Revelation awaits an Appointed Time

Independence Day

2011-07-04T12:16:00.001-04:00

by J.S. Holland

Happy 4th of July!

In no particular order and off the top of my head, these are some of the things I'm working on for the future, goals for the next few years:

First and foremost, more books. Lots of them. Over the last year, the requests I've received for e-books has increased exponentially. I've not been a fan of e-books myself, but there's no denying that this is the way things are headed. And though I lament the death of paper, if people tell me they want e-books, I listen. I'm talking to several different publishers right now, assessing my options, trying to decide if I want to go through them or if there's any reason not to just start my own e-publishing imprint and cut out the middlemen. I continue to welcome your opinions on the subject of e-books and e-readers.

There are a lot of writing projects cluttering up my desk these days - a couple of crime-detective-noir novels I've been working on, plus projects devoted to specific local subjects like Springheel Jack, The Pope Lick Monster, and Kentucky artists. Theoretically Weird Cemeteries for Sterling is still a go, but it seems to be held up in Development Hell for reasons known only to my editors and publisher. My cemeteries book will see the light of day, however, in the next two years one way or another.

I'm still very excited about working for KyForward, a news website focusing on the Bluegrass area (Lexington and surrounding counties) with a consciously positive, upward-toned sense of civil discourse. Which, as you must know, is all too rare on the internet these days. If you'd like to support such a venture, potential advertisers, please contact them and inquire about ad rates! We're also kicking around the idea of doing video content, including an interview show hosted by yours truly.

And I still love Kentucky Monthly magazine! You can find my column, Commonwealth Curiosities in each issue. If you don't see it at your local newstand or bookstore, bug 'em till they stock it! (Having said that, though, it's a hugely popular magazine and getting more popular all the time; I don't think I've ever seen a reputable store that didn't carry it.)

I'm still a painter first and foremost, although hyping my primitive neo-expressionist outsider-folk-art flavored canvases has taken a back seat in the last couple years to everything else. I aim to rectify that in the weeks and months ahead, with a renewed drive to get these paintings in the hands of as many people as possible, by any means necessary. Do you want a JSH original in your home or office? Talk to me. It's so doable. I offer interest-free payment plans for every budget. (And my Happy & Froggie painting that was featured in the film When Happy Met Froggie is still available, although its price has gone up since the movie was released.)

Something else I've been slowly putting together over the years is material for an Unusual Kentucky museum - something that would be not only a legitimate educational and historical museum, but also take a truly "Weird Kentucky" spin on the whole thing, showing cultural artifacts of the Commonwealth that might be a little - okay, a lot - fringier than what you might see at the Frazier. There have been some nibbles of interest in the concept from parties in both Louisville and Lexington, but I'm holding out until I get a guaranteed deal that gives me control over the place if it's going to be using my name. There are some recent rumblings that give me hope this thing will actually happen, and sooner than later. Keep your fingers crossed with me; it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Those are the primary projects on my front burners, but there's plenty more still bubbling under. My interest in Kentucky's horse industry is going to manifest in some way sooner or later, we'll see. A couple more goals I have: I intend to operate a Steampunk-themed bar and a hillbilly/exotica miniature golf course (the crazy over-the-top kind with giant statues and weird gimmicks like you see down in Pigeon Forge) before I die. All in time. Wait and see. (And when that retro bar does come to life, my bartending blog Transmissions from Agent J will be pressed back into service.)

There's still more. A lot more. This'll do for now though. Stay tuned to JSH News for the latest updates on my dreams and schemes! And remember, I can always be reached, by anyone on the planet, at jshpaint@gmail.com. You can also text me on Twitter or just pick up the phone and call me at 502.649.3378. Find me.

That Was Then, This Is Now

2011-07-03T00:14:00.007-04:00

"You loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win.

You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline.

How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin."

================- - Leonard Cohen.

Tomorrow, July 4th, will be my last post on any of my blogs, for some time to come. I'm increasingly busy with a lot of exciting real-world projects that demand my full attention, and I just don't have as much time to devote to the internet.

That may sound odd, since my internet presence has always been rather over-the-top. But the fact is, this is not the same Internet I originally signed on for. I won't bore you with the details and you'll find I've belabored the point suitably elsewhere, but suffice it to say I'm bored with the internet and I don't like the direction it's going - and by extension, the direction it's taking most of us.

And ever since the recent announcement by NASA of a confirmed Space-Time Vortex around the Earth, that's pretty much been my indicator that we've reached the point where this blog is no longer necessary and I'm starting to feel, as Tom Lehrer once said, "like a resident of Pompeii being asked to provide witty commentary on lava." You either already know what to do with the pieces I've presented here or you don't. If the implications of the things that have come to pass in the last two years haven't turned your normal everyday life upside down since you learned them, then you didn't really learn them.

When you start really grasping these concepts with the same part of your brain that you think about your day-to-day life stuff - and not just quickly filing it away in the "gosh, how bout that, aint that somethin" part of your brain - you might start caring a lot less about the little things on this rock that so many people waste their entire brief existences obsessing about (sports, politics, scrapbooking).

Click here to read more about which blogs are going and which blogs are staying. (Different blogs have different versions of this same post.)

Tomorrow, on the fourth of July, we'll get into the good news - all the fun things that I'm working on that'll be better than blogging, and things that I want you, dear reader, to feel free to get involved in! As Jack Lord used to say, "Be here! Aloha!"

The Reason Why

2011-07-02T16:49:00.005-04:00

Just two months short of two years ago, on September 1, 2009, I instituted this blog as a side outlet for that special body of subjects near and dear to my heart that strayed too far afield of my other online venues. It's all one interconnected body of work to me, of course, but it's just the way of things that my friends who love Kentucky weirdness, old-school theatre, and gentlemanly pursuits may not have as much of a frame of reference for my observations on pirates, aviation, astronomy, and Victoriana. Not to mention my little mini-tributes to those very few elements of modern pop culture that I find illuminating from my peculiar sense of perspective.

Terms like "Steampunk" and "Dieselpunk" have never been big enough to hold me (and certainly not "Cyberpunk".) I'm looking at a much bigger picture than those narrow-scope enthusiasts, but they're handy terms to use to help explain to someone why I am so interested in a worldview that mixes elements of the past and the future, of science and science fiction. Then fold in the sheer determination of Steampunk types to grab speculative fiction/fantasy and drag it kicking and screaming into reality, right here, right now. Speculative living, if you will. I have a lot of respect for that.

Then again, much of my adult life has been shaped by instructions given to me by an "imaginary friend" when I was a toddler, and by past-life memories accidentally triggered in 1982 while watching one of the goofiest 1980s music videos ever made, so you may not want to cherish my advice too closely. Or maybe you will.

Nevertheless, my research is about to go into its next major phase. Stay tuned for an important announcement here tomorrow.

The Frequency

2011-07-01T22:28:00.005-04:00

One month ago I issued a memo about my refusal to co-exist in the same space with CFL bulbs, and now comes some information that would seem to indicate I'm righter than ever in so doing:

It's bad enough that a broken CFL bulb in your home will result in a toxic hazmat situation costing a fortune to have cleaned up professionally, but now some people are implementing a plan to invisibly transmit data through household lights. How is such a thing possible? It's simple, actually - so simple I'm surprised this wasn't done long ago - specially modified ceiling lights are now transmitting data to computers on desks below by flickering faster than the eye can see. By reducing these flickers to a binary code that literally moves at the speed at light, you soon will never know what secret coded information is whizzing through the air all around you, whenever and wherever there are electric lights nearby.

Similarly, broadband-quality communications can be sent literally through the electrical charge that flows through your home's wiring and through your neighborhood's power lines. So, between computer hackers commandeering data from your home remotely in any number of ways, your own home's wiring and the very beams of light shining from your lamp could be additional means to aid spying on you and me.

Do we really know whether the invisible flickering of this light-traveling data will affect human brains adversely? We already know that more and more people are reporting sensitivity to the subliminal strobing that occurs barely-perceptibly on all computer and TV monitors. And now, according to Patent #6506148, "Nervous System Manipulation by Electromagnetic Fields from Monitors", you don't even have to be looking at the TV screen to be affected by them - they can be made to radiate any kind of field that is needed to have a desired affect on anyone standing nearby.

