are pretty purty/nice :)
Update: and the themes change with time of day (and apparently weather). It's a very nice little touch. The pic above was taken while it was late afternoon/dusk here. Now it's night and here's what my google page looks like now.
Another update: Oh, and another pic :) I'm so easily amused I guess. Check out the little fox who's decided to start star gazing. Lol.
How does he do it? How do they do it? Uncanny and immutable.
This is such a happening tailpipe of a party.
Like sugar, the guests are so refined, (look like melting mice)
A confidence man, but why so beleaguered?
He's not a leader, he's a Texas leaguer
Swinging for the fence, got lucky with a strike
Drilling for fear, makes the job simple
Born on third, thinks he got a triple
Blackout weaves its way through the cities
Blackout weaves its way through the cities
Blackout weaves its way,...
I remember when you sang
That song about today
Now it's tomorrow and
Everything has changed
A think tank of aloof multiplication
A nicotine wish and a columbus decanter
Retrenchment and hoggishness
The aristocrat choir sings
"What's the ruckus?"
The haves have not a clue
The immenseness of suffering
And the odd negotiation, a rarity
With onionskin plausibility of life,
And a keyboard reaffirmation
Blackout weaves its way through the cities
Blackout weaves its way through the cities
Blackout weaves its way,...
I remember when you sang
That song about today
Now it's tomorrow and
Everything has changed
Have a gander at Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel. Good read.
from Generics > Subtyping.
If on the one hand you maintain that English is ambiguous;
But what about an "animal cage"? English is ambiguous, so to be precise let's assume we're talking about an "all-animal cage"...and then follow up with a justification which for all intents and purposes seems to be based on that ambiguousness;
Since a lion is a kind of animal (Lion is a subtype of Animal), the question then becomes, "Is a lion cage a kind of animal cage? Is Cage<Lion> a subtype of Cage<Animal>?". By the above definition of animal cage, the answer must be "no". This is surprising! But it makes perfect sense when you think about it: A lion cage cannot be assumed to keep in butterflies, and a butterfly cage cannot be assumed to hold in lions. Therefore, neither cage can be considered an "all-animal" cage:I think you have a problem.
While Cage<Lion> and Cage<Butterfly> are not subtypes of Cage<Animal>, they are in fact subtypes of Cage<? extends Animal>I'm sure this has to do with covariance, but I don't understand this, and I'm pretty sure Larry Wall would cry into his moustache while agreeing with me (though he might like the punctuation character syntax :)).
Welcome to Conservapedia, a conservative encyclopedia you can trust.
Conservapedia has over 3,800 educational, clean and concise entries on historical...
Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses...
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
Take the Programmer Personality Test.
I'm a PLTB apparently :)
What the hell does this mean? Who knows, but this is what the site reckons.
You're a Planner.
You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
You like coding at a Low level.
You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.
You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.
You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.
If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the 'Fuck you' signs in the world. It's impossible.
Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye
'Stay where you are, I don't need you! You think you have enough strength to come here, and are merely staying back because that's what you have chosen to do. You are mistaken! I am still by far the stronger of us. Alone, I might have had to give best to you, but your mother left me all her strength. I have made a wonderful pact with your friend, and I have all your customers right here in my pocket!
'So he's even got pockets in his shirt!'* Georg said under his breath, and thought the remark would make his father impossible in the world. The thought came and went, as everything did, because he was continually forgetting everything.
'Just you try slipping your arm in your fiancee's and coming to meet me! I'll swat her away from you, you have no idea!
Georg pulled a face, as though of disbelief. His father merely nodded towards George's corner, in confirmation of what he had said.
'How you amused me today when you came along and asked me whether you should tell your friend about the engagement. He knows everything, you silly boy, everything! I wrote to him, because you forgot to deprive me of my writing implements. That's why he hasn't come for years, he knows everything a hundred times better than you. In his left hand he crumples up your letters unopened, while in his right he holds mine in front of him to read!'
In his enthusiasm, he swung his arm over his head. 'He knows everything a thousand times better!' he shouted.
"Ten thousand times!' said Georg, to mock his father, but even as he spoke them the words sounded deadly earnest.
'For years I've been waiting for you to approach me with your question. Do you think anything else had the least interest for me? Do you imagine I read the newspapers? Here!' and he tossed Georg a page from the newspaper, which had somehow been carried into bed with him. An old newspaper, with a name that didn't sound at all familiar to Georg.
'How long you dilly-dallied before reaching maturity! Your mother was unable to witness the joyful day, she had to die first, your friend is going under in Russia; three years ago he was so yellow he was obviously not long for the world, and as for me, you see what condition I'm in. It seems you have enough vision to see that!
'So you were lying in wait for me! shouted Georg.
Pityingly, his father remarked: 'I expect you meant to say that earlier. It doesn't fit in here.'
And then, louder: 'So now you know what else there was besides yourself; up till now all you knew was you! You were an innocent child, really, but it would be truer to say you were a veritable fiend! - And now hear: I sentence you to death by drowning!
Georg felt himself expelled from he room, the crash with which his father came down on the bed ringing in his ears as he sprinted away. On the stairs, which he took like a smooth incline, he collided with the charwoman, who was just on her way upstairs to give the flat its morning clean. 'Oh my God!' she exclaimed, and buried her face in her apron but was already gone. he sprang through the gate, crossed the road, and raced towards the river. Already he was gripping at the rails, like a hungry man his food. He swung himself over them, like the excellent gymnast he had been in his early years, to the pride of his parents. His grip was beginning to weaken, when through the rails he spied a motor omnibus that would easily cover the sound of his fall, softly he called out, 'Dear parents, I have always loved you,' and let himself drop.
At that moment, a quite unending flow of traffic streamed over the bridge.'
* Kafka's variation on the German proverb that says the last shirt - the shroud - has no pockets in it.
I thought therefore I was. I think therefore I am. What happened in between?
Have a luke at The Bad Writing Contest. Now try and read this:
Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self).
Not even a first draft.
The girls you fuck after walking dark dripping streets of rain are just mothers. They mope about, painting faces, placing make-up, worrying about paunches and stockings that smell like piss.
You want something that doesn't exist. Your disease. Wake up man! Stop trudging around "The Rocks" assaying crevices and divining rocks for impressions of sexual lust. It's stupidity.
