To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing."
— Henry Miller
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Hello Jesus #1
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing."
— Henry Miller
Monday, April 11, 2011
Still Shinin'. NBA Playoffs Preview Pt. 1
Since for some reason most of my life is prosecuted in the company of people who wouldn't dribble a basketball to spit on it, I've had to resort to novel and inventive ways of showing that just like all of life, basketball is best experienced not by actually getting out and living it, but internalizing it into a series of stories or narratives.
Well, in Spring 2011, even the eye candy is always a debatable experience for value if you can wait long enough for a screener, but the immediacy of the NBA Playoffs is still a time-binding experience the likes of which Hollywood wishes it still got the point of. As the Houston Rockets failed to launch in a timely fashion, my 'official' fandom* has been eliminated from the playoffs, so who's left to pick my pique? The Lig playoffs are a font of April showers what continue to flow on into June. Long? Sure, and even as we speak, the 82 'regular' games are not yet burnt, but nevertheless, positions have been established, so I'll set this off right now. To help you slap a GUI onto the world of all these tall black men you'd normally give not a shit about (HEYO!), I've broken the first round (of CONFLICTS) down into cinematic tropes:
SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS:
Third Seed Versus Sixth Seed
Boston (55-26) vs New York (42-38)- AKA “The Bucket List” vs. “Melo, STAT, and The Expendables”
The Celtics' “Big Three” as a storyline has long since given way to a three headed dragon comprised of “This Is Really Rajon Rondo's Team Now”, “Can They Survive Without Perk?”, and “Would Anyone Named O'Neal Necessarily Go Gimpy If He Wore Gang Green?”
Physically, the Knicks should match up well. Mr. Big Shot is certainly not going to be cowed by Rondo or Sweet Ray, Extra P will have his hands full with Melo, and I reckon a win for KG over Amare is KG playing his game and STAT only getting off ten shots and a look in his eyes that bespeaks detachment what got nothing to do with his surgically reattached retinas. At center, it's a push, the battle of the benches equally so. What this really boils down to is not just synergy, but identity. The Celtics have an identity: long after Tom Thibodeaux is gone, the belief that they can lock down as a defense and do the non-athletic things to make that happen (communication, basic conditioning)- is still there. The Knicks have the identity of a Trump-commissioned Brett Easton Ellis novel about Sarah Lawrence's first fundamentalist Christian teeny bop rock star. The coach is known to run. The first star was enjoying a run as the Man, the new star cannot be anyone BUT the Man, and running is something that happens to other people. Players come, names stay. Love and Rockets breaks up. The Posies reunite. They breakup. Bauhaus reunites.
Second Seed Versus Seventh Seed: The Miami (57-24) Clown Machine's “Fatigable Dud Torpedo Of Uncomfortable Realizations/Tears Are Totally An Option” vs I Am A Lesbian Art Film Called The Philadelphia 76ers (41-40)
We know the Damned Heat at this point. And we know that the damned DO cry. Sorry, couldn't resist.
No, seriously, the Heat are a preposterous excuse made flesh:
“a team with Dwayne Wade, LeBron James, Chris Bosh and 9 also-rans & C-list All Stars could win 70 games...provided they're not victimized and abused with a little footspeed at the 1 and bulk up the middle. YOU KNOW, LIKE ANY TEAM, AT ANY LEVEL, OF BASKETBALL.”
To take nothing from the Sixers, who have lost all their meetings with the Heap this year, the Playoffs are the time for Third Rate Peasant Armies everywhere to rise up and take down helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft:
OH, AND:
But while I ride for the Phour Aces in baseball, I'm not drinking any kind of Illadell-kool aid, even if it means getting with Sweet Dee. This is the perfect matchup for Los Bleeps to demonstrate their cherished overmatching situational superiority- the 76ers are wing-like, not single-minded of purpose at the 5 or the 1 with the likes of Jrue and Sweet Lou. And thus will the Heat advance to the 2nd round with all manner of overmessianic folderol from CaBron. You've been great, and we've all been waiting. Stay tuned for Part 2: Critical Acclaim (The Beats Talk Like Mike Ladd, But It Won't Get You Laid)
*a concept roughly equivalent to a bid in the French Foreign Legion- 'Screwston/Clutch City- we'll take anyone if you recognize the primacy of the Dream, peace be unto his name'
Monday, January 10, 2011
Think Burns
Have you seen this billboard?
What exactly is the point of it? I thought I knew what Jesus was. I didn't need to fill in the blanks, but here's seven I'm fairly sure the sponsors weren't thinking of, and probably SHOULD HAVE.
7. Jesus is... up for election, and the incumbent was so bad, you're about to make a write-in entry
6. Jesus is...in the back, making minimum wage.
5. Jesus is...waiting for you to finish him off.
4. Jesus is...formally undecideable.
3. Jesus is...a blank check?
2. Jesus is in fact, fairly characterizeable. To suggest he is what you say he is constitutes total insult to his name.
I'm kidding. Here's a truly Christlike legacy:
The truth is cold and hard and it never has feelings:
1. Jesus is...not here
np: Sonic Youth- Unwind
Thursday, January 6, 2011
apologies to Bertie Rooster
Why I Am Not An NFL Fan
What Is an NFL fan?
I’ll start by making a distinction between a devotee or follower of American football (henceforth referred to as ‘football’) and an NFL fan. Very simply, the former could watch just about any old game of sufficient proficiency and be entertained. Someone who regularly watches an NFL team is part of a fandom, with all the derision and philosophical impotence that should imply.
