Today on the way to get a bit of tea I ran into one of my English co-workers, Abdul and he reminded me of how you don’t really see quite as many fat people over in the UK.
I think it’s because they drink more tea than us.
It keeps the metabolism high and helps them lose weight.
With our multi-million dollar teeth bleaching industry, I think we can afford some tarnish for some vanished poundage. Look at Kate Moss for golly’s sake.
TexasIndecision listmember R. Steans has asked the blogging community to put together entries for the 2004 Mellies.
Here is my stab.
1) Most loathsome celebrity (non-political)
Simon Cowell. It’s part of his act to act loathsome, and I know that, I don’t like the act though.
2) Most loathsome television program
Fox News - if I must be specific I think it’s Hannity and Colmes - rarely is such a series of slam dunks so cynically set up to make the host and his puppet look good. The “liberal” puppet is forced to defend the liberal perspective presented in absolutely indefensible phrasings.
3) Most loathsome movie (theatrical release)
The Passion of the Christ for undermining the hopeful message of Christianity and turning it into a death cult on the par of Q’tub’s death cult.
4) Most loathsome band/album/ song
Nickelback - in the words of Jeaneane Garofalo back when she was doing comedy central ads, “mediocrity is evil”.
5) Worst idea of the past 6 months
MS-Windows perenially takes the cake
6) Best television commercial
iPod ads. They have defined a whole decor motif, launched a thousand parodies, and launched the careers of several artists. Even if you don’t like them they have been incredibly influential.
7) Clearest, bluest day
In Northern California all the days ending with “day” are clear and blue.
A day that was particularly good was the day at Bondi when I caught my first real wave and rode it all the way to the shore with a few sweet turns.
It was a real bonus that some lovely bikini’d Sydneysiderettes gave me their generous smiles as I hopped off.
The sun was shining, the surf was frothy, the girls friendly, and the skies above the sunburnt continent clear and crystalline.
Best candy
Sour gummy peaches - so tangy, so sweet, so citric.
Keeps scurvy away - Arr!
9) Least tragic event.
The Cardigans release their new record, “Long Gone Before Daylight”
10) Worst blog topic at “League of Melbotis.”
I find it all equally … equally … equal.
11) Best name for Jill’s forthcoming child (sex is unknown. Submit one for each!)
Boy: Calvin Girl: Ravenna
12) Best item at Taco Bell
The plain old taco. Simple in its conception, flawless in its execution
13) Most loathsome Democratic presidential nominee
The Republican president has already lowered the bar so low that this question doesn’t make much sense anymore.
14) Best book you read
Tie: What Should I do with my life - Po Bronson
A scanner darkly - PK Dick
15) Other blogs of wonder
boingboing.net - I love it through and through. It makes me feel not so embarrassed about loving my PowerBook, my Motorola v600, and my iPod.
16) Which former POTUS (President of the United States) do you know least about, but want to know more?
Polk - I just picked a random one out of the bevy of presidential streets in the Fillmore / Marina districts of San Francisco.
I heard a very good track today on MTV by a band called Faithless who I first ran across in NL (it’s actually a trio, one third of which, Rollo Armstrong, is the brother of quasi-depressive chanteuse Dido, who i think is the girl playing drums in the video…).
Whether long range weapon or suicide bomber Wicked mind is a weapon of mass destruction Whether you’re soar away sun or BBC 1 Disinformation is a weapon of mass destruc You could a Caucasian or a poor Asian Racism is a weapon of mass destruction Whether inflation or globalization Fear is a weapon of mass destruction (echoes of Russell Simmons)
Whether Halliburton or Enron or anyone Greed is a weapon of mass destruction
The rest of the lyrics are great, clever, including references to the wheel of karma, Daddy going to Vietnam and not coming back, etc.
What are we fighting for kids?
Damn, The Sounds are not playing in SF, they’re part of the warp tour in SF. Like i want to go through all that freaking drama to see them.
