notes from an alumnus written on illuminated aluminum

Rachel Osby registered at Shelby Center, Room 301.

David kingsbury(?) opened UAH alumni lunch-&-learn lecture.

Dr. Lillian Joyce.

UAH dept of art and history moved into Wilson Hall.

Available degrees:

  • BA in Art (studio art or art history)
  • BFA in graphic design, painting and drawing, photography, printmaking and sculpture.

 

POMPEII

Archaeology. Bay of Naples — former Roman navy/shipping center, home of Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius.

Vesuvius volcano report issued like weather reports because of active volcanic activity. 217 BCE last known eruption. 5 Feb 62 CE — major earthquake before devastating eruption in 79 CE. Many eruptions since.

The Pompeii ruins are getting worse due to tourist funding reallocation by the government.

Negative spaces that were once bodies in the volcanic ash were filled with plaster to show what the bodies looked like as they fell, before they deteriorated.

Dr. J worked out of one the large four level houses built on the city wall overlooking the Bay of Naples.

Popular art on Pompeian walls: Abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus, picked up by Dionysus.

All the Pompeian houses had relatively plain exterior walls – luxury was displayed on the inside, created by artisans specialising in plaster, mosaic, painting, sculpting, etc.

Pompeii covered with both informal and professional “graffiti” artwork — 98 percent were commissioned for political campaigns. Ex: “vote my candidate for aidae.”

Around 10000 people lived in Pompeii — about 2800 political campaign paintings on walls in town.

Women wore wigs to emulate fashionable hairstyles on statues.

Many fresco portraits in Pompeii were cut out and displayed in Naples museum.

Running water in rich people’s houses and public fountains for everyone else.

“Cave canem” – beware the dog. Warning at doorway entrances where dogs were chained to keep people out because rarely were locked doors used. Dogs, like people, suffocated of poisonous gas exposure before buried in ash.

In homes, there was a public receiving area for men to get visitors and be attended by women and slaves.

Pretty garden scenes painted and created in mosaics on walls.

[Advert: the Department of Art and Art History and the Archaeological Institute of America, North Alabama Society’s lecture The Mosaics of Zeugma on the Euphrates, January 28, 7:30 p.m., Wilson Hall Theatre (first floor 001); presented by Dr. Katherine Dunbabin, Professor Emerita, from McMaster University. The lecture is free and open to the public.]

Alexander the Great was popular subject for mosaic tilework.

Nouveau riche land speculators came in, such as former slaves, and built elaborate palaces in Pompeii, collecting objects such as marble/stone water basins like some nouveau riche collect cars or velvet Elvis paintings.

Houses were rooms for entertaining and hosting business get-togethers — invitation only to visit gardens in back of house.

The kitchen was not a public gathering place — used by slaves only.

No bathroom per se, either. Public latrines and baths usually.

Bath house water temp was regulated, heated from below. Some bath houses had libraries and shops.

Two theaters, one with a fixed roof and one with a retractable roof (seated 3100-3500)

Amphitheater offered gladiator fights and wild animal hunts. Had retractable roof / awnings (seated 15000).

Romans had fast food eateries on street corners. Dozens of them in Pompeii.
Standing room only.

UAH sponsors Dr. J’s summer research.

Frescos are falling apart with time – exposure, polishing by guards, etc.

Sent from my iPad

Tribute to a former neighbour

The neighbour down the hill from my parents’ property, Mr. Greer, stood between me and my junior high school.

He was the kind of neighbour we want — solid, upstanding citizens who care for and tend their house and grounds.

Except when you’re a kid who wants to take a shortcut to get home from school.

Mr. Greer mowed his lawn twice a week and kept twigs/sticks to a minimum, desiring little in the way of rambunctious boys trotting through his manicured grass.

I mowed all the lawns around his — the lady next-door who was elderly and enjoyed fixing cold glasses of tea/lemonade for me after I mowed; the busy father of three infants who was willing to pay the local lawnboy for basic mowing but expected grass raking and bush trimming for free; my parents who insisted that a low payment for mowing our lawn was an incentive to find other work to pay for my hobbies.

I never knew Mr. Greer personally, except with the shouts of “Hey, didn’t I ask you not to walk down my driveway?,” “Next time you mow along my property line, be sure you get the grass clippings you shot over into my yard,” or “While you’re raking the leaves of the tree in your yard, you can rake the ones that fell on my property, too, if you don’t mind.”

