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2020-10-31 (Saturday)
Current Mood: controlling you
Current Music: theremins
2020-10-30 (Friday)
For your consideration...
And stop using Internet Explorer! Really, it's dangerous for your machine and your private data. Use Firefox instead. It's a breeze to install and easier to use.
Μέκκα λέκκα ἅϊ; Μέκκα ἅϊνι ὧ !
2009-12-06 (Sunday)
Dear Log,I was asked today: "I don't suppose you're a notary public, are you?"
Sadly no.
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: notable
Current Music: Talking Heads- Crosseyed and Painless
Dear Log,From an email I just wrote:
I want to tell the world:
"Kids, don't make the mistake I did– Stay in school, and don't leave until there's an orgy!"Word.
Tags: edutainment, writinglocation: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: epigrammatical
Current Music: Talking Heads- Crosseyed and Painless
2009-12-01 (Tuesday)
Dear Log,Tired of the blocky Aramaic Hebrew script on dreydels? So upgrade/rollback to good timey Phoenecian/Unishem letterforms!
Extra credit: origami dreydel.
location: Tativille
Current Mood: DIR=R2L
Current Music: Talking Head- I Zimbra
2009-11-26 (Thursday)
Dear Log,Yup, it's that time of year, folks!
It's not exactly cheery, and I'm already in not a great mood.
[Youtube video, 2½ video min, of the author reading it.]
William S. Burroughs
"The Thanksgiving Prayer"For John Dillinger, in hope he is still alive
Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986
Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through.Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.
For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind their own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories— alright let's see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
Here's some sparse explanatory notes, for folks who might not get some of the more cryptic references, because of being not an American, not old enough, and/or not familiar enough with some of Burroughs's various personal stylistic tics.
- Dillinger — "idolized by some as a modern-day Robin Hood." -Wikipedia entry
- wild turkey — a species that European Americans hunted to (relative) near-extinction. Now very numerous.
- passenger pigeons — a species that European Americans hunted from a population in the hundreds of millions(!), to complete extinction. (The last known one of them died a few months after Burroughs was born.)
- bison — species wastefully/pointlessly massacred by the millions, in the 19th century.
- KKK (Ku Klux Klan) — a radical racist organization (or factions of), originally Southern. Now has ties to Neo-Nazi groups.
- "notches" — a lawman proud of killing a black person would file/carve a notch onto their gun, for each kill.
- "laboratory AIDS" — as late as 1986, it was a conspiracy theory with at least some plausibilty that AIDS was a synthetic virus— and either released accidentally; or deliberately, possibly targeted at the (first) groups to be devastated by it, gay men and junkies. This reference is a definite piece of bathos, making an otherwise "as true today..." work into something very much stapled into the early 80s. Mentally edit out that line, much better that way.
- In 1969, President Nixon declared a "War against Drugs", i.e., vigorous police action against drugs. That's why you can't find drugs anywhere anymore.
- "Show us your arms" — searching someone to see whether they are or were, a junkie; the arms would show scarred/bruised arms.
- "Last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams": very, very open to interpretation– especially on seeing the Youtube video, and knowing some of Burroughs's work... Interpretation which, after reading Youtube comments there, I don't think I particularly want to hear any more of.
Burke, 2009
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: theoretically hungry
Current Music: Grieg- "In my native country" (43-4)
Dear Log,Today is Thanksgiving Day for all Earthicans. I prefer to think of today as a great chance to collectively thank Native Americans, who have been spending millennia crafting some of the world's sanest and sauciest languages.
But their most famous undertaking has been how they've been making some of the best food on the planet: twisting genes to turn corn from a scrawny grass into a lucious sweet grain; turning potatoes from a marble-sized weed-root into a hundred varieties that you can happily live on (and get drunk on); and coaxing chili peppers from a weird acrid seed-pod into the world-wrapping glory that they are today. And that's to say nothing of the whole of Mexican (and New Mexican) cooking, or of the delights of thousands of weird drugs: Cocaine! Ayahuasca! Magic mushrooms! Maple syrup!
