Fluff.
Just wanted to counteract the sniggering, condescending, and spiteful links that this piece is sure to generate by noting that my own (admittedly lackluster) interest in seeing Matrix Reloaded just doubled.
No, I Claudius.
From Patrick Farley, genteel proprietor of that of which androids do dream:
The Which I, Claudius Character Are You? quiz.
(Me? I’m Clau- Clau- Claudius. Who else?)
Take the first left after Venus, you can’t miss it.
Venus:
- Diameter: 5.2 inches
- Location: Budget Traveler Motor Inn (0.7 mile from Sun)
- Construction: Styrofoam ball with fiberglass cover
- Constructed by: Caribou Tech Center (Caribou High School)
- Painted by: Jeanie McGowan, Curator of Collections at the Northern Maine Museum of Science and student at the University of Maine at Presque Isle
- Posts constructed by: Northern Maine Technical College, Sonny Michaud and students
- Base constructed by David Tardie and his students, Loring Job Corps, Cement Mason Program
—Via MetaFilter, the coolest thing I’ve seen this morning: a 40-mile-long scale model of the solar system, from the Sun at the Northern Maine Museum of Science at Presque Isle, to Pluto (and Charon) outside the Houlton Information Center at the junction of Route 1 and Interstate 95. It’s the brainchild of Kevin McCartney, a professor of geology at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and it was constructed pretty much entirely of donated materials and volunteer labor on a budget of zip, zero, zilch. Here’s the Smithsonian’s write-up:
Just now, newspaper ad sales manager Jim Berry is drilling a hole in Saturn’s post and remembering his first encounter with McCartney at a Kiwanis Club meeting. “I went home that night and said to my wife, ‘I met this guy today. He’s a wacko. You can’t believe what he’s going to try to do.’ “ When he got up the next morning he said, “Wait a minute. This is a great idea. I’ve got to get involved in this. This is just too good to pass up.”
McCartney has that effect on people; one day they think he’s crazy, the next day they’re painting Jupiter’s spot. His list of prominent “squirrels,” as he inexplicably calls his volunteers, runs eight pages long. Add the anonymous students who worked on a planet here or a stanchion there, and McCartney estimates that more than 500 squirrels have pitched in so far. Perley Dean, a retired Presque Isle High School guidance counselor who wears a “Maine Potato Board” baseball cap, got the job of persuading several landowners that what was missing on their property was a planet. “Many of them don’t stay up late at night reading about the galaxy,” Dean deadpans.
To infinity and beyond!
Film at elevenses.
Medley’s noting another disquieting example of the government threatening experts who speak out against a proposed government policy. This time, it’s about the dismantling of Head Start, which, despite years of sketchy funding and grudging support, is still one of the more impressive federal success stories. Ah, well; scratch off another opportunity for your tax dollars to do some good in this world. —Elayne ties it to a venerable PBS institution in trouble because of a lack of cartoon figures ripe for exploitation on jammies and lunchboxes.
From one Sara to another: Sara Ryan links to the text of a great speech Sara Peretsky’s been delivering these days.
Ampersand is all up in Congress’s face about the “Partial-Birth” Abortion Ban: it’s patently unconstitutional, and he makes his case quite clearly here, here, and here (with a sidetrack to [shudder] the Corner here). A fourth part of his series will be coming up next week, looking at what we might expect from the Supremes, given that O’Connor will almost certainly resign before this travesty of law reaches their chambers; look for it.
I never got around to pointing out that Fantagraphics needs your help, but since everybody and her sister was on top of it, my slacking doesn’t matter so much in this hill of beans. The which said, here’s a quickie update on how they’re faring, and a reminder that now’s a great time to pick up a copy of Safe Area Goradze, a Maakies collection, or the TPB of Small Favors.
Judging from the comments section, and much to his puzzled bemusement, Kevin’s two-week old post on the Dixie Chicks and FUTK still has freakishly gawky legs. I point it out less for any insight the ongoing discussion might offer (pretty much nil) than for the entertainment value it offers as a curious singularity.
And, well, it’s mildly instructive to note the differences in headlines covering Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix’s final address to the Security Council: “US deaf to arms inspections pleas,” says the New Zealand Herald; “Blix decries coalition’s intelligence on Iraq arms,” says the International Herald Tribune; “Blix: Inspections could yet turn up banned weapons in Iraq,” MSNBC; “Blix: ‘No surprise’ if WMD found,” CNN. —Take from that what you will, which is the point, really.