All this rapid advance in technology comes at a time when the U.S. Government is about to initiate a foolhardy experiment in altering the traditional frequency of North America's power grid. At the very least, according to MSNBC, it will screw up appliances and devices in households nationwide:

"A lot of people are going to have things break and they're not going to know why," said Demetrios Matsakis, head of the time service department at the U.S. Naval Observatory, one of two official timekeeping agencies in the federal government.

Do all these seemingly disassociated fragments add up to anything greater than the sum of their parts? I think you know the answer to that already.

Egmont is the Key

2011-06-27T19:07:00.004-04:00

Egmont Key, a somewhat distant island in the keys off Florida's gulf coast, has had an illustrious past - much of it military.

During the Seminole Wars it was used to detain Seminole prisoners until they could be transported to the reservation in Arkansas. Early in the Civil War, it was a Confederate base until Union forces captured it in July 1861. A cemetery for Civil War dead existed on the island from 1864 to 1909, when the bodies were moved elsewhere. It was a U.S. military position during both World War I (as a National Guard training center), World War II (as a radio beacon and ammo dump), plus the Spanish-American War - during which Fort Dade was built. Dade was decommissioned in 1921 and subsequently fell into ruin.

What I like best about Egmont is that it's deserted. No one lives there, and other than its historic lighthouse, there's not many signs of civilization. No stores; not even a bait shop or a snorkel supply. No restaurants, no bars. No restrooms. No nothing. And best of all, it's only accessible by boat, which really separates the shoppers from the hoppers. If you have no seafaring vessel to call your own, you can charter a ride with Hubbard's Marina out of Tampa Bay, Captain Snow from Pass-a-Grille, Captain Hal Batey of Charlie's Charters out of Treasure Island Marina, and my personal recommendation, Captain George's Mystic Dolphin Island Cruises.

But my interest in Egmont Key goes back to earlier times. According to some sources, it was first explored by the Spanish in the 1500s, and in 1759 it was called Castor Cayo after a mysterious Caribbean pirate - about whom I can find very little information. Supposedly, if internet chatter is to be believed, this Castor the Pirate buried treasure on Egmont Key and and near Sweetwater Creek at Rocky Point, and held his own pirate community called Castortown on the East end of the key. Nothing remains of Castortown today.

Castor was, as legend has it, captured and beheaded by the Spanish government. I wonder where this took place. I wonder what they did with his body and head. I wonder if he was buried someplace, or dumped into the ocean. I wonder where Castor's spirit is now and what his next move is.

West of the Fields

2011-06-26T14:02:00.009-04:00

Lately, I've been watching Stanley Kubrick's The Shining with the subtitles on, and just noticed that in the final scene where Jack is dying of exposure in the Overlook Hotel's famous hedge maze, he's singing "San Francisco, here I come, back where I started from". His gutteral noises in the film are so indistinct, however, that you'd never ever know this without the assistance of the subtitles.

This is actually a modified version of the Al Jolson song "California, Here I Come". Why would Kubrick have Jack singing this as his final words? Puzzling evidence indeed. And why specifically San Francisco?

That Jack's swan song would be a Jolson number may be, in part, tying in with the undercurrent of racism that the movie provides subtextual commentary on, regarding both African-Americans and Native Americans. (Jolson is, as you must know, infamous for continuing to perform his blackface minstrelsy routines long after they fell out of social acceptability.)

San Francisco is, of course, also the location where Hitchcock's Vertigo was filmed and is the setting. (Aficionados of both the film and the city can view images from the film constrasted with identifying shots taken of each location today, by clicking here.) Though the two films are linked in some small way in the private gin-soaked geometry of my mind, I doubt Kubrick had any Vertigo reference intended.

But I'm betting my Hell Money that Kubrick was thinking along LaVey lines, since the film repeatedly suggests that Jack, in a previous life, made a deal with the Devil that is continuing over into subsequent incarnations. San Francisco was the location of the original Church of Satan, founded by frustrated circus calliope player and lion tamer Anton LaVey.

I also noticed today that when Jack finally sits down and dies, he is clearly leaning against the wall of the maze. In the very next shot which cuts presumably to the morning, he is no longer positioned there. What's up with that? And we know that the deleted and destroyed true final scene of the film had Ullman mentioning that Jack's body had disappeared and was never found. Had the scene remained intact, we would have been presented with three different circumstances of Jack's death position within seconds of each other.

And Kubrick didn't pull the final scene because he changed his mind about its content and its meaning, he only pulled it because test audiences responded poorly to it, and the studio suggested that maybe it was just too confusing for the masses - even for a Kubrick production.

Lastly, I should take this moment to mention something I already knew about but haven't mentioned before on any of my Shining rants: there's a scene where Danny and his mother are watching the 1971 film The Summer of '42 on an impossible television that has no electrical cord coming from it. Since the TV is in front of a pair of glass doors, there's absolutely no chance of there being a wall socket obscured by the TV itself. I don't even know how Kubrick did the shot. Did he construct a battery-powered TV because having a cord would upset his obsessive-compulsive sense of symmetry?

The Summer of '42, by the way, is a film (based on a true story) about an adult woman's sexual tryst with a 15-year-old schoolboy on Nantucket Island, and the subject matter is treated with surprising nonchalance. This would seem to connect with another of the film's subtexts, which implies that Danny has been sexually molested.

George Ohr

2011-06-20T20:09:00.005-04:00

During the years when I was actively in the antiques biz, ceramics and art pottery was one of my specialties, and my holy grails were to obtain a piece of Teco and a piece of Ohr.

I did indeed succeed in the Teco department, finding a small green Teco urn (value at that time, in the mid-90s: $800) for only a couple bucks at Sammy's Flea Market on the edge of Richmond, KY. But I still have yet to actually lay my hands on a George Ohr product, and as time marches on I begin to think it's only as likely at this point as finding a Jackson Pollock at a yard sale (though some have claimed to have done exactly that.)

Why Ohr? Well, his pottery was fantastic, but mainly, I worship the man himself. With his trademark mustache, his wild and creative designs, and his flair for showmanship and eccentricity, George Ohr was truly the Salvador Dali of ceramics. He quickly earned the reputation as "The Mad Potter of Biloxi", and we most likely will not see his kind pass this way again.

George married Josephine Gehring of New Orleans on September 15, 1886, in Biloxi, and had 10 children: Ella, Asa, Clo, Lio, Oto, Flo, Zio, Ojo, and Geo. He's buried in Biloxi City Cemetery.

The Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art is celebrating George's 157th birthday, July 15, 2011. They're located at 386 Beach Blvd. in Biloxi and are open to the public, Monday thru Sunday, 9am-5pm.

Vanishing Vessels

2011-06-19T12:49:00.007-04:00

In July 1909, the SS Waratah disappeared without a trace somewhere pff the coast of South Africa between Durban and Cape Town. There were 211 passengers and crew on board. There have been many efforts to find the wreck ever since, but to no avail - even modern-day searches using the latest technology have turned up no clues. In 2004 treasure hunter Emlyn Brown, who spent the last 22 years searching for the Waratah declared that he was giving up: "I've exhausted all the options. I now have no idea where to look".

In A. Bertram Chandler's science fiction story "Into the Alternate Universe", a spaceship accidentally falls into "a crack between the universes", a vacuum without any matter except other people who had fallen there earlier. Being a spaceship, they are equipped to travel through the vacuum, unlike most other entities that fall into the crack. In their journey through the vacuum, they discover the SS Waratah, its crew and passengers suffocated.

The doubly-ironically-named Tempest sailed eastward to Glasgow from New York City on February 13, 1857 with crew, cargo and one passenger aboard. It never arrived in Glasgow, vanishing without a trace.

The L'Acadien II was a Canadian vessel that struck a wall of ice and sank on March 29, 2008 while being towed by Canadian Coast Guard ship Sir William Alexander off Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Recovery efforts have surprisingly failed to locate the sunken ship, even though the area in which it sunk is fairly specifically known. The search, now abandoned, covered an area of approximately 9,800 square nautical miles and yet has turned up nothing.

The L'Acadien II had been on a seal-hunting expedition, and Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society stirred some controversy when he announced: "The deaths of four sealers is a tragedy but Sea Shepherd also recognizes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups is an even greater tragedy."