I can’t stand going to festivals for all that effort just to see one band. all the rest are those blase poppy punk skate bands.
Bah.
My love of Scandinavian bands, and those nordic ingenues that generally front them is very well docmunted.
While Bj?rk marks the start back in 1992 I have to say that my absolute favorite prennial scandinavian band is The Cardigans.. Actually they’re also one of my favorite bands ever, flat-out.
Their latest record Long Gone Before Daylight .
It is rumoured that this record marks an even more Bergman-esque, Dedman-approved, turns of darkness as compared to their previous record (which itself was moving to a Nordic winter of the soul), Gran Turismo.
..and let’s get what needs to be said out of the way. The singer, Nina Persson, is darkly-humored (once wishing that she would die by receiving a poison-laced candy bar from Ozzy Osbourne), daring (check out the video from “My Favourite Game”), and beautiful as an glacier.
The trouble with this latest album was that it was released only in Europe - to get the import was a meager $40.00.
I love The Cardigans, but a 40 dollar CD that’s not a double set or something is a bit rough…
But this month marks the American release (yay!).
To get a sample of some of their newest tunes you can check out a great live performance they did for “Morning Becomes Eclectic” on Santa Monica public radio.
It is awesome.
At KCRW, (who recently fired commentatrix Sandra Tsing Loh for pushing the FCC’s buttons with a rather, spicy bit of vernacular) you’ll be visiting the station that first gave home to Joe Frank’s beautiful, mental-psychedelic oddysseys.
Mike and I love this one especially. Regrettably the costs of operation have forced Joe to start requiring money to play these streams. Alas! This one is certainly worth it.
I would love it if Joe were to get his work into iTunes or audible.com.
“Strange things man, strange things”
This was originally said by a boy who crashed a car into a pole after robbing a gas station.
This boy was known by my friend, and college roommate, Matt.
So last Wednesday morning I woke up in the middle of the night (as seems to be happing a bit too often lately, I’m going to take some melatonin and even it out) with this intense feeling of pressure in front of my face. You know like someone put a fist riiiiiiight at the tip of your nose but didn’t touch it.
And, uhm, well, I’m face to face with the ceiling. I can feel its proximity down the entire length of my body.
Now, being one who did his requisite Tibetan Book of the Dead and Carlos Castaneda reading back in my university days, I’m pretty comfortable with the realization that my awareness has been projected outside of my traditional vessel for such realizations and don’t freak out.
I remembered reading that certain practitioners describe basically a pole extending from the pineal gland (third-eye area) upwards upon which the “subtle body” can rise and fall. Basically a pole that runs perpindicular to the subtle body.
Well, as I thought of it I was able to shift my awareness/body vertically along such an axis.
I then rotated on my axis 180 degrees and saw my sleep-paralyzed non-subtle body below.
At this point I started feeling a pull back to the form, I tried to break clear of the pull with a force of will but could not.
I awoke, manning the meatspace vehicle.
So I’ve been grappling with this experience for the last week or so.
Did this really happen? Was it all in my head?
The Matrix has brought all these questions to popular consciousness and ultimately we are left with the phenomenological conclusion:
I Experienced what I Experienced.
(life would be so inexplicable without Hegel)
So I’ve been reading all sorts of related literature this week reading about ancient vedic traditions of the types of body (i.e. the subtle, non subtle) in the body, chakras, lucid dreaming, OBE, Near-death.
It seems to me that when we are born we learn to focus awareness into our sense organs - can we focus our awareness elsewhere - and by what mechanism?
I talked to my fairly grounded friend Patrick about it - I was expecting him to dismiss the whole thing as he is both an agnostic guy with a strong atheist streak and a computer science guy and a NOVA on PBS watcher - but oddly he said that he too had experienced something similar and could not deny its occurrence.
I wonder if it’s an effect of all the yoga - basically increasing my ability to focus my awareness on what I’m doing instead of the ship of my awareness being guided by random thoughts?