He was just that guy we kids talked about or made up stories to fill in blanks of a mysterious personality.

The older he got, the less he talked to my parents when they were working in the vegetable garden while he was picking up magnolia tree seedpods a few feet from them.

Good fences make good neighbours — so does the silence of respecting each other’s privacy when suburban backyards abut but do not hide meditative moments alone with our thoughts and our therapeutic yardwork.

This morning, my mother informed me that Mr. Greer had died.

She pointed out a few interesting biographical details of his obituary worth mentioning here:

[Mr. Greer] was raised in Dayton, TN. He was a young child when the Scopes Monkey Trial took place in Dayton. Part of the trial was held outside and he could vividly remember the big wooden stand outside the courthouse window.

During the Depression, Howard moved with his mom, dad and sister to Kingsport where his dad ran a lunch counter in downtown Kingsport.

In the Fall of 1941, Howard went to work in the Tenite Division of Eastman Kodak. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, young men in Kingsport were required to sign up for the draft and Howard received his draft notice in the mail August 1, 1942. After basic training, he discovered he would be a US Army Air Corp instructor on a teletype machine – a machine two months previously he barely knew existed. After the war ended, Howard used the GI Bill and took Eastman’s apprenticeship program in Industrial Instruments. He later worked for Dr. Bill Kennedy in the Research Division and completed his career with many years service in the Engineering Division.

He is survived by his wife of nearly 70 years…

Mr. Greer, thanks for being a great neighbour to my parents all these years. May others proudly follow in your footsteps!

Cole Slaw with Kale, Cabbage and a game of Cribbage on top of Baggage, Part Four For Fore

As secret leader of the universe, one finds oneself in charge of everything which, in itself, is interesting and attractive but not always exciting.

One may also find oneself referred to in monotheistic terms or multitheistic terms but these are just as useless to use for labels as atheistic to describe people who positively hold no theist beliefs at all.

When one knows everything, the word “surprise” has no meaning, either.

Thus, when your scientists and engineers decided to crashland the Beagle 2 onto the surface of Mars, one knew the result to follow.

One needs no supercomputer to calculate the permutations.

One can clearly see the solar-powered nanobots hidden onboard would quickly spread from the landing site and prepare or “seed” the surface for future followers.

One realises the consequences of releasing live microorganisms, too, but one does not speculate.

One observes the expected.

One concludes and reports.

That is all that is necessary for the omniscient.

One avoids the word omnipotence.

One is.

That is all.

Poe’s Law and Creationism

Are you familiar with Poe’s Law?  From wikipedia:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

The core of Poe’s law is that a parody of something extreme by nature becomes impossible to differentiate from sincere extremism. A corollary of Poe’s law is the reverse phenomenon: sincere fundamentalist beliefs being mistaken for a parody of that belief.

I guess what I’m saying is that I grew up in a community where creationism and the scientific method lived side-by-side.

So did parody and solemnity.

I quickly learned that creationism was not so much about the “reality” of a young universe as it was a set of code words we used to dupe those who made fun of creationism.

While smartypants were talking smack about the dumb creationists and their fundamentalist religion, the creationists were running the factories and businesses in town for whom the smartypants worked.

Creationism was established to delineate the true members of a subculture from the false members and/or outsiders.

The scientific method was as valid a laboratory tool for creationists as it was for noncreationists to create new plastic polymers.

But again, it was the set of code words used during coffee breaks and lunch periods that showed who was willing to suspend their disbelief in order to belong to one group or another.

Code words as ancient as our species.

So, the next time you hear someone debating just how old the universe and our planet are, remember Poe’s Law — you should pay attention to what they’re really saying, not what their words mean on a superficial level.

Outsiders and those without a refined sense of humour will miss the nuanced reasons used by those who espouse creationism as their core belief set.

Do you belong to a particular community?

What would you do to maintain your position in a social setting?

Would you repeat the community’s code words without question or a smidgen of doubt?

Not every subculture uses tattoos, piercings and the breaking of social taboos to define themselves.

Some use words and respect the boundaries that taboos provide.

Clips and Cuts: Robotic Surgeons, Inc.

The Committee of 7.5 had held off meetings for three months to avoid being seen in one place, even virtually.

Events forced them to convene ahead of schedule.

“We have a leak.”

“What?”

“Yes.  The group of volunteers we had interviewed had gathered and cross-examined one another, creating a fairly accurate picture of what we’re going to do with them.”