For the acolyte, all that matters is 22 men being violent to each other in 3-5 second doses. Who these men are, or where they’re from isn’t so important, I mean hell, their names aren’t even on the backs of their jerseys. The acolyte has multiple loyalties to multiple colleges, conferences, even parts of the country- which deep inside they know to be wellsprings of offensive style or maybe just prone to producing lightning fast tailbacks.
The NFL fan, on the other hand, at best is a parochial soul, and at worst, a front-running pleaser of men, beholden only to the jersey of the moment on sale at Champs. She MIGHT watch the NCAA national championship if it looks like her team is lousy enough to be able to draft the star player. They mediate their relationships to the rest of the existence of the sport through how it affects their fandom. In this, someone who normally couldn’t tell you jackshit about Roman Gabriel or Flipper Anderson can tell you all about the defensive line of the St. Louis Rams, because their Hawks can’t run the ball.
Why? Because the sports fandom experience provides a plotline and characters, just like any other tv show, and anyone in America can follow those. However, this is about why I am not an NFL fan. The monograph “Why I Don’t Watch A Lot of Network TV” is a whole other animal, albeit one with many of the same spots and stripes.
The Existence of Plotlines in Football
The position I espouse is that the average NFL fan does not in fact care about the discrete actions of the sport on a play-by-play basis, and as such, this is a less than fulfilling position for the true believer. The fan just cares about them as mediated by plotlines explicated through sportswriters and talking heads. At best, this is a subordination of process to result, and at worst, worshipping the golden calf for the beauty of the bovine form. Here’s the plotlines of the NFL:
The Manning Family Rivalry
Bill Belichick Is Mean and Evil (And Effective)
The Redemption of Michael Vick (or) The National Shame That Is Michael Vick
Is It Okay To Root For An Alleged Rapist, So Long As His Team’s Good Without Him?
The Saints Singlehandedly Saved Louisiana
What’s my proof? The fact I couldn’t tell you who won the Super Bowl last year. Was it the Saints? The Giants? I seriously don’t know.
The Populist Argument (football gives you something to have in common)
Is it really so bad to have something you can share with people who would otherwise…not share with you? Wrong question. Is it really so GOOD? I mean, buildin on it with the gang is great and all, but they also hang with those who sit and watch Firefly. Point being, if the mobb aint deep, the mob don’t rule. 5 million Elvis fans CAN be wrong.
The Natural-law Argument (college football was how you were raised)
Real Talk: I was raised to bleed purple and gold, and these are not the colors of an NFL team. Where I’m going with this is my personal loyalties were ever-tilled and rotated each year. Ironically, this concept of matriculation-as-inoculation-against-following-the-players-and-not-the-team has been inverted in the era of free agency and nonguaranteed contracts. To whit, there’s now LESS turnover in college football than pro.
The Argument from Design (if you must have football, shouldn’t you have the best?)
Food for hobgoblins small enough to mind me: my system of sports hedonic calculus is not internally consistent. I would rather watch professional basketball than college, and yet the ‘professional’ grade of football is decidedly an inferior product than that of college as far as entertainment value.
Why is this? The NBA is an 82 game season, more of an endurance match (and therefore more valid as an indicator of overall athletic fitness) than the NFL season, which at 16 games over 4 months or so, takes on the quality of a annual short term relationship with a date each weekend, or worse still, a political campaign with more debates and stupider questions.
When Coach Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs finds his league-leading team down by 10 points in the fourth quarter against the Knicks, he pulls his starters. Why? Not because he’s afraid they could make a run to win the game, fall short at the end, and possibly make the loss look worse than it is. But that’s TOTALLY the mentality of a NFL coach in a losing effort- all damage control and no go for the gusto. Pop’s pulling Duncan and Parker because he knows it’s a long season. In the NFL, you can be down 3 touchdowns in the fourth quarter, STILL have your starters in, and yet STILL punt on fourth down.
The Moral Arguments for Deity (why pro football isn’t the best on its own merits)
The gutless quality of professional football is most apparent in the lack of diversity or innovation in the offensive formations. The popularity of the spread and Vick’s resurgence notwithstanding, you’ll never see anything like a triple option or Mike Leach’s ‘ninja’ play in the NFL- the stakes are simply too high, it’s too much a business, and in business at this scale, there is NO impetus to do things that are different let alone LOOK different.
If the sport is being prosecuted in such a way that tactical decisions are made (the coach feels his job is safer at 6-10 if he perennially loses 17-21, and not 7-9, but with a couple of 30 point blowouts) without regard to actually winning the game, again- this paves the way for interacting with the sport on terms that have nothing to do with the sport itself.
This is the gist of the complaint "the NFL is just a business".
The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice (why college football is superior to the NFL and high school)
Hopefully what is trickling through the narrative is a commitment and demonstrated appreciation to the art of football, which is organizing 11 people to move a ball 100 yards against 11 other people. Violence is involved. Discussion of haircuts & pitbulls is not. If we’re not to let this simply devolve to an appreciation of sheer size and bulk, then let’s remember why NFL coaches look dull- because college coaches MAKE them look that way.
Football is a team sport. Yes, individual stars are necessary for certain types of team philosophy (do you prize speed or bulk? Pass to set up the run, or run to set up the pass?), and yet they can only get you so far. The cult of personality at the college football level then is not the player, but the coach. The upshot of idolizing or putting focus on the coach is that the individual watching can secondguess an intellectual decision rather than a physical one, which they were never capable of replicating.
Appreciating college football= choreography
Appreciating professional football= striptease
The Character of Football (is there anything redeemable about this crap?)
Probably not?
Defects in Football's Teaching (what football diverts you from)
Basketball. Reading non glossy, non-HTML publications. Women who don’t brag about being a bitch.
