Links of the day

Digital Illustrations by Rob Shields

They Have Arrived!!! Get Them Today!

Underwater Aliens by Ed “POPS” Centeno

Obsession Photoshoot

What I Find Attractive

Time After Time..

And the Answer is….

Potato Patch – A Proposal

Lexis

LANA BLACK

40 bags in 40 days Challenge

Santorum Speech in Tacoma, WA – 2/13/12 (Occupy Protest excerpt)

“San Pedro (St. Peter’s Square)” – Vatican City – Manolo Garcia – Featured Photographer

199

Justified: Thick as Mud

Göran

Sunny Beadz on Sunny Country Radio – The Band Perry snags some SWAG

INN MEMORIES- The little blue book of my grandfather.

Dear ========

BOOK REVIEW: UN ANNO DOPO (The Year That Follows) by SCOTT LASSER

The Legend of the Hummingbirds

Hope My Prof Likes My Newspaper Ads!

步步惊心 Scarlet Heart

Spacepaintings 1 minute quand tu veux

USA road-trip part 2: what would you like to see? polls are open

A Fitting Sendoff

The Elaborate Spinning Machine Is His Head

April Taylor’s Music

Post Ideas

Moses Melkonian – Beirut Lights

maze a day

Daily Health Boost Feel Good Tribe

Develop your conscious awareness

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!

Mashup of the day [NSFW]

[Warning:  the links below contain words/ideas/images currently subject to categorisation as inappropriate for family-oriented audiences]

Here’s the story that led me to this mashup.  Word.

Make sure you listen to it accompanied by Delibes “Coppelia/Slow Waltz and Final Gallop” performed by the Royal Opera House – Covent Garden, Mark Ermie, Conductor, on satellite radio or digital TV.

What are you selling?

Do you want the codewords of your subculture to join the repertoire of the general [regional/national/global/solar] culture?

Are you a member of a guild?  You know, a craft/workers union, a medical association, a political party, a corporation, a sports club, that sort of thing.

Do you share a set of words solely around something like Earl Grey Tea?

What do I share with the bird pecking on the shagbark hickory tree outside my window?

What do I call the bird?  Do I give it a common name?  A botanical/Latin name?  A list of descriptors?  The sounds that it makes?

Black and white feathers.  Tends to hop up the tree.  Can’t hear what, if any, sounds that it makes from its throat.

Should I say downy woodpecker?  How about Picoides pubescens?

As I drink a cup of water which contains a prepackaged bag of Twinings Classics Earl Grey Tea I zapped together in the microwave oven, what else do I observe that doesn’t necessarily pass by the viewhole-cut-in-the-wall called a window?

Today, I am alive.

Thoughts left over from previous days’ influences vie for my conscious action to record them here.

One to remember: [“Fascism under the guise of democracy is the rule of financial capital itself.” — Laibach], ironically read and recorded from a video on the commercial website, YouTube, along with [“What is art?  Art is the goal and the end of progress.”], “Stop the parahuman” and the fact that art both creates a new mythology and should take the system more seriously than the system takes itself seriously.

Which means a performer like Jimmy Fallon is just another fascist propagandist, if you follow that line of reasoning.

IF, that is, you take art seriously and believe that politics is in the service of theatrical performances.

Global absurdistcynical art means nothing to the bird looking for a few bites to eat on this cool, late winter day.  The larvae and other insects being eaten have no philosophical funny point to make in sacrificing their lives to feed the bird.

Can you protest against a government that provides the roads and education that brought you to the steps of the government building to wave legible signs of protest?

Of course you can.

What is education?  Is it not our way of tricking people of all ages, not just children, into adopting a set of codewords to increase their success when interacting with others who most often use the same codewords; i.e., share the same [sub]culture?

A white breasted nuthatch, Sitta carolinensis, clears out an old nesting hole in the same tree on which the woodpecker was searching a few minutes ago.

How do we train ourselves to observe our codeword sets and our behaviours so we can make changes before we get to the point where we feel our only recourse is to generally protest the system that got us to that point?

How do we enhance our [bio]feedback system to protect ourselves as individuals, giving easily-accessible new routes for those who wish not to perpetuate the codeword set of the [sub]culture in which they/we feel trapped?

