Get Dirty: The Second Incarnation

The blogger version of Get Dirty is no more. Come on over and check out the wordpress incarnation - the new and improved GET DIRTY. I'll actually be posting regularly. Thanks.

Robots & Toddlers

There's a recent article in Cosmos Online about a study of human/robot interaction that placed Sony's QRIO robot in a Kindergarten classroom and observed the children eventually treating the robot more as a peer than a toy. From the article:

The researchers hope that more advanced versions of robots like Sony's QRIO (short for 'quest for curiosity') could become personalised tutors to assist teachers in classrooms. A robotic tutor could react on the spot to social cues and approximate social skills like facial expression and eye gaze, they said.

"It is becoming clear that to achieve this goal we are going to [need to] endow machines with something akin to affect and emotion, not just traditional forms of intelligence," said co-author Javier Movellan from UCSD's Institute for Neural Computation.

Ideally, social robots should be able to produce new behaviours based on their past experience by themselves, said Tanaka. QRIO's interaction with the toddlers was close to being autonomous, he said.

"In this study it is clearly demonstrated that a limited range of behaviours, however impressive, is nowhere near as important to social behaviour as being able to make appropriate responses from a broad repertoire of behaviours," commented associate professor David Powers, an expert in artificial intelligence and cognitive science at Flinders University in South Australia.

"This work needs to be taken seriously, but is at the early stages and there are many issues as to how to evaluate human-robot behaviour - the conclusions must be regarded as preliminary," he said.

There's also a cute video of the kids interacting with QRIO embedded in the article. A world where every classroom teacher has a robot assistant now seems a bit more plausible. Maybe I'll go into teaching afterall.

Surfer's Theory of Everything

Andy pointed me to an article from The Telegraph earlier this week titled Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything. Exciting stuff. Here's an excerpt:

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

The headline is comically misleading though. Who would read it if they lead with the fact that this dude has a doctorate in theoretical phsyics? He is a surfer, so they make sure to fit the loaded phrase "surfer dude" in the headline. Some good stuff in the comments.

Key McKenna Interview

Are you like me in that you can't get enough of Terence McKenna? Then don't miss this interview in which the self-described "plant biologist turned psychedelic advocate transformed into a kind of spokesman for technophelia and psychedelia" lays it all out moderately succinctly. Thanks again to theduderinok, super youtube user.



Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Harper's Weekly

November 13th, 2007

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf said that the country will hold parliamentary elections in January but refused to give a date for ending his emergency decree or stepping down as head of the military. Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was placed under house arrest when she tried to attend a political rally. President George W. Bush said that General Musharraf has been an "indispensable ally." Burma's military junta permitted pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years, to meet with her party. At an Ibero-American summit in Chile, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called Spain's former prime minister a fascist, adding, "fascists are not human. A snake is more human." "Why don't you shut up?" asked the king of Spain. The Senate approved Michael Mukasey as U.S. Attorney General even though he refused to condemn waterboarding. Congress overrode President Bush's veto for the first time, on a water bill that earmarked money for the Everglades and the Gulf Coast, and half of New Orleans streetcars were still broken. Congress cheered a speech by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "You just heard a Ronald Reagan speech from a president of France," said a Republican senator from Kentucky. One full year remained before the U.S. presidential election. Ron Paul raised $4.2 million in 24 hours; Mitt Romney said that children were better off with dead straight rather than living gay parents; and Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry's, denied that there were plans for a John Edwards flavor of ice cream, but said that a hypothetical Edwards ice cream would not be a "very fluffy flavor" and suggested it be called "Captain Courageous Crunch." It was reported that more American troops were killed in 2007 than in any year since the start of the Iraq war, and at least 75 people, including 59 children, were killed in Afghanistan's deadliest suicide bombing since the fall of the Taliban.

Wrestler Mary Lillian Ellison, known as the Fabulous Moolah, died at 84, as did writer and wife-stabber Norman Mailer. Members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike to demand greater profits from new forms of media, television networks hired "loyalty consulting firms" to figure out how to lure back viewers, and a North Carolina researcher found that female spadefoot toads will mate with other species of toad in order to increase the survival rate of their tadpoles. Canadian scientists discovered that women are more likely to swing their hips seductively when they are at their least fertile, and researchers in Pittsburgh found that women with big hips and small waists had smarter children. Obesity was found to cause cancer in women, and researchers announced that ten years after a woman stops taking birth-control pills her heightened risk of cervical cancer returns to normal. Ted Klaudt, a former Republican South Dakota state legislator, was convicted of raping his teenage foster daughters. Klaudt convinced the girls that he was a licensed gynecologist and massaged their breasts ("to get the fibroids out") and vaginas regularly to ascertain their capability for egg donation. A London woman, who says she only called herself the "Lyrical Terrorist" because "it sounded cool," was convicted under the UK Terrorism Act for posting poems on the Internet praising Osama bin Laden and for owning terrorist manuals. "You have been in many respects," said the judge, "a complete enigma to me." Voters in Great Britain decided that their most ridiculous law was one that makes it illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.