The Moral Problem (the NCAA)
Even when Roger Goodell gets around things like Sterger Gate by fining Brett Favre for not cooperating in a timely manner, it does nothing to make the Barney Fife Pharisees of the NCAA look any better. These guys sneeze at a mosquito to swallow an ostrich. Or something. They miss the forest for the pine needles. I can’t put a good spin on them. They’re like the Satan of the football cosmology, and if there is a god that can make good from their evil, it’s definitely a deus absconditus.
The Emotional Factor (the SEC)
There’s something problematic about a reconstructed Southerner such as myself continuing to take pride in SEC dominance over the rest of the country. What exactly am I rejoicing in?
That their descendants of slaves are bigger and faster? That the universities of the South may possibly have their priorities skewed toward winning sports programs and not, say, educating students? I can’t defend or explicate this. Instead, I will just point to the NFL and show that neither does it unite or atomize society as effectively as the geo-socio importance of the conferences of the NCAA. And if its ineffectual, it’s got to be inferior, right? Um, sure.
How the BCS Has Retarded Progress
This is the hardest part of my football theogony or christology. How can I support college football over pro when there’s no playoff system? When unbeaten teams don’t have a chance to prove they’re the best? WHEN BIG CORN (Tostito’s) DECIDES WHO IS IMPORTANT AND WHO IS BESIDE THE POINT!?!? I mean, if there was ever a Question of Evil in football, this is it.
There is no making this look better. About all that can be done is point to domestic violence rates on Super Bowl Sunday and say “college athletes (usually) aren’t rich enough (yet) to get away with murder…as much?”
War, the Foundation of Football
We’ve simply got to have football in America. We’re a savage, bloodthirsty lot, and that’s the civilians. Standing armies must have something to fight, else they turn on the population. Human beings like to fuck shit up, plain and simple. Ergo, people need to understand that those desires are natural and need a vent, but one with consequences and etiquette, like holding penalties, pass interference, broken bones, and torn cartilege. However, it needs to go through a sport, and one that is participated and celebrated- not passively consumed.
What We Must Do
Nothing. I am quite content to stay in my ghetto, just quit acting like you graduated from mine.
What Is an NFL fan?
I’ll start by making a distinction between a devotee or follower of American football (henceforth referred to as ‘football’) and an NFL fan. Very simply, the former could watch just about any old game of sufficient proficiency and be entertained. Someone who regularly watches an NFL team is part of a fandom, with all the derision and philosophical impotence that should imply.
For the acolyte, all that matters is 22 men being violent to each other in 3-5 second doses. Who these men are, or where they’re from isn’t so important, I mean hell, their names aren’t even on the backs of their jerseys. The acolyte has multiple loyalties to multiple colleges, conferences, even parts of the country- which deep inside they know to be wellsprings of offensive style or maybe just prone to producing lightning fast tailbacks.
The NFL fan, on the other hand, at best is a parochial soul, and at worst, a front-running pleaser of men, beholden only to the jersey of the moment on sale at Champs. She MIGHT watch the NCAA national championship if it looks like her team is lousy enough to be able to draft the star player. They mediate their relationships to the rest of the existence of the sport through how it affects their fandom. In this, someone who normally couldn’t tell you jackshit about Roman Gabriel or Flipper Anderson can tell you all about the defensive line of the St. Louis Rams, because their Hawks can’t run the ball.
Why? Because the sports fandom experience provides a plotline and characters, just like any other tv show, and anyone in America can follow those. However, this is about why I am not an NFL fan. The monograph “Why I Don’t Watch A Lot of Network TV” is a whole other animal, albeit one with many of the same spots and stripes.
The Existence of Plotlines in Football
The position I espouse is that the average NFL fan does not in fact care about the discrete actions of the sport on a play-by-play basis, and as such, this is a less than fulfilling position for the true believer. The fan just cares about them as mediated by plotlines explicated through sportswriters and talking heads. At best, this is a subordination of process to result, and at worst, worshipping the golden calf for the beauty of the bovine form. Here’s the plotlines of the NFL:
The Manning Family Rivalry
Bill Belichick Is Mean and Evil (And Effective)
The Redemption of Michael Vick (or) The National Shame That Is Michael Vick
Is It Okay To Root For An Alleged Rapist, So Long As His Team’s Good Without Him?
The Saints Singlehandedly Saved Louisiana
What’s my proof? The fact I couldn’t tell you who won the Super Bowl last year. Was it the Saints? The Giants? I seriously don’t know.
The Populist Argument (football gives you something to have in common)
Is it really so bad to have something you can share with people who would otherwise…not share with you? Wrong question. Is it really so GOOD? I mean, buildin on it with the gang is great and all, but they also hang with those who sit and watch Firefly. Point being, if the mobb aint deep, the mob don’t rule. 5 million Elvis fans CAN be wrong.
The Natural-law Argument (college football was how you were raised)
Real Talk: I was raised to bleed purple and gold, and these are not the colors of an NFL team. Where I’m going with this is my personal loyalties were ever-tilled and rotated each year. Ironically, this concept of matriculation-as-inoculation-against-following-the-players-and-not-the-team has been inverted in the era of free agency and nonguaranteed contracts. To whit, there’s now LESS turnover in college football than pro.
The Argument from Design (if you must have football, shouldn’t you have the best?)
Food for hobgoblins small enough to mind me: my system of sports hedonic calculus is not internally consistent. I would rather watch professional basketball than college, and yet the ‘professional’ grade of football is decidedly an inferior product than that of college as far as entertainment value.