Watson went on to say: "One of the sealers was quoted as saying that he felt absolutely helpless as he watched the boat sink with sealers onboard. I can’t think of anything that defines helplessness and fear more than a seal pup on the ice that can’t swim or escape as it is approached by some cigarette smoking ape with a club. This is a seal nursery and these men are sadistic baby killers and that might offend some people but it is the unvarnished truth – they are vicious killers who are now pleading for sympathy because some of their own died while engaged in a viciously brutal activity."

Because of Watson's statements, Elizabeth May (the leader of the Green Party of Canada) resigned from the advisory board of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

At least 50 German U-Boats are unaccounted for after World War II. Mechanical failures and other accidents have been posited as possible reasons for their disappearance. Less likely is the possibility that they were sunk in circumstances of battle that somehow failed to be logged and reported by Allied forces. (And then there's the "Last Battalion" theory to consider.)

The Ångermanelfven was a steel 1,322 ton cargo steamer built in 1914. It was acquired by the Hudson's Bay Co. in 1921 and subsequently renamed the Baychimo. The ship was abandoned in the winter of 1931 when it became repeatedly stuck in ice. It was expected that the ship would soon sink, but instead it kept going, traveling a little further with each ice melt.

Over the years, there have been many sightings of the Baychimo, mostly by Eskimos, Inuit, and other sailors. Some even boarded the ship but could see no easy way to reclaim her. The last recorded sighting of her was in 1969, stuck once again in ice in the Beaufort Sea northwest of Alaska. In 2006 the Alaskan Government finally decided to capitalize on the folklore popularity of "the Ghost Ship of the Arctic", and set about to retrieve it. But it was nowhere to be found, and despite extensive searches, the ship has not been seen again.

Oblivion

2011-06-18T23:37:00.003-04:00

I'm looking forward to the next project by TRON Legacy director Joseph Kosinski - it's called Oblivion, and it's coming out as both a film and an "illustrated novel" that comes close to the realm of painted comics, but is actually more akin to a copiously-illustrated storybook.

The illustrated novel will be written by Kosinski himself and Arvid Nelson, and drawn by Andree Wallin.

The story centers on Jak, an ex-soldier who lives on a barren world and repairs drones that patrol the planet's surface. The drones are out to eradicate what's left of a savage alien race known as "the Scavengers". Jak's female partner Vika works as his "eye-in-the-sky," scanning for damaged drones and monitoring Scavenger activity. But one day when Jak rescues a mysterious woman from a downed spacecraft, her story turns his life upside down as he begins to realize that the truth of his circumstances is not what he has been led to believe.

The film has suffered Development Hell for awhile. Disney fought hard to get the rights, but then once they got it, they changed their minds and decided the story wasnt "family friendly" enough for them. But now the film is a go with Universal Pictures and has a very tentative release date of July 2013. Can't wait!

The Ninth Configuration

2011-06-16T23:21:00.011-04:00

One of my favorite films of all time, William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration, is all but unheard of today even though it won a Golden Globe award for best screenplay in 1981 and was nominated for best picture.

And in fact, it's probably the ultimate Jeffrey Scott Holland picture - it takes place in a spooky castle in a remote setting (like The Shining), it's anti-psychiatry, anti-war, pro-spirituality, blurs the line between reality and hallucination, blurs the line between sanity and insanity, and has Shakespeare, Nazis, astronauts, bikers, people who obsessively communicate through quotes from films and literature, and people who may not be who they say they are. There's even an Al Jolson musical sequence, and a surrealist crucifixion on the Moon. Not to mention some brilliant Richard Condon-ish dialogue ("I am convinced that we can walk through walls. Not just me, but anyone - Cops. People. People in Nashville.")

The film takes place during the Vietnam War, in a castle in America's Pacific Northwest. The U.S. Government, convinced that the increasing number of soldiers who have seemingly gone insane in combat are faking, has secretly set up this location to study them. Also being kept here is a NASA astronaut named Cutshaw who had a nervous breakdown just before being sent on a manned Moon mission.

A mysterious military psychiatrist named Colonel Kane (Stacy Keach), who is so soft-spoken it makes Rumble Fish's Motorcycle Boy sound like the Aflac Duck by comparison, arrives at the castle to try to sort out whether the men are faking. But we soon see that Kane himself is troubled by violent, bizarre nightmares. The inmates quickly catch on that something's not right with Kane ("I'm telling you he's like Gregory Peck in Spellbound!"), and in a bit of hammer-into-anvil they try to mess with his mind.

A patient, who runs a canine theatre company from inside the asylum, is producing Hamlet with an all-dog cast. In the midst of a rant about Hamlet to Col. Kane, he deliberately plants ideas in Kane's mind with a theory that Hamlet had to act crazy in order to keep from actually going crazy, as a way of letting off steam. (Cutshaw conspiratorially asks him later, "Did he buy it?" and he replies, "Hell, I bought it.") Kane, convinced that this Hamlet theory is the answer to the men's problems, encourages the asylum to descend into anarchy.

From there I'll lay off the plot spoilers. It's on youtube in its entirety, and I beseech ye to view it.

Interestingly, Blatty has stated that he considers The Ninth Configuration as a sequel to The Exorcist, and that the astronaut in that film who Regan warns, "You're going to die up there" is intended to be Cutshaw, foreshadowing his appearance in The Ninth Configuration. Presumably then, his irrational fear of going into space was triggered by Regan's warning.

17th Century Flea

2011-06-15T13:49:00.003-04:00

From the great historical archives of the Chemical Heritage Foundation: antique editions of Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) and van Leeuwenhoek's Arcana naturae (1695), laid open to immaculately detailed illustrations of fleas.

Hooke's book is famous for being the place that the term "cell" was coined - Hooke, studying the cells of plants, was reminded of the prison-cell-like quarters that a Monk sleeps in.

The Double Slit Experiment

2011-06-14T23:46:00.004-04:00

Here in what Art Bell called "The Quickening", we constantly receive new and shocking quantum revelations of how the world we are living in is not the world we thought we were. But we actually got our biggest heads-up about the true nature of reality back in 1801, when Thomas Young performed the original "double slit experiment" to determine the properties of light.

Here's how it works:

A beam of subatomic particles is directed at a surface that will record the impact of said particles. A screen with two slit openings is placed in front of that surface, and these slits can be opened to allow the particles to pass through or closed to keep them out.

Now, common sense would tell you, like aiming a firehose at two openings in a wall, that if both slits are open, twice as many particles will pass through. But bafflingly, that is not the case. More particles get through if only one slit is opened.

You get an Moire-style interference pattern when you have two slits open, and stranger still, when you reduce the light source to only one photon at a time, it still makes the interference pattern, one dot at a time, if you repeat the experiment over and over. But if you close one of the slits, the pattern disappears. This shouldn't make any difference. And yet it does.

How does the particle know that one of the slits will be opened or not opened?

And that's not the crazy part. The crazy part is this: if you try to track the photon so you can witness which slit it actually chose to go through, the pattern disappears. Placing a detector even in just one of the slits will result in the disappearance of the interference pattern. Again, this shouldn't make any difference whatsoever to how the particle behaves. And yet it does.

The act of looking at something changes it.

Your Temporal Extension

2011-06-13T09:10:00.001-04:00

"I watched as her fingers drew a perfect line in space, I watched as she looked on through into another place." - Devo, "The 4th Dimension"

There's a quantum-physics notion that Time is either a key part of the Fourth Dimension or actually is the Fourth Dimension itself. With that view, some startling things about life, birth and death inevitably rear their head.

Viewed from the Fourth Dimension, some posit that you and I are actually worm-like entities that represent the "us" as we see ourselves from birth to death, like a series of Muybridge photographs showing a runner proceeding from A to B. Even though the runner was at point A and then moved on to point B, quantum theory says his actual self is at both those points simultaneously and both are expressions of the same entity.

As you sit there reading these words on your computer monitor, imagine that the "you" who was getting turkey slices out of the fridge half an hour ago is part of a greater entity that includes the "you" that sits here now. From a 4-D perspective, we are an entity that extends into our past and our future. We think that our future "hasn't happened yet" but this is an artifact of our limited consciousness, as is our perception of what we call Time.

J.H. Brennan describes it best:

"It is the focus of our consciousness that creates the sensation of time passing, rather as looking through the window of a train creates the sensation of scenery passing, although we know the world outside the train is in fact standing still."