If you read one book review this season
make it John Dolan’s review of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. (Thanks, ’hat!)
78 luftballoons.
Yeah, it’s running up the blogdex like a thing that climbs up something else really fast, but it’s worth it: the ’80s Tarot. There are some truly inspired choices in there, and if your memory is long enough to have looked past the rather blandly mediocre nature of That ’80s Show to appreciate just how frighteningly, subtly spot-on the production designers and set dressers were in capturing That ’80s Look—not so much the bar or the record shop, those were gimmies; I’m thinking of the condo they lived in, the generic hotel-lobby furniture, that weird mix of wall and decor colors, neutral cools and mellow pastels that manage to be prickly and uncomfortable despite their best efforts: slick salespeople too studied, too mannered in their insouciance, smiling too much, their hands behind their backs holding other shoes about to drop. —Where was I? If you caught more than one episode for some variation on this queasily fascinated nostalgia kick, then the Tarot will make you laugh in delight, and you’ll think of Howard Jones for the first time in ages.
Luftballoon bonus: the 99 Luftballoons installation at Project Blinkenlights.
So small and flat.
How can I trust you if you write to me, but do not include an URL to your photoblog? How can I tell, first, what your face looks like? Isn’t that enormously important? Secondly, without a photoblog I cannot know if your perception of the world is stale or fresh. I cannot know if you look around you, and, if you do, what you’re looking at, and how. I cannot know how you dress, and whether it would be appealing to undress you. I cannot know to what canon of beauty you subscribe unless I can subject you to rigorous style analysis.
You may be a brilliant writer, like Ian Penman, and you may have a blog stuffed with lively wordplay and interesting opinions. But the world is already full of opinions, of commentaries on commentaries, glosses on glosses, and spins on spins. Photos, in a world where the word-snake dines on its own tail, give me hope. Maybe photos can break the ever-narrowing vicious circles of language. Break them with textures, colours, forms; the peculiarly irreducible specificities of the visual world.
I want to know what you look like, and what the world around you looks like. It’s tremendously important to me, because in the end I don’t care a fig about whether you pronounce in favour of this or that book, film or record, or what life has taught you. Don’t tell me, show me! I want to look at the new shapes you’re seeing, viddy the texture of your lips and the colour and condition of your teeth. I want to see your face and use your eyes, damn it, because mine are always stalling and failing.
You have no choice but to start a photoblog. It’s a course requirement in the art school of life.
—That’s pop star Momus on photoblogging. Lots of icy cool links, too. —And if what little work I’ve done in graphic design convinces me that reproductions of the teal blue of his shirt are just as untrustworthy as the words, “teal blue,” well. He nonetheless has his point. (Several, in fact.)
The final Buffy.
As opposed, I guess, to the Buffy finale? Anyway. I didn’t end up watching it, what with one thing and another, and the fact that the show never really recovered from its sixth-season slump, a couple of decent shows this past year notwithstanding, and, well, there was the one thing and another I was up to. Washing my hair, I think, or something. But it seems I made the wrong call: the finale actually sounds like it was a hoot and a half.
Ah, well. I’ll end up catching it on DVD sooner or later.
Since I seem to be in a short and pithy mood.
I bagged this from last week’s New Yorker, which I’m just now getting around to reading, but which they already seem to have taken off-line or something. Omar al-Issawi, the “smoldering Lebanese” hotshot correspondent at Al Jazeera, was told by a fellow CENTCOM journalist: “You’ve risen to star status.”
“Let’s hope not,” is what al-Issawi says in response. “They say the light from a star reaches us long after it has depleted its resources.”
The case for Appalachia.
So Mr. President, you have all the elements you need: weapons of mass destruction, a nearly third world enemy, potential terrorists, someone to call evil, and an easy path to victory. Now all you have to do is attack. And please, do it soon. We need the reparations, better schools, better infrastructure, universal healthcare, and a fair share in the wealth of our own resources.
You also promised Iraq democracy. We could use that here as well.
—from “Mr. President, Please Attack Appalachia,” posted over at Common Dreams last week, via largehearted boy (who also led me to—well, hear for yourself).
O, eldritch Godwin!
It’s come up twice in separate conversations over the past few days, which means it goes up here, darn it. (“What I tell you two times gets blogged.”) So: that alternate history where H.P. Lovecraft gets elected president and invades Canada, among other things.