And that's just the stuff you've heard of, the stuff that got around. I've travelled here and there and I've stumbled on some great stuff that stayed local: sumac-berry punch; ooligan grease; rice with black seaweed; glasswort salad; blue atole; herring eggs on spruce branches; dried black seaweed, great just to chew on. Mmmmmm. Now I'm almost hungry.
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: capsaicine
Current Music: Willam S. Burroughs- A Thanksgiving Prayer
Dear Log,To everyone outside the US and Canada, happy Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving is a late-autumn Thursday dinner party generally for family, or friends.
Myth has it that it dates to the 1600s when a general European harvest-
time feast was Established by USA Holy Pilgrims. They decreed a Solemn and Joyous Observance of having harvested barely enough, or maybe-not enough, food to get them thru winter; so they also begged/grifted the friendly locals, Natives, into keeping them from potentially starving: the locals gave gifts of native foods, and showed the Pilgrims how to grow corn and other foods that the Natives had put a few thousand years' work into genetically optimizing for hardiness and nutritive yield. (That's the myth. The truth is different— some parts messier, some more tame, some simply contradictory.)
But these days:
The traditional main course of the meal is a bigger-
than- your- head turkey, which I think tastes like cardboard no matter how you prepare it; and in this case, the normal preparation is to bake it for hours and hours. Unfamiliarity with how long it takes to bake this thoroughly often leads to undercooked meat in places, which can lead to salmonella et al. A recent fad has been to try to deep-fry the turkey. A very common result is splattering searing hot oil on everyone, and possibly catching the house on fire.
People also eat "cranberry sauce" which is not a sauce, but basically like an over-thick jam made with cranberries (which are like small cherries) and containing a massive amount of sugar to offset the bitter taste of the cranberries. That is rarely served except during a Thanksgiving meal. Most people just buy a can of it.
There is also "the stuffing", which starts out as smallish chunks of bread mixed up with seasoning, and stuffed into the HOLLOWED-OUT INTERNAL BODY CAVITY of the turkey, to absorb heat and grease from the process of baking the turkey. This stuffing is later spooned out, and is served as an actually quite tasty glop.
Skillfully slicing the turkey meat apart is called "carving", and is a grand task, jocularly but skillfully performed by the α-male.
To keep the turkey from turning into a papery husk as it is being cooked for hours and hours, it is routinely "basted" with a large plastic syringe, where you draw up fat from the bottom of the pan (which has dripped off the turkey), and squirt it out on top of the turkey.
(Also: supposedly these oversized large plastic syringes can also be bought and used for at-
home on- the- cheap artificial insemination! That is not part of the traditional holiday.) location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: basterd
Current Music: The Killers- Human
2009-11-25 (Wednesday)
Dear Log,This...
...and variations on it are happening waaaay too often these days. I go write some BRILLIANT comment on something, hit Submit, and maybe one time out of four, I get the above. B-b-b-b-but what about my brilliant comment!? Oh I'll just hit Back... nope, it's gone. Disparute.
It's almost as if Facebook's isn't carefullly built and maintained!
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Music: Talking Heads- Once in a Lifetime
Dear Log,
JOIN US...
IT STOPS HURTING AFTER A WHILE...
Tags: designlocation: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: monospatial
Current Music: Madonna- Secret
2009-11-24 (Tuesday)
Dear Log,The "favicon" that I chose for the The Unicode Slide Rule is:
, which is the Burmese letter "ii", Unicode character U+1024. On the extremely off chance that your system supports the hassles of Burmese typography and also has a font for it, here it is: ဤ
For more fun, see the Unicode character charts, and look under "Southeast Asian Scripts" for "Myanmar". Yay it's fun, scribbly scrubbly scroobly!
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: bubbly
Current Music: Elis Regina & Antonio Carlos Jobim- Águas de Março
2009-11-23 (Monday)
Dear Log,I've started reading a supposedly Very Important piece of autobiography from a few decades ago... I'm barely on page four, and I'm already almost spasming with laughter at the prose. Not only is it pathetic, and bathetic, but the sense of tone, in every single paragraph, makes it impossible to believe, even for a second, that it was written by the purported author– and also impossible to believe that the actual writer was... an actual writer!
It reads as if you took Less Than Zero, and 1:1 interleaved lines from The Young Visiters, and then held it up as the Great American Novel... by Christina Aguilera. O how ever shall I dissapier hear Blair asked hersself.