Meanwhile, science has finally caught up with what philosophers knew all along - that everything we have experienced in our life is permanently recorded and nothing is ever truly forgotten - which also fits in perfectly with four-dimensional theory.

Looking into the future, now that's a little trickier. But it can be done. And philosophy, once again, has the leading edge over modern science with their zillion-dollar particle supercolliders.

Common Sense

2011-05-05T20:46:00.002-04:00

Thomas Paine is one of the best-known among the Founding Fathers of the USA even though he never held a political position. His main claims to fame are Common Sense, Rights of Man and Crisis, booklets that helped to incite colonists into overthrowing the British Government and starting a new civilization. I remember reading about this booklet in school, but we didn't actually read it. Had we done so, it would've been most illuminating, I think, to hear that the seeds of the American Revolution had proto-capitalistic motives even then:

"What have we to do with setting the world at defiance? Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because, it is the interest of all Europe to have America a FREE PORT."

There are a lot of aspects of Paine that didn't make it into my high school civics class, in fact. Our textbook by Daniel Boorstin didn't mention that after helping to found America, Paine high-tailed it to France, palled around with Napoleon, and advised the French government on methods to conquer America. Eventually he ended up pissing off the French as well, and found himself in a cell awaiting the gullotine. He very narrowly escaped being beheaded and got a reprieve.

He published a diatribe against Christianity and religion in general, called The Age of Reason. In so doing, he turned almost all of his former friends and allies against him. When he died in 1809, only six people attended his funeral.

His contradictions and excesses must be taken with the giant grain of salt necessitated when assessing any truly great man; he ping-ponged around the globe like a pirate philosopher, doing whatever he needed to do to survive, and for his ideas of free-thinking to survive. Somehow, in the midst of all his revolutionary activities, he found time to be editor of Pennsylvania Magazine, architect of bridges (one of which was unique enough that he received a patent on its design), developed a smokeless candle, and worked with John Fitch in inventing steam engines. What have you done lately?

The Nernst Lamp

2011-05-03T15:54:00.007-04:00

The more I hear well-meaning but misguided souls blather about the "carbon footprint" of incandescent bulbs and how it will "obviously" help save the Earth if we switch to pet-killing toxic Mercury-filled CFL bulbs, the more I think it's time somebody went back into the Nernst Lamp business.

The Nernst Lamp, invented in 1897 by the German physicist Walther Nernst, was twice as efficient as carbon filament bulbs and emitted a superior natural-color light. Unlike tungsten-filament bulbs, it did not require a vacuum to function, which means anyone could make one in their garage if they knew how. The only reason they're enclosed in a bulb at all is to protect users from touching the workings.

They operated by way of a ceramic rod that is superheated until it glows, giving off a more effective light source than you might expect. The device has an elegant and ingenious built-in heating element, which gets the ceramic hot enough to begin conducting electricity on its own.

George Westinghouse saw the potential for Nernst's invention, obtained the U.S. rights to the patent, and set about manufacturing them himself, from his newly-formed Nernst Lamp Co. based in Philadelphia. To obtain sufficient quantities of the best Gadolinite to manufacture the ceramic rods, he ended up in a competition with his (and everyone's) evil arch-enemy Thomas Edison for a place in Texas called Barringer Hill. This was an amazing treasure trove of rich mineralogical specimens, which was tragically and stupidly flooded permanently when the construction of the Buchanan Dam in 1939 turned the area into what is now Lake Buchanan.

By then, Westinghouse had given up on the Nernst bulb anyway, and had fallen in line with everyone else moving toward vacuum-sealed tungsten-filament lighting anyway. Nernst's magic lamp, which had been used for everything from microscopes to early fax machines to dazzling crowds at the Paris Exposition of 1900, was all but forgotten, except for a few lab-coated monks of research who continued to invoke the term "Nernst Glower" to describe other applications of the glowing-ceramic-rod concept.

Cairo, Illinois

2011-05-02T17:24:00.005-04:00

The Victorian author Anthony Trollope, writing in his non-fiction travelogue North America, 1863, devoted a chapter to his ill-fated visit to Cairo, Illinois.

Trollope did not have a good time in Cairo, and he didn't have much nice to say about the population: "Fever and ague universally prevail. Men and women grow up with their lantern faces like spectres. The children are prematurely old; and the Earth, which is so fruitful, is hideous in its fertility... No faces looked out at the windows of the houses, no forms stood in the doorways. A few shops were open, but only in the drinking-shops did I see customers. In these, silent muddy men were sitting, not with drink before them, as men sit with us, but with the cud within their jaws, ruminating. Their drinking is always done on foot. They stand silent at a bar, with two small glasses before them. Out of one they swallow the whisky, and from the other they take a gulp of water, as though to rinse their mouths. After that, they again sit down and ruminate."

Curiously, he notes that the area called Cairo lay in a broader general area popularly known as "Egypt". What was the purpose for the Egyptian motif in the region's nomenclature? No one seems to know now, nor did they then. As Trollope notes: "Who were the founders of Cairo I have never ascertained. They are probably buried fathoms deep in the mud, and their names will no doubt remain a mystery to the latest ages."

The truth is somewhat less flowery. Cairo was founded in 1818 by a fellow named John G. Comegys of Baltimore, Maryland, but it wasn't until 1837 that it really amounted to anything, under the leadership of a Bostonian named Darius B. Holbrook. Prior to Mssrs. Holbrook and Comegys, the area had a few false starts. Lewis & Clark had explored it in November, 1803. Before that, a Frenchman named Charles Juchereau de St. Denys had operated a tannery here in 1702 but soon his enterprise was wiped out by Cherokee. And before that, a French Catholic Priest named Father Louis Hennepin camped here in the Spring of 1660. Seems like only yesterday.

Incandescence

2011-05-01T11:54:00.012-04:00

Hear me well, the gauntlet is now laid down: if you're using CFL bulbs in your home, I won't be coming over for tea anymore.

No, I'm not excessively paranoid about the toxic mercury that resides inside said bulbs, although that certainly is an important consideration for the sake of the environment. Then again, the recent disastrous release of highly radioactive material from Fukushima has rendered that point a bit moot at this time. (Most citizens are apparently too dense to even wrap their head around the implications of that, let alone CFL-mercury in landfills.)

It's a matter of mythic resonance, of aesthetic principles. As devotees of the innovations developed during mankind's true golden age, we must fight the future - especially when evil men are trying so hard to make these annoying CFL bulbs part of that future. Ask yourself why it is so important to President Obama and others to phase out the incandescent bulb. Of all the battles worth fighting, why pick this one?

And yet people are laughing at Rand Paul for opposing the ban (and yes, it does amount to what is practically a ban). God forbid I should be on the same side as Rand Paul on something, but his particular Aspergian adamance for his cause serves us well on this one. At least give the public a choice about how they light their home, rather than strong-arming the world into acceptance of a toxic and inferior light source that no one really wants (that is, except morons. I apologize if you are a moron, dear reader - I do have acquaintances that are - and I pray for you to regain your senses and sensibilities in the coming radioactive days ahead.)

Of course, as far as we're concerned, the incandescent light bulb (which, media to the contrary, was NOT invented by Thomas Edison!) is actually a lightsource-come-lately to the big picture. What about gaslight? What about oil lamps? What about candles? Hell, what about just going to bed when it gets dark, like real people used to do in agrarian times?

The battle against creeping technocracy starts with yourself. I will no longer tolerate CFL or other fluorescent lighting any more than I can get away with avoiding. It's enough that I must tolerate it when shopping in excessively-lit stores like Target, but if you've made your choice and sided with the enemy in your own home, I will not darken your doorstep, good sirs and madams.

You're welcome to come over to my plantation, however, to remember what it looked like to live amongst incandescence before the migraine-inducing, false-color-giving and toxic-for-pets advent of the new world order's CFL bulb.

Make it quick, though: I'm about to start an investigatory pilot project to assess returning completely to oil lanterns and candlepower in my home, in solidarity with our allies in the Dark Sky Movement. Seriously.

