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

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.

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.

Camel Straws I Have Known And Loved

The Death Of A Perfectly Good Paranormal/Speculation Site With A Rotten Dog Carcass

It used to be I would spend my days at the call center mentally composing responses to some amateur sleuth holding forth on who Carl Allende REALLY was. Or maybe while my ears were engaged about billing cycles, my mind would be closer to sunspot cycles, and just how that can affect the throughput, so to speak, of the transmitting phallus when said possessor is in the gateway chair. But now the call center remains, and I don't even care to correct the occasional reference to it being 'just a John Carpenter film, and one of the particularly bad ones'.
That's how much this sensationalism masked as respectable cryptozoology galls me. And to bring it over HERE, to this forum, where so much of the truth about Montauk Point, its past, present, and on-going future, has been DISSEMINATED...well, goddammit it breaks my heart a little. I guess some people don't care about wonder, about the deeper questions. You see a beak on a dog and all the sudden the U.S.S. Eldridge never existed. Well YEAH it never existed, not in THIS universe! Try having your eagle-turtle-pitbull explain THAT! WE'VE been trying too, me and eviLdRED008, and a few others. We few. We faithful few. Candles in a cosmic void.
Well, dRED, I can't speak for you, but this is where this truthseeker gets off.

keep searching for the truth, me, I must do it elsewhere and alone it seems...
-W.G. Wentworth of the Holmic Institutes of Mid-Inner Sciences (1st shift supervisor at Big Lots)


Elements Of The Periodic Table I Couldn't Come Up With In 15 Minutes Fire Back

Potassium: Jesus, man. Eat a fucking banana every now and then. No wonder you've never heard of me, what with your bowels.

Aluminum: Oh, you can come up with titanium, iridium, all the olympic metals, and those snazzy transuranics that go boom, but you can't come up with me, the can in your hand?

Sulfur: I remember a time, boy, when you believed in hell. You can at least believe in insurance and politics.

Iodine: I guess I shouldn't feel so bad, you've always been a bacitracin type and never spent much time around microscopes...still, when it came to disinfecting, I used to run that game...

Phosphorus: Dude, I go boom too. What am I, chopped plant matter?

Cesium: STEP TO ME. You go ahead with your tritium, plutonium, cobalt, uranium...I'm still here, bitch. Forget about me at your peril.

Francium & Germanium: Guessing, we think, could have come up with us. The state of California got its own as you indeed recalled, did you not?

Osmium: For a guy who said he used to read Marvel Universe "just for the armor suits", you sure don't recall large wodges of time on your floor in the 5th-10th grade.

Dysprosium: Hi. We've never met formally. I aint mad atcha...I am indeed the least known metal to this quiz. Look, I don't want to brag, but I'm kind of cool stuff...I mean, you remembered a lot of the gases because of chemical lasers, and all the hot metals because of reactors and bombs, right? Ok, I'm used in lasers AND reactors. I'm silvery-ish, don't occur as a free element, and can be cut with bolt cutters.

rocking mineral machines

The future is here, Amanda Pays just hasn't been equally multiplexed and distributed yet. Seriously, if there is anything 80s SF moving pictures told me, it was that I could expect Amanda Pays in the future, and that we two, together, would ride underwater.

Amanda Pays. Married to Corbin Bernsen (unfortunately). In 80s SF if you wanted a slightly, subtly hot Englishwoman with a mastery of the emotional scale ranging from mildly amused schoolmarmish disbelief of some stupid remark

to a Stanislavskian in-the-moment reaction of professional surprise in the workplace

to full-blown righteous indignation at such callous floutings of the laws of nature

then Amanda was your womanda for the job. Those 80s movies knew their place, they were chiseled into the bedrock of the revolution of lowering expectations in such a blandly generic way...sigh, you just can't get deculturalization like that these days. It's far too personally marketed and specific. I digress. The Amanda Pays Future wasn't like movies today where the future is say, Angelina Jolie or Monica Bellucci and then you think 'yeah right. I'm still in the Matrix.'