How this... this Artifact... even made it into print, much less got the NYT fawning over it, I'll never understand. This far surpasses all my usual excuses of "interns did it, didn't care", or "everyone was drunk".
Oh man. Ghaaahstly details to follow!
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: hilared
Current Music: Jimmy Eat World- Get It Faster
2009-11-21 (Saturday)
Dear Log,I'm not a religious man, but I've decided that when my time comes, I want a full ska funeral.
Tags: musiclocation: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: sacroskanct
Current Music: Lady Gaga- Captivated
Dear Log,This shtik of making fun of Amazon's dumb recommendations is too easy.
But this one I can't pass up, because it is a Borges aleph:
As someone who has purchased or rated Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States by Gary Younge, you might like to know that How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst President in History [by John Gibson] will be released on December 1, 2009.First off, who is Gary Younge and what did he write? He's a British reporter for the Guardian. They posted him in the US starting in 2003. His Stranger in a Strange Land is an anthology (that I bought) of some of his articles that he wrote as he traveled around the US, before settling back into NYC. Here he is, on the book cover. HE'S THE ONE NOT WEARING A HAT. ( ... )
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: predated
Current Music: REM- Man on the Moon
2009-11-20 (Friday)
Dear Log,"What are you buying when you get on a roller coaster? Not risk... but the illusion of risk. Being hurled to the edge of danger but knowing that you'll never have to cross it. Now, Mr. Disney's innovation was to put these carnival rides and attractions into a story context where you can imagine yourself as a character in one of his cartoon epics, floating through a plaster-of-paris jungle. The obvious next step... is not bigger and better facsimiles of nature, but nature itself. Think of Alaska as one big theme park."—Albright, in Limbolocation: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: itself
Current Music: a cat grumbling at me
2009-11-19 (Thursday)
Dear Log,Paul F. Tompkins is my new personal superstar, maybe because he is a semi-replicant of jjohn. Maybe because he saw Fabio in person (albeit at a distance) and lived to tell the tale. And maybe because he near-absurdly overdresses (but no, no monocle), a goal to which I have always aspired— but alas too lazily. (Iron things? Go to the dry cleaner?)
Now, I have an old story about how I was once getting over some mild general anesthesia (I was out only about an hour, max), and I watched Powaqqatsi, and: I was so stoned that I kept thinking "this is a really long trailer", until I saw the credits roll. I am told that that can compete with many of the good "I was so stoned that I..." stories going around, without including stories from people getting brain-hurt by obviously hallucinogenic / deleriant drugs.
However, I concede, as must we all:
Paul F. Tompkins has a story about his last, his final pot experience, beginning with "That cookie I just ate tasted like a tire! Wait, WHAT? There was POT in it? I fucking hate pot, it makes me feel miserable!". And of course, there is later a moment, fueled by already-ingested booze and pot, where he conceives, and acts on, the idea: "I'm high and I hate it, but I might as well just do more, WHY NOT." And then the we pick up the story:
He ended up at a party, in that condition. As the party broke up (where he had been miserable from being stoned), he heard come up on someone's iPod shuffle the song "You Needed Me", by Anne Murray. This is a song which he had never had any particular appreciation of, nor interest in.
But that night, he was so high that he suddenly thought it was the most breathtaking and evocative song ever. High enough? Oh, but here's the kicker:
He was so high that he suddenly thought of there being people in the world who may claim to like that song, love that song, maybe adore the song and relate to every subtlety of the lyrics— and then he became furious because he realized that he understood it better than anyone else could, anyone else in the world who might claim to like the song. "YOU DON'T FUCKING GET IT! I'VE BEEN INSIDE THAT SONG!!
And I think that that is inherently the unbeatable "I was so stoned that I..." story ever.
Because... Anne Murray?
Further– maritime!– awesomeness to follow.
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: seeing eternity
Current Music: the needle going "kthup kthup" at the end of an LP
2009-11-18 (Wednesday)
Dear All,This is your over-annual reminder to go to the (free) annualcreditreport.com. I suggest using their thru-the-mail option-- they have the one-page easy form to hardcopy.