Dark Skies

2011-04-30T13:43:00.004-04:00

All Transylvania Gentlemen (and ladies) are urged to join us in supporting The International Dark-Sky Association, a noble unit devoted to decreasing human-generated electic light pollution at night. As their website puts it:

Once a source of wonder--and one half of the entire planet’s natural environment—the star-filled nights of just a few years ago are vanishing in a yellow haze. Human-produced light pollution not only mars our view of the stars; poor lighting threatens astronomy, disrupts ecosystems, affects human circadian rhythms, and wastes energy to the tune of $2.2 billion per year in the U.S. alone.

But most importantly, perhaps, our interest in their efforts are twofold:

For one, we prefer a night sky uncluttered by electric lighting because, simply, that's the way things used to be and is therefore better.

And secondly, because light pollution clouds out the details of the night sky and tends to make it easy to forget that we're actually standing on a tiny rock hurtling through outer space on the edge of a giant galaxy that itself is speeding at unfathomable speeds through an infinite Universe. We don't want people to forget that - we want them to be more cognizant of it than ever.

The Scent Box

2011-04-29T13:32:00.006-04:00

Scent boxes, also known as vinaigrettes, were tiny boxes made of silver or sometimes wood, in which a tiny perfume or oil-scented sponge lay in repose under a hinged grill or screen. They were universally used by men and women alike in the 19th century and earlier, this being before the advent of the atomizer spray bottle (invented in 1887 for medical purposes but not popularized for perfume and cologne until after the turn of the century.)

Then, as now, a gentlemen needed a lot of pockets to hold all his stuff. In addition to a scent box, you would also have your snuff box, your silver cigarette case, your silver cigar tube, a spare stickpin for your cravat, several cloth monogrammed handkerchiefs, keys, a pocket watch, a small flask of brandy or bourbon, boxed vestas (matches), Maybe a deck of cards, some hand-carved bone dice, and a condom made of cloth linen or animal bladder.

I'd love to bring the concept of the scent box back, but I frankly already have way too much stuff to lug around in my coat pockets as it is.

Known and Not-Known

2011-04-27T13:36:00.007-04:00

There once was a time I regarded Donald Rumsfeld as one of the most evil men on Earth.

After all, at a glance, it seems a no-brainer, right? He was a key player in the Nixon, Ford and Bush II administrations. In the Watergate tapes, Nixon praises "Rummy" for his ruthlessness. His complicity in the "weapons of mass destruction" lie, and in the Gitmo atrocities - including continued defense of them even after the human rights violations were made public - would surely drive any sane person to condemn him. Right? And the mission statement and member list of his Project for the New American Century read like a virtual instruction manual and Who's Who for fascism, right?

And yet... and yet. Rage against the machine though we rebels may, let us never lose sight of the fact that Rumsfeld and his ilk do indeed have access to classified information that we do not, and that we cannot truly know why these sort of people do the things they do without knowing what they know. Without apologizing for the atrocities committed under Rumsfeld's watch, at least let us entertain the remote possibility that he knows something that, if we knew it too, would change everything. But like imagining what the fourth dimension is like, we can't even begin to speculate on things that we don't even know that we don't know about.

One of the best indicators to me that old Rummy is less of an Illuminati-esque power-broker and more like a subservient victim trapped like a cog in the gears of a greater beast, is his statement made on public television on February 12, 2002, in which he actually attempted to educate the masses on that very mindset I just spoke of. One might even call it a cry for help via a very telling shibboleth. What he said was:

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.

We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know."

This is one of the most algebraically elegant, illuminating, and jaw-droppingly truthful things I've ever heard come out of a politician's mouth, and here it is coming from a conservative Republican generally regarded as a shill for the military and mega-corporations.

Most people, however, couldn't even make sense out of Rumsfeld's statement, and immediately his comments became the butt of jokes around the water cooler and among the media talking heads, who said he was talking gobbledygook. That's about the beginning of when I really started feeling like I was living in John Carpenter's They Live and I'm the guy with the special sunglasses. Or at the very least, glad I don't consume the dumbing-down artificial sweeteners that keep people from seeing the Fnords.

Am I ready to join the Donald Rumsfeld fan club? No, far from it. I doubt he and I could ever see eye to eye on much of anything, though the more I learn about him, the less I thought I knew. And I have great difficulty convincing myself that any man is truly evil incarnate - they may do horrible and wicked things due to some sort of mental aberration, or because they were acting on bad information. Old Rummy was, it must be said, a fighter for civil rights in the 60s and 70s, which sets him squarely in a different league than the gray-faced old racists in the Nixon administration that he ended up servile to. The man was an Eagle Scout - which is an organization I hold in high esteem - and he was close personal friends with, of all people, Sammy Davis, Jr., hardly the kind of chum you'd expect from a man reputed to be slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.

Even more eye-opening, there is a possibility that Rummy was actually making a sort of reference to a similar statement made in the 14th century by the Islamic mystic poet Ibn Yamin Faryumadi:

آنکس که بداند و بداند که بداند

اسب خرد از گنبد گردون بجهاند

آنکس که بداند و نداند که بداند

بیدار کنیدش که بسی خفته نماند

آنکس که نداند و بداند که نداند

لنگان خرک خویش به منزل برساند

آنکس که نداند و نداند که نداند

در جهل مرکب ابدالدهر بماند

Translation:

One who knows and knows that he knows: This is a man of knowledge; get to know him!

One who knows, but doesn't know that he knows: This is a man who's unaware, so bring it to his attention.

One who doesn't know, but knows that he doesn't know: This is an illiterate man; teach him!

One who doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know: This is a dumb man; and would be dumb forever!

I also find it worth mentioning that Rummy's autobiography, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, depicts him standing in Taos, New Mexico with the Plaza Blanca mountains behind him. This general area is a paranormal/conspiracy nut's wet dream, what with the Taos Hum, the Taos Vortex, the nearby UFO crashes, the spooky volcanic Ice Caves, and the haunted Taos Inn.

JFK Demanded UFO Files Just Before Death

2011-04-22T14:03:00.002-04:00

Not long after the announcement of a memo to J. Edgar Hoover about a crashed UFO, now comes information about two memos from President Kennedy - instructing the CIA to turn over all available UFO intelligence.

Kennedy never saw that data, however. He was assassinated just ten days later.

What does it all mean? The Daily Mail suggests that JFK was worried that the Soviets would mistake actual alien UFOs for U.S. spy craft. majesticdocuments.com suggests that the word "Unknowns" in JFK's memo is actually code for the aliens, and that the phrase "defensive responsibilities" refers to our need to defend ourselves from aliens, not the Russians. They also host scans of the "Burned Memo" which, although lacking the provenance of the other JFK UFO docs, does seem to add corroboration - in it, the CIA director notes that "Lancer" (code word for the President) "has made some inquiries regarding our activities, which we cannot allow."

The burned memo also alludes to Project MAJESTIC, Project JEHOVAH, Project EVIRO, Project PARASITE, and Project PARHELION.

Pluto's Anomalous Atmosphere

2011-04-21T09:43:00.003-04:00

The planet Pluto has always been something of an anomaly. Scientists can't even stop bickering over whether it's even really a planet or not (take our word for it, it most certainly is.)

Many scientists insist that Pluto and its largest moon Charon, should be considered a binary system because the barycentre of their orbits does not lie within either body. Those confused bureaucrats at the IAU haven't been able to come up with an "official" definition for binary dwarf planets (Meanwhile, the rest of the solar system is doing just fine without the IAU's arbitrary proclamations).

Having been declassified from planet status, Pluto is now considered part of the Kuiper belt. But it's unusual among Kuiper Belt objects in that it has an atmosphere. In 1988 it was discovered that Pluto, presumed to be a tiny clod of rock and ice, possessed a very thin methane atmosphere that extended no more than 85 miles above the planet's surface.

The existence of this atmosphere is, in itself, anomalous, but it gets weirder: researchers are now stunned to find it's growing by leaps and bounds. According to sott.net, the atmosphere has been steadily expanding and currently extends for about 1865 miles. Scientists had assumed Pluto's atmosphere would actually shrink as its orbit takes its further away from the sun's warmth, but the opposite is happening. No one's sure why.

Not only that, the chemical composition of it is spontaneously changing: carbon monoxide is now showing up there where it never had before. Again, no one's sure why.

As sott.net wisely opines:

Mainstream astrophysicists are continually "surprised" by new data sent back by space probes and orbiting telescopes. That ought to be a clue that something is wrong. New information always sends theoretical astrophysicists "back to the drawing board". In light of this, it is curious that they have such "cock-sure" attitudes about the infallibility of their present models. Those models seem to require major "patching up" every time a new space probe sends back data.