Anyway, I don’t think many spiritualists read my site ( I haven’t checked my logs in ages, I’m not sure if anyone besides friends and family read it ) but if you do and you have some wisdom to share I’d be glad to hear it.
…but my co-worker mice has discovered that Texas will love you anyway…
We know the visual clich? from film and small screen…
YOUNG BOY walks up to the check-out stand and, nervously, gets 4 packs of gum, a Woman’s Journal, and a Coke so as to cover up that he’s got 1 package of condoms on the conveyor belt
This generally gets played out in that the cashier is a relative of the girl upon whom our YOUNG BOY has designs, or the condom needs a price check, etc.
This scene has been played out in both in The Summer of ‘42 and the venerable crappy teen drama that launched a thousand crappy teen dramas (and the career of Kevin Smith), Degrassi Jr. High.
Even my Dad knows a funny joke keyed off this cliche:
In the 50s we used to walk up to the druggist and say: “Can I have a pack of smokes whispers and some condoms?”
In the modern times we walk up to the druggist and say: “Can I have a pack of condoms whispers and some cigarettes?”
Now that we accept this as a cliche, the inevitable discussion turns to this modern mantra.
“Sex is natural and sex is lethal without protection. Ask for condoms sans shame, ask potential partners for their blood screening, etc.”
I mean if “The Facts of Life” were still on, the episode where Tootie gets a Trojan would no longer merit the “On a very special episode…” lead-in.
So now, here, in the 00s, one need have no shame of asking proudly and loudly for protection. Heck, on campus lawn at UT it was impossible not to pick up a free basketful every third week of the month. Nurtured in such a milieu, I haven’t the least shred of angst about asking for such pharmaceuticals.
What do I actually have a problem with? Asking for books at the bookstore.
Me: Do you have a copy of “I hate my job and my friends, what the hell is wrong with my life?
Guy: Let me check….
Now obviously this guy doesn’t know me except that i sound like a slightly depressed adult. I’m agonizing that he thinks I’m a serial killer instead of some sex-pervert who simply wanted those all-to-pedestrian prophos.
Or what about…
Me: Do you have a copy of “Channeling Learned Masters for your Cat?
Guy: Hang on puts hold on Hey Bob, some whack job wants to channel learned masters for his cat. Can you believe these whack jobs?
Imagine what kind of geek loser I am asking for a 50 year retrospective on Dr. Who (which I hate, whew, dodged that one).
Unlike a package of hats, asking for a book says something about my essential being as a person. It says I’m into tantra, or the history of cross-dressing.
Condoms, those sheaths of pedestrian laytex, simply say that I’m aware of the lethal risks of a biological drive that everyone has (ho-freaking-hum).
But don’t worry, I’m not really that angsty about the whole thing (who am I, Woody Allen?) - I just think that the parallel is amusing.
If you love sci-fi, especially the classic stuff, you may know one of the unique special pleasures of our love - finding a really pulpy, really yellowed, Ace, Trade, or Avon paperback release of a sci-fi book from the sixties.
Now, the book doesn’t have to have been printed in the sixties, although it helps. The key things we’re looking for are:
Finding a yellowed I, Robot or Foundation is a jolt of pleasure like no other.
Today at the book trader on Castro in Mountain View I picked up a copy of the fourth book of the Dune series: God Emperor of Dune. It’s definitely a winner on the above points.
It’s one of those great sixties editions with the title in pseudo-psychedelic gold leaf with a hand-drawn picture of the mostly transformed Leto II (also called the God Emperor) on the cover.
OK, a picture is worth a thousand words.
I can easily imagine some shaggy hippy-type guy ambling slouchedly through the Haight with this latest release on his way to yet again cook his third eye with another dose of lysergia. I wonder what the poor bastard made of this.
“Hey man, do you think The Spice is like, acid?”