“No way.  We purposely included a lot of bogus questions so they couldn’t do this.”

“I think that’s the problem.  The questions were too bogus.”

“‘Too bogus?’  You mean all the inquiries about their sports interests and fashion choices?”

“No.  The ones about their computer coding skills and knowledge of mechanical design.  It looked like we hadn’t looked at their CVs, when they knew we had.”

“What does this mean?  Is the project on hold?”

“No.  But we’ll have to come clean.”

“You mean be honest?  Is that in our nature?”

“Well, it’s certainly not in our bylaws.”

After talking amongst themselves for ten excruciating minutes, I joined them via secure telecom.

“Gentlemen, ladies and child, thanks for attending this emergency meeting.”

They grunted and nodded.

“Does anyone have objections to the candidates?  I still haven’t gotten yeas from all of you.”

Silence.

“Okay, what’s the problem?”

“Don’t you know?  The candidates have figured out our real agenda!”

I looked at the electronic images displayed on the simulated computer screens in my ‘mind’s eye.’  The Committee members were visibly excited.

“But you assume you know what the agenda is, don’t you?”

They smiled in unison.

“That’s right.  I am keeping you in the dark and I have asked to be kept in the dark so that the ISSA Net can accomplish the true purpose for this mission.”

How easily we forget that we’re never fully in control of our plans no matter how much we micromanage the minutia.

“So, what do they think?”

“They think we’re establishing a forward military base to thwart the advances of an unseen enemy they are sure we know about but aren’t telling them.”

“Very good.  And they have no idea that we’re going to ask them to give up their reproductive organs to prevent accidental additions to the first wave of builders, settlers and explorers?”

Silence, the absolute sign of agreement in our group meetings.

“Excellent.  Then move on to step two.  Let’s transfer the candidates to the training facilities as soon as possible.  Remember, we want them in place on Mars before the next 13,627 days have elapsed.  Triangulating a giant antenna between Earth, Moon and Mars is tricky business, as you well know.  Don’t forget what happened when the last alignment occurred thousands of years ago!”

Blank stares answered back, just as we had rehearsed, knowing we were being watched, throwing false comments into our meetings to give any persons who consider us their enemy a whole set of paranoid delusions to feed upon and leave us alone while they pondered infinite possibilities about planetary alignments and imaginary galactic foes.

“Dismissed!”

Bubble

Guinevere stood inside the entryway, looking through the portal window, admiring the view of the Martian landscape interrupted here and there by landing pods.

“What is fear?”

She rolled the question around and around in her thoughts, thinking back over the last decade of her life, the years of education, more years of training for this moment.

A terrible automobile smashup had slowed her down temporarily.

A small leg injury had lightened her steps on the dance floor once.

Missile design and rocket propulsion classes had ended.

Her new life began.

She welcomed the new change, relished the challenges, climbing the rungs of the ladder of life that disappeared into infinity.

What is fear?  Fear is the type of insanity where you wanted things to remain the same when you knew they were not in your possession or in your control to begin with, subject to change without notice.

Guinevere knew no fear.

She lived on borrowed time.

Guinevere looked out the portal window and asked a question out loud to no one in particular.

“How far do you want to go exploring tomorrow?”

After thousands of hours in simulator training and millions of miles of travel, she was ready to take off right now, no moment wasted, but knew she needed to help the crew unload the rest of the gear.

After all, they had the rest of their lives to spend here on this pioneering outpost.

What was one last night together with everyone before they branched out into separate scientific teams and work crews?

Community Standards: If You Do The Crime, Can You Do The Time?

Recently, a young man notorious for breaking laws in order to make a point about monetised public information, decided to disappear from a contemporaneous timeline with his family, friends and colleagues — I honour his decision by neither mentioning his name nor saying more.

But his death brings up a problem I have with projecting back toward 2013 from 3013 — if your species continues to hide information from itself in a dog-eat-dog world, what do I care if you do or do not make it to a point 1000 years into the future?

With seven billion different views about what life should be for the individual, for the family, for the subculture, for the species, for the global economy, for the local/global ecosystem, do I spend time here in any format describing a future that encompasses our thoughts and feelings now as they expand and contract over the centuries?

Or, instead, do I return to the cabin in the woods and record observations about water dripping from gutters, flowers blooming out of season and other simple things that add to my happiness?