Better to sit to warm bread and tales of Ulysses in warm comfort. Or Gaelic passion fiddled for tourists, and a kiss on cheek. Reciprocal, meaningless kisses. Chalk studied bodies poised like waxen gelatin. They simulate the perfect cadaver, model the correct density for brachytherapy studies. A slight gelatinous cheese cloth density - a skin, a cheek. A touch of friendship.
So it was we wandered, as I had hunted years before, homeless, forlorn and lost in indiscriminate passion. Or lust. But this time with friends.
And a cure, curled in brick wall cavities, molded for reasons other than drunken proclivities - meaningless actions caught on film. Digital print flaunting youth and extravagant meaninglessness. Pose. Flash. Harsh light and smiles stumble ahead. So lost - so climb illegal fences like immigrants. Boat people slapping car mirrors. Shame to not be understood. But then I'm a hypocrite. Oh to be as staid as they think I am...
So, I bought this book today1.
1 I lost my book of Feynman down the toilet this afternoon at work, and this is what I end up with.
Finally got around to starting this again. My god, what a book! I'm utterly gobsmacked.
"A belief system that preaches innate imperfection and guilt has to have as it's centrum a gospel of self-hate."
"Removing poverty and inequality isn't going to work. That would remove one of the main institutions of fear, which in turn would remove one of our main fulcrums of control."
Excuse the equivocal nature of the title of this post.
This morning the papers are awash with a story concerning the euthanasia of Dr John Elliot in a Swiss clinic last Thursday. This is a well written, objective article. It had me in tears.
Then we turn to a smh.com.au opinion piece titled "The line that must never be crossed" in which the author makes his intention clear very early:
However, emotion cannot be allowed to cloud the ethical and practical principles that must inform the euthanasia debate. Whatever the circumstances of Dr Elliott's case, the principles remain the same. So, too, is the conclusion to be drawn from those principles: the law must continue to prohibit euthanasia.
Yet a string of surveys here and overseas suggests doctors are readier than ever to administer pain-killing drugs or to withdraw or withhold treatment even when that will hasten death. Such relief for the terminally ill is to be welcomed, and the law's application is appropriately sensitive to this need. Such surveys of doctors' actual practice undermine the common argument by euthanasia advocates that patients suffer unnecessarily because doctors fear criminal prosecution. How often are doctors criminally prosecuted? Patients who suffer pain at the end of life can expect an easeful death, and that the law will not stand in the way.
There is no knowing where euthanasia law would take us once it had a foothold in the statutes. Overwhelmingly, families wanting to hasten the death of loved ones are motivated by love and compassion. But removing existing criminal sanctions could leave little to inhibit family members conniving with compliant doctors to end a patient's life for other, unacceptable motives such as greed or impatience. And cash-strapped health systems will surely find it cheaper to institutionalise death than care for the physical and emotional wellbeing of the old and frail.
Corruscating excerpts from Yukio Mishima.
Once I sat for hours on the grass watching a colony of ants engaged in transporting minute particles of red earth. It wasn't a matter of the ants having aroused my interest. On another occasion I stood for ages outside the university, staring like a dolt at the thin wisp of smoke that rose from a factory chimney at the back. It wasn't that the smoke had caught my fancy. At such times I felt as though I was drenched up to my neck in the existence that was myself. The world outside me had cooled down in parts and had then been reheated. How shall I put it? I felt that the outside world was spotted and again that it was striped. My inner being and the outer world slowly and irregularly changed places. The meaningless scene that surrounded me shone before my eyes; as it shone, it forced its way into me and only those parts of the scene that had not entered continued to glitter vividly in a place beyond.
'What about it?' he said. 'Something broke inside you just now, didn't it?' I can't bear to see a friend of mine living with something inside him that is so easy to break. My entire kindness lies in destroying such things.'
I did not expect that I should encounter the sea here on any intimate terms, although of course a jeep might come along from behind and push me into the sea just for fun.
The mouth of the river was unexpectedly narrow. The sea lay there indistinctly mingled with the dark cumuli of clouds, melting into the river, assaulting it. In order to get a tactile perception of this sea, I still had to walk a considerable distance with the wind blowing fiercely on me from across the plains and the rice fields. The wind was drawing its patterns over the entire surface of the sea. It was because of the sea that the wind was thus wasting its violent energy on these deserted fields. And the sea was a sea of vapor that covered this wintry area, a peremptory, dominant, invisible sea.
from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
A man is walking home from work along the side of a busy road. There is only one path and it is narrow. He sees a collection of leaves on the path in front of him. It is a matted collection of leafy vegetation, matted from a soggy cycle of rain and sun. Rain and sun.
He sees a woman walking towards him. She is an older woman and well dressed with a certain allure smarting about her hips and finely cut business accouterment.
She veers towards him.
Man: I am going to walk straight. This is ridiculous. I am not going to move for this woman. Why can't she walk straight? Does this woman think she owns the path? This path was here before both of us. I have intimated "straightness" in my journey for the last 30 minutes.
The woman continues to veer closer to him. It is evidently self evident that she is attempting to circumnavigate the matted leaf patch. She shows no concern for the imminent meeting of their trajectories.
Man: Oh come off it! She's going to walk into me to avoid the leaf patch? The leaf patch is on her side of the path. The burden of leaf patch is hers to deal with! Why must she confer this responsibility on me? It seems such a particular act and yet we're total strangers!
The woman comes to within two metres of the man. The man looks at the woman, being careful to express his look of severe annoyance. The woman continues unabated in her veering, for she is power-suited and exercising her right of post-feminist womanhood.
The man's body jerkily responds. One foot after another betrays his resolute promise to practice self-worth. He admonishes himself privately. He sinks to the primitive role of hunter-gatherer. The man sidesteps and lets the woman take the clear path. He has been displaced. He is on the grass beside the path. She is on the clear path. He is on the grass.
Man: "Ergghh!!"
The woman acknowledges his grunt with a look. The man tries to focus his frustration in his eyes and shoot it at her....
Woman: "I can't walk on the LEAVES!!"
Man: "Is it going to murder you?"
The woman shows the man a look of obvious disdain. They pass each other and keep walking. The man has learned his place.
... it is as from the moment when a typist earning twenty pounds a month recognises herself in the big wedding of the bourgeoisie that bourgeois ex-nomination achieves its full effect.
Mythologies - Roland Barthes
I'm only documenting this because it happens throughout most of the day. Every day. I understand that I will have necessarily had to procrastinate equally as long to observe this compulsive procrastination, but I have to keep telling myself that I'm doing this for the betterment of humanity.
