Random Question

Do you believe that forks are evolved from spoons?

What a silly question! You obviously don't understand evolution.

With the arrival of spoons, food faced extinction. Food adapted in two ways. Some food evolved into simpler structures, like beans or macaroni, that could reproduce in greater numbers. Other food grew in size until it was too large for spoons. With no natural predators, this larger food threatened to unbalance the entire ecological system.

Forks and knives evolved together in response to larger food. What species they branched out from is less important than the evolutionary niche they filled. Nature is a complex system of relationships, all interacting to maintain a balanced whole. Without forks and knives, ever-larger food would have dominated the world. There would be no cities, no roads, just giant cheeseburgers floating like islands in the grease-mottled seas.

Image Hosting

More from Pierrot le Fou for the Rigorous Intuition Board. I uploaded my old VHS, the entire flick, to my computer and I've been glomming screen captures at leisure, a fascinating process. The movie spins off great images by the hundreds. It's ideal for the images-only thread, the real cyberspace location of all the images parked here under "Image Hosting."

Though stripped of context, the images here do have themes in common, such as guess-the-movie and my-favorite-films (excluding the Sailor Moon captures in the preceding post). In case you can't guess the movies, the first "Image Hosting" back in July showed Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman in Lost Highway, and the second, the water buffalos who appear so significantly and symmetrically in Apocalypse Now, followed by a symbolic double exposure of Martin Sheen reading about Kurtz, actually the perigee of one of Apocalypse Now's many slow dissolves -- a technique and even a word that seem peculiarly appropriate.




















As I said, I uploaded Pierrot le Fou and I've been glomming images ever since. The direction, by Jean Luc Godard, and the cinematography, by Roaul Coutard, aggressively explore the source material -- not just the moody, hardboiled paperback original it's based on, Obssession by Lionel White, but all the sources of the footage, such as the cast members and the locations. Then Godard and the editor, Françoise Collin, aggressively explore the results, taking apart all the internal connections to study each element in isolation while, at the same time, making new connections with the outside world of 1965 -- pop culture, the generation gap, Third World revolution. That may be why to aggressively explore it with a digital window -- to skip back and forth, to pause, reverse, slow, freeze, capture -- turns out, counterintuitively, to be more enjoyable -- exciting, involving -- than to watch it passively in a theater.














"The best way to do it is with scissors." --Alfred Hitchcock

Image Hosting

I, Oracle

One of the places I post regularly is the Bartcop Forum, a satellite of the pro-Democratic site Bartcop. Needless to say, things were grim there after election day, 2004, so I did something I'd never done before -- start a new topic -- to try to cheer people up.

"Bush won the election like the Americans won the Tet Offensive"

November 4, 2004

Bush's victory over Kerry -- and for the sake of argument I'm giving the election numbers the benefit of the doubt -- should be compared to Nixon-McGovern in 1972 and Reagan-Mondale in 1984 before it is assessed. Those were 49-state landslides. Bush barely survived.

In Vietnam the Tet Offensive was defeated by the Americans, but the real story was that it happened at all. The official narrative of the war was shattered.

That's what happened to Bush, though characteristically he will act as he got his 49-state landslide anyway, hoping this will make it seem as if he did. Instead of a blue elite besieged by a red majority -- the official narrative of the conservative revolutionaries -- we now have blue forces that are almost equal and potentially superior to the red. In retrospect, despite a few more years of political war, in which the red forces wield superior weapons like the Supreme Court, the 2004 election will be remembered as the turning point in the conservative revolution, the moment it became obvious that it would fail.

There were no replies, and my post drifted quickly into obscurity. Yet it records one of those moments of perceptiveness that I almost always fail to leave any record of, so I hope you'll forgive me for bringing it up myself.

Random Question

The profile page cues them up. I smack them onto the next page to score posts.

You're trapped in a well with a goat and a slinky. Describe how you will escape.

Do you think I'm going to tease the goat until it turns around and kicks me up out of the well and use the slinky to break my fall? What am I, a clown? That is so not going to happen.

I sacrifice the goat to the Great Old Ones and the slinky and I exchange bodies. As the slinky I walk up the wall. They can do that, right? Then, once I'm out of the well, we revert to our own bodies. The goat's ghost blames the slinky, and they fight at the bottom of the well for all eternity.