Italian police discovered the Mafia's Ten Commandments. "Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty," reads number five, "even if your wife's about to give birth." Companies in Florida were forbidding their employees to smoke, even in private. "If you are an alcoholic and we have the right to fire you, we will do so," said the president of Westgate Resorts. "And if you are obese and there is a way for us not to hire you or to fire you, we will do that, too." Desperate to protect themselves from crime, many South Africans were attending martial arts classes taught by Bruce Lee's top student, Grandmaster Richard Bustillo. "I was born in 1975 and Bruce died in 1973," said one pupil. "He was a Chinese guy but maybe he came back as an African?" Nigeria was suing American tobacco companies for promoting underage smoking, and California was suing the federal government for preventing it from reducing car pollution. Soon after "Aqua Dots," a China-made bead toy aimed at children four and older, was named Australia's toy of the year, 4.2 million units were recalled because chemicals in the tiny beads, when metabolized, turn into the date-rape drug GHB. Eight-year-old twins from Ohio were nationally recognized for inventing wedgie-proof underpants, and doctors performed a 40-hour operation to remove four limbs from an eight-limbed Indian girl, who is believed by some to be an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi.

- Chantal Clarke


Subscribe to Harper's Weekly here.

Domestic Cats

Thanks to Jonathan for pointing me to this article in the Washington Post about a cat genetics study recently published in the journal Science showing that house cats very likely "domesticated themselves." Not only will this article increase your respect for cats, it will help explain the feeling you might have that every cat you've ever known thinks it's better than you. From the article:

The findings, drawn from an analysis of nearly 1,000 cats around the world, suggest that the ancestors of today's tabbies, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking for food, not friendship.

They found what they were seeking in the form of rodents feeding on stored grain. They stayed for 12 millennia, although not without wandering off now and again to consort with their wild cousins.

The story is quite different from that of other domesticated animals: cattle, sheep, goats, horses -- and dogs, cats' main rivals for human affection. It may even provide insight on the behavior of the animal that, if not man's best friend, is certainly his most inscrutable.

The idea that, unlike in dogs, tameness in cats was selected for naturally rather than artificially via human controlled breeding is one that seems intuitively true. It explains so much about the dynamic between humans and cats, and cats and dogs, mainly the perceived and elusive "independence" of domesticated felines. Knowing that cats joined us because it was convenient for them and not vice versa should have even the most harden cat-haters looking twice at these enigmatic pets.

Graham Hancock on Coast to Coast

Here is Part 1 of a twelve part interview with author and scholar Graham Hancock on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory from September 2006. Great stuff. Maybe even a bit tame for Coast to Coast. From the duderinok's youtube description:

Researcher and author Graham Hancock presented his thesis that "supernatural" entities such as aliens and fairies are actually transdimensional beings that humans encounter during altered states of consciousness. The ability to shape-shift has been ascribed to both modern aliens as well as elves and other entities reported centuries ago, he detailed.

Around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago humans underwent a sudden change, and the emergence of cave and rock paintings are evidence of this, said Hancock, who noted that some of their depictions were of part human/part animal beings. He believes these represent the supernatural entities, and through altered states (probably due to ingesting psilocybin mushrooms) humans learned advanced skills from their encounters with these beings.

Nowadays, shamans commonly have such altered state communications. They feel humanity is at a crossroads-- the West has lost contact with the spirit world, and many of the world's woes are due to this, Hancock reported. As part of his experiential research, he traveled to South America and took the psychedelic plant mixture ayahuasca. During one such episode, he described a confrontation with an alien being, but rather than being an extraterrestrial, he suggested it inhabits another dimension that can only be accessed during an altered state.

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 |

If you're in the mood for more Coast to Coast, there are a fair amount of episodes available on youtube, which, like this one, offer the audio from the show with a still shot of the guest and occasional slideshows related to the discussion.

Update, Forecast, The Bard McKenna

Where have I been? I know. But fear not, things are progressing. Look around. How can you doubt it? Soon I'll be building a new Get Dirty (though the name may have to change - suggestions?) with more focused weekly postings than this blogspot incarnation. In the meantime, I've been devouring a lot of material dealing with psychedelics and shamanism, and I want to share some of it with a full understanding of how such information is likely to be received: with great skepticism. Rightfully so. Before I get GD 2.0 going, I may get around to posting my supremely rational reasons for getting involved in these apparently flaky matters. Until then, you'll have to take my word for it, I am not losing my mind - I am, in fact, paying closer attention. If you'd like to have a conversation about any of this material, please leave a comment, or call, or something. I am often in the mood lately to talk about this kind of stuff.