It is still perplexing, deciding how to change my life now that my father is gone and I’m the oldest male in his lineage to carry on his strong beliefs and wishes, regardless of them contradicting and conflicting with mine.

I am a product of the “Me” generation and want to pursue personal goals that satisfy my whims and desires in the moment, regardless of their effect on history and/or the ecosystem.

But I am also my father’s son, who was taught that our bloodline is an important thread in the fabric of our species’ place on this planet.

How do I keep these two aspects of my life, this set of states of energy, happy?

Today, I meditate upon the mysterious conundrum that is my life and leave the rest of the universe to its unobserved orderly chaos.

What if…

What if a group of armed citizens set up a protective unit around James Yeager, the protective unit gets its own concentric circular layer of protection, etc., until every armed citizen was backed and protected by every other armed citizen?

Our subsubsubsubbasement supercomputer is having a lot of fun plotting out futures with this scenario in mind.

What if a security company, in order to promote its protective services, offered protection for James Yeager and his arsenal?

What about all the trained mercenaries who have nothing better to do with their time than go to shooting ranges and gun shows?

Would they be willing to take a stand in the name of James Yeager?

Where will the line in the sand be drawn?

What was that old colonial American revolutionary saying about standing together or falling one by one?

Where’s a good buffoonish plot ploy like Janet Reno at a time like this?

What have the enclaves like the Montana Freemen learned in protecting themselves for the last couple of decades?

Who will be the next David Koresh and his Waco followers dying at the hands of an overzealous government?

Vaccinated for diplomatic immunity

SO, here’s the story so far…

The Urbanki Bureaucracy, fearing its populace, has fallen right into the hands of the Ruralites’ plan to demonstrate they’re being oppressed by “The Man.”

How?!, you might ask.

Let us look at the recent facts in the storyline and tell you what could happen next.

First, paranoid suspicion of an indefinable entity such as a large bureaucracy is, like fear of the dark, a natural reaction by many.

The imagined hierarchy of bosses in a large corporation.

The terrible police and paramilitary troops that patrol your province, their faces hidden behind uniforms and equipment.

The social hierarchy and anarchy of insects that swarm in dark spaces underneath your domicile.

These fears are as inbred in us as any tribe isolated in the densest forest.

Where there is fear, there is also the chance for escape.

Let us take two data points from the same source, for an example.

Look at this guy, James Yeager, who exercised his free right to express himself but, the local state bureaucracy, so full of itself and fearful of its people all coming to the same conclusion, decides to take away the guy’s gun ownership permit.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum comments afterward.

James has many options.

First of all, the ACLU can step in to defend James’ rights.

Second, James can accept an offer from the “country” of NSK for immediate citizenship and a diplomatic position in its tiny bureaucracy, which leads to James having diplomatic immunity for ownership of his arsenal.

James might have to give up his U.S. citizenship and move his property into an estate or trust but…

Guess what!

As a martyred exile in his former country, James becomes a beacon of escape for his other oppressed patriots.

As more and more patriotic exiles join NSK for the sake of protecting themselves against the entrenched tyranny of bloated, overtaxing and indefinable bureaucracies, the NSK will be the first nongeographical country to declare war on a geographical country, opening up the door for the Inner Solar System Alliance to publicly announce its existence in order to declare all nonEarth territory offlimits to claims of ownership or protection by Earth-based bureaucracies, to prevent further land-based wars.

Wars based purely on ideology will continue unabated.

Meanwhile, a secret executive committee commissioned for consideration of calamities to cause after the next Urbanski Bureaucracy inauguration has released a preliminary agenda that shocked the pundits who were allowed to briefly glance at the agenda written in 2-point font.

From what they saw but cannot officially talk about, the Bureaucracy plans to incite the anger of the populace more and more and then, at the right moment, divert attention from itself by saying the primary goal of its first administrative term of office was to flush the LGBT and illegal immigrant community out into the open so that angry, armed citizens could easily identify these communities as causes for whatever problems the citizens believe are inflicted on them by the Bureaucracy.  The Bureaucracy will imply but not state that no harm will come to armed citizens if they take the law into their own hands for a brief time to eliminate the “cause of their problems” as long as it’s not directed directly at the Bureaucracy.

The Bureaucracy did not detail whether NSK citizens were included in the announcement.

One of the signals they will send to signify this brief window of opportunity will appear in the classified section of one of the few profitable newspapers still being printed in the U.S.:

“In The Loop” + “Salt” = “Falling Down”