Why is this? The NBA is an 82 game season, more of an endurance match (and therefore more valid as an indicator of overall athletic fitness) than the NFL season, which at 16 games over 4 months or so, takes on the quality of a annual short term relationship with a date each weekend, or worse still, a political campaign with more debates and stupider questions.
When Coach Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs finds his league-leading team down by 10 points in the fourth quarter against the Knicks, he pulls his starters. Why? Not because he’s afraid they could make a run to win the game, fall short at the end, and possibly make the loss look worse than it is. But that’s TOTALLY the mentality of a NFL coach in a losing effort- all damage control and no go for the gusto. Pop’s pulling Duncan and Parker because he knows it’s a long season. In the NFL, you can be down 3 touchdowns in the fourth quarter, STILL have your starters in, and yet STILL punt on fourth down.
The Moral Arguments for Deity (why pro football isn’t the best on its own merits)
The gutless quality of professional football is most apparent in the lack of diversity or innovation in the offensive formations. The popularity of the spread and Vick’s resurgence notwithstanding, you’ll never see anything like a triple option or Mike Leach’s ‘ninja’ play in the NFL- the stakes are simply too high, it’s too much a business, and in business at this scale, there is NO impetus to do things that are different let alone LOOK different.
If the sport is being prosecuted in such a way that tactical decisions are made (the coach feels his job is safer at 6-10 if he perennially loses 17-21, and not 7-9, but with a couple of 30 point blowouts) without regard to actually winning the game, again- this paves the way for interacting with the sport on terms that have nothing to do with the sport itself.
This is the gist of the complaint "the NFL is just a business".
The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice (why college football is superior to the NFL and high school)
Hopefully what is trickling through the narrative is a commitment and demonstrated appreciation to the art of football, which is organizing 11 people to move a ball 100 yards against 11 other people. Violence is involved. Discussion of haircuts & pitbulls is not. If we’re not to let this simply devolve to an appreciation of sheer size and bulk, then let’s remember why NFL coaches look dull- because college coaches MAKE them look that way.
Football is a team sport. Yes, individual stars are necessary for certain types of team philosophy (do you prize speed or bulk? Pass to set up the run, or run to set up the pass?), and yet they can only get you so far. The cult of personality at the college football level then is not the player, but the coach. The upshot of idolizing or putting focus on the coach is that the individual watching can secondguess an intellectual decision rather than a physical one, which they were never capable of replicating.
Appreciating college football= choreography
Appreciating professional football= striptease
The Character of Football (is there anything redeemable about this crap?)
Probably not?
Defects in Football's Teaching (what football diverts you from)
Basketball. Reading non glossy, non-HTML publications. Women who don’t brag about being a bitch.
The Moral Problem (the NCAA)
Even when Roger Goodell gets around things like Sterger Gate by fining Brett Favre for not cooperating in a timely manner, it does nothing to make the Barney Fife Pharisees of the NCAA look any better. These guys sneeze at a mosquito to swallow an ostrich. Or something. They miss the forest for the pine needles. I can’t put a good spin on them. They’re like the Satan of the football cosmology, and if there is a god that can make good from their evil, it’s definitely a deus absconditus.
The Emotional Factor (the SEC)
There’s something problematic about a reconstructed Southerner such as myself continuing to take pride in SEC dominance over the rest of the country. What exactly am I rejoicing in?
That their descendants of slaves are bigger and faster? That the universities of the South may possibly have their priorities skewed toward winning sports programs and not, say, educating students? I can’t defend or explicate this. Instead, I will just point to the NFL and show that neither does it unite or atomize society as effectively as the geo-socio importance of the conferences of the NCAA. And if its ineffectual, it’s got to be inferior, right? Um, sure.
How the BCS Has Retarded Progress
This is the hardest part of my football theogony or christology. How can I support college football over pro when there’s no playoff system? When unbeaten teams don’t have a chance to prove they’re the best? WHEN BIG CORN (Tostito’s) DECIDES WHO IS IMPORTANT AND WHO IS BESIDE THE POINT!?!? I mean, if there was ever a Question of Evil in football, this is it.
There is no making this look better. About all that can be done is point to domestic violence rates on Super Bowl Sunday and say “college athletes (usually) aren’t rich enough (yet) to get away with murder…as much?”
War, the Foundation of Football
We’ve simply got to have football in America. We’re a savage, bloodthirsty lot, and that’s the civilians. Standing armies must have something to fight, else they turn on the population. Human beings like to fuck shit up, plain and simple. Ergo, people need to understand that those desires are natural and need a vent, but one with consequences and etiquette, like holding penalties, pass interference, broken bones, and torn cartilege. However, it needs to go through a sport, and one that is participated and celebrated- not passively consumed.
What We Must Do
Nothing. I am quite content to stay in my ghetto, just quit acting like you graduated from mine.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Fear of a Stat Planet
Complaints about the standoffishness of the world’s brainiest city are older hat than that kettle-looking toboggan you wish your nephew would get it through their head to take off. If you really want to know what this city’s most epic fail is as far as its collective socialization, consider our inability to deliver an unequivocal negative. Long after you stop noticing the freeze, this is what you continue to get (and give) after you actually get regular conversations and circles of Texan & Alaskan expats. (also sometimes called ‘friends’)
Let’s be clear, this is an obvious oxymoron- the no of the 206/425 is an answer characterized by its lack of content. There’s no positive, there’s no negative, there’s no explicit idea as to how the person feels about the proffered invite, although you’d have to be the worst kind of submental (not actually clinically retarded, but clearly missing whatever part of self-reflection that allows one to not only know people aren’t interested in you, but also not care) to miss the implicit.