Without further ado, here is an excerpt from a talk Terence McKenna gave in 1987 called "Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature." This is a good intro to the "Bard McKenna" because he addresses (if briefly) how he came to this weird, weird stuff which would become his legacy. His grasp of language is quite enviable, and I maintain that he was one of the 20th centuries most original thinkers. Here's the beginning of the talk:

A theme was touched on last night which is one of the centerpiece themes of aboriginal shamanism; the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence. An intelligence that is somehow co-present with the human sense of self, for different people, in different ways, with varying degrees of intensity in different times and places. At the bedrock of shamanism is the notion that life is really finally a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but without resolution. Nevertheless as you close distance with this mystery there are a series of analogical metaphors that don't really suggest themselves but that are communicated to you by the other.

One of these analogical metaphors is the presence of an alien intellect, an organized other that is folklorically present in tradition as fairies, gnomes, elves, jinns, afreets, sprites, tree spirits -- that sort of thing -- and anecdotally present in rural cultures throughout the world as the poltergeist and the milk-souring fairy -- these things seem to reside in a curious area that is not epistemically clearly defined for the culture.

Among aficionados of these domains the question of, "is it real or not?" is thought to be mildly tasteless. You would intuitively sense if you were drinking in an Irish pub and people began to spin leprechaun stories, that the question "is it real?" is a real bring down. It isn't really like that because the question "is it real?" can ultimately be shown to be infantile in any situation. I mean is the Bank of America real? Immediately we realize that ordinary experience is simply assumption skating over the mystery.

But I choose to talk so much about the felt presence of the other because it was for me such an astonishing personal surprise. I was raised Roman-Catholic and indulged in the kind of theological fiddle-faddle that involves. And then grew out of that into atheism, into agnosticism; by the time I got to college I was reading Jean Paul Sartre and Husserl. My intellectual ontogeny had followed historical phylogeny and I had arrived in the 20th century. And then having thought I had absorbed the lessons of LSD, which seemed to me to be to reinforce and confirm the theories of Freud concerning the dynamics of the psyche: that it was about repressed memory, repressed desire, sexual neurosis, parental foul-ups and the imprinting of traumatic behavior experienced in infancy.

And then someone came to me one rainy February evening, in 1967, really a mad person, a kind of a social menace and intellectual criminal. A person who had said to me only months before, "we must live as if the apocalypse has already happened." Here he was on my doorstep, he wore little black suits that he buttoned up to the throat. He came in and he said "here's something that you might be interested in." And he brought out a sample of di-methyltryptamine that he had somehow come into contact with. And I said, "well what is it?" And he said, "well, it's short acting -- it's a flash." And I said, "how long does it last?" -- that was my first mistake. He said, "oh it doesn't last long." So I said, "OK, we'll do it." And we did it.

And I discovered, I had, I guess it's called a peak experience, or a core revelation, or being born again, or having your third eye opened, or something, which was a revelation of an alien dimension; a brightly lit, inhabited, non three-dimensional, self-contorting, sustained, organic, linguistically intending modality that couldn't be stopped or held back or denied. I sank to the floor -- I couldn't move. I had become a diastolic hallucination of tumbling forward into fractal geometric spaces made of light, and then I found myself in the sort of auric equivalent of the Pope's private chapel, and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them. And I was aghast, completely -- appalled -- because the transition had been a matter of seconds and my entire expectation of the nature of the world was being shredded in front of me. I've never gotten over it.

And it all went on, they were speaking in some kind of -- there were these self-transforming machine-elf creatures -- were speaking in some kind of colored language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Faberge eggs, but crafted out of luminescent super-conducting ceramics, and liquid crystal gels, and all this stuff was so weird, and so alien, and so "un-english-able" that it was a complete shock. I experienced the literal turning inside-out of the intellectual universe and I had come to this -- I thought -- fairly intellectually prepared: A kid, but nevertheless double-Scorpio, art history major, Hieronymus Bosch fan, Moby Dick, William Burroughs.

And as I came down -- this went on for two or three minutes, this situation of dis-incarnate dimensions orthogonal to reality engulfing me -- and then as I came out of it, and the room re-assembled itself, I said "I can't believe it. It's impossible. It's im-possible." That to call that a "drug" is ridiculous. It means that you just don't know, you don't have a word for it and so you putter around and you come upon this very sloppy concept of something which goes into your body and there's a change -- it's not like that, it's like being struck by neotic lightning.