FBI Releases Declassified Alien Memo

2011-04-11T12:58:00.004-04:00

Hold on to your hats, because this is the biggest major step towards full disclosure that the U.S. Government has made yet: the FBI have released a 1950 memo regarding flying saucers crashed in New Mexico that yielded three humanoid corpses.

No, really.

"An investigator for the Air Forces stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.

According to Mr. [name censored] informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers."

Ironically, the memo was declassified years ago, and could have already blown up a media frenzy if people had known where to look. With the FBI's new "Vault" site releasing more and more documents to the internet, there will probably be more revelations about all manner of things for which it is the appointed time.

As Javier Ortega is commenting today, " Although this is three years after the reported Roswell incident, the fact that such a cable exists in the hands of the FBI should raise some alarms in your head. If these things are just weather balloons, then why do these cables talk about disc-shaped objects and 3 foot tall beings? More importantly is this last cable. It was directed towards J. Edgar Hoover."

Let's just be real quiet for a few minutes.

A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes

2011-04-10T20:27:00.005-04:00

Germany tends to get the credit for mankind's first ventures into space, having sent the first V-2 rocket above the Earth. But long before that, the theoretical groundwork was already trailblazed by American researcher Robert H. Goddard, who began studying rocketry in 1898, inspired by the writings of H.G. Wells. By 1919 he was ready to publicize his findings, and wrote a progress report for the Smithsonian Institution entitled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. Goddard was the first to suggest that it would be possible to create a liquid-fueled rocket of sufficient power to reach the moon. He soon became a laughing stock in the newspapers for his suggestions. Many educated men in academia and science understood that Goddard was on to something, but the average Joe Q. Public just couldn't be made to grasp the idea (How little times have changed.)

By 1929 he was past theory and actually building prototypes. As an article in the July 18, 1929 edition of Missouri's St. Joseph Gazette explains, citizens and law enforcement agents were shocked to see one of Goddard's experimental creations hurtling through the air. Having no frame for reference for such a thing, most assumed that what they were seeing must have been an airplane of some sort (How little times have changed.)

Curiously, Goddard made Roswell, New Mexico his base of operations in 1930, on a remote property called the Mescalero Ranch. The U.S. Army wasn't very interested in his research despite his repeated attempts to get their attention. However, he had the attention of the Germans and Soviets - spies from both nations were trying to learn all they could about his plans. After World War II, Goddard examined remains of a German V-2 and was certain they had built it by stealing his work. Goddard suddenly came down with throat cancer in 1945, and died just a few months later. The U.S. space agencies posthumously gave the accolades he should've receieved during his lifetime (How little times have changed.)

Duk-Duk

2011-04-08T00:00:00.003-04:00

The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica has an entry for Duk-Duk:

DUK-DUK, a secret society of New Britain or New Pomerania,
Bismarck Archipelago, in the South Pacific. The society has
religious and political as well as social objects. It represents
a rough sort of law and order through its presiding spirit Duk-Duk,
a mysterious figure dressed in leaves to its waist, with a helmet
like a gigantic candle-extinguisher made of network. Upon
this figure women and children are forbidden to look. Women,
who are entitled in New Britain to their own earnings and work
harder than men, are the special victims of Duk-Duk, who
levies blackmail upon them if they are about during its visits.
These are generally timed to coincide with the hours at which
the women are out in the fields and therefore cannot help seeing
the figure. Justice is executed, fines extorted, taboos, feasts,
taxes and all tribal matters are arranged by the Duk-Duk
members, who wear hideous masks or chalk their faces. In
carrying out punishments they are allowed to burn houses and
even kill people. Only males can belong to Duk-Duk, the
entrance fees of which vary from 50 to 100 fathoms of dewarra
(small cowrie shells strung on strips of cane). The society has
its secret signs and ritual, and festivals at which the presence
of a stranger would mean his death. Duk-Duk only appears
with the full moon. The society is now much discredited and
is fast dying out."

Does this secret society still exist today? The traditional Duk Duk costumes are still employed by hired dancers as a tourist attraction, but what of the true inner elite cabal of men carrying out Duk Duk's will?

And what of the actual spirit of Duk Duk himself, who, even if he wasn't real before, most certainly is now?

Curiously, the Duk Duk is also being kept alive and in circulation as a thoughtform via a popular pocketknife called the "Douk Douk", manufactured in France by the M.C. Cognet company since 1927 and still available today. It features an engraving of Duk Duk on the handle.

The Petrashevsky Circle

2011-04-07T13:53:00.004-04:00

In 1844, Mikhail Petrashevsky formed what came to be known as "the Petrashevsky Circle", a small, close-knit secret society of freethinkers and scholars (including Dostoevsky) who held regular get-togethers to read and discuss philosophies and literature banned under the rule of Nicholas I. They were especially concerned with utopian socialism, materialist philosophy, and the histories of past revolutionary movements. They were devotees of the French utopian François Marie Charles Fourier, founder of the La Reunion commune and coiner of the term "feminism".

In 1849, Mikhail Petrashevsky was arrested and sentenced to death. In an interesting bit of psychological torture, he and other members of the Circle were brought to the Semenovsky plats of St. Petersburg (the customary place for official public executions), blindfolded and tied to stakes. Then, at the very last moment, it was revealed that it was only a charade to frighten them - they would not be killed after all, but sent off to various locations of punishment like Eastern Siberia.

If Nicholas I thought this "execution ritual" psychological trick would help instill submission and gratitude amongst the members of the secret society for sparing their lives, it didn't work out that way. Petrashevsky continued to fight the government and speak out until the day he died in 1866.

Nicholas I tends to get a bad rap, historically, because of his clamping down on free speech, revolts and demonstrations. But it's interesting to note that Nicholas found himself in the all-too-familiar position of being a leader of a people who were ignorant, selfish, and ethically in the wrong. Nicholas strongly wanted to abolish slavery and serfdom in Russia, but his advisors warned him that to do so would turn the people against him and cause a violent uprising. It's one thing to promote "power to the people", but sometimes the people are dumber than a box of rocks and sometimes they're downright evil.

According to Wikipedia: "He did make some efforts to improve the lot of the state peasants (serfs owned by the government) with the help of the minister Pavel Kiselev. During most of his reign he tried to increase his control over the landowners and other influential groups in Russia."

Ultraism

2011-04-06T11:37:00.007-04:00

The Ultraists were a literary movement founded in 1918 by Jorge Luis Borges (pictured at left), his brother-in-law Guillermo de Torre, and a group of assorted Spanish malcontent poets.

The Ultraist Manifesto was published in Nosotros magazine (Buenos Aires, 1922), and Borges described their objectives:

1. Reduction of the lyric element to its primordial element, metaphor
2. Deletion of useless middle sentences, linking particles and adjectives.
3. Avoidance of ornamental artifacts, confessionalism, circumstantiation, preaching and farfetched nebulosity.
4. Synthesis of two or more images into one, thus widening its suggestiveness.

These issues are so arcane and specific to their own place and time, that today they are nearly incomprehensible. But they were a dedicated lot, who fought hard in their day for a new artistic vision that included "evocative imagery, references to the modern world and new technologies, elimination of rhyme, and creative graphic treatment of the layout of poetry in print" (as Wikipedia puts it). Even though looking back today, the results are quaint at best and pretentious at worst.

More interesting to me than the movement itself is the fact that it was hatched via the tertulia concept, a lost tradition of holding important artistic convocations in bars and cafes. These gentlemanly proceedings, usually surrounded with copious food, coffee, alcohol and tobacco, were a sort of scholarly lodge meeting without a lodge, commandeering a public cafe for that purpose.

Variations of the tertulia concept still survive today in a way, when we see organizations holding meetings at a table in a restaurant or at Starbucks (I used to mock such people and say "Starbucks is not your office!" and now I've become one of them!), but it's only a pale vestige of the golden days of Spanish tertulias or the Viennese Kaffeehauskulture.

Victorian Catalog Scraps

2011-04-04T16:19:00.003-04:00

Found inside a wall in the 150-year-old house I live in: several fragments of Victorian-age catalogs from Bellas Hess. There'll be plenty more of these images to come:

The Penny Black Stamp

2011-04-02T00:01:00.001-04:00

Strange as it may seem, until 1840, persons receiving their mail from the postman had to pay for it upon delivery each day, or else face it being returned to sender.