Q: Why do Seattleites make shitty air traffic controllers?
A: They have to see what the other planes are doing first.
What’s wrong with that? Nothing- if you actually have made plans, and you can’t at the moment recall their specifics.
HOWEVER! If you have no plans, and you cough that answer up, what you have REALLY said- and to anyone intellectually honest there should be no dispute- “that doesn’t sound interesting enough for me to commit to, but should I have no other plans that night and said void in my life didn’t drive me to starting intoxication so early that I don’t just pass out on the couch in front of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, I’ll show up”
Why or how did we get that way? One of my friends suggests:
"I'm thinkin' there may be a relationship between mood stabilizers and the Seattle No. how do you decide what to do if nothing is exciting or awful?"
What happens to make people this way? I think that not only do you take less chances after continually getting your nose slammed in the door for your trouble, eventually you long to dish the rejection yourself.
And like money is the only way some people have of knowing who’s won, turning people down is the only way others have to pad the stats of a social life.
Spade time: we’re in a upwardly mobile, youth-obsessed, trend-ruled, in a word-shallow- city. Not only are we aware, we’re proud of it, and we were drawn to this tendency like a bunch of backpack wearing moths listening to The Decemberists. Well, you people anyways, I fucking hate that band. There’s so much opportunity here, you’d feel like a schmuck if you went by your small town standards of interacting with people or commitments like they’re not only your only option, but a potentially shitty investment that you need to hedge against.
If you don’t believe me, pay attention next time you find yourself in a conversation where standards of loyalty are up for grabs. This city is shameless about constantly looking for a better deal. If the internet didn’t exist, this city would invent it to brag on Yelp about the deal they just got. Let’s loop back and emphasize that word “shameless”, to wit, you cannot shame a Seattleite for being shallow. In fact, it may be the essence of Seattle is a mastery of being an inch deep emotionally and a mile thick intellectually. In Seattle, we tolerate shallow so long as you’re thoughtful. After all, thoughtful people buy coffee and read books, and shallow people make such witty observations on life. You want relationships with people? You want to know where and when people will show up? Whoa whoa whoa, go read a Jan Karan book, Sally Field. I’d love to go on, but I’m getting a fear that I’m not sure when or how it should end. Is it ending? Let me see what I’m up to later this afternoon.
np: Introductory Nomenclature- Telefon Tel Aviv
Let’s be clear, this is an obvious oxymoron- the no of the 206/425 is an answer characterized by its lack of content. There’s no positive, there’s no negative, there’s no explicit idea as to how the person feels about the proffered invite, although you’d have to be the worst kind of submental (not actually clinically retarded, but clearly missing whatever part of self-reflection that allows one to not only know people aren’t interested in you, but also not care) to miss the implicit.
Q: Why do Seattleites make shitty air traffic controllers?
A: They have to see what the other planes are doing first.
What’s wrong with that? Nothing- if you actually have made plans, and you can’t at the moment recall their specifics.
HOWEVER! If you have no plans, and you cough that answer up, what you have REALLY said- and to anyone intellectually honest there should be no dispute- “that doesn’t sound interesting enough for me to commit to, but should I have no other plans that night and said void in my life didn’t drive me to starting intoxication so early that I don’t just pass out on the couch in front of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, I’ll show up”
Why or how did we get that way? One of my friends suggests:
"I'm thinkin' there may be a relationship between mood stabilizers and the Seattle No. how do you decide what to do if nothing is exciting or awful?"
What happens to make people this way? I think that not only do you take less chances after continually getting your nose slammed in the door for your trouble, eventually you long to dish the rejection yourself.
And like money is the only way some people have of knowing who’s won, turning people down is the only way others have to pad the stats of a social life.
Spade time: we’re in a upwardly mobile, youth-obsessed, trend-ruled, in a word-shallow- city. Not only are we aware, we’re proud of it, and we were drawn to this tendency like a bunch of backpack wearing moths listening to The Decemberists. Well, you people anyways, I fucking hate that band. There’s so much opportunity here, you’d feel like a schmuck if you went by your small town standards of interacting with people or commitments like they’re not only your only option, but a potentially shitty investment that you need to hedge against.
If you don’t believe me, pay attention next time you find yourself in a conversation where standards of loyalty are up for grabs. This city is shameless about constantly looking for a better deal. If the internet didn’t exist, this city would invent it to brag on Yelp about the deal they just got. Let’s loop back and emphasize that word “shameless”, to wit, you cannot shame a Seattleite for being shallow. In fact, it may be the essence of Seattle is a mastery of being an inch deep emotionally and a mile thick intellectually. In Seattle, we tolerate shallow so long as you’re thoughtful. After all, thoughtful people buy coffee and read books, and shallow people make such witty observations on life. You want relationships with people? You want to know where and when people will show up? Whoa whoa whoa, go read a Jan Karan book, Sally Field. I’d love to go on, but I’m getting a fear that I’m not sure when or how it should end. Is it ending? Let me see what I’m up to later this afternoon.
np: Introductory Nomenclature- Telefon Tel Aviv
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Six Real Ways Of Getting Shit Into Orbit Without Rockets, Richard Branson, or Space Elevators
Aerospace engineers have been saying for years that space flight costs will eventually start coming down due to advances in engineering (scramjets, for one), and even more wishfully, competition amongst the private sector. There is a reason these people are engineers and not sci-fi authors- the sci-fi authors are more convincing.