The other thing about it, which astonished me, was there is no clue in this world -- in the carpets of Central Asia, in the myths of the Maya, in the visions of an Archembolo or a Fra Angelico or a Bosch -- there is not a hint, not a clue, not an atom of the presence of this thing. When you look at the religious hierophanies of the human species they don't have the same vibe, don't have the same charge. Religion is all about dissolving into unitary states of love and trans-linguistic oceanic unity and this sort of thing. This was not like that. This was more multiplistic than the universe that we share with each other. It was almost like the victory of neo-Platonic metaphysics -- everything had become made out of a fourth-dimensional tesseractual mosaic of energy.

I was quite knocked off my feet. And set myself the goal of understanding this. There was really no choice you see.

Read a transcript of the entire talk here.

The Universe

The first season of The History Channel's The Universe is available for streaming or download from Stage6 (also via alluc.org). I haven't watched all of it (yet), but what I have seen is very well done. Doesn't quite rival Cosmos, but the explanatory power of its awesome animations makes it worth checking out. Episode 1 is embedded below with links to the rest of the first season.

Episode 1, Secrets of the Sun


Episode 2, Mars - The Red Planet | Episode 3, End of the Earth | Episode 4, Jupiter - The Giant Planet | Episode 5, The Moon | Episode 6, Spaceship Earth | Episode 7, Mercury & Venus - The Inner Planets | Episode 8, Saturn - Lord of the Rings | Episode 9, Alien Galaxies | Episode 10, Life & Death of a Star | Episode 11, The Outer Planets | Episode 12, Most Dangerous Places | Episode 13, Search for ET

The way of tracking belongs to him.

Ashley recently brought to my attention a 2001 interview between two thinkers and writers - Derrick Jensen and Martin Prechtel - (both of whom I intend to read) that is worth excerpting at some length here.

Prechtel, a Mayan shaman, explains shamanism in eloquent terms easy to grok. One thing that struck me about the Mayan understanding of the world discussed in the interview is that while it's rooted in mysticism it's also quite rational, working off the premise that anything we take from the natural world requires some kind of spiritual payment. We must feed the world that gives us life. A gift for a gift. Tit for tat. Symbiosis. Here's a short excerpt:

Jensen: What is a shaman?

Prechtel: Shamans are sometimes considered healers or doctors, but really they are people who deal with the tears and holes we create in the net of life, the damage that we all cause in our search for survival. In a sense, all of us — even the most untechnological, spiritual, and benign peoples — are constantly wrecking the world. The question is: how do we respond to that destruction? If we respond as we do in modern culture, by ignoring the spiritual debt that we create just by living, then that debt will come back to bite us, hard. But there are other ways to respond. One is to try to repay that debt by giving gifts of beauty and praise to the sacred, to the invisible world that gives us life. Shamans deal with the problems that arise when we forget the relationship that exists between us and the other world that feeds us, or when, for whatever reason, we don’t feed the other world in return.

All of this may sound strange to modern, industrialized people, but for the majority of human history, shamans have simply been a part of ordinary life. They exist all over the world. It seems strange to Westerners now because they have systematically devalued the other world and no longer deal with it as part of their everyday lives.

Another interesting point they discuss is the absence of the verb to be in some indigenous languages, a concept that I find difficult to grasp though I recognize a sort of poetry in it. This excerpt will shed light on the title of this post:

Prechtel: When I was a child, I spoke a Pueblo language called Keres, which doesn’t have the verb to be. It was basically a language of adjectives. One of the secrets of my ability to survive and thrive in Santiago Atitlán was that the Tzutujil language, too, has no verb to be. Tzutujil is a language of carrying and belonging, not a language of being. Without to be, there’s no sense that something is absolutely this or that. If two people argue, they’re said to be "split," like firewood, but both sides are still of the same substance. Some of the rights and wrongs that nations have fought and died to defend or obtain are not even relevant concepts to traditional Tzutujil. This isn’t because the Tzutujil are somehow too "primitive" to understand right and wrong, but because their lives aren’t based on absolute states or permanence. Mayans believe nothing will last on its own. That’s why their lives are oriented toward maintenance rather than creation.

"Belonging to" is as close to "being" as the Tzutujil language gets. One cannot say, "She is a mother," for instance. In Tzutujil, you can only call someone a mother by saying whose mother she is, whom she belongs to. Likewise, one cannot say, "He is a shaman." One says instead, "The way of tracking belongs to him."

In order for modern Western culture to really take hold in Santiago Atitlán, the frustrated religious, business, and political leaders first had to undermine the language. Language is the glue that holds the layers of the Mayan universe together: the eloquence of the speech, the ancestral lifeline of the mythologies. The speech of the gods was in our very bones. But once the Westerners forced the verb to be upon our young, the whole archaic Mayan world disappeared into the jaws of the modern age.

