Category: looky

Written and set in the mid 1970’s by Ryu Murakami. It follows the hedonistic and very non-glamorous existence of a group of Japanese punk junkies, constantly poor and scraping together the money from selling themselves for sex and parties to get to the next concert or score the next batch of drugs.

Everything has a smell and a texture. Lots of descriptions of mucous, other bodily fluids, rotting food.

A bit like Trainspotting, but Japanese and more 1970s

A bit like Naked Lunch, but more coherent and a lot shorter, and not surreal

A bit like Bright Lights Big City, with much less fun

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When the provisional Ohio votes are counted and if George W. Bush is re-elected, single, sexy, American liberals – already a threatened species – will be desperate to escape.

These lonely, afraid (did we mention really hot?) progressives will need a safe haven.

You can help. Open your heart, and your home. Marry an American. Legions of Canadians have already pledged to sacrifice their singlehood to save our southern neighbours from four more years of cowboy conservatism.

Web link of note: Marry An American
(At http://www.marryanamerican.ca/)

Electronic Voice Phenomena, or “EVP,” is when you record ghost voices on a tape recorder. Listen to the examples, they are pretty creepy.

According to the recording procedure posted by the AAEVP,

If the taper wishes to speak to a specific friend or loved one in the next dimension, he should ask helpers on the other side to please get this person for him. For best results, it is advised to make this request as you end recording for the day. As an example: “When I return tomorrow, I would especially like to speak to my mother, Mary Smith. If you would please try to bring her to me, I will be very grateful.”

I’m thinking this is to give the dead time to contact the requested party, and then for the Beloved to re-arrange their schedule to plan to be at the next contact meeting.

Is this such a bizarre concept? When you make an (unexpected) long-distance call into a developing country, the operator has to schedule the call’s connection, and leave a message for the call recipient. Also, sometimes the only phone is in another village and the time for the incoming call must be relayed by friends or neighbors from the village with the phone to wherever the call recipient lives. This could take several days.

What if the only phone in North America was in Salt Lake City, and you lived in San Francisco? The phone only takes incoming calls. Even with trains or the Pony Express, getting the message that you had a call would take weeks. Then you’d have to travel to the phone, which would take more weeks.

So I propose the following: At the end of your recording session or what have you, list off the next few people you intend to contact, in order, from nearest future to furthest. the list only would move every week or so. That way, someone on the top of the list has about a week to make the connection, and people in future slots on the list will have ample warning, possibly several months. Sort of like a “upcoming events” list for contactees.

But there is a slight complication- we all know how communicating with the Departed is a fairly unreliable proposition. The dead aren’t as direct in their communication, and rarely stay on topic. There may be a large degree of garbling of communicated messages- like a long chain of myna birds relaying spoken messages. Or maybe being on the Other Side makes you a senile flake.

In either case, the message, even “I want to talk to my grandfather,” must be repeated simply and with a high frequency. Like a simple, easy-to-remember and therefore easy-to-repeat phrase. Maybe have a tune that goes along with it to make it even easier to recall. Whoever or whatever receives this message can then more easily relay it to the Loved One, who then can in turn be at a future scheduled recording session. For maximum exposure you would repeat this short song with a single sentence every five minutes or so, during the recording sessions.

Oh crap. I’ve just invented Radio Advertising for the Dead.

EMILY’s List, the nation’s largest grassroots political network, is dedicated to taking back our country from the radical right wing by electing pro-choice Democratic women to federal, state, and local office. We are a network of more than 97,000 Americans — from all across the country and all walks of life — committed to recruiting and funding viable women candidates; helping them build and run effective campaign organizations; and mobilizing women voters to help elect progressive candidates across the nation.

Web link of note: Emily’s List
(At http://emilyslist.org/)

His new video “Mosh” rules. See it immediately!

See also Public Enemy’s video “Son of a Bush” which is like a 3 minute gangsta public service announcement, filled with so much information you will have to watch it several times.

I almost wonder why it’s not on MTV 24/7. Almost.

“Bush Relatives for Kerry” grew out of a series of conversations that took place between a group of people that have two things in common: they are all related to George Walker Bush, and they are all voting for John Kerry. As the election approaches, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out about why we are voting for John Kerry, and to do our small part to help America heal from the sickness it has suffered since George Bush was appointed President in 2000. We invite you to read our stories, and please, don’t vote for our cousin!

Web link of note: Bush Relatives for Kerry
(At http://www.bushrelativesforkerry.com/)

Projects:

1. Construction of a condenser in a arid zone of Marrocco
2. Construction of a condenser in a arid zone of Burkina-Faso
3. Installation of experimental dew condensers on the island of Biševo in Croatia
4. Study of the dew water as an alternative water source in the Canarian Islands
5. Construction of a atmospheric humidity condenser on Tahiti

…Dew is like our Earth,
so solid but also so fragile.
We all are responsible that this morning miracle should never be transformed into an acidic, hazardous liquid so that dew remains a symbol of purity and innocence …

From the Publications page:

Russian engineer, Friedrich Zibold. In Féodosia, in Crimea, during the summer 1900, while leveling its forest district, Zibold discovered large conical stone heaps, of volume approximately 600 m^3 volume.

In the majority of cases, remnants of clay pipes
surrounded these tumuli. Zibold concluded, as will be shown later, wrongly; but which gave rise to an astonishing construction, that these stone heaps were dew condensers. He decided that the tumuli were used to feed with of drinking water the antique Feodosia.