Quote

Against a wall of one of the narrow gray corridors on the eighteenth floor of The New Yorker, there used to be long, ugly shelves, also painted gray, where the daily newspapers were kept in separate cubicles. The New York Times, The New York Post, The Daily News, The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, The World Telegram and Sun, The Journal American -- the last three still existed then, though they were foundering -- piled up, were read, became crumpled and disordered, but never seemed to be removed until the shelves were full. Most writers and editors did not arrive at the office until noon. Young writers, and very old writers, as they do at most publications, tended to come in early and work late. Each morning when I came in, I used to head for the cubicle that held The Daily News. The News horoscope, it seemed to me, though far from sunny, was reliable. The Dick Tracy comic strip was in an inspired phase....

One morning when I arrived, the News was gone. This was not serious. To miss a day of Dick Tracy was a bit like missing an episode of a soap opera. One could catch up. Several days passed. Each morning I came in earlier, and then earlier still, hoping to catch the News at the moment of distribution. I suspected the messengers. One or two messengers seemed always to be sitting, either chatting or reading newspapers, on the depressing little brown couch in the last bleak corner of the lounge -- which was rapidly being crowded out anyway by the ever-encroaching walls. But no. When the messenger came to put the newspapers in their cubicles, The Daily News was not among them. The next day, I arrived before seven. There it was. I took it to my office, read and returned it. The next morning, standing beside the cubicle, was Edmund Wilson. "Have you seen The Daily News?" he said, with consternation. "I can't find it anywhere. I've been following Dick Tracy...."

-- Renata Adler, Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999)

Image Hosting

More screen captures from an old VHS tape. Since "Image Hosting" has turned into a favorite movies topic as well as a series of suggestive images for the Rigorous Intuition Board, and this one's a little obscure, there's no reason not to mention that this sequence is from Pierrot le Fou, a Jean-Luc Godard film from 1965. Tres pop, oui? And no, I don't know whether Odorono is a real brand, Pete Townsend got the name from this movie, or whoever wrote the subtitles in 1969 got the name from The Who Sell Out.

Link

Mark Gibbs at Networkworld:

08:52 Welcome to the Microsoft Windows Horizon operating system. Today is July 10, 2012. The temperature outside is 105 degrees Fahrenheit, the wind speed is 40 knots gusting to 80 knots, the air pollution level is extreme and the UV level is dangerous. The Homeland Security Threat Level is red.

09:03 To log on, please enter your name and password. Thank you, your account is valid. Please touch the fingerprint scanner. Thank you, your fingerprint is recognized. Please look into the retinal scanner. Thank you, retinal scan passed.

09:05 Please place a drop of blood on the analyzer. Thank you, your DNA is recognized. We note your sugar and albumen levels are high. Your health insurance provider has been notified and your doctor informed as per the Miller Limbaugh Computer Users Health Reporting Act of 2008. The mandatory $1 health check fee will be added to your Microsoft Service Account.

09:06 Please say: "I accept all license terms and conditions and surrender all legal rights to any and all compensation in the event of loss of time, data or employment due to use or misuse of any Microsoft products and services." Thank you, your voice profile is recognized.

09:07 Please wait.

09:15 Microsoft thanks you for your interest in Windows Horizon (aka Vista 3). To ensure this is a valid copy, we will now enter the authentication phase.

09:20 Microsoft has been contacted over the Internet and your connection speed has been verified to be adequate. The verification process can be speeded up for a $5 fee added to your Microsoft Service Account. Say or click "yes" to log on quicker or "no" to skip and continue.

09:21 Thank you, your logon has been accelerated.

09:31 Please wait.

Read the rest....

Quote

...In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and that devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind....

-- Saul Bellow, Herzog (1965)

Unscheduled Outage

We are experiencing technical difficulties. First, a box said my floppy disk was full. I opened the file with all my drafts and notes for future posts to see if it was okay. It was, but when I closed it again everything except the first twenty lines or so got eaten. Ouish!

I fell into bed, knocked out. By the time I had recovered sufficiently to think of copying the other files, the disk wouldn't open at all. It was unformatted, the box said. Had I lost the whole thing?

I started a new disk, but soon that was even worse. The evil box claimed the disk wasn't there at all, that the drive was empty. That allowed me to hope that the first disk was recoverable, since the drive, not the disk, was at least part of the problem. In this new frame of mind, it occurred to me that I could save my work on the hard drive, something I'd gotten out of the habit of doing years ago. We now resume our regular scheduled programming.