And not only does she have her own body of work, but she also made possible such technologies as Claire Forlani, and on this side of the drink, Zooey Deschanel. What I'm saying is she's got everyday archetypal appeal. (because we all have perfectly slightly better than average looking Englishwomen living next door? what?) Is there a sexy British schoolteacher she couldn't play?
(pic taken by )

Geeks named a video codec for her. That's serious love, and proves my point: we as a people have a reasonable expectation that there be more Amanda Pays In The Future. And trust me, we NEED Amanda Pays in the end-of-history/afterfuture/TAZ/slow-burn Soylency. If you ended up a spastic simulated consciousness, Amanda Pays can be close by on a keyboard the size of a carrier battle group.



If you end up the Flash, those dewy orbs can soften even the tackiest 'how I got my powers' scene.



Even if you run to the depths of the ocean floor, there Amanda Pays can find you (and leviathan). But who'd run?

open your memory hole

possibly the finest writing I've ever seen in Wikipedia. From the section on the alleged movie Road House:

Dalton is cut in a scrape with Wesley's henchman and visits the local hospital for staples to his wound. The doctor offers a local anesthetic, but when Dalton refuses, she asks "Do you enjoy pain ?". Dalton, in a moment showcasing his philosophical tendencies, proclaims: "Pain don't hurt", which later on is in conflict with his actions after getting beat up, he winces in pain which apparently DOES hurt.

...in fact, the whole thing is THAT good. It needs archival past the hobgoblins of little minds taking smaller things bigly on Wikipedia (read: "editing", although this is the bible, so hands off). It also needs pictures. So without further ado, and before they can delete their copy, the Wikipedia entry for the movie Road House, illustrated. Again, I did not write this, I just felt like it was too good to last, so I saved it and picked a few pictures.

Based on a true story, Swayze plays Dalton, a professional "cooler" with a mysterious past, a degree in philosophy from New York University, and a specialization in cleaning up rough establishments.




Lured away from his current job to work at the Double Deuce in Jasper, Missouri, Dalton quickly makes an enemy of local kingpin Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), who has made his fortune extorting the townsfolk and monopolizing the liquor trade.



Dalton also hooks up with his old friend, house musician Cody (singer/guitarist Jeff Healey),



who fills him in on the sorry state of the establishment and warns the rest of the staff that Dalton will "seal their fate" if they get out of line. Dalton quickly asserts himself in his new role by kicking ass and initiating a turn around of the Double Deuce from a fight and drug haven to an acceptable establishment. After showcasing his penchant for putting beat downs on drunk party-goers, Cody declares: "The name...is...Dalton!", thus signifying his official arrival.



First Dalton dismisses Wesley's cronies from the Double Deuce. Dalton then begins to clean up the bar from the inside out. After renovation work, a new Double Deuce opens, without the usual roadhouse chicken wire across the stage. Business vastly improves. Gone are the dirty rough housers that frequented the establishment in its previous incantation; replaced by a more upscale clientele.



Meanwhile, Wesley recruits his most prized thug, "Jimmy" (Marshall R. Teague), a murderous ex-con, to smash monster trucks into buildings and terrorize the citizenry. Jimmy displays the type of skill no one else possesses for the eventual clash with the equally hot Dalton.



During another destructive fight at the Double Deuce, Wesley's girlfriend "Denise" climbs on stage and performs a striptease. Dalton calmly escorts her off stage back to Wesley and proclaims: "If you're gonna have a pet, keep it on a leash."



Wesley allows Jimmy to "have his way" with the Double Deuce bouncers but the ensuing brawl is promptly interrupted by Wesley who wishes to put an end to the violence, even though he has been the root cause of it. The people now begin to look to Dalton to liberate them from Wesley's clutches.