Then Sir Rowland Hill's idea to charge the sender rather than the recipient was implemented, and a paper adhesive stamp was used as proof that payment had been received.

And from that day, stamp collecting was born.

Just days after the Penny Black came the Two Penny Blue. Whereas the Penny Black allowed for mail to be sent anywhere in Britain with a weight of under a half ounce, the Two Penny Blue was good for a full ounce.

Although the Penny Black was in use for only a little over a year - it was replaced by the Penny Red in order to better show a postmark - it is not a rare stamp. The custom of the day was to place the address and stamp on the outside of the folded letter itself; therefore, any saved correspondence from this period bears the stamp. Curiously, Hill also invented the envelope, out of a similar brainstorming attempt to improve the postal service. Once the envelope became popular, people would often save the letter but throw the envelope away, leading to harder-to-find philatelic specimens.

Even now, as then, British stamps are the only ones on the planet that do not mention their country of origin.

Meanwhile, in the United States, individual postmasters were inspired by the example set back home in England, and a few experimented with the idea of postage stamps strictly on a random local basis. The first official U.S. postage stamp, however, came in 1847 with a 5-cent Benjamin Franklin and a 10-cent George Washington. With America still being a very young country and lacking the infrastructure of Great Britain, our stamps were costly from the getgo. Regardless of weight, the 10 cent stamp was used for mailings involving over 300 miles.

Genetically Engineered Sugar

2011-04-01T11:32:00.004-04:00

Proterro, a company specializing in "synthetic biology", has announced their development of Protose, a "fermentation-ready sugar feedstock that will enable the economical and scalable production of biofuels and chemicals" based on genetically modified bacteria. Says Technology Review:

Today, almost all of the sugar for biofuels is made from corn or sugarcane, and several companies are developing processes for making sugar from abundant cellulosic materials such as grass and wood chips. But as a feedstock to make biofuels, "sugar is still too expensive," says Kef Kasdin, Proterro's CEO. Only sugar from sugarcane is cheap enough to make economic sense, and that can only be grown inexpensively in some locations, such as Brazil...

Proterro's microbes naturally produce sucrose when the water that they're growing in becomes too salty—it's a defense mechanism to keep water from being sucked out of them into the surrounding water via osmosis. The company has identified the genes that trigger this mechanism, and engineered the organisms to switch it on. The researchers have also engineered the organisms to secrete the sugar, which makes it easier to collect.

In theory, we're intrigued by Proterro's bold move to create a biofuel that doesn't take food from the mouths of the world's starving (as does biofuel based on corn). On the other hand, we can't get behind their claiming of a life form as their own intellectual property - which is something their website spells out in no uncertain terms.

Furthermore, we are uneasy at the idea that this sugar intended for industrial use could end up in the food chain. Given the fact that rogue countries like China will put anything - absolutely anything in the crap they export to us, it is a certainty that they will sooner or later swipe Proterro's technique, mass-produce this stuff, and put it in their food products that end up on American grocery shelves.

It's also rather unfortunate that Proterra has named their product "Protose", given that this term is already quite well known as a vegan meat substitute foodstuff developed by John Harvey Kellogg.

Buckminster's Clouded Mind

2011-03-30T23:22:00.004-04:00

Years before Star Trek envisioned the cloud city of Stratos, and before Star Wars gave us Lando Calrissian's cloud city, there was the mad genius Buckminster Fuller, who attempted to create such places for real, not science fiction.

One of Bucky's lost and languishing inventions was his "Cloud Nine Project", in which entire communities would live inside giant inflatable polyethylene geodesic spheres. These spheres would theoretically float up among the clouds, which sounds like a fun trick for a brief balloon ride, but doesn't sound desirable to me at all as a permanent home.

Wikipedia describes the scheme like this:

Geodesic spheres (structures of triangular components arranged to make a sphere) become stronger as they become bigger, due to how they distribute stress over their surfaces. As a sphere gets bigger, the volume it encloses grows much faster than the mass of the enclosing structure itself. Fuller suggested that the mass of a mile-wide geodesic sphere would be negligible compared to the mass of the air trapped within it. He suggested that if the air inside such a sphere were heated even by one degree higher than the ambient temperature of its surroundings, the sphere could become airborne. He calculated that such a balloon could lift a considerable mass, and hence that 'mini-cities' or airborne towns of thousands of people could be built in this way. The 'cloud nines' could be tethered, or free-floating, or maneuverable so that they could 'migrate' in response to climatic and environmental conditions, such as providing emergency shelters.

Well, I have trouble wrapping my head around this concept, but hey, he's Buckminster Fuller and I guess he knows what he's talking about. I haven't found any explanation of exactly how the people inside these giant wafer-thin Buckyballs keep from getting jostled around and buffeted by random high altitude winds.

Nor I am sure what happens if someone accidentally punctures the thin plastic membrane. I can guess though.

Perhaps there's a very good reason why some of ol' Buck's inventions are "lost" today. Still, the simplicity of the design and the grandiosity of the idea make this an ideal dream for the Steampunk generation to attempt to resurrect...

Confectioner's Glaze

2011-03-29T00:18:00.004-04:00

On many food items - especially candies - you'll see "Confectioner's Glaze", "Resinous Glaze", or "Pure Food Glaze". These are all names for food-grade versions of Pharmaceutical Glaze, an edible resinous shellac produced from - are you ready for this? - the excretions of the insect Kerria Lacca.

The insect was first classified by modern researchers in 1782, but man has harvested its secretions, known as "Lac" (and this is literally where the term "shellac" comes from"), for thousands of years. The Mahabharata makes reference to a palace built entirely from it.

It is literally the same substance as the shellac which 78rpm records were made of, and the very same shellac with which wood is stained and protective-coated. So how is it possible that a human could digest such a thing? Well, guess what - it isn't. Shellac is practically insoluble in stomach acid, and it mostly passes through your system undigested. This is how it came to be used in pharmaceuticals, to provide an ultra-thin coating for time-release pills.

Being the by-product of an insect (and almost always containing bits of dead insects in the harvesting process), anything containing this glaze is not Kosher, and because of its alcohol content, it is not Halal. And some vegans - those extremists who won't even eat honey because it came from an insect - certainly won't approve.

Most candies out there - from candy corn to Junior Mints - are loaded with the stuff. If you eat a lot of candy (and I do), then you and I have consumed a lot of bug secretion in our times, friend.

The Gentleman Scientist

2011-03-28T22:47:00.003-04:00

In another era, the concept of "science" was not something closed off to the common man; rather, it was as commonplace a hobby as gardening or philately. Scientific discoveries of immense value were frequently made by home enthusiasts.

Nowadays, one of the few remaining areas of science still considered wide open to so-called "amateurs" is astronomy. But even then, any discovery that doesn't jibe with what the "experts" have already decreed will be suppressed or ignored. Just about every other field of science has been encircled with barbed wire by career "scientists" - and, of course, the universities, government agencies, and corporations who fund them.

But in days of old, from colonial times to the Victorian age, a man didn't need a fancy college degree or the blessing of academia. If he built a science lab in his carriage house and declared himself to be a scientist, then dammit, he was, and nobody laughed when he said so.

"Gentlemen Scientists", they were nobly called. Even many early members of the Royal Society were Gentlemen Scientists. One was Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry. Benjamin Franklin, who was a pioneer in electrical research, was another.

There are still a few Gentlemen Scientists out there, toiling in the night pursuing their vision like an artist slaving away in his garret, shaking up consensus reality until it coughs up the elusive truths he seeks. Others are somewhat independent but still rooted in the status quo, such as J. Craig Venter and James Lovelock. These men are not so much Gentlemen Scientists per se (though scientists and gentlemen they may be) but simply independent mavericks within the existing system of Big Science.

If there are any fellow Gentlemen Scientists out there, we'd love to hear from you.

Xanthan Gum

2011-03-27T00:54:00.002-04:00

If you look at the ingredients on everything you eat (and if you don't, maybe you should), you'll see Xanthan Gum listed for all kinds of products, even including non-food ones. Since you're eating so much of the stuff, don't you think you owe it to your innards to find out just what it is?