In a culture with the verb to be, one is always concerned with identity. To determine who you are, you must also determine who you are not. In a culture based on belonging, however, you must bond with others. You are defined by where you stand and whom you stand with. The verb to be also reduces a language, taking away its adornment and beauty. But the language becomes more efficient. The verb to be is very efficient. It allows you to build things.

Rather than build things, Mayans cultivate a climate that allows for the possibility of their appearance, as for a fruit or a vine. They take care of things. In the past, when they built big monuments, it wasn’t, as in modern culture, to force the world to be a certain way, but rather to repay the world with a currency proportionate to the immense gifts the gods had given the people. Mayans don’t force the world to be what they want it to be: they make friends with it; they belong to life.

See the entire interview here. It's a good read.

My fascination with this kind of material has blossomed in the past few months along with my rekindled interest in pyshcedelics. Not sure what sparked all this, but it's happening. More later.

Postmodern Times

I am not very motivated these days to post to GD or reincarnate the blog on wordpress as B hopes I eventually do. My lack of motivation is due in large part to the fact that perhaps the only people who look at this blog are B & A. So until I get around to creating something worth promoting, a page I actually want people to explore rather than a page rarely updated with a sidebar full of outdated links, I am going to use GD as a sort of a filecabinet for things that interest me. I guess that's what I've been doing since the beginning. Point is, I'll be putting less effort into writing each post. I do have a bunch of videos to post that are no good for S&P which will find their way here over the next few weeks so stay tuned. And without further ado, here's a video I've been meaning to post for at least a month. I swear I discovered it before boingboing did.



From their youtube channel page:

Postmodern Times is a series of short animated films presenting new ideas about global consciousness and techniques for social and ecological transformation. Our first episode, "Toward 2012", introduces the project, explaining concepts from the best-selling book, "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) by Daniel Pinchbeck, in the author's own voice. Future segments will focus on shamanism, sustainability, alternative energy systems, the Mayan Calendar, quantum physics and synchronicity, human sexuality, and a host of other subjects.

Not sure when they will post a second one. When they do, I'll embed it.

Last Week's Harper's Weekly

In case you're interested, I neglected to post it. From October 23, 2007:

Michael Mukasey, President George W. Bush's nominee for attorney general, received a warm reception on his first day before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he decried torture and promised a nonpartisan Justice Department. On his second day, however, he hedged on whether waterboarding is torture and argued that the president could disregard laws passed by Congress. "I don't know," said Senator Patrick Leahy, "whether you received some criticism from anybody in the administration last night after your testimony, but I [sense] a difference." The Senate Intelligence Committee agreed to grant retroactive immunity to phone companies that provided the government with subscribers' phone and e-mail records, and the House failed to override President Bush's veto of the SCHIP health care plan, which was intended to provide health insurance to 10 million children. Arkansas lawmakers were unable to muster enough votes to ban tobacco-chewing in the state's legislative chambers.

Vladimir Putin traveled to Iran and cautioned the United States against a military strike; President Bush responded by saying that democracy might not be in the "Russian DNA" and threatened World War III if Iran acquired nuclear weapons. Iranian and Chinese companies won contracts worth $1.1 billion to build power plants in Sadr City, Iraq, and the Turkish parliament authorized attacks on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq by a vote of 507 to 19. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice painted an upcoming U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace conference as a "moment of opportunity" for Israelis and Palestinians, while film director David Lynch claimed that 250 experts in Transcendental Meditation could end that conflict by dissolving "the suffocating rubber clown suit" of hatred. The Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal. "We are furious," said Zhang Qingli, secretary of China's Party Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region. "If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award, there must be no justice or good people in the world." Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto returned from self-imposed exile to Karachi, where bombs struck her welcome parade, killing 134 and wounding 450; police believed they had found the bomber's head. State inspectors visited a Texas youth jail to find spoiled food, overflowing toilets, walls smeared with feces, and a curriculum reliant on crossword puzzles. It was reported that students at 31 New York City high schools will now receive thousand-dollar prizes for a top score on any advanced placement exam and that middle schoolers in Portland, Maine, can obtain birth control pills from their schools without notifying parents. In England, cooks at a Suffolk middle school discovered maggots in a rice dish, and a government study found that 50 percent of Britons will be clinically obese by 2050. A British restaurant began serving gray squirrel pancakes. A poll revealed that a quarter of Germans think National Socialism had "good sides," including low crime, low unemployment, and "the encouragement of the family." French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife divorced.