(Written by John J. Reilly, whose crankery I’m finding quite endearing this fine, damp evening, despite the inevitable cocked eyebrow or three.)
They say, everything could be replaced.
Nina Simone is dead, alas.
Alabama’s got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam!
I think this awkward, broken translation of Pravda’s obituary says it best, in a 7.30-in-the-morning first-cup-of-coffee sort of way:
Why are cigars lit at a match? They are lit with a strong and natural flame of a match which unwillingly slips from under professional hands; the flame sputters, resists, envelops rolled tobacco leaves; it gives the leaves the passion and the flame. The head of a match falls off in a second. It is only in hands of a professional that a match lights straight away.
Mostly because she isn’t here to say it herself anymore.
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer
Don’t tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I’ve been there so I know
They keep on saying “Go slow!”
Twisty. Little. Different.
At End Of Road
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
>which end of the road is it?
I don’t understand the question.
>I mean, if this is where the road ends, did I walk down the road to get here? How else would I get to the end of the road? Or is it the other end of the road?
Why does it matter?
>I don’t know if I should walk up the road, which might be repeating myself, or walk past the end of the road and see if it goes somewhere.
It doesn’t matter which end of the road it is, and you didn’t come from anywhere—you’re just here.
>how is that possible?
Possible isn’t important in this game.
>Oh.
Which reminds me of a bunch of other stuff I mean to catch up on when I’ve got the time.
Never attribute to malice.
Kevin has an oddly—touching?—postscript to his cartoon from earlier this week. Turns out the shock jocks thought it was “totally awesome,” and offered this defense:
it wasn’t nessesarily just a tirade about her, just us acting like three year olds saying fat bitch on the radio.
Aww. Isn’t that sweet?
Rolling back the years.
The chickenhawks of the kulturkampf continue their war on truth, health, life, science, trust; the very fabric of the commonweal. —I’m running out of curses. Japanese is a geat language for getting up a righteously angry dudgeon. Maybe I should learn some Japanese.
Happier thoughts: Ampersand’s blog, which I don’t link to nearly so often as I ought, because a) I assume most of you reading this read him already, and b) I’m a lazy, disreputable bastard, is about to go group: housemates Charles and Bean (who guest-hosted while Barry I mean Amp was off telling his relatives once again why this night is different than other nights) will be joining as regular co-bloggers, fingers flying over keyboards to fight the power and whatnot. A round of applause, please, ladies and gentlemen.
And: the Polyphonic Spree is one small way I’ve just discovered for dealing somewhat with the current surfeit of Weltschmerz: “When you’re dealing with 25 Texans in white robes, it’s pretty impossible not to mention you’re dealing with 25 Texans in white robes.” —After which, you’ll be needing a bracing tonic; management humbly suggests rather than spinning Godspeed You! Black Emperor once more, you instead pluck up this poem by George Faludy, nicked from a Making Light comments thread:
Learn by Heart This Poem of Mine
Learn by heart this poem of mine;
books only last a little time
and this one will be borrowed, scarred,
burned by Hungarian border guards,
lost by the library, broken-backed,
its paper dried up, crisped and cracked,
worm-eaten, crumbling into dust,
or slowly brown and self-combust
when climbing Fahrenheit has got
to 451, for that’s how hot
your town will be when it burns down.
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Soon books will vanish and you’ll find
there won’t be any poets or verse
or gas for car or bus—or hearse—
no beer to cheer you till you’re crocked,
the liquor stores torn down or locked,
cash only fit to throw away,
as you come closer to that day
when TV steadily transmits
death-rays instead of movie hits
and not a soul to lend a hand
and everything is at an end
but what you hold within your mind,
so find a space there for these lines
and learn by heart this poem of mine.
Learn by heart this poem of mine;
recite it when the putrid tides
that stink of lye break from their beds,
when industry’s rank vomit spreads
and covers every patch of ground,
when they’ve killed every lake and pond,
Destruction humped upon its crutch,
black rotting leaves on every branch;
when gargling plague chokes Springtime’s throat
and twilight’s breeze is poison, put
your rubber gasmask on and line
by line declaim this poem of mine.
Learn by heart this poem of mine
so, dead, I still will share the time
when you cannot endure a house
deprived of water, light, or gas,
and, stumbling out to find a cave,
roots, berries, nuts to stay alive,
get you a cudgel, find a well,
a bit of land, and, if it’s held,
kill the owner, eat the corpse.