Here is a small snippet in time (approximately 45 odd minutes) which describes the actions of possibly the most extreme and perverted procrastinator I've ever seen. He's been at my current place of work for just on 2 weeks. I haven't seen him do any work the entire time he's been there. He's had conversations about hypothetical situations and potential ideas or designs, but I haven't seen him actually *do* anything.
Update: for those of you who don't believe this actually happened - believe me. I typed this in exactly the correct order and at precisely timed intervals while he did it.
[4:30pm]
clicking repeatedly on individual days in a Lotus Notes weekly calendar view.. then back to clicking repeatedly through windows.. staring at screen.. clicking through windows again.. scroll down 10 lines through code.. click through windows repeatedly.. click repeatedly through individual days in a Lotus Notes weekly calendar view.. click repeatedly through windows.. stare at a command prompt with output text in it.. rub hair repeatedly.. stare at a command prompt with output text in it.. rub hair.. click through windows.. scroll up through code by about 100 lines.. stare at code and rub chin thoughtfully.. click through windows.. scroll down through code by about 100 lines.. click through windows repeatedly (for about 2 minutes this time).. scroll up through code by about 10 lines.. rub hair and face repeatedly.. click through windows repeatedly.. scroll up and down through java code repeatedly.. look at code and rub hair.. click through windows repeatedly..
[4:45]
use the keyboard! go to yahoo mail.. check mail.. read email from Peoplebank1.. click through windows repeatedly.. stare at empty MS Word window (no open document).. click repeatedly through windows.. rub hair repeatedly.. scroll up and down through yahoo mail inbox.. open email.. pick up the phone.. put the phone down (without calling anyone).. appear to be reading email2..
[4:50]
click repeatedly through windows.. open email from Peoplebank.. click repeatedly through windows.. rub hair repeatedly.. stare at intranet homepage.. type(!) url in window (without pressing enter).. click through several windows.. go back to browser and ponder url.. alt tab to yahoo mail window.. logout of yahoo mail.. log back into yahoo mail.. open previous email.. pick up phone.. dial a number.. click through a few windows..
[4:55]
speak to someone in Chinese3..
[5:01]
hang up.. start clicking repeatedly through windows again.. rub hair repeatedly.. go back to clicking repeatedly through windows again.. sigh4.. stare at code.. rub hair.. click repeatedly through windows (for several minutes).. rub face and hair and stare at command prompt.. go back to clicking through multiple windows..
[5:07]
start scrolling through code with the keyboard.. stop.. rub hair.. pick up pen.. look around.. put pen down.. lean back and start repeatedly stroking hair.. go back to clicking through windows..
[5:13] Get out of chair.. walk outside..
[5:15] Sit back down.. begin clicking through windows repeatedly again.. click repeatedly on individual days in a Lotus Notes weekly calendar view (which he continues for the next minute or so)..
And we've come full circle.
What is to be done with such people? I really don't know, but I would like to leave you with a quote from peoplebank.com.au:
"Some agencies throw up resumes in a shotgun approach. Peoplebank don't do that. They are willing to spend time getting to know my business, and that allows them to put up quality candidates, with the right technical skills who will fit into my team.
Classic by WCW. Am going to pick up a book of his poems this weekend as a priority.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams
How about:
Odysseus
I rule.
Poseidon
For your sin of pride, I curse you for all eternity.
(Unfazed, Odysseus boards his ship and sets SAIL for Greece, where his family is awaiting his RETURN from Troy. A STORM happens, and it drives them off course into the MEDITERRANEAN, where they come upon a strange LAND owned by the giant Cyclops POLYPHEMUS who eats some of the men ALL UP, but then they ESCAPE. Still lost, they run into the island of the sorceress CIRCE who turns some of Odysseus' men into ANIMALS, and it takes YEARS before they escape, and then they sail by some singing SIRENS, but they can't hear because they have STUFF in their ears. Then they come upon an island where there is a field of HERBS, and they all get HIGH, until Odysseus says it's time to GO. Then Odysseus' men let a WIND out of a BAG, and some more men DIE. And they sail on to HADES to talk to some DEAD people, and some more men DIE. And they steer the ship between the six headed monster SCYLLA and the torrential whirlpool CHARYBDIS, and Scylla makes some more men DIE, and Charybdis makes the rest of them DIE. Then the ship busts up into a JILLION pieces, but Odysseus is SAVED by the nymph Calypso who confines him to her ISLAND because she thinks he's HOT, and she wants his BODY. Then years later she lets him GO, but Poseidon is determined to terrorize him FURTHER. And then SUDDENLY Odysseus has an IDEA.)
Odysseus
Poseidon, I am sorry.
Poseidon
Ok, you can go home now.
(Odysseus goes home.)
We climbed Marianne Moore's narrow stair
To her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest, in Brooklyn
Daintiest curio relic of Americana.
Her talk, a needle
Unresting - darning incessantly
Chain-mail with crewel-work flowers,
Birds and fish of the reef
In phosphor-bronze wire.
Her face, a tiny American treen bobbin
On a spindle,
Her voice the flickering hum of the old wheel.
Then the coin, compulsory,
For the subway
Back to our quotidian scramble.
Why shouldn't we cherish her?
You sent her carbon copies of your poems.
Everything about them -
The ghost gloom, the constriction,
The bell-jar air-conditioning - made her gasp
For oxygen and cheer. She sent them back.
(Whoever has her letter has her exact words.)
'Since these seem to be valuable cabon copies
(Somewhat smudged) I shall not engross them.'
I took the point of that 'engross'
Precisely, like a bristle of glass
Snapped off deep in my thumb.
You wept
And hurled yourself down a floor or two
Further from the Empyrean.
I carred you back up.
And she, Marianne, tight, brisk,
Neat and hard as an ant,
Slid into the second or third circle
Of my Inferno.
A decade later, on her last visit to England,
Holding court at a party, she was sitting
Bowed over her knees, her face,
Under her great hat-brim's floppy petal,
Dainty and bright as a piece of confetti -
She wanted me to know, she insisted
(It was all she wanted to say)
With that Missouri needle, drawing each stitch
Tight in my ear,
That your little near-posthumous memoir
'OCEAN 1212'
Was 'so wonderful, so lit, so wonderful' -
She bowed so low I had to kneel. I kneeled and
bowed my face close to her upturned face
That seemed tinier than ever,
And studied, as through a grille,
Her lips that put me in mind of a child's purse
Made of the skin of a dormouse,
Her cheek, as if she had powdered the crumpled silk
Of a bat's wing.
