to build our hip, rebellious ipods we will have to think critically about our own comfort. And that won't necessarily be fun.

What we learned from Tonight's "Grey's Anatomy"

-If you are a doctor, and you don't cover for another doctor who has committed fraud and recklessly endangered the life of a patient, you are heartless.

-If a woman is physically bigger than the man she is with, she will be willing to settle for tepid attraction.

-Asians are innate overachievers. Only white people's love can save them from following the black man's path into emotional distance.

-All women are completely defined by their relationships with men.

-Major teaching hospitals routinely assign surgical interns nonsensical, nonmedical tasks. This helps them retain their precious humanity.

-Black women are easily excitable.

-Everyone is completely defined by who they were in high school.
- corollary: Only Jocks can be Heroes.

-The most important thing in a young professional woman's life is to learn how to be devoted to a male mentor figure. The most important thing in a middle-aged professional man's life is to have hot sex with a beautiful subordinate woman.

-There are no gay people in medicine.

-How do you know if the accomplished surgical intern you are in love with loves you back? You call her like a dog. This will seem less offensive if a Snow Patrol song is playing.

-"Stop looking at me like that" means "Yes"

Andy == Still Existing

End of semester fries my tiiiny little bwain. Owie. I'll post something real soon.

All the cool kids are doin' it

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

25% Yankee

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

More Coyotes

Turn up in more places (both real places and media spaces).

The coyote was always the central symbol of my fiction.

Some days, I'm unhappy with the coyote as resistance figure. Surviving without changing anything is complicit, isn't it?

Other days, declaring we will survive this apocalypse they have declared civilization without actively assisting in the work of empire seems like the best we can do.

We will survive.
We will not be made part of you.
We will teach our children to reclaim the carrion you leave behind, when you leave your broken culture burning on the highway.

Free Katie!

Tom Cruise on his intentions to wed Katie Holmes:

"First the baby, then the film," he was quoted as saying. "Then, in summer, we want to get married. I won't let this woman get away." (from CNN.com)

Get away? He won't let her get away? Clearly she's been trying to escape! Clearly a crack team of brave hostage rescue experts... or, failing that, Cultural Studies and International Relations graduate students... need to launch an extraction plan immediately!

I have such a plan here somewhere, under the zombie-apocalypse plan, and the killer monkeys with super-weapons plan... I'll find it...