(The voice of reason)
Call us skeptics, but as long as space requires rockets, it's the ultimate glass ceiling. And by glass, we mean the stuff they use in high rise windows like that movie where Ben Stiller and that other dude smoke crack and take turns bouncing off of them. It's hard to imagine an economy of scale involving a goddamn ROCKET that gets cheaper than air travel.
"this is basically just a bus stop, really."
And while space elevators are everyone's favorite sci-fi trope after hookerbots and pulse rifles, there's nagging problems with things like materials strength (even after you read 5 articles about carbon nanotubes), Coriolis forces, and traveling so slowly through the Van Allen Belt that you get radiation damage. Here then, are 6 ways that are absolutely 100% ammonium perchlorate-free, and in no way require you to hang out with chicks who wear adult diapers on cross country stalks.
1. Space Fountain- Yeah I know, I thought we said no space elevators. The thing is, space fountains are actually *more* feasible than space elevators. There's a couple of competing claims to who came up with the idea first, but the one we find most interesting is where a bunch of scientists more known for their work on robotics & artificial intelligence (Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky & John McCarthy), and laser-initiated fusion (Lowell Wood, Roderick Hyde) used an early version of the internet to knock out the math of the idea and discover it was actually feasible. Robert L. Forward then suggested the idea of a pellet stream as fountain substance. We imagine it went something like this:
First Church of Evil Genius IRC 03/02/82 16:32/***/
MEN-skeetskeetskeet: robots are boring me, let's kill shit in space.
HANSoileaux: I love cock, I want to robotize it.
JMC: Consider this: space stations held in orbit by deflecting a ring of pellets orbiting below them
MEN-skeetskeetskeet: sounds tame. HANS, I have cock for those who love and serve me.
Bobby->: if you shot enough iron cocks into space and then redirected them down at the same speed, and then never quit doing it, you could build a tower into space supported by PURE IRON COCK VELOCITY
HANSoileaux: iron cock? I'm listening.
JMC: It's just crazy enough to work. So of course we'll stick with rockets and dreams of iron spiders shitting nanotubes.
Arthur C. Clarke made the concept famous as it ever will be with his novel The Fountains of Paradise, but since it was neither made into a movie by Kubrick nor despite its name, featured a lot of Spice Channel fodder, tends to go into the part of his back catalog that doesn't even get the love of Rendevous With Rama. The thing that makers a space fountain preferable over a space elevator is that it basically requires no handwavium or unobtainium, so to speak. Existing materials would work fine, and the concept is completely scalable- build as quickly or slowly as you like. If you think the idea of magnetic levitation and acceleration over the course of several miles is silly, consider the LHC, the Large Ion Collider, Fermilab, and just about any other nuclear accelerator worth a damn.
Basically we just have to build one pointing up and then another one pointing down. Basically.
2. Laser propulsion- as in a ground based station vaporizing metal propellant or plain old air into plasma with frickin LASERS.
Leik Myrabo got a rocket 100 feet in the air with these in 1999, so he's probably putting kitties into the ionosphere with LED pointers now. The idea almost sounds simple- the bottom of the beamcraft is so shiny that it refocuses & intensifies the lasers and makes a hunkahunka burning thrust. How hot? 30,000 K, or five and a half times as hot as the sun, or half as hot as Renee Olstead.
The specific impulse of that sweater has absolutely nothing to do with propulsion.
Mainly it's limited to how powerful you can get the laser, which is such an insignificant problem, that its why we're only now just installing the fucking things as glorified flash-bangs and the occasional 747 that can knock down a missile with a written warning. Clearly it's only a matter of getting the appropriate people for the job.
3. "America's Other Space Program"- Airships. Wait, why do you laugh? Oh yeah, Hindenberg, we get it. The page is a nightmare to navigate, but basically it sounds like a 3 stage series of airships, each bigger than the last, capable of higher and higher points in the atmosphere. This sounds like completely, well, hot shit-smelling air until you realize they've already made the second blimp, which they call a Dark Sky Station. By the way, as far as branding, "Dark Sky Station" is what a focus group calls "hell fucking yes". Right now though they're complete message board fodder.
(real)
(not so much)
As nanotechnology brings more of science's horror and wonder within the reach of yr average Spore enthusiast, we're thinking the doom/profit scenario is something like:
1. space blimp launches a Craig Venter-wannabee's tailored goo
2. tailored goo drifts in space until it finds feedstock (dead satellite/asteroid)
3. goo uses feedstock to replicate itself and come back to Earth as an army of conquering goo-bots
But they're thinking bigger than that- manned mission in seven years, they say. Smart money says America's other space program will still favor skinny folks.
4. Gerald Bull's Ghost
That's right, a fucking GUN to BLOW shit into space.
What really is there to explain?
Right off the bat we're going to admit Project Babylon's got some problems- whatever you launch into space with it has to be small, light, able to withstand a hell of a lot of acceleration, and the general experience of being a bullet shot out of a cannon longer than a football field. Since that rules out most satellites, experiment platforms, and living beings of a more complex form than Carlos Mencia, it will end up in Dubai as a toy for the world's most worthless rich, shooting I don't know, cricket balls with their initials etched in pure elephant ivory. Somehow that last sentence just made it seem the most likely of the whole lot.
5. Project Orion- we got the know how, we got the bombs...we don't really have the ecosphere to burn to survive something that flies by dint of shitting hydrogen bombs out and then catching the (hundreds of) blasts with a very very VERY big plate. But hey, did you know they did successful flight tests with conventional explosives like RDX? Scientists have calculated that if Michael Bay could be prevented from making another movie until 2016, the concomitant savings in explosives could be used to make a 180 day Mars run. By scientists, we mean comedy writers who've read George Dyson's excellent book about the project.
She is keeping you from space.