And I listened, heavy as a graveyard
While she searched for the grave
Where she could lay down her little wreath.
Ted Hughes - Birthday Letters
I'm guessing Letter From America: Atheists throw down the gauntlet by Richard Bernstein is a fine example. I wonder if Bernstein has read Dawkin's "The God Delusion"? He certainly quotes Sam Harris from "Letter to a Christian Nation". Perhaps he's flicked through that at least?
From the article:
What is going on? One conclusion is not so far-reaching. It could be simply that there's a market for just about anything in this country — whether atheism or psychic channeling.I can imagine it must have taken about 2 minutes to come up with this stunning insight. What informs a view such as this? A guess perhaps? A rumination over coffee and stale toast? How novel!
The best-sellerdom of books like those of Harris and Dawkins shows that there is a market for militant atheism, but the market for religious belief is bigger. I wouldn't imagine any candidate for office winning on a platform of disbelief in God. I would similarly suppose that Billy Graham and other televangelists will have far vaster audiences than Harris does.Does Bernstein realise that (at least) Dawkins deals directly with these issues in his book? He certainly doesn't comment on it. If we're supposed to accept that Bernstein is presenting an informed opinion on the subject he certainly succeeds in looking absurd.
Harris is obviously bothered by the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States, which has coincided with the very violent rise of fundamentalist Islam in the Middle East, one product of which was the attacks of Sept. 11.Again, Dawkins deals with this in his book. Having read both "The God Delusion" and this watered down mental prolixity from Bernstein I can't help feeling that perhaps he hasn't.
The two movements are almost entirely dissimilar, of course, with Christian fundamentalism engaging in no violence or threats.
Will he succeed? It is doubtful. There are no available statistics on who exactly is buying the books by Harris and Dawkins, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the majority of them are already solid members of the rationalist choir.I kid you not - Bernstein doesn't justify this statement. For all we know it probably just "felt right" at the time.
Groovy. What's with all my inane, pointless posts lately?
This Year I Resolve to... This has to become my standard reply to people asking me what my new years resolutions are :)
Bento has a good post on his blog showing a bomb1 of a photo he shot somewhere in North Sydney :)
1Note terrorist allusion
Why would NRMA Insurance feature a woman in their ads who has different coloured eyebrows from her hair (red vs. brown)? Wrong.
The mind boggles.
What's wrong with the English? To say that two of their best bowlers struggled to get two of our best bowlers out is a massive understatement (Warney and Clarke batting?!). The Poms were slapped all over the place.
One of the crummiest English teams I can remember watching1. Poor buggers.
1Update [05/01/2007] - How does "2 wickets remaining. England leads by 20 runs" sound?
Update: As Scottio rightly pointed out, this is hard to read without me letting on that each paragraph is a separate excerpt :D
Enjoy! (and buy and read this book - phenomenal!)
An important phenomenon, this invention of a site of constraint, where morality castigates by means of administrative enforcement. For the first time, institutions of morality are established in which an astonishing synthesis of moral obligation and civil law is effected. The law of nations will no longer countenance the disorder of hearts. To be sure, this is not the first time in European culture that moral error, even in its most private form, has assumed the aspect of a transgression against the written or unwritten laws of the community. But in this great confinement of the classical age, the essential thing -- and the new event -- is that men were confined in cities of pure morality, where the law that should reign in all hearts was to be applied without compromise, without concession, in the rigorous forms of physical constraint.Morality permitted itself to be administered like trade or economy.
Confinement hid away unreason, and betrayed the shame it aroused; but it explicitly drew attention to madness, pointed to it. If, in the case of unreason, the chief intention was to avoid scandal, in the case of madness that intention was to organize it. A strange contradiction: the classical age enveloped madness in a total experience of unreason; it reabsorbed its particular forms, which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had clearly individualized into a general apprehension in which madness consorted indiscriminately with all the forms of unreason. But at the same time it assigned to this same madness a special sign: not that of sickness, but that of glorified scandal. Yet there is nothing in common between this organized exhibition of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which it came to light during the Renaissance.
There comes a moment in the course of passion when laws are suspended as though of their own accord, when movement either abruptly stops, without collision or absorption of any kind of active force, or is propagated, the action ceasing only at the climax of the paroxysm.
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
Madness and Civilization - Foucault
I've been really impressed by this album from Katatonia - particularly a track called "My Twin".
Get it somewhere. You're looking for album cover that looks like this :D
It's as "listenable" as the legendary Tool album - Lateralus (big call), or A Perfect Circle - Thirteenth Step etc.
Same kind of adrenaline inducing rawness :)
Go and watch The Century of the Self (documentary by Adam Curtis shown on BBC Four).
Brilliant overview of the different techniques employed to control the masses and shape the idea of "democracy" that the US seems so intent on exporting.
The Century of the Self Episode 1 2 3 4
N.B. This is approx 4 hours of documentary :)
Saddam Hussein (1937-2006)
From an article on the International Herald Tribune:
A trial on the far more sweeping charges that he directed the killing of 50,000 Kurds in an organized ethnic-cleansing campaign is still under way and will continue despite Hussein's execution.and
Iraqi officials said the execution would be filmed, both for the historical record and as proof for those who may doubt the word of both the Americans and Iraqis.
The US-based rights group Human Rights Watch condemned the hanging, saying history would judge his trial and execution harshly.
Richard Dicker, a Human Rights Watch director, said: "Saddam Hussein was responsible for horrific, widespread human rights violations, but those acts, however brutal, cannot justify his execution, a cruel and inhuman punishment.
41 emails and 2 days to delete one file and move a redirect page through 4 environments.
That's when you know you're dealing with process overkill at work. I've never in my entire life had to deal with so much bullshit to delete a file off a freaking test environment. Why the hell a company would pay tens of thousands of dollars for software which can do this for you out of the box with full transactional deployments and audit trails, and not use it is beyond me.
I'm laughing about it as I type this in fact. A squeaky, desperate slightly maniacal little laugh.
everyone needs bringing back down to earth
every now
and
again.
Why does everyone think I'm a genius?
Read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It's a brilliant and enlightening read.
Quotes to come in later posts.
Why won't God heal amputees?
Dinner conversation:
Mary: "I believe in God. I've believed in him since I was 7"
You: "Yeah? I want to because there's reams of hot ass at Hillsong but he doesn't heal amputees"
Mary: "Huh?"
You: "If he regenerated legs he'd get my vote."