[ My own response to this question can be found here. ]
Anyway, back to the exchange of tender for goods, when you buy these old pulpy versions you feel the cultural disdain that the ‘straights’ had on the sci-fi crowd. Woody Allen once said that sex is only dirty and wrong when it’s done right. The satisfaction of reading sci-fi is truly extra satisfying when it’s shamefully geeky and pulpy.
So as I was basking in this acquisition I thought about the title, God Emperor of Dune.
I know (as do readers) that Leto II was of woman born and therefore would not be whan I think of as God: immutable, omnicient, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
But…. let’s think about it from another angle…
What is the one essential idea we have about God?
Doubtless some of the pious might say “forgiveness”, or “creator”, or some similar such Sunday school convenient platitude of gross nonsense.
I mean you may have been created by a diety, maybe not. A diety may care if you didn’t called the “Red Hot Date Line for Hot Steamy Chat” a diety may not care.
Think like a child, or a savage, what is the essential fear you have: death.
What is the essential nature of God? Immune to death.
I remember my mother telling me that Heaven was a city made of Gold when I was very young. What’s the essential lesson? When I die, there is something already waiting that doesn’t die. Godhood is longevity.
History bears me out. I recall seeing the exhibit of Ramses The Great (Ramses II) back in Dallas many years ago. Many of his officers thought he was a God because he lived to the ripe old age of……eighty.
Eighty. Eighty in an age where the average mortality age was less than half of that!
Eighty is a pretty good age to die these a-days. You live to 80 you have kids, grandkids, gamble some in Vegas. Things are pretty good. Living five centuries would seem like Godhood to us.
In this story, Leto II lived several thousand years so, phenomenologically, if godhood is a function of longevity he is truly right to be called (or to call himself?) God Emperor.
Or for the calculus minded: When we learn about calculus series we learn that the function for a series is represented by the function (Hm, can’t format this properly with the sigma and superscripts :-/ - let me “say it out”).
“As n appreaches infinity, the sum of the series 1/x^n, as an aggregate, approximates 1.”
In fact, at certain levels the proximity grows so close that we, in calculus, say “1”.
Thus for Leto II, as n represents the years of life, he moves closer and closer to 1 — immortality and, in essence, Godhood.
Anyway back to the book, beyond its title.
It’s certainly the most mystical of the Dune books. The opening sets the events of the book as having already happened during a time called “The Scattering” and shows some recently uncovered diaries of the God Emperor (even God Emperors like to ‘blog, as it were).
Leto’s voice is mystical, disjointed, fatalistic, and occaasionally confused by his long, long life. Humanity’s future which he saw with his psychic power, which he experienced with his life, and which he now sees receding behind him like a wake leaves him bursting forth observations like a mystic.
I find many of his writings have a Rumi-like, explosive quality.
In any case, I read God Emperor years ago. While I’ve read the original at least 10 times, this one only once. I think, perhaps, I was too young to understand some of the more adult depth of his characters.
The other trouble is that Leto II is not a traditional hero (or anti-hero) much like God I think he is beyond good and evil. His father, the hero of Dune, is much more standard. He’s an heir, he’s cast out, he regroups, he kills the ursurpers, his rule is law Along the way he has some very interesting mental wig-outs, but there you have it.
In book two, he becomes worshipped, in book 3 he has the twins. OK, great.
But Leto….he loves humanity, but he has lost his own it seems. He doesn’t even seem particularly inclined to fight for his life. He accepts death in a way that his father railed against and that we, as the audience, expect.
I suppose this is one of the most frustrating things for Dune series readers - the format fundamentally changes. The characters don’t become more noble after time. They don’t seem readily inclined to do the right thing. The universe feels more and more removed from the traditional human drama rules passed to us by the Greek dramatists.
It’s hard to believe his books can still engender so much thought and debate.
Herbert was a genius and I doubt we shall ever see his like again.
Open Source software like Linux was just the beginning.
Open source textbooks have been written, open source architecture, and now Open Source Textbooks. Why not.
Remember some of those textbooxs you read where you were like “hey this bozo doesn’t know anything!”. When people who write for interest not profit will make things much better.