In other words, how do we take those who are mostly followers and readily give themselves over to hypnotic leaders, who aren’t interested in promoting more than one subcultural codeword set, and give those followers the ability to break their trances and follow the leaders they are best predisposed to emulate?

Those who can follow themselves, are able to self-hypnotise belief in the power of nonconformance, no matter how much the self is a product of mass hypnosis and thus not completely individualistic/unique, just a unique combination of mass [sub]cultural codewords, we need not worry about, but should still give them the same protection under the law as conforming, hypnotised followers.

No matter how much we adore/abhore the prevailing system of social interactions, we all contribute.  In fact, diversity of beliefs is an inherent part of species survival.

We can still belong to our codeword groups — our clubs, corporations and associations — creating entrance exams and other means of excluding codeword noncompliers, including official denial/rejection codeword sets (“that person is an enemy of our [religious/political] belief system,” “your team sucks,” “you are not qualified to be an official member of our witchdoctor medical practitioners,” etc.), if we wish.

In the end, we are all selling something, ourselves in opposition to or ourselves as part of a system.

How do you/I buy or buy into a system?

That’s a question the birds would understand.  Sometimes, they’re species-specific, mating with others of their kind, and sometimes, they’re members of a bigger flock, taking advantage of numbers, a group of different species gathering to elude a predator and feed upon the fat of the land.  Safety in numbers as prey while the predator simply gets a wider variety of food to choose from.

That’s all we are, too.  You/me/us.

The Art of Alarmism

When I was a kid, one of my favourite celebrities was a comedian named Don Rickles.

Something about the in-your-face insult versus the insinuated/subtle insult attracted me to the likes of MAD Magazine’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” series as well as Don Rickles and the occasional show that roasted another person in the limelight.

Not that Don Rickles is very appealing.  In fact, my mother once said she was cleaning the garbage disposal and the gunk at the bottom was more attractive to her than Don in his best years.

Which says a lot about his comedy that fungus would even slightly remind my mother of Rickles.

I told her about this scene and she corrected me.  It wasn’t the gunk at the bottom, per se, that jarred her memories of Don.  It was the sharp teeth of the disposal that cut my mother’s finger and sent chills up her spine of nightmares she used to have, sitting on a big throne and having insult after insult thrown at her by Rickles and his roast club.

You see, that’s the thing about selling space travel or drilling to the top of a subglacial lake in the Antarctic.

Where’s the fun if you can’t make a little fun, subtle or over the top, about what really happens in special scenarios.

For instance, the real reason that the Russians took so long to get to the top of Lake Vostok was that they kept drinking all the vodka they were supposed to use to keep the drill from freezing up.

And do you know how difficult it is for FedEx or UPS to make an overnight delivery of alcohol to the South Pole?

Why, even Santa Claus won’t bother with the continent, which means the little, tuxedoed penguins aren’t exactly fans of the big fellow who only works one day of the year.

I’m talking about the penguin’s dislike of Don Rickles, not Santa Claus, you fools.  After all, what’re they gonna do with Christmas gifts — store ’em next to their precious eggs or babies under their tushes?

Which reminds me… I had a private discussion with Ahmadinejad last night about all this controversy surrounding nuclear development.  I mean, he and I both know that Allah is not a friend of nuclear armament in the hands of infidels or his followers.  Ahmadinejad assured me that the only reason he’s paying scientists and technicians to make radioactive fuel is to heat the subterranean Roman baths that his family uses to stay out of the public eye.

I’m willing to believe anything.  Up to a point.

Ahmadinejad, my friend, you have more oil reserves at your fingertips than Elizabeth Taylor had husbands, Queen Elizabeth has power or Elizabeth Hurley has acting skills.

Then he opened up and told me that his wife has an addiction problem.  She can’t stop adopting orphans, especially deposed dictators and their children.

He showed me his family “tree” and it looks more like a forest, with roots and branches stretching all over the globe.  That, he says, is why he’s afraid to tap the limited oil reserves to heat the baths and would rather use the unlimited power of nuclear energy.

Put it like that and I’m all teary-eyed…with laughter.  Ahmadinejad can’t see the real problem.  Why does his family need to take so many baths?

Cut down on the obsession with cleanliness and we could have peace in the Middle East in our lifetimes, dude.