Mary: "You're sick"
You: "Hey, I don't claim to be able to regenerate legs."
And so on.
Fucking ridiculous.
Scott is Jeff Daniels in the Squid and the Whale. Only he's studying philosophy and not a PhD in literature (yet).
Amarok pictured here is the out of the box music player in Kubuntu and just another reason why Kubuntu lords it over your puny-assed little OS.
Mmm.. let me see - you want song lyrics? Click. Artist or band info (sourced from Wikipedia)? Click. A summary of all the albums you have by a given artist and which songs you listen to most often? Click. Want to grab missing album art? Click. Download track info to supplement your crappy ID3 tags on your mp3 collection because you're a pirate and BitTorrent rocks? Click!
The wonders of open source eh?
I've already blogged about most of these points here, but the author of this article, "Avoid the loony Zune" makes some good points about Microsoft and its dealings with the wider music industry.
There are far more positive reviews at the Zune scene's Zune Owner Reviews page, and I guess this helps to balance all the bad press Zune has been getting since release.
Despite reading 100 "good reviews", I still find it hard to look past the DRM, lack of podcast support, next to useless WiFi and the Zune points system for buying tracks. The sad thing is, Microsoft's famous marketing prowess will probably convince most users that these things aren't important.
Educate yourself about the recent Novell and Microsoft agreement, and then decide if you want to sign the protest against it (written by Bruce Perens). I did.
I was having a discussion with a web developer friend of mine the other day about Kubuntu. He made the very valid point that he still needs a windows install around to do thorough testing of IE browser support on a windows box.
Well I have IE 5.5 and 6.0 running on Kubuntu (and no I'm not using VMWare). I found a very nifty little script in my blog reading this morning which installs IE 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 for you (you can choose which versions you want). The magic all happens with IEs4Linux (also check out his blog - looks like IE7 support is there too - maybe this will convince me to finally install IE7). It installs with a minimum of fuss and hassle. In fact with ADSL2+ the install is lightning fast.
The only requirement is that you have Wine installed and cabextract (a program to extract Microsoft Cabinet files). Using Adept Manager I had these installed in minutes. Following the Kubuntu instructions on the IEs4Linux was incredibly straightfoward. Within minutes I had two fancy looking IE icons on my desktop (an upside down IE logo in what looks like a cocktail glass), and I was ready to go.
I have a screenshot of IE 5.5, IE 6.0 and Firefox running behind it. No hacks, no pain. It Just Works. Very impressive. Just to prove that it really is IE I've loaded up Bento's blog Waffle which proudly gives IE the middle finger. You can see what I mean in the screenshot :)
So while it's not IE on Windows, it's about as close as you'll get whilst running a Linux distro. I say give it a whirl :)
I stumbled across this article today. Reminds me of someone who recently bought a mac to do Rails development on, but wasn't particularly happy a few days after buying it.
Anyone who swears by a particular platform to do development for a particular web framework needs their head checked. And as far as David Hansson's comments? Mere elitist hype-generating mumbo jumbo.
At least this guy backs up his claims.
This was a pleasurable read. Another poignant article considering yesterday was my last day at Insane Asylum Group (you all know the acronym). I'm officially unemployed. First time in almost 7 years. What the fuck. It's awesome.
10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job
I've been reading a chapter of 'The Art of Unix Programming' by ESR every morning before work lately. I was also having drinks with a few guys who organised and spoke at World Usability Day yesterday at the State Library in Sydney. Anyway, reading this koan this morning seemed particularly poignant and funny :) Enjoy!
Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface
One evening, Master Foo and Nubi attended a gathering of programmers who had met to learn from each other. One of the programmers asked Nubi to what school he and his master belonged. Upon being told they were followers of the Great Way of Unix, the programmer grew scornful.
“The command-line tools of Unix are crude and backward”, he scoffed. “Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a graphical user interface”.
Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.
“I don't understand you!” said the programmer.
Master Foo remained silent, and pointed at an image of the Buddha. Then he pointed at a window.
“What are you trying to tell me?” asked the programmer.
Master Foo pointed at the programmer's head. Then he pointed at a rock.
“Why can't you make yourself clear?” demanded the programmer.
Master Foo frowned thoughtfully, tapped the the programmer twice on the nose, and dropped him in a nearby trashcan.
As the programmer was attempting to extricate himself from the garbage, the dog wandered over and piddled on him.
At that moment, the programmer achieved enlightenment.
Quoted from: Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface
Ok - so I'm typing this post from my newly installed Kubuntu (which is pretty much just Ubuntu with KDE as the default window manager). It's very very nice.
I'm just copying across my mp3s from my USB external hard disk and we'll be good to go. I have Gaim installed and configured (which I was using on Windows anyway - it wees all over MSN and Trillian (which is just plain ugly)). Kubuntu pre-installs OpenOffice which I was also using on my Windows XP box, and I have Firefox 2.0 up and running.
It's been about 9 years since I ran Linux exclusively on my desktop at home, and that only lasted about 18 months. Boy o boy has Linux come a long way. I haven't had to go hunting around for my XConfig file. I haven't spent days looking for an obscure X server driver. Everything Just Works. In fact, it's interesting to note that I've installed and configured Kubuntu to my tastes faster than it normally takes to download, configure and install Cygwin (a tool that any serious programmer familiar with *nixs would usually install on their Windows boxen).
Ah, I love it. Let me see, I have Adept which appears to be a kickarse GUI interface to the powerful apt-get packaging system we've all been envious of from Debian. I have an audio player already installed (mp3s work with barely any fuss). I have CD and DVD burning software, a powerful media player in Kaffeine. I have an RSS reader pre-installed. I have Bluetooth chat (!), a bittorrent client, an IRC client, a PDF reader out of the box, Konqueror - a kick arse web browser (arguably better than Firefox in some sense - just ask Apple - Safari heart KHTML and all that). I have all that Linux brings to the development table (Windows has nothing on Linux - and no I'm not convinced that Powershell will make much of a difference), and all of this is wrapped up in a really quite beautiful GUI (I rate it way higher than XP or other MS derivatives - Mac OS X still rocks - though Ubuntu is definitely up there).
For those who want to take a peek you can click on the smaller image below for a full res screenshot of what Kubuntu looks like on my desktop (1280x1024). Even the process of taking this image was effortless. Hitting printscreen on your keyboard automatically brings up a snapshot program which wants to save your desktop as a PNG for you. Excellent :)
I'll get to know Kubuntu better over the next week or so and post some more, so stay tuned :)
One last point. People who are interested in Linux, or Free Software in general (there is a convincingly philosophical argument behind this) should definitely check Ubuntu out. You can download it here. Give it a go. If you're a developer and you're happy to put the time in I can't imagine you'd fail to be impressed.