You can do this all online, but you will be barraged with ads trying to sell you stuff so you can get routine SUPER-NEWS about your CREDIT HIGH SCORE or whatever for, only twenny nan nanny nan a year! No, paper, this time, is much much easier.
I've been sending away for my raw credit reports for two or three years now, and the results are boring-- which is exactly what they should be. Surprises = bad. Check for surprises.
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: credulous
Current Music: Talking Heads- Psycho Killer
2009-11-16 (Monday)
Dear Log,«The trouble with a 'scientific' argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.»No, halfwit Daily Mail writer, the trouble with a "scientific" argument, of course, is that it is made in the real world, by researchers (not necc. academics) often with an extremely shaky grasp on statistical methods, much less clear and sane argumentation.—"Yes, scientists do much good.: But a country run by these arrogant gods of certainty would truly be hell on earth""The trouble with the Daily Mail is left to the reader. Literally.
* * *
Even the fundamental errors in the article are beyond cataloguing, so let us not even try. Let us, instead, nap.
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Music: Eurythmics- There Must be an Angel
2009-11-14 (Saturday)
Dear Log,«The earliest written evidence of cats in Japan indicates that they arrived from China at least 1,000 years ago. In 1602, Japanese authorities decreed that all cats should be set free to help deal with rodents threatening the silk-worms. Buying or selling cats was illegal, and from then on, bobtailed cats lived on farms and in the streets. Japanese Bobtails thus became the "street cats" of Japan.»Wow, an invasive species that apparently didn't ruin things horribly! Well... as far as we can tell now. There's actually a good chance that they wiped out a dozen unique species of birds and forest rodents. (Like how the Maoris went and Polynesian-BBQ'd to extinction just about everything in sight, the minute they first set foot on the NZ islands, not so very long ago.)—Wikipedia article "Japanese Bobtail", subsection "History"But already Japan was an ecological disaster area– I can't remember if 1602 was before or after the huge deforestation crisis, when the government snapped to and figured out that if they didn't do something, they'd end up as a big ol' chapter in a Jared Diamond Collapse, instead of a paragraph in the "Close Calls, Whew!" section.
* * *
And... I can't quite picture an economy where cats are bought and sold. Or rather: why doing so would have anything to do with cats (not) being numerous enough to kill rodents.
With domestic bovine, you can create and control scarcity (always a fun game in capitalism) by keeping the bulls penned and away from the cows, neutering the bulls, etc.
But, as the very saying itself has it: "...like trying to herd cats..."
Whoops, your expensive-as-jade cat got out! Somehow. Did it bolt past your feet as you opened the front door to step out? Did it do the inconceivable, and just SLASH into your paper wall and walk right through? And once outside, it... might find others of its kind, and BREED EXPONENTIALLY!!!
Thus ruining all concept of value and worth in your vast monopolistic cattery scheme.
This may evenually force the God-Emperor to take the yen off the cat standard.
Or is the cat really outside? It could have climbed a post and could be in your rafters. Looking at you...
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: bouncy
Current Music: theme music from Tati's "Play Time"
2009-11-12 (Thursday)
Dear Log,This one's going out to just you guys who read medicalese:
[ P: S BURKEE ]
* P ≈A&W
* P OV Ystr 2:30pm ĉ FNP-BC
* Dx: URTI, Cjvts OD, Ø brain
* Rxx: Septra bid PO ĉ aq; Vigamox tid OU; Guaifenesin ad lib; BR BR BR BR aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq aq
--
* 24h p OV, P reports:
LANI incip Sx OS! now ů
LANI incip LAGI! now ů
↑↑↑OU cond ↑GC
aq aq aq aq ur ur ur ur ur aq aq aq aq ur ur ur ur ur ur ur ur ur ur
cats HVY wt HVY schiz
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: aq aq aq aq aq aq
Current Music: George Webley- Handbags & Gladrags
2009-11-09 (Monday)
Dear Log,
( ... )
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: mural
Current Music: The Beatles- Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
2009-11-06 (Friday)
Dear Log,
Tags: usalocation: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Music: PiL- Rise
Dear Log,For a few weeks, Jordan was in Armenia and Republic of Georgia. He came back a few days ago... with his lungs still rattling with a nasty cold/flu/URI that he'd had for two weeks there.