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of DNA, said that while he wishes everyone were equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true." Lynn Cheney announced that her husband and Barack Obama are eighth cousins. "Every family," said the Obama campaign, "has a black sheep." A New York man was arrested after wearing a stolen Rolex watch to his parole meeting, an Ohio woman stood accused of digging up her ex-boyfriend's grave and stealing his ashes, and a Virginia woman was fined for attacking a Comcast store with a hammer after the company cut off her phone and Internet connections. "I smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor and I went to hit the telephone," she said. "I figured, 'Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.'"A New Jersey woman sent 80,000 cans of Silly String, which can locate trip wires, to U.S. troops in Iraq; a military spokesperson thanked her but admitted that soldiers don't use as much Silly String today as they did at the beginning of the war. Forty-nine percent of New Jersey residents admitted they'd rather live somewhere else. Taku the killer whale died unexpectedly at the San Antonio SeaWorld, 5 of the world's 350 remaining Asiatic Lions were found dead next to an electric fence in India, and the curator of the Rotterdam Natural History Museum asked the public to donate pubic crabs, claiming that their population was dwindling as a result of Brazilian waxes. "When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with extinction. Pubic lice," he explained, "can't live without pubic hair."

-- Paul Gleason

Goldstar Road

One of the best teachers I've known and a personal hero of mine, Richard Hoffman, recently won the Barrow Street Press Book Contest for his newest collection of poems, Goldstar Road. I had the pleasure of attending a recent reading he gave in New York and bought a copy of the book. Because I'm sure he wouldn't object, and because it's a marvelous excerpt, below I've posted the first five stanzas of the long and beautiful closing poem. Enjoy.

Suite: In Lieu of a Legacy

I lived in one of the great cities
along a river spanned by beautiful bridges.
Trains ran overhead and underground.
Bells rang as if we were still in the old world,
trolleys passed, shopkeepers swept the sidewalks
or cranked down canvas awnings as before the war.
Every few moments a jet lifted off from the airport.

Everyone talked about money, having it or not.
We watched what everyone else was watching,
heard what everyone else was hearing, read
what everyone else was reading. Endless
arguments sought by disputation to discover
why so many women were dying and so many men
were empty of feeling except for a murderous rage.

And because, before I arrived here, I had lived
in another city of slow rivers and boulevards,
downtown bright with color for the holidays, music
and monuments, factories, ballfields, railroads, schools,
all gone now - not transformed, collapsed - I wonder,
walking the avenue eating ice cream, looking
in the windows at the new merchandise, how long
before the money finds its interest elsewhere,
leaving behind it video training games for the poor,
push-button killers on the sofa, slapping high fives,
knocking back shots in front of virtual tortures,
or stoned in front of wide-screen horror DVDs.

You have a right to ask why I am telling you this
in the past tense, clearly addressed to you in the future.
You have a right to ask if I tried to awaken,
or if I was among those paid to devise new ways
to remain asleep, or if I remained asleep myself.
(I am not sure, today, how I would answer.)
You have a right, like Dante, to condemn me
to the vestibule of hell where, neither in nor out,
I will prevaricate forever, comfortless, deliberating

whether to suck my left thumb or my right,
whether to stand or kneel, speak or remain silent,
and you have the right to refuse us all forgiveness.
I acknowledge it here and now. And yet I hope
what will come is no kingdom, no dominion,
no chink of coins, no rustle of bills; instead,
as before the long nightmare, the learning of poems,
the making of music, the trading of songs.

- Richard Hoffman

Buy the book here.

Harper's Weekly

Turkey shelled the village of Dashta Takh in Iraqi Kurdistan and declared plans to send its ground troops to attack outposts of the Kurdish separatist PKK in the north of Iraq; criticized for the announcement, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pointed out that the United States invaded Iraq without anyone's permission. After the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted for a resolution affirming that a genocide was committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians during World War I, General Yasar Buyukanit, commander of the Turkish armed forces, said that, should Congress pass the resolution, his country's military alliance with the United States would never be the same. "We could not," he said, "explain this to our public. The U.S., in that respect, has shot itself in the foot." The Marine Corps was seeking to withdraw its 25,000 troops in Iraq and redeploy them to Afghanistan, and CIA Director General Michael V. Hayden ordered an internal investigation of the agency's inspector general, John L. Helgerson, whose own investigations have harshly criticized the CIA's methods of interrogation and its failure to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001. Hugo Chavez broadcast his weekly television program, "Alo Presidente," from Che Guevara's mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba, to honor the fortieth anniversary of the guerilla leader's death. "We are the Axis of Evil," said Fidel Castro to Chavez via phone. "You will never die," said Chavez to Castro. "You remain forever on this continent, and with these nations, and this revolution is more alive today than ever, and Fidel, you know it." Ramzi Yousef, the jailed mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, converted to Christianity, and guru Sri Chinmoy, author of 1,500 books and organizer of the Self-Transcendence 3,100, the world's longest footrace, died of a heart attack.