6. StarTram- Imagine a maglev into space, a REAL Shinkansen, if you like, and apparently the launch tubes themselves are somewhat levitated as well? We can't follow the math, but they're trying to say all the science and engineering necessary for the superconducting magnets and attendant cryogenics has been done on the LHC and is actually easier.
We've already showed you one picture of the LHC, so just pretend she's it again, and somehow 'old hat'.
Imagine a magnet bent into a V and then leaned on one side. These guys say that a train on the bottom of the V could very well be shot into space. Of course, if this really did result in space travel becoming accessible to all, and it ended up being staffed & used by those of us who rely on public transit, we're imagining a lot of hobos dying in vacuum for lack of proper change.
(The voice of reason)
Call us skeptics, but as long as space requires rockets, it's the ultimate glass ceiling. And by glass, we mean the stuff they use in high rise windows like that movie where Ben Stiller and that other dude smoke crack and take turns bouncing off of them. It's hard to imagine an economy of scale involving a goddamn ROCKET that gets cheaper than air travel.
"this is basically just a bus stop, really."
And while space elevators are everyone's favorite sci-fi trope after hookerbots and pulse rifles, there's nagging problems with things like materials strength (even after you read 5 articles about carbon nanotubes), Coriolis forces, and traveling so slowly through the Van Allen Belt that you get radiation damage. Here then, are 6 ways that are absolutely 100% ammonium perchlorate-free, and in no way require you to hang out with chicks who wear adult diapers on cross country stalks.
1. Space Fountain- Yeah I know, I thought we said no space elevators. The thing is, space fountains are actually *more* feasible than space elevators. There's a couple of competing claims to who came up with the idea first, but the one we find most interesting is where a bunch of scientists more known for their work on robotics & artificial intelligence (Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky & John McCarthy), and laser-initiated fusion (Lowell Wood, Roderick Hyde) used an early version of the internet to knock out the math of the idea and discover it was actually feasible. Robert L. Forward then suggested the idea of a pellet stream as fountain substance. We imagine it went something like this:
First Church of Evil Genius IRC 03/02/82 16:32/***/
MEN-skeetskeetskeet: robots are boring me, let's kill shit in space.
HANSoileaux: I love cock, I want to robotize it.
JMC: Consider this: space stations held in orbit by deflecting a ring of pellets orbiting below them
MEN-skeetskeetskeet: sounds tame. HANS, I have cock for those who love and serve me.
Bobby->: if you shot enough iron cocks into space and then redirected them down at the same speed, and then never quit doing it, you could build a tower into space supported by PURE IRON COCK VELOCITY
HANSoileaux: iron cock? I'm listening.
JMC: It's just crazy enough to work. So of course we'll stick with rockets and dreams of iron spiders shitting nanotubes.
Arthur C. Clarke made the concept famous as it ever will be with his novel The Fountains of Paradise, but since it was neither made into a movie by Kubrick nor despite its name, featured a lot of Spice Channel fodder, tends to go into the part of his back catalog that doesn't even get the love of Rendevous With Rama. The thing that makers a space fountain preferable over a space elevator is that it basically requires no handwavium or unobtainium, so to speak. Existing materials would work fine, and the concept is completely scalable- build as quickly or slowly as you like. If you think the idea of magnetic levitation and acceleration over the course of several miles is silly, consider the LHC, the Large Ion Collider, Fermilab, and just about any other nuclear accelerator worth a damn.
Basically we just have to build one pointing up and then another one pointing down. Basically.
2. Laser propulsion- as in a ground based station vaporizing metal propellant or plain old air into plasma with frickin LASERS.
Leik Myrabo got a rocket 100 feet in the air with these in 1999, so he's probably putting kitties into the ionosphere with LED pointers now. The idea almost sounds simple- the bottom of the beamcraft is so shiny that it refocuses & intensifies the lasers and makes a hunkahunka burning thrust. How hot? 30,000 K, or five and a half times as hot as the sun, or half as hot as Renee Olstead.
The specific impulse of that sweater has absolutely nothing to do with propulsion.
Mainly it's limited to how powerful you can get the laser, which is such an insignificant problem, that its why we're only now just installing the fucking things as glorified flash-bangs and the occasional 747 that can knock down a missile with a written warning. Clearly it's only a matter of getting the appropriate people for the job.
3. "America's Other Space Program"- Airships. Wait, why do you laugh? Oh yeah, Hindenberg, we get it. The page is a nightmare to navigate, but basically it sounds like a 3 stage series of airships, each bigger than the last, capable of higher and higher points in the atmosphere. This sounds like completely, well, hot shit-smelling air until you realize they've already made the second blimp, which they call a Dark Sky Station. By the way, as far as branding, "Dark Sky Station" is what a focus group calls "hell fucking yes". Right now though they're complete message board fodder.
(real) (not so much)As nanotechnology brings more of science's horror and wonder within the reach of yr average Spore enthusiast, we're thinking the doom/profit scenario is something like:
1. space blimp launches a Craig Venter-wannabee's tailored goo
2. tailored goo drifts in space until it finds feedstock (dead satellite/asteroid)
3. goo uses feedstock to replicate itself and come back to Earth as an army of conquering goo-bots
But they're thinking bigger than that- manned mission in seven years, they say. Smart money says America's other space program will still favor skinny folks.
4. Gerald Bull's Ghost
That's right, a fucking GUN to BLOW shit into space.
What really is there to explain?