Look at Don Rickles.  He never takes a bath and doesn’t have any problems with his friends as a result.  [The fact that he doesn’t have any friends is irrelevant.]  Do you see him causing an international energy crisis?  No.

Therefore, let Don be an example to all of us.  A little less soap, a little less hot water, a lot more body odour and we’d be a peaceful species — at arm’s length (or at least out of range of each other’s noses), perhaps, but less dangerous, because of our energy-efficiency, if not our good looks, personality and charm.

Welcome to my place in the zeitgeist

Is “Iron Sky” the future of filmmaking?  Or “Tuvalu,” instead?  Maybe Laibach’s “Predictions of Fire“?

Do you gauge the future by looking at trends of incoming recent photobucket images?

How much of the universe exists outside the Internet of things?

How many men felt their manhood threatened by the U.S. HHS Secretary’s announcement about forced payments for birth control, even if they weren’t Catholic?

Have you watched “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” or listened to Emiliana Torrini?

How many producers/agents have profited off of drug-addled performers?

How many drug-addled performers have profited off of producers/agents?

How many drug-addled producers/agents have profited off of drug-addled performers?

How many performers have profited off of drug-addled producers/agents?

How many drug-addled producers/agents have profited off of performers?

How many performers have profited off of producers/agents?

How many producers/agents have profited off of performers?

What is profit?

These and other questions reside in the thoughts of a group of people sitting in a cold room of an interplanetary transport ship.

They are detached from instantaneous communication with Earth.

They exist outside the cocoon of the zeitgeist.

They experience the long false 24-hour artificial day/night of constant exposure to the Sun.

Circadian rhythms disrupted like workers shifting between 8/12 hour timeslots.

If the doubling of information is nearly impossible to detect, what does it mean to become steam?

Is the scale logarithmic or exponential, both or a combination with some other esoteric formula unfamiliar to the general population?

What is the inverse of life?

The group, composed of multifunction beings resembling us for the most part, stay busy, either physically or mentally, usually both.

They are trained professionals.

There is little room for crazy or lazy here.

The purity of the creative artist detached from reality is a fiction to them.

Not that they can’t produce art in their own way, mimicking air guitar or whistling a tune, doodling on their virtual 3D sketchpads or changing procedures on the fly.

Twenty-four hour headline Earth news is not a habit with them but they keep up with major events through osmosis, in conversations with the base station or updates from family.

A few will surf the Net in their offhours, such as they are, researching ideas about improving minimissions due to begin in their next duty shift, noticing adverts for products they hadn’t seen before they went offworld, their thoughts temporarily drifting toward another place and time when their families would have excitedly talked about product launches.

But immediately their thoughts sync back up with the group, focused on the majormissions which depend on the minimissions and the casual research of those off duty, as well as their timely discombobulated thought patterns.

Money — the fuel that built their ship — is irrelevant in space.

Energy and creativity is worth more than any labour/investment credit system out there.

Out here.

The March 1950 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists included a review of Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Ape and Essence,” with a reference to the Guiding Hand that all religions, all belief systems, hold dear.

Out here, the synergy of groupthink is its own guiding hand, foreshadowing a prediction of a future that is inevitable.  The expected and the unexpected are foretold, fully anticipated, calculated, waited for without bated breath or dreadful fear.

Embraced.

They know.

They know they will not return to Earth, despite false promises to friends and family.

Promises made based on old data and dated equations.

Now they produce data before it’s measured.

The data, in turn, produces more data that, given more time, would overflow the limited memory locations of their enhanced thought sets tied to the supercomputer embedded and networked throughout the ship.

They know they become more and more a necessary part of the ship.

A ship destined to crash to produce data needed for a mission not yet envisioned, much less funded, to determine the fortitude of the people on Earth in the face of another costly catastrophe involving members of their species with dwindling resources available for space travel and extraplanetary settlements.

The ship is their sepulchre, their traveling crypt.

They are the crypt keepers and the terminated, all in one.

The minimissions and the majormissions go on, the unspoken final mission taking shape in their groupthink, unknown to anyone on Earth.

An egg splits from a cocoon and grows into a new lifeform all its own.

The lifeform sees its death written in the stars but fights for every last breath, regardless.

There’s always a chance the data will change, a new outcome predicted.

No matter how infinitesimal.

Transformation is a beautiful thing.

Mutation even more so.