Six million dollars in Nobel Prizes were awarded to: a pair of physicists who discovered giant magnetoresistance; a chemist who created a method for studying surface chemical reactions such as rust; three doctors who used stem cells to deactivate mouse genes; three economists who study malfunctioning markets; novelist Doris Lessing; and documentary film star Al Gore, who, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was cited for efforts "to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract [climate] change." Former aides to Gore told the press that he was unlikely to join the presidential race because he thinks Hillary Clinton is unstoppable. "Nothing is inevitable," said Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, of a Clinton victory. "Sometimes we wear the same suit even if it's got holes in it. We need a new suit, not just a new tie or new pants." The Republican candidates for president gathered in Dearborn, Michigan, for a debate on the economy. Mitt Romney, who was born in Detroit, bemoaned the "one-state recession" gripping Michigan; Duncan Hunter repeatedly blamed the loss of American manufacturing jobs on free-trade policies with "communist China"; Ron Paul attributed the large profits of hedge-fund managers to a conspiracy among politicians, banks, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and the military-industrial complex to inflate or destroy currencies and swindle the middle class; and John McCain advised Paul to read "The Wealth of Nations." The candidates generally agreed that taxes are too high. "We're taxed to the max," said Sam Brownback. Mike Huckabee touted his Fair Tax proposal to abolish the IRS and to tax consumption as a way to shift the tax burden onto drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and illegal immigrants. Paul and Tom Tancredo refused to pledge to support the Republican nominee in the general election. Two thirds of American CEOs, a study found, think that American CEOs are overpaid.

Investigating the disappearance of a 30-year-old female pharmacist, police in Mexico arrested her boyfriend, Jose Luis Calva, after finding the woman's torso in his closet, one of her legs in his refrigerator, bones in a cereal box, chunks of an unidentified fried meat in a pan, and the draft manuscript of a novel entitled "Cannibalistic Instincts." Germans were reading "Interview with a Cannibal," the story of Armin Meiwes. In the book, Meiwes urges other would-be cannibals to seek psychiatric help, expresses disappointment that the experience was not as "romantic" as he dreamed it would be, and cites the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel as inspiration for his 2001 slaughter and ingestion of Bernd Brandes, who volunteered over the Internet to be eaten. "For him," said Meiwes "it was a sexual thing. But he also thought like me he would live on in me." The Colombian game show "Nothing but the Truth" was canceled after a woman won $25,000 for admitting to have hired a hit man to kill her husband, and a Kremlin spokeswoman said assassins are plotting to kill Vladimir Putin this week during his visit to Tehran. Bo Ward, the proprietor of a barbershop near the Army's Fort Campbell, committed suicide at a town meeting in Clarksville, Tennessee. Ward had requested that his home be rezoned as a commercial property to increase its value and to offset the losses he suffered when most of his regular patrons, among them General David Petraeus, were deployed to Iraq; the City Council refused. "Y'all have put me under," said the barber before inserting a pistol into his mouth. "I'm out of here."

-- Christian Lorentzen

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Colbert on Fresh Air

I just had the chance to hear Tuesday's Fresh Air, a fantastic interview with Stephen Colbert. Highlights include the Tony Bennett duet, a great anecdote about Henry Kinsinger and pancakes, and an explanation to his 2nd grader of what God is. Hell too. Enjoy.

Paul MacCready TED Talk

Paul MacCready's recently posted TED talk from 2003 is my favorite in a while. The recently deceased MacCready was an aeronautical engineer, the inventor of the first functional human powered flying machine, and a pioneer of solar aircraft. Besides presenting a very cool video of one of his solar planes in action and having one of his sons demonstrate the walkalong glider (one of the coolest toys I've ever seen), he discusses the rapid and dangerous introduction over the past 200 years of fossil fuel fumes to earth's atmosphere. He also offers up "the most important slide any of you will see... ever," showing the overwhelming effect of modern human society on the balance of nature. Humans, livestock, and pets currently make up 98% of the world's total mass of land and air vertebrates, whereas a mere 10,000 years ago this number was less then one-tenth of one-percent! As one of MacCready's slides puts it:

Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life - complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile.

Suddenly we humans (a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature) have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power: we now wield the paintbrush.

Profound and sobering stuff. Here's the talk:



If you're having trouble streaming as I did, it's available for download on their website.

Something From My Flickr

Here's one of the photos from my escape to the Outerbanks. As B put it, "It's as if the water and vapor are saying, you think that we're nice... you should see what we've seen."



More here.

Saunders w/ Jesse Thorn

George Saunders is interviewed on the most recent episode of The Sound of Young America. He discusses being awarded with a MacArthur Genius Grant, his new book of essays, The Brain Dead Megaphone, and the generally sorry state of intelligent debate in our society. Well worth a listen:


The Sound of Young America: George Saunders

Also, check him out on Letterman a few weeks ago. What a likable guy. An American treasure even.