Right off the bat we're going to admit Project Babylon's got some problems- whatever you launch into space with it has to be small, light, able to withstand a hell of a lot of acceleration, and the general experience of being a bullet shot out of a cannon longer than a football field. Since that rules out most satellites, experiment platforms, and living beings of a more complex form than Carlos Mencia, it will end up in Dubai as a toy for the world's most worthless rich, shooting I don't know, cricket balls with their initials etched in pure elephant ivory. Somehow that last sentence just made it seem the most likely of the whole lot.
5. Project Orion- we got the know how, we got the bombs...we don't really have the ecosphere to burn to survive something that flies by dint of shitting hydrogen bombs out and then catching the (hundreds of) blasts with a very very VERY big plate. But hey, did you know they did successful flight tests with conventional explosives like RDX? Scientists have calculated that if Michael Bay could be prevented from making another movie until 2016, the concomitant savings in explosives could be used to make a 180 day Mars run. By scientists, we mean comedy writers who've read George Dyson's excellent book about the project.
She is keeping you from space.
6. StarTram- Imagine a maglev into space, a REAL Shinkansen, if you like, and apparently the launch tubes themselves are somewhat levitated as well? We can't follow the math, but they're trying to say all the science and engineering necessary for the superconducting magnets and attendant cryogenics has been done on the LHC and is actually easier.
We've already showed you one picture of the LHC, so just pretend she's it again, and somehow 'old hat'.
Imagine a magnet bent into a V and then leaned on one side. These guys say that a train on the bottom of the V could very well be shot into space. Of course, if this really did result in space travel becoming accessible to all, and it ended up being staffed & used by those of us who rely on public transit, we're imagining a lot of hobos dying in vacuum for lack of proper change.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
oh, yeah, the MBV show...
I tried to flesh this out, but it's not improving or embellishing with time. Plus I only just now remembered this space existed. Consider this me hammering on the engine trying to get the thing to turn over.
Set List
I Only Said
When You Sleep
You Never Should
(When You Wake) You're Still in a Dream
Cigarette in Your Bed
Come in Alone
Only Shallow
Thorn
Nothing Much to Lose
To Here Knows When
Slow
Soon
Feed Me With Your Kiss
You Made Me Realise
Bilinda Butcher has to be the best preserved Englishwoman since Jane Seymour. FORTY SEVEN years and she still looks like a foxy gelfling. She has such a lack of stage presence, it’s almost the best stage presence ever. She does a great job of reminding you that rock is a noun as much as a verb, and an immobile one at that.
Despite the stories of just how loud the Valentines were back in the day and even without the complimentary ear plugs, I would have to say Sunn O))) is much louder. (also Francisco Lopez, Bloodlet, Shai-Hulud, others) But still, with the strobes and jet engine volume (recall the use of such recorded sounds to try and oust everyone from Manuel Noriega to David Koresh), I found myself thinking one man’s torture truly is another’s ecstasy (and wine).
I had a good time, I’d still pay the money if I had it to do the last month over again, but I don’t think I would go back a second time. It’s not that I didn’t find myself smiling and dancing (yes, dancing) from the get-go, but seeing them live felt more like closure rather than satiation. As if I were taking my place with the rest of Gen X, getting ready to crucify our ears, nailing them to the a crossbeam of the platonic psychedelic guitar sound.
On that note, the crowd indeed did make me feel less old than any other I’ve been to in the past few years.
They truly do have cross-generational appeal. Even if everyone basically looked the same, the sheer span of age on display made you think you were indeed in the presence of sound for the discerning.
Colm’s snare rolls on “Nothing Much To Lose” sound just as forced and out of place live as they do on record. Which is funny, because I’d always assumed his performance on the record was full of fuckups but they’d decided to leave it in anyways.
The samples were mixed horribly. There’s no excuse for that with the ticket price and amount of equipment and time at their disposal to get it right.
Set List
I Only Said
When You Sleep
You Never Should
(When You Wake) You're Still in a Dream
Cigarette in Your Bed
Come in Alone
Only Shallow
Thorn
Nothing Much to Lose
To Here Knows When
Slow
Soon
Feed Me With Your Kiss
You Made Me Realise
Bilinda Butcher has to be the best preserved Englishwoman since Jane Seymour. FORTY SEVEN years and she still looks like a foxy gelfling. She has such a lack of stage presence, it’s almost the best stage presence ever. She does a great job of reminding you that rock is a noun as much as a verb, and an immobile one at that.
Despite the stories of just how loud the Valentines were back in the day and even without the complimentary ear plugs, I would have to say Sunn O))) is much louder. (also Francisco Lopez, Bloodlet, Shai-Hulud, others) But still, with the strobes and jet engine volume (recall the use of such recorded sounds to try and oust everyone from Manuel Noriega to David Koresh), I found myself thinking one man’s torture truly is another’s ecstasy (and wine).
I had a good time, I’d still pay the money if I had it to do the last month over again, but I don’t think I would go back a second time. It’s not that I didn’t find myself smiling and dancing (yes, dancing) from the get-go, but seeing them live felt more like closure rather than satiation. As if I were taking my place with the rest of Gen X, getting ready to crucify our ears, nailing them to the a crossbeam of the platonic psychedelic guitar sound.
On that note, the crowd indeed did make me feel less old than any other I’ve been to in the past few years.
They truly do have cross-generational appeal. Even if everyone basically looked the same, the sheer span of age on display made you think you were indeed in the presence of sound for the discerning.
Colm’s snare rolls on “Nothing Much To Lose” sound just as forced and out of place live as they do on record. Which is funny, because I’d always assumed his performance on the record was full of fuckups but they’d decided to leave it in anyways.
The samples were mixed horribly. There’s no excuse for that with the ticket price and amount of equipment and time at their disposal to get it right.
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