I’ll trudge beside your faltering steps
between the ruins’ broken stones,
whispering “You are dead; you’re done!
Where would you go? That soul you own
froze solid when you left your town.”
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
Maybe above you, on the earth,
there’s nothing left and you, beneath,
deep in your bunker, ask how soon
before the poisoned air leaks down
through layers of lead and concrete. Can
there have been any point to Man
if this is how the thing must end?
What words of comfort can I send?
Shall I admit you’ve filled my mind
for countless years, through the blind
oppressive dark, the bitter light,
and, though long dead and gone, my hurt
and ancient eyes observe you still?
What else is there for me to tell
to you, who, facing time’s design,
will find no use for life or time?
You must forget this poem of mine.
Chin-chin.
The thing of it is, we could have been spending it on books all along.
Watched the most recent episode of Angel (which is fun these days in a way that Buffy, sadly, isn’t) through a haze of static.
We watched Angel through a haze of static because a couple of weeks ago I asked Jenn if we’d gotten a cable bill recently. —We’ve just swapped bill-paying duties from her to me, so a couple of things still needed sorting out, and while it was possible that a cable bill had slipped through the cracks, it seemed odd that two whole months’ worth would not turn up. So I called AT&T Broadband and discovered via the chirpy answering recording that it had been bought out by Comcast or somesuch.
So sue me. I don’t read my junk mail.
I asked for a new statement and got it, last week. For four months’ worth. $134 and change. Wrote them a check back. Mailed it off. Came home today, checked email, checked voice mail, twiddled with a couple of things. Got dinner ready. Turned on the television for some background yammer. Got the blue screen of death.
So I called and was on hold while the pasta water boiled and when the nice person came on the phone I asked why we didn’t have cable. And was told it was because I hadn’t paid my bill. There was no record, apparently, of my previous call, when I’d asked for a new statement, and told them I hadn’t been getting one. “We’ve sent them out every month on the 14th,” she said. I tried to explain the bit again about how we hadn’t been getting bills and I understood that maybe it was because of the changeover from AT&T to Comcast which I hadn’t even been aware of until I’d called to ask for a new statement. “We’ve had TV commercials and everything,” she said.
She never got around to explaining why I’d never gotten a notice of cancellation mailed to me, or a phone call from them wondering where my money was.
We haven’t been watching cable all that much, lately. That ’70s Show in reruns while I cook, maybe, because Jenn likes it so much; Buffy reruns on FX. First-run Buffy and Angel. Gilmore Girls now and again; if the damn thing doesn’t get turned off on a Thursday night, an episode of Scrubs. I tried that new Lucky the other night, which, eh. But Firefly is dead and Farscape is dead and anyway coming out of college when we never had money for cable; we watched videotapes every now and then and otherwise, the box was cold. TVs, we discovered, are big dead presences in rooms when they aren’t on. If you put them up high—on top of those rickety pressboard entertainment towers you buy at Circuit City, say—it’s paradoxically less noticeable; or you can cover them with a tapestry or something when not watching them. Just flip up the cloth when you want to put in Duck Soup or Metropolitan for the umpteenth time. Video wallpaper. Comfort food. —We went to Sara and Steve’s one night to watch Tom Waits on Letterman. They hauled out a tiny television from some back room and hooked it to the cable jack coming out of the wall in an unused corner. I cocked an eyebrow at the relatively large color set sitting dark on top of their VCR and under their DVD player. “Doesn’t hook up to cable,” said Steve. He pointed at the little set, where Letterman was sweeping a dud joke off-camera. “We’ve hauled that thing out twice, for New Year’s,” he said. “And September 11th,” said Sara.
“So why do you have the cable jack?” asked Jenn.
They shrugged. “Comes with the condo,” said Steve. “We couldn’t get them to turn it off.”