Harper's Weekly

WEEKLY REVIEW October 9, 2007

Burma's junta claimed that peace and stability had been restored following its crackdown on mass pro-democracy protests in which at least 30 people, but likely far more, were killed. Up to 6,000 monks had been arrested, Internet service to the country was almost completely cut off, and the army was paying 20,000 kyat to the families of non-protesters who had been accidentally killed. "Myanmar people," said a demoralized taxi driver, "have no blood in their veins." Sylvester Stallone, filming a sequel to "Rambo" near the Burmese border, described the country as "a hellhole beyond your wildest dreams." Three thousand two hundred South African gold miners were rescued without injury after a power cable accident trapped them underground; the last group of miners emerged within 40 hours of the accident, dehydrated and exhausted, singing and stamping their feet. It was reported that the U.S. Justice Department, despite calling torture "abhorrent" in 2004, had secretly endorsed brutal interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and the Iraqi government launched an official investigation into the role of U.S. military contractor Blackwater in last month's civilian shootings in Baghdad, calling the incident a deliberate crime and raising the number of people killed in the shootings from 11 to 17. In Iowa, Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson continued to attest to the existence of WMDs in Iraq. "We can't forget the fact that although at a particular point in time we never found any WMD down there, [Saddam Hussein] clearly had had WMD," he said; Thompson ended his speech by asking for applause. Republican Senator Larry Craig was selected for induction into the Idaho Hall of Fame and announced that he would not resign from the Senate, despite being denied his request to withdraw his guilty plea of disorderly conduct resulting from a sex sting at an airport men's room.

A Nepalese eighth-grader who felt pity for policemen facing street demonstrations invented a crowd-controlling robot that can "charge at the mob with baton, use water canon, lob tear gas, and even shoot." Canadian researchers found that lonely, bullied, or ostracized children have sex earlier than happier children, and the mother of a bullied Jacksonville, Florida, boy brandished a gun at his bus stop, asking his fellow pupils, "Does anyone have something to say?" In England, American gray squirrels were bullying diminutive, mild-mannered indigenous red squirrels. A Thai restaurant in London was cordoned off by police after passersby mistook the smell of its extra-spicy homemade chili sauce for a chemical outbreak, and a volcano erupted on the Red Sea island of al-Tair. Ivory Coast was fighting chronic lateness, known as "African time," with a contest that offered a $60,000 villa as its grand prize. The winner, legal adviser Narcisse Aka, is known by his colleagues as "Mr. White Man's Time" and said that his punctuality made him feel like "an extra-terrestrial." Studies found that nearly two-thirds of HIV-positive patients in the United States are overweight or obese. "It would be very sad to survive HIV," said an epidemiologist, "and die of something else that was preventable."

American pastors were luring teenage boys to church by installing large-screen game consoles equipped for group sessions of the video game "Halo." Responding to concerns that the explicit and realistic violence in "Halo" is at odds with Christian values, Gregg Barbour, a youth minister in Colorado, stated, "We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell." "Teens are our 'fish'," he wrote in a letter to parents. "So we've become creative in baiting our hooks." British clergy were condemning the nomination of video game "Resistance: Fall of Man," which features a fire-fight scene set in Manchester Cathedral, for an award. "For a global manufacturer to recreate one of our great cathedrals with photo-realistic quality," said the Bishop of Manchester, "and encourage people to have gun battles in the building is beyond belief and highly irresponsible." The Middlebury Institute, a liberal advocacy group opposing the Iraq War, and the League of the South, which displays a Confederate battle flag on its banner, met in Tennessee to discuss their shared goal of secession from the Union. A white family in Florida found three burning crosses in its back yard. An autopsy could not reveal the identity of a baby found in a Big John's Pickled Sausage jar and left in a Florida cane field, and researcher Craig Venter announced that he has constructed a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals, creating the first artificial life form on Earth.

-- Gemma Sieff

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Delivery

Here's a wonderful animated short Ashley sent me that I'm posting to make up for missing Sunday Videos this weekend. I've included a brief synopsis below, and here is an interview about the film with the creator, Till Nowak, and here is his studio's website. Enjoy.

In a grey, industrial and uninhabited future, an old man lovingly waters a flower, perhaps the last flower to exist. In his home, across from a factory spewing gas, noise and bad vibrations, the vision of which constantly reminds him that the world isn‘t what it was, the man caringly tends the flower because he knows it‘s his last hope. Unexpectedly, he receives a surprising package that could change the world, at least his world, and perhaps a little more. A surrealistic fable on the world to come, the portrayal of a corrupt society infested by machines, that has forgotten the human being, a future in which there is still place for hope: flowers can grow again.
- Carlos Plaza, San Sebastián Fantasy and Horror Film Festival