Saw U2 last night at Sydney's Telstra Dome. I've never been a huge U2 fan, but holy crap. Bono and especially The Edge - WOW. The effect of Edge's guitar riffs on the crowd is inexplicable. You have to experience it to understand I think - spine shattering, goose-bump inducing beauty. I'm still processing the whole thing, but I was wholey and entirely impressed. Incredible entertainers.
Oh - and they played this song. The whole thing was incredible.
I'm going to switch from Windows XP to Kubuntu on my desktop at home.
I'll post rants about it in the coming weeks :)
Three stories from my life by Steve Jobs.
And another interesting/motivational article I stumbled across recently How to make something amazing, right now.
Just start doing it. Whatever it is. Yeah ok.
I obviously have more time on my hands these days :) I've spent the whole weekend doing *nothing* so far. A very welcome change from writing Ruby on Rails apps for uni and writing 20 page project management progress reports.
This is really interesting. I love how flexible this interface is. I'd agree that it's incredibly intuitive1. Anyone who reads digg.com might have already seen this. Pretty nifty touch driven UI. Have a look. This gets me a bit excited about technology :)
1 This begs the question though, 'what does intuitive mean for different audiences?'. I'm definitely going to have to do HCI next session at uni.
Saw this on reddit.com this morning. Pretty interesting imo. Check out the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud from "1776-01-15: Foundation of Government" to "2006-01-31: State of the Union Address". Play with the slider. Groovy.
I resigned today and you're all invited to my farewell. I'll be having it on the 10th of November (I think). Should be a total blast.
Everyone is invited. Yes - even you Saliba - and you Bentley. I'm paying for Milton and Constandinou to circumnavigate the globe and show us a good time.
Very very exciting times. [Mescaline - it's the only way to fly].
I'll leave you with:
jerry stand up
pull back the curtains and let some light in
quit your job
because you hate it and it's wasting you
Hack of a fest sounds good.
"Openness is part of the magic for us," said Dickerson. "If you go around Silicon Valley there is this whole veneer of privacy."
"You aren't greeted with open arms if you knock on the door and say 'What are you doing?' With hack day, we are saying we want you to knock on the door and see what we are doing."
Since beginning internal hack days last year, Yahoo has held them at facilities in Australia, India, Europe and the US.
"There are some major products coming that were conceived and built at hack days," Dickerson said. "We can't wait to tell people."
Sounds like a pretty nifty idea. www.portablefilmfestival.com
Better than buying an ipod and paying for movies. Totally different of course but I couldn't resist :)
jerry stand up
pull back the curtains and let some light in
quit your job
because you hate it and it's wasting you
once upon a time you were running
singing to the ground every morning
once upon a time you were
jerry stand up
am i the only one who's noticed that you've been missing
remember yourself man
remember that you have chance and possibility
once upon a time you were running
singing to the ground every morning
once upon a time you were crazy
jerry
you're not getting any younger
all you need is fresh air
a nice new suit and a walk in the park every day or two
every day in every way
Jerry Stand Up - Echolalia
Zune is looking more and more like a crappy attempt to break into the portable music player market.
I've spent some of the morning reading some details about it on the zuneinsider.com blog. There is an interesting Zune interface demo up there as well.
It didn't take long however to realise that there are some real corkers in the latest information released by MS.
"I made a song. I own it. How come, when I wirelessly send it to a girl I want to impress, the song has 3 days/3 plays?"This is an absolute joke. Everyone in the know understands that Digital Rights Management is bad for you and me2.
Good question. There currently isn't a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can’t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding. And besides, she'll come see you three days later. . .
Zune will play podcasts. I'm actually listenting to a podcast right now. If you bring the audio file into the software (like a wma or mp3 file), you can play it on your Zune. Beyond that, there will be other options for podcasting support for future releases.I'm sorry, but just because I can import an mp3 file or whatever into my Zune and play it doesn't mean it can play podcasts. Who the hell do they think they're duping? I can't import my existing podcast RSS feeds? I can't syndicate my favourite podcasts? To say Zune will play podcasts is just lame. Zune doesn't support podcasting.
ok, back atcha. lots of folks have asked about Mac support: Not right now, but we'll continue to listen to folks and customers and respond to what they tell us they want and need.But not about Mac support eh? Being listened to is great and makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, but if you're not going to do anything about it what's the point?
There's been ruminations in the online media about www.myspace.com lately, and about potentially forged identities and people questioning the true motivations of the creators and owners of the site. This article is fairly interesting and goes into quite a bit of depth about it. At least it's interesting to read about how the business grew to it's current stature, even if you disregard or don't care about the so-called hidden machinations of the creators.
www.myspace.com is the new Moleskine.
I'm going to post an email conversation from work about my company's latest attempts at making a fool of themselves by showing that they have no idea about web standards, and no idea about the web in general. This document slid on by past web developers, web producers (who were instrumental in writing it or at least reviewing it) and even past our esteemed senior system analysts (who have been mentioned before on this illustrious blog). Let me just state this: JSR has nothing to do with front end scripting standards. I know you want to know more - stay tuned - it'll probably not be worth it :P
How good is it that the people we work for in IT don't know what Turing complete means. They haven't heard of brainfuck and they certainly don't know what Big-Oh notation means ("Oh, is that something to do with .NET?" - certainly not you stupid fuck). This is why google is kicking arse.
UPDATE: Actually this is a perfect question to pose to prospective employers at the close of an interview.
Big Wig: Right Jones, do you have any questions for us before we consider your future with us?
Jones: Yes, actually, I do. What does Turing Complete mean?
Big Wig: Ahh, Turing Complete? Umm.. Turing Umm.. Ke?
Jones: C'mon man, Turing Complete. Surely they taught you this in high school computer science?
Big Wig: Ahh, no.
Jones: You're fired!
Big Wig: What? I'm fired! Get out. How dare you.
Jones: You're fired you fucking moron!
Big Wig: Get out! Security?!
Jones: HaHAahAHaHA You fucking MORON
Big Wig: SECURITY! Get this man out of here. He's a threat to national security
Jones: Eat this (bends over and pulls /dev/null out his arse). BAAANG!!!