And the thing of it is, we haven’t been watching television all that much. —It was Buffy that got us back into the habit, dammit. Jenn and Barry way back in 1997 caught the first showing of episode two on a whim and said hey! This doesn’t suck! And cajoled the rest of us one at a time into watching it. By the time of the first season finale, we were group-watching, a microcosmic echo of those massive geek outings back at Oberlin, where we’d sign out the massive projection TV in the Mudd Library AV Room for showings of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Only much more satisfying.) (And you should probably note the rather sloppy use of the first person plural throughout; at times it means me and Jenn, at times it means me and Jenn and Barry and Sarah and Charles and Matt and Brad in various subsets, and just then it meant a whole helluva lot of people I knew in college who all teased me mercilessly for looking like Wesley Crusher. Verb. sap. and all that.) —By the midpoint of second season Buffy, we were hooked, and hooked good. Tuesday nights were sacrosanct. You didn’t call any of us at 8 pm because we just wouldn’t answer the phone. It is not at all an exaggeration to state that Jenn and I first got cable ourselves so that we could watch Buffy without the static and occasional unwatchable nights we’d had with a simple antenna.
But the thing about having cable is once you’ve got it, you might as well use it. We got caught up on DS9, say, which is the best of the various Treks, yes, but I don’t think has aged all that well. We watched a lot of Friends in reruns, and Seinfelds, and Roseannes; we got hooked on Xena for a while. Tried Farscape on a whim and found it was better than not, and then somewhere in its second season we got that ohmygod rush again: this show rocked. Friday nights, out on the town? I think not. At least, not without setting up the VCR to record while we were away. Angel we started watching because, well, it’s a Joss Whedon show, and ended up enjoying it in its own right, but Tuesday nights were an utter wash when both it and Buffy were on the WB: that’s two hours of television right there, not counting the hour or so of syndicated sitcoms in the 7 – 8 cook-and-eat bloc. G vs. E we both liked a lot, but it got cancelled. Jules Verne was fun until it got weirdly obsessed with Dumas and shunted to one o’clock in the morning and then cancelled. Cupid—remember Cupid? I don’t remember why we started watching it, a whim again, I guess, maybe because we’d liked Jeremy Piven in Ellen which, you know, we’d been watching, but it was a great little show, and it got cancelled, too. We loved Sports Night, until it got cancelled, and Sports Night led us to West Wing which we loved even more. We never clicked with Smallville, despite the cheeky amusement value of a show that knows it’s nothing but an engine for slash; we checked out that Iron Chef show, which we did click with. Wow. AbFab reruns on Oxygen? Okay. Commercial break—skip up to AMC, there’s an old spaghetti Western on. Surf back down to the mid 50s, where TNT and FX and the Superstation hang out—what the fuck? Wesley Snipes, with a sword, slicing Stephen Dorff in half with lots of bad computerized blood effects? Jesus, this is so bad you have to watch. There’s a Law and Order on every hour tonight. Or we could skip back down to the Cartoon Network—Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack…
We got really excited about Firefly. The idea of Whedon and co., stretching their wings a little, the background and backstory we’d seen bits and pieces of, what we knew about a couple of the actors (Gina Torres, Ron Glass, Adam Baldwin) going into it—it had us buzzed. The first couple of episodes were a bit rocky, and then it started hitting its stride, and it got better and better. We were getting that ohmygod rush again. Friday nights were going to be shot once more. —And then it got cancelled.
Which wasn’t the straw here, no, but as I said, we hadn’t been watching television all that much. We’d been leaving it on, looking at something out of curiosity, surfing up or down to the next interesting thing. The times you actually watch television—when you sit down and know you’re not getting up for a half hour, or a full hour, or until the tape ends, when you’re committed to ride whatever story’s unfolding in front of you—we hadn’t been doing that through cable all that much. Buffy still, yes, but out of grim loyalty these days more than anything else, and anyway it’s about to go gently into that good night. Angel, but it isn’t a big deal to miss a week or two. West Wing—what happened to that one? Right, we just sort of stopped watching. Farscape? Gone. Firefly? Gone. And what else was up there on the television screen?
Right. Law and Order and Wesley Snipes sneering under some badass sunglasses. Morimoto rolling some deft sushi with asparagus in it or something. Bubbles and Buttercup and Blossom riffing on old Beatles songs. Axminster hunting MacGuyver, and Christopher Lloyd channelling Reverend Jim under inches of Klingon makeup for the umpteenth time.
For this we were paying nearly $40 a month.
So I told the nice woman on the other end of the line, who insisted they’d been sending us bills we hadn’t gotten, who seemed to think it weird that I hadn’t seen the TV commercials telling us Comcast had bought AT&T, who couldn’t explain why we’d gotten no mailed notice about cutting off our service, or a phone call ditto, I told her to cancel our account.
We can get The Sopranos on videotape from the library, you know.
