Just another F'ed up humanoid trying to make sense of this old world...
I live in
Seattle , and I love it , but
I am planning a move abroad in August 2008...
Anyone from Europe reading this, especially
Greece / Aegean Sea
Please share your stories of the cool places
Heaven on Earth
Jeans, Jeans, Jeans
YUM!
The. Best. TV Show. EVER.
The End
Why this Show was SO Great!
Featured Band:
Genesis (1969-1977) Previous:
Minus The Bear
Archives:
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Marillion
Caravan
Morrissey
Little Feat
Bjork
Djam Karet
Camel
Prefab Sprout
Porcupine Tree
Gentle Giant
Led Zeppelin
Pocketful
Featured Painter:
Camille Pissarro
Previous:
Vincent van Gogh
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Archives:
Rene Magritte
Edward Hopper
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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Entrance to the Village of Voisins 1872
The Road from Versailles at Louveciennes 1870Pond at Montfoucault 1874
Le petit pont, Pontoise 1875
Boulevard Montmartre:Rainy Weather, Afternoon 1897 The Road to Louveciennes, at the Outskirts of the Forest 1871
Boulevard Montmartre:Night 1897
The Orchard 1872
Featured Writer:
Kurt Vonnegut Jr
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And so it goes...
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.
...
"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass."
At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.
It is as free-form as an amoeba.
In his "Fifty-third Calypso," Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice--
So many different people
In the same device.
Cat's Cradle 1963
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Previous:
Harlan Ellison
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And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us; we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshippers of the sun’s passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don’t keep the schedule tight.
  Until it becomes more than a minor inconvenience to be late. It becomes a sin. Then a crime.
"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman 1965
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He heard the moist sounds from the basement and went down with fur and silence into the darkness. The basement had been flooded. One of the eleven was there. His name was Teddy. He was attached to the slime-coated upper wall of the basement, hanging close to the stone, pulsing softly and giving off a thin purple light, purple as a bruise. He dropped a rubbery arm into the water, and let it hang there, moving idly with the tideless tide. Then something came near it, and he made a sharp movement, and brought the thing up still writhing in his rubbery grip, and inched it along the wall to a dark, moist spot on his upper surface, near the veins that covered its length, and pushed the thing at the dark-blood spot, where it shrieked with a terrible sound, and went in and there was a sucking noise, then a swallowing sound.
Shattered Like a Glass Goblin 1968
Archives:
Charles Dickens
Brian W. Aldiss
Samuel Beckett
R. D. Laing
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THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,†said Hazel.
“Huh?†said George.
“That dance – it was nice,†said Hazel.
“Yup,†said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,†said George.
...
“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?†said Hazel.
“Right,†said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
“Boy!†said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?â€
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
Harrison Bergeron 1961
And so it was--strangely, strangely--that I found myself standing in the backyard of the house I had lived in when I was seven years old. At thirteen minutes till midnight on no special magical winter's night, in a town that had held me only till I was physically able to run away. In Ohio, in winter, near midnight--certain I could go back.
Back to a time when what was now ... was then.
Not truly knowing why I even wanted to go back. But certain that I could. Without magic, without science, without alchemy, without supernatural assistance; just go back. Because I had to, I needed to ... go back.
Back; thirty-five years and more. To find myself at the age of seven, before any of it had begun; before any of the directions had been taken; to find out what turning point in my life it had been that had wrenched me from the course all little boys took to adulthood; that had set me on the road of loneliness and success ending here, back where I'd begun, in a backyard at now-twelve minutes to midnight.
At forty-two I had come to that point in my life toward which I'd struggled since I'd been a child: a place of security, importance, recognition. The only one from this town who had made it. The ones who had had the most promise in school were now milkmen, used car salesmen, married to fat, stupid, dead women who had, themselves, been girls of exceeding promise in high school. They had been trapped in this little Ohio town, never to break free. To die there, unknown. I had broken free, had done all the wonderful things I'd said I would do.
Why should it all depress me now?
One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty 1970
Slag:
MySpace is way cool, but
beware
Plans are
in motion to regulate the Internet
Telecom Corporations
want a bigger slice of the pie
Do not be fooled, this is about content, not money
They can not censor what they can not control access to
Things get mixed up in the real world
Chew on This:
Do you know what RFID is?
Is an RFID-equipped cellphone the same as Orwell's telescreen ?
Why is marijuana still illegal ?
Why does the USA have the highest per capita incarceration rate ?
What happens when Nanotechnology hits the fan?
Has World War III already begun?
If So , what
event will History use to define its start?
If Not , then what
event will trigger its onset?
Is MySpace
the Pods , or what?
34D or 36C?
Discuss
Weird Stuff:
Robot Death
Slack Off
Star Trek Cribs