Ok - this is insane and brilliant in my opinion. Get ready for a bit of memory usage in your browser on opening that link - but man - I love it. The more I get sucked into the details the more it reminds me of my days spent gazing at miniature train models as a little kid. Well kinda like that crossed with playing Chrono Trigger on a PC emulator. Oh yeah - and cross that with memories of playing with little lego men. Yeah! Brilliant stuff :)
This really is kinda creepy. The facial expressions are amazing.
Check out the wikipedia entry for more information.
Read an article on smh.com.au this morning called Devil in the detail: Vatican exorcises Harry Potter.
Favourite quotes:
"Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil," says Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope's "caster-out of demons".
Last year the Pope, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, described Harry Potter as a potentially corrupting influence.
In the same interview, Father Amorth said he was convinced that Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were possessed by the devil.
It's been 9 days and counting so far. Let's see how long I last. 9 days since that and that. I need to give up the latter. The former can happen whenever the planets align and all that malarkey.
I think I'm on to a good thing this time. True lucidity is just around the corner. I wake up and feel it slithering out of my fingers in the mornings now.
Check your website out as a graph.
(This is muttering-madman.blogspot.com) ;)
As an aside, I've been arguing with the powers that be about a website developed by our company fairly recently. They put everything behind https with a completely newbie-ish JavaScript redirect from the http:// landing page. Obviously this is completely brain dead. The scary thing? The person responsible for designing this solution is a senior systems analyst...
Anyway, I generated a graph of this. Hillarious I'm sure you'd agree.
(URL hidden to protect the guilty) :|
have been getting to me lately. Almost every song I listen to has some gem in it. Great writing in my opinion.
"i want days and weeks to burst out of you"
Say Something
"in a city that rumbles like an impatient child
he hears everything"
Feeding The Birds And Hoping For Something In Return
"and your eyes become corridors
where i wander with a candle
calling out to you"
You Only Hide
"I was hanging upside down from the overpass
Waiting to discover something about the world
I couldn't get with the program and I couldn't listen to them
It was like trying to think in reverse
And I don't want to slide into apathy"
Monsters
"You're not the first to think that everything has been thought before
I spoke to an echo and he said
'I’m not satisfied, I want something more'"
Three Dimensions
"you hold me in mid air and you keep me a measure from impact
you stop and ask me if the ringing in your ears might be the sound of thought
you're like a long slow accident, time stood still while motion emptied you out
and we watched you like a slide show 1,2,3,4 and there you go"
Stunt Show
i picture myself like a column of smoke
and when questioned i see myself riding around forever on a manmade horse and you
and you
you'll be
moving randomly
Manmade Horse
Kinda interesting article about false memories and imagination.
This probably helps explain why I sometimes have false memories about situations and events I've dreamt. Most bizarre. I guess I just have very vivid dreams (or something).
"What we learn could be useful for people who make decisions outside [the lab] based on the memory of others"
Grasping the Thistle by Lisa Kelly. Brilliant read imho.
My favourite bit was:
Though back at question time at the close of the June symposium session my prickly question was duly responded to, even if the answers could have been more likened to variously sidestepping17, trampling18 and patronising19 the thistle rather than grasping it. And I was left none the wiser as to the significance of Sydney to the Biennale of Sydney, other than as a host city with a series of well appointed venues for culture sourced from ‘elsewhere’.
17 Museum of Contemporary Art senior curator Rachel Kent insisted that she was unable to comment, not having worked on ‘Zones of Contact’, but suggested attending meetings, lunches and talks.
18 Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre artistic director Nick Tsoutas asserted that the Biennale of Sydney was not a platform of inclusivity, was not responsible for representing Sydney artists, was a nationally organised international event that could be staged in any interchangeable city and has nothing to do with Sydney or its arts community. Probably all in one sentence. No one disagreed with him.
19 Australian Centre for Photography director Alasdair Foster suggested that the artworks themselves in ‘Zones of Contact’ functioned as a ‘conversation’. And that whilst local artists might not get to meet visiting artists, they got to meet the works.
Some Henry Miller excerpts from "Black Spring"
'Anyway, after she had worked herself up to a state of collapse, when the neighbors couldn't stand it any longer and there were knocks on the door, then her aged mother would come crawling out of the bedroom and with tears in her eyes would beg me to go in there and quiet her a bit. "Oh, leave her be," I'd say, "she'll get over it." Whereupon, ceasing her sobs for a moment the wife would spring out of bed, wild, blind with rage, her hair all down and tangled up, her eyes swollen and bleary, and still hiccoughing and sobbing she would commence to pound me with her fists, to lambast me until I became hysterical with laughter. And when she saw me rocking to and fro like a crazy man, when her arms were tired and her fists sore, she would yell like a drunken whore—"Fiend! Demon!"—and then slink off like a weary dog. Afterwards, when I had quieted her down a bit, when I realized that she really needed a kind word or two, I would tumble her on to the bed again and throw a good fuck into her. Blast me if she wasn't the finest piece of tail imaginable after those scenes of grief and anguish! I never heard a woman moan and gibber like she could. "Do anything to me!" she used to say. "Do what you want!" I could stand her on her head and blow into it, I could back-scuttle her, I could drag her past the parson's house, as they say, any goddamn thing at all--she was simply delirious with joy. Uterine hysteria, that's what it was! And I hope God take me, as the good master used to say, if I am lying in a single word I say.
(God, mentioned above, being defined by St. Augustine, as follows: "An infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.")'
'No more peeping through keyholes! No more masturbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I'm sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don't want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible a la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible—it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism, megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicide, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil, and the glory that is God. All brought into the open on a colossal scale, and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age.
A classic purity, then—and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! The odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion's dung, of tiger's breath and elephant's hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human bones—whilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!'
The response:
hmmm... we dont' know. we grabbed the miller off of file sharing. don't know where it came from, etc. we haven't altered the file in any way. such are the hazards of file sharing, no?
yrs,
kenneth
ubuweb
I noticed something very strange in a recording I downloaded from UbuWeb the other day. A friend of mine recommended I give a Henry Miller reading of an excerpt from "Black Spring" a listen so I promptly downloaded and listened to it; several times. As soon as I could I went out and bought a copy of the book. It's total madness and genius and quite possibly a perfect rendering of beauty and "esctasy" in the manner Miller intended. I haven't finished it yet, but it's an amazing work of art. Check it out.