And today, out of nowhere, I woke up today with a sore throat.
This should be interesting.
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: vectoral
Current Music: The Vengers- What Do You Believe In
2009-10-29 (Thursday)
Dear Log,I take a normal daily multivitamin. It contains a solid 400IU of vitamin D, which is an okay dose, right from the USDA's calculation of such things. For normal Earthican people. Who have light skin. And who are getting normal exposure to sun at normal wavelengths and intensities, for normally long periods of the year.
Whelps long story short, nearly all of the 600K people living in Alaska are moderately to seriously deficient in Vitamin D; and what they need is not 400IU daily (which they're not getting unless they're taking a multivitamin), but something three or four times that.
My neuro-psych-MD (therefore MD) said ohyeah, it's practically a given that general blood tests at the doctors' office come back saying "
vit d: very too little", which you'd think that MDs might mention to all their new patients even as they walk in the door for the first time even before there's a need for blood test for any reason, but, uh, not so much. She remembers one extreme case— a patient whose general blood report incidentally said: "Vitamin D: undetectable". I.e., there was presumably some in there, but that it was below the presumably tiny threshold that the blood-mo-stat could detect. That means they could get RICKETS. Haven't heard that word in a while, have you? Well...* * *
So every day for two or three years now, I've been taking, daily, a little 1000IU pill of D, on top of my normal multivitamin, and it's easy to remember, as I just put slot it in with the daily obligatory mandala.
* * *
By the way, yeah, I'm in Alaska, but I'm not on the moon. Anyone living at or north of Boston or Portland— the above applies to you too for at least November, December, January, and February. Hey, that's now!
Of course, doses change significantly for infants, pregnant women, nursing mothers, or, just programmers who never see the light of day, as one hears of, occasionally.
Look in the Google tubes for details, axe your doctor, ex cetera.
* * *
And, folks: running low on vitamin D will never be put down as "Cause of Death: _____". It's not one thing. But not-enough of D is a drag on a dozen metabolic systems that will manage, but... Don't put a drag on them. Or maybe they aren't "managing", because of any other illness/condition you have, and so they really wish you would stop dragging on them and that you would just take the damned tiny pill so they can stop constantly having to biochemically rob Peter to pay Paul.
A visual: when you're 72 (or 42!) and slip in the shower, and fall, and yell "MOTHERFUCKER AAAAA!", and go to the ER, then your lifetime-to-date steady intake of vitamin D might be the deciding factor between: broken hip goddammit, or: shattered hip, complex and stressful surgeries, and then ploddingly slow physical therapy.
* * *
And don't tell me you're getting enough vitamin D from fish, unless you're consuming a daily heap of salmon large enough that you're violating the rule of "don't eat anything bigger than your head". THE FISHSTICKS, THEY DO NOTHING!
location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: rickety
Current Music: The Church- Under the Milky Way
2009-10-26 (Monday)
Dear Log,Ugh.
2009-09-26 6:41am AKDT 6:32pm 11h 50m 2009-10-26 7:41am AKDT 5:18pm 9h 37m 2009-11-25 7:42am AKST 3:25pm 7h 43m Right about now is where I keep a schedule (X's on a calendar) to make sure that I get out of the house and walk around for a decent period of time at least four days a week; usually it's the weather deciding which four days.
Also I have a "lightbox"– a zillion-lumen full-spectrum fluorescent beam, which ideally I... use? stare into?... and which makes me not so LOAGY. So far I've been using it for a minute or so, thusly: I get up, and open the (blackout+insulating) blinds, and see that the weather isn't giving me a lot of light through the window.
So I sit down and turn on the lightbox and HELLO I AM IN ORBIT AROUND VEGA BAKING IN ITS RADIATION STARING INTO IT MUST STARE STARE STARE THIS TELEPORT DID NOT WORK AS ADVERTIZED ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS GO TO THE ALPHA-BETA TO GET SOME BENADRYL BUT INSTEAD I'M IN THE ALPHA-LYRAE SYSTEM. MISTAAAAAAAAAAKE
Tags: brainCurrent Mood: full-spectrum
Current Music: David Bowie- Space Oddity [Major Tom]