Dalton is cut in a scrape with Wesley's henchman and visits the local hospital for staples to his wound. The doctor offers a local anesthetic, but when Dalton refuses, she asks "Do you enjoy pain ?". Dalton, in a moment showcasing his philosophical tendencies, proclaims: "Pain don't hurt", which later on is in conflict with his actions after getting beat up, he winces in pain which apparently DOES hurt. The doctor and Dalton strike up a friendship which leads to two of them dating. The local physician, Elizabeth Clay (Kelly Lynch), called "Doc" is Wesley's ex-girlfriend. She and Dalton are seen together around town.



Wesley calls Dalton to his bungalow to talk truce. When Dalton arrives he notices Denise has bruises over her body which she attempts to cover up but fails to do. Wesley, recognizing Dalton's skill and flair, offers Dalton a chance to come work for him. Dalton refuses to take sides with the despised Wesley. In return, Wesley blows up the local auto-parts store owned by Clay's uncle (Red, because he has red hair) (Red West) who has befriended Dalton as a signal to those who would betray him and because Dalton is unavoidably attractive.



Dalton's mentor Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott) arrives in town. Wade is an aging cooler who, though not as hot as Dalton, taught Dalton everything he knows, although his glory days are now long behind him. Dalton introduces Wade to his the woman he is currently sleeping with: "Doc" Clay. After a night of carousing, Wade and Doc dance together in a diner. Doc goes to work to treat patients after being up all night, drinking. Wade interrupts a shipment of liquor Dalton gets without using Wesley's operation. Wesley's goons fight Dalton and Wade to a draw, but then Wesley dispatches Jimmy to blow up the farmhouse where Dalton is staying.



During this time, Wade tries to convince Dalton to leave town and leave the town's troubles (as well as his girlfriend Doc) behind. Dalton, determined, argues with Wade about the right thing to do. Their passion built up; they nearly rain blows on each other. Wade stops one of Dalton's blows with his fist. Their eyes meet and Wade declares: "We don't want to do this!" This would be the last time they would ever enjoy each other's musk as Dalton decides to bring Wesley to his knees, but he still has to deal with Jimmy.



During the ensuing melee, Jimmy declares his love/hatred for Dalton by declaring "I used to fuck guys like you in prison". Dalton reacts, in a fit of passionate rage, by ripping Jimmy's throat out. He sets him adrift face down, sans throat, in the pond that separates Dalton's and Wesley's domiciles. Wesley's last henchman is now dead. In revenge, Wesley beats up his defenseless girlfriend and then declares that he will kidnap and murder either Wade or Elizabeth if Dalton doesn't leave town. He flips a coin to decide who will be murdered (Heads=Doc, Tails=Wade). Dalton finds Wade dead at the Double Deuce (it was tails). He then rushes to confront Wesley in a final showdown.



Rigging his car to crash into Wesley's house as a distraction, Dalton sneaks into Wesley's compound and proceeds to take out each of his thugs one at a time. Dalton finds Wesley hiding in the trophy room, and the two fight until Dalton pins Wesley with his knees on each shoulder. Starting down at Wesley, Dalton, hurting from a wound, threatens to rip Wesley's throat out. But Dalton takes pity on him and sees the error of his own violent ways; he turns his back, giving Wesley the opportunity to attack again.



Doc shows up just in time to watch as the townsfolk Wesley has bullied over the years come to Dalton's defense, repeatedly shooting Wesley with their shotguns. The police show up and immediately question the townsfolk. The townsfolk brazenly deceive the police by hiding any knowledge of the cause of Wesley's death, despite the fact that they were only ones present. The police, completely fooled by the cagey townsfolk, make little effort to investigate the matter. The town is finally freed from Wesley's tyranny.

like money for groceries for hairdos

The signs on the bus tell you to know what to expect when your cell is asked to call 9-1-1. The contingency plans for developing a mental block against dialing 4-1-1 when trying to query "Best practices for confrontations with primordial sub-mattress entities who've lost their way home?" Not so coalesced.



He said he was just in the relationship for the tickets, and he was just getting the tickets for the relationship. I told him he'd lost perspective and become needlessly recursive.



The set of the things I like includes Cold War nostalgiabation, chili cheese Fritos. Also,



And of course, baked goods.