To verify his assumption, F. Zibold built a condenser functioning on principles that he thought identical to those of the old condensers. For this experiment, Zibold choosed a place at the top of Tepe-Oba, close to Feodosia, at 288 m elevation. He built a stone condenser, in form of a cup, 1,15 m depth and 20 m diameter. The cup was filled with sea pebbles from 10 to 40 cm in diameter, arranged in the form of truncated cone 6 m height and 8 m diameter at the top. The condenser began to be operated in 1912, and gave till 360 liters of water per day. The experiments had to cease in 1915 because of leaks in the base. Partially dismounted, it was completely abandoned. Today, there remains only one gigantic cut 20 meters in diameter.

quote from Marq De Villiers:

…”But for me, a small and largely forgotten example of technological inventiveness, and one of the most beguiling, is the work of the Russian Feodor Zibold in the early 1900s.

   Zibold was a “natural scientist,” as they were then called, a philosopher of nature, a man consumed with a childlike curiosity about how things really worked. There were people like him all over Europe a hundred years ago, men of independent means and independent minds, all imbued with the kind of sunny optimism that goes with exploring where none other had been before. Charles Darwin is the most famous exemplar of this agreeable species. Zibold came later, but he was operating on the fringes of Europe, in the last tottering days of czarist Russia, and could be forgiven his dilatoriness. And, unlike Darwin, he was often spectacularly wrong, which only adds to his charm.

   One day late in 1906, when he was taking the waters in the Crimea, he came across a local legend that the ancient Greeks, who had built an important provincial capital at Theodosia (now Feodosia, Ukraine), had mastered the morning dew: they had become so proficient at collecting and dispensing it that they had supplied the whole city with its fresh water, using neither well nor brook.

   Zibold was captivated by this notion and determined to recover the secret. Once he started to look around, the evidence was everywhere. Lying about on the ground were stony tumuli, undoubtedly remnants of ancient dew collectors, and surrounding them were clay pipes, which had clearly been used for conducting the water to storage cisterns. Filled with enthusiasm and energy, he bullied the local agricultural community into helping him build his own massive dew collector, a stone reservoir 20 meters across, in its center a pyramid of stones and pebbles 6 meters tall. Halfway through construction he ran out of money, and it wasn’t until 1912 that the marvel was finished. And, indeed, it worked: a yield of 350 liters per day was reported, not exactly city-slaking news, and not much water per ton of rock, but something.

Web link of note: International Organization For Dew Utilization
(At http://www.opur.u-bordeaux.fr/)

FogQuest is a non-profit, registered charity dedicated to planning and implementing water projects for rural communities in developing countries. We utilize innovative fog collectors as well as effective rainfall collectors to make optimum use of natural atmospheric sources of water.

Web link of note: FogQuest
(At http://www.fogquest.org)

Send a greeting card reminder to someone… like say a debtor.

What’s weird is I remember seeing a sunday school movie (at a Buddhist temple) about the trap of “Yuomi” (“you owe me”)- the tendency (in Asian cultures) to give someone a gift larger than the one you last received to assuage one’s own guilt.

It was pointed out that this is a manifestation of the ego, and is not a healthy habit.

In the film, a gremlin-like man, played by one of the actors, is named Yuomi, and keeps encouraging the other characters to “do better than that” e.g. “how can you be so stingy? Remember what she gave YOU? You should make sure you give her something better.”

It’s a weird balance.

Web link of note: U Owe Me
(At http://www.u-owe-me.com/)

Based in Minnesota, the McKnight Foundation is the sponsor of Food’s Frontier by journalist Richard Manning.

The basic premise of the book: the agricultural revolution of pesticides and fertilizers has actually set humanity up for a big fall. We have become dependent on them (I’m not sure if he covers this idea, but since most fertilizers are based on petroleum products we may be more screwed than we realize) and the only way out of a scenario where billions starve will be learning about more traditional crops and methods which are more sustainable. Sounds like a safe bet to me.

Incidentally Manning was also the author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. In that book he advocated returning to our hunter-gatherer roots… Yyyyyeeeeeahhhh…

The part that interests me most:

“The Midwest is strewn with rural ghost towns whose small farmers were driven away by huge agricultural firms farming thousands of acres of a single crop. And the oversupply of grain has promoted widespread usage of high-fructose corn syrup in processed foods, contributing to the epidemic of obesity,” Manning said. The McKnight project researching an ancient Aztec polycropping system, still used by Mexican peasants, called milpa, could provide a solution for reversing monoculture in the U.S.

I love exploring new crops. Of course this ties in directly with my current interest in desert reclamation.

More related to consumer protection and sustainable agriculture:

The second green revolution is a revolution not only in biological science, but also in information distribution among scientists, farmers, and consumers. Food’s Frontier documents the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation’s Collaborative Crop Research Program, which has funded research and training in agricultural science in nine developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Each project is headed by scientists from the developing country, who identify the agricultural problem they want to tackle and put together interdisciplinary teams of scientists such as biologists, economists, and anthropologists. Each team collaborates with counterparts in U.S. universities.

“We’re realizing that economic and cultural factors are as important as biology, soil and climate in developing a secure global food supply,” Manning said. “Certainly, you have to understand the biology behind the interaction of, say, a chickpea and a pod borer if you want to reduce the damage the pest does to the plant. But you also need to figure out how to help Ugandan farmers learn about a method of planting that protects sweet potato from weevils, or how to convince Mexican wholesalers that there’s a potentially strong market in the United States for blue corn.”

Web link of note: McKnight Foundation
(At http://www.mcknight.org/)