Anyway, to get to the point. There is a discrepancy between the book and the recording on UbuWeb. I noticed something missing from the recording because the line in the book which happens to be missing from the recording is a total bombshell and beautifully poised for maximum impact :) So I posted some feedback on their feedback web form:-
*Quick note about possible censorship?*
Hi guys,
I've been reading Henry Miller's "Black Spring" lately. Your link to Miller reading an excerpt from it inspired me to get my hands on the book and read it for myself. One thing has come to my attention during my reading of it though. There is a discrepancy between the recording you have hosted on your site and the book.
The book (ISBN 0-8021-3182-4) has (bottom of p24-25):-
"Something better than a Christ, something bigger than a heart, something beyond God Almighty I think of--MYSELF. I am a man. That seems to me sufficient.
I am a man of God and a man of the Devil. To each his due. Nothing eternal, nothing absolute. Before me always the image of the body, our triune god of penis and testicles. On the right, God the Father, on the left and hanging a little lower, God the Son; and between and above them the Holy Ghost. I can never forget that this holy trinity is man-made, that it will undergo infinite changes--"
But your recording cuts out "the Devil. To each his due." and also leaves out "Before me always the image of the body, our triune god of penis and testicles."
It's obvious in the first instance that the recording has been doctored. The second sentence is neatly censored in its entirety.
Are you aware of this? I'm intrigued and somewhat dissapointed as it's one of the more powerful images/lines in the beginning of the book. Who would deliberately censor such things?
I look forward to your reply and thank you in advance for your investigation,
P.S. ubuweb.com is an amazing resource. Thank you so much for making all of this freely available.
This is a very groovy thread with some very groovy images done on cardboard!?!
cardboard is for boxes
My favourite would have to be the little dude standing next to the street sign with a broken umbrella.
Scene: man wearing "street gear", "graffing" a wall and generally being "hip hop".
"Man, I don't believe in cliches you know. They're wack."
"Apropos of Readymades" by Marcel Duchamp, from Marcel Duchamp on UbuWeb Sound
In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.
A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called "Pharmacy" after adding two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon.
In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote "In advance of the broken arm."
It was around that time that the word "Readymade" came to my mind to designate this form of manifestation.
A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these "Readymades" was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.
The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anaesthesia.
One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the "Readymade."
That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.
Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which, in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called "Readymade aided."
At another time, wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and "Readymades," I imagined a "Reciprocal Readymade": use a Rembrandt as an ironing board!
I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the production of "Readymades" to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my "Readymades" against such a contamination.
Another aspect of the "Readymade" is its lack of uniqueness... the replica of the "Readymade" delivering the same message, in fact nearly every one of the "Readymades" existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.
A final remark to this egomaniac's discourse:
Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are "Readymades aided" and also works of assemblage.
Marcel Duchamp, 1961
See an artists paint box strewn with violent reds and dashes of yellow ochre. Add sullied rags wrung through hands and dropped frequently at the foot of an easel. They're blackened and soiled with heavy blotches of colour. Add an assortment of tools and spatulas. Pick this box up and shake it thoroughly and imagine the contents being mixed up and smacked around inside. Now open it and blow the result up to room size. Think of a house looking exactly like this, a replica of an oversized artists paint box. This large paint box is illuminated with a warm yellow light. Music is blaring out every orifice of this place. Bottles of paint are lined up on the window sill in the kitchen like miniature watercolours. The room before it is littered with so many individual newspaper sheets. Someone has taken enormous care to separate each one from it's sheaf and then thrown them spontaneously around the entire house. Empty glasses stained with bourbon and coke seem to lounge in a drunken stupor between pillows on the floor. The entire house-in-a-box is a trail of mess from one room to the other.
Two women sit directly outside of this. The oversized one's face is darkened with black hair. Her eyes don't make a statement because they hide in shadow. The other woman is dainty by comparison. She has the stature, remarkably, of a mouse. Her nose moves in a dainty wiggle as she nibbles at her companion's conversation, tasting each piece and lavishing audible satisfactions.
“Oh, comeon, I know he likes you”, she murmurs quietly. Her body language is shy and wary of the larger woman. She leans away from her larger companion. She seems wary of being crushed.
“Yeah, he's weird. I love him and I know he loves me too”, whines the other one.
I think about cutting to a suburban soap-opera scene. “He's weird”. Ok. Let's go with that.
But the large one stops talking and contents herself with moping under her mop of dirty black hair. I notice that her hands are too large. They are mans hands. I want to throw a soiled nappy in her face. Her little partner sits and silently placates her. Her little body moves imperceptably, but it's there. A certain cooing rhythm. A slightly seductive wobble. That's when I notice it; they are mistress and slave. I look at the black haired woman and imagine dark gritty black pubes to match. Suddenly she is sitting upright on her stool, her faced screwed up with enormous exertion. Her significant arse starts to envelope the seat with a hot swollen greed. I stare slack-jawed in wonder. The seat buckles violently and flings the smaller woman in the air. Her hands have clamped around one of the legs and she dangles off it staring, transfixed at the looming event horizon, the point where time is slowing and at which the seat is disappearing. I'm dimly aware of shouting something though I'm not sure it's intelligble. No-one is listening. The little woman's tail wraps around the window sill and rattles the old glass pane. The pane beats back and cruelly slaps the large womans sagging breasts. I beat my hands on my thighs and scratch wailing lines into the duco of a passing car. The dark haired woman is groaning and her eyes have started to grin blood. Her lips shake and shower saliva over the entire verandah. I'm kicking the fence down in front of me while the little woman is disappearing, but she is gone and the only remnant is a slick wet mess of hair. The large woman heaves a massive sigh and winks at me. I grin back at her and continue on my way.
Great black rolls of shadow roared in our ears and raced over viridian hills. The earth folded in magnificent creases to meet the land below, and you moved your fingers nimbly and quickly through your hair. Your nervous staccato movements spilled more black like an ink spill but the earth ignored you; you with your sweet sorghum tangled hair and your thin wet dress clinging to your hips. You squatted and I ground my teeth at the black grave. Why Didn't You Cry? Instead you conducted the skies and moved earth with your pink little fingers. No one was out there but us. Just the two of us and mist and rain and racing shadows following your direction. They would bend back their ears and bare their teeth in a stretch to race across vast lengths of paddock and sweep through fences and smash into bales of hay. The sky was cold and miserable. The air was blue around us. I wanted to hold your hips in my hands and feel their gentle warmth. You flittered smiles at me, and blinked your long lashes. I shrank back from you and trembled.
"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is incredible. What an author. If only I could read Japanese.