No? Tough. I looked it up for you anyway.

Xanthomonas campestris is a bacterial species that causes many different kinds of plant diseases - from citrus canker to leaf rot, as seen in the photo shown above. In the 1950s Allene Jeanes discovered that a combination of Xanthomonas campestris fermented in a corn sugar culture produced a colorless slimy substance. It's also been done with wheat, whey, soy, and other plants; even dairy products can be a useful medium for the bacteria.

Xanthan Gum, as it was ultimately called, turned out to be a useful stabilizer and thickener. And best of all, it's ridiculously cheap to produce - it's just biofermentation of a plant-rotting bacteria. For that reason, its use has skyrocketed in recent times, and is imported heavily by Chinese manufacturers.

With the gum's propensity to increasing the viscosity of any substance at a remarkable degree by adding only a timy amount - and given its ability to sort of take on that substance's taste, color and characteristics, one has to wonder just how much of the stuff they're putting in consumer products as filler. Xanthan gum allergies are on the rise, which leads me to suspect that we're eating a lot more of it now than we used to. Anyone who compares fresh homemade ice cream (ingredients: cream, sugar) to store-bought ice cream (lots of ingredients including Xanthan Gum, Guar Gum, Cellulose Gum, Locust Bean Gum and Carrageenan) can see the obvious difference between the two, and after eating the former, one might ask whether the latter is actually more gum than anything else.

Also, it's been demonstrated that people with wheat allergies will also react to Xantham Gum that used wheat as its fermentation base. Other adverse reactions and side effects include dry skin, respiratory problems, and bowel problems. Sufferers of Celiac Disease have been warned by many doctors and nutritionists to avoid Xanthan Gum.

Old New Thought

2011-03-26T15:44:00.009-04:00

Recently, in my meanderings around the net, I chanced upon the site for a company called Seed Of Life Publishing. They offer for sale PDF files of rare and obscure metaphysical texts from the Victorian age, including New Thought Common Sense by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, The Message of New Thought by Abel L. Allen, The Law of the New Thought by William Walker Atkinson, The Science of New Thought by E. Whitford Hopkins.

And if you'd like a book that doesn't have "New Thought" in the title, try This Mystical Life of Ours, by Ralph Waldo Trine. Trine, seen pictured at right striking a pose that Edgar Cayce would mimic years later, was born in 1866 in Illinois, and died in California in 1958, at the age of 91. During those years, he wrote at least 24 books - including the aforementioned and In Tune with the Infinite, which was a huge success and its philosophical advice was championed by such luminaries as Queen Victoria and Henry Ford.

They also carry the complete collected works of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, an inventor, philosopher, and - some say - a faith healer whose work inspired Mary Baker Eddy.

Today, the Church of Spiritual Science (not to be confused with Eddy's Christian Science, Ernest Holmes' Religious Science, Malinda Cramer's Divine Science Federation or L. Ron Hubbard's Churches of Scientology) keeps Quimby's reputation out there, plus other related New Thinkers like Prentice Mulford, C.W. Leadbeater, and the Queen of Theosophy, Helena P. Blavatsky.

Quimby was something of a savant in that he was an stirring orator and prolific writer even though he had very little in the way of a formal education and his manuscripts had to be proofread and corrected. He also was a whiz at watchmaking and clockmaking, and a huge clock he made for a church in Belfast, Maine (see image below) still ticks on to this day.

Arabic Automata

2011-03-25T17:47:00.007-04:00

In the 12th century, a Muslim inventor by the name of Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī ( أَبُو اَلْعِزِ بْنُ إسْماعِيلِ بْنُ الرِّزاز الجزري‎) single-handedly pioneered the field of Islamic robotics.

His book Kitáb fí ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya ("Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices") was published in 1206, the year of his death. Known during his lifetime for his amazing inventions, he wrote this book at the end of his life to reveal his secrets of how he did it. The book is, in fact, written in the style of a "do-it-yourself" instruction manual. It contains plans of how to build his camshaft, crankshaft, water wheels, water clocks, and elaborate improvements on the candle clock. His most impressive clock was the "Castle Clock", however, about which Wikipedia says:

"al-Jazari's largest astronomical clock was the "castle clock", which is considered to be the first programmable analog computer. It was a complex device that was about 11 feet (3.4 m) high, and had multiple functions besides timekeeping. It included a display of the zodiac and the solar and lunar orbits, and an innovative feature of the device was a pointer in the shape of the crescent moon which travelled across the top of a gateway, moved by a hidden cart, and caused automatic doors to open, each revealing a mannequin, every hour. Another innovative feature was the variable ability to re-program the length of day and night everyday in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year. Yet another innovative feature of the device was five robotic musicians who automatically play music when moved by levers operated by a hidden camshaft attached to a water wheel. Other components of the castle clock included a main reservoir with a float, a float chamber and flow regulator, plate and valve trough, two pulleys, crescent disc displaying the zodiac, and two falcon automata dropping balls into vases."

But it's his humanoid automatons that represent his true genius. One was a robotic waitress that would serve beverages to guests. By turning the machine on, a tank with a reservoir filled with tea would drip into a cup. Wnen the cup was full, it would trigger the waitress to move forwatd through an automatic door to serve the drink.

Another was a female humanoid standing by a basin filled with water. When the user pulls the lever, the water drains out of the basin and the automaton refills it. In creating this, al-Jazari invented the flush mechanism that is now standard in modern toilets today.

His grandest creation was a musical robot band, which may have been the first truly programmable automata in history. It consisted of a boat with four automatic musicians, which floated on a lake to entertain royal guests. According to Wikipedia, "It has a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operated the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs were moved around. According to Charles B. Fowler, the automata were a "robot band" which performed "more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection."

The Italian Renaissance inventor Leonardo da Vinci was almost certainly influenced by al-Jazari, as were countless subsequent experimenters in the field.

Anton LaVey was a collector of exotic automata and was said to own highly programmable female mechanical companions that made Disneyland's animatronics look like hand puppets by comparison. The leading automata of that time, such as "Isis" (pictured above), were the handiwork of Dr. Cecil Nixon. They also played a significant role in LaVey's Erotic Crystallization Inertia theories, which posited the quantum youth-enhancing effects of controlling one's environment with an intent to disregard the modern era.

(And whether it actually works or not, we applaud the concept strictly for its own culture-jamming sake.)

Horizontal Gene Transfer

2011-03-21T00:29:00.006-04:00

Once upon a time - not that long ago, really - science strictly thought of genetics in terms of an organism receiving genetic material from its parents or other ancestors. You passed your genes down to your offspring, and that was that.

Hold onto your seats. Nowadays, that's known as "Vertical Gene Transfer" and a previously undreamt-of Horizontal variety has changed everything. With Horizontal Gene Transfer, two entities can exchange genetic material without being related.

Horizontal Gene Transfer was first postulated in Japan in 1959, when it was demonstrated that antibiotic resistance seems to magically transfer itself between different species of bacteria; this had previously been thought impossible. The unoiled gears of empirical science grind slow, and very few people really sorted out for themselves the implications of that study until 1985. That's when M. Syvanen published his paper "Cross-species gene transfer: Implications for a new theory of evolution".

Syvanen's groundbreaking hypothesis was that genes could potentially be transferred laterally in all species (possibly even humans), without reproduction. "The cross-species gene transfer model could help explain many observations which have puzzled evolutionists," he said, "such as rapid bursts in evolution and the widespread occurrence of parallelism in the fossil record." Today, we now know that Horizontal Gene Transfer takes place frequently with bacteria, but proof that it happens with humans isn't concrete - yet.

The frightening implications of Horizontal Gene Transfer are numerous. For one, it means that transgenic DNA could jump from one genetically engineered species to a natural one, wreaking untold havoc in nature. And many opponents of GMOs say that's already happening.

Agrobacterium causes large galls (tumors) on plants by injecting its own DNA into them. According to Wikipedia:

"Although generally seen as an infection in plants, Agrobacterium can be responsible for opportunistic infections in humans with weakened immune systems, but has not been shown to be a primary pathogen in otherwise healthy individuals. One of the earliest associations of human disease caused by Agrobacterium radiobacter was reported by Dr. J. R. Cain in Scotland (1988). A later study suggested that Agrobacterium attaches to and genetically transforms several types of human cells by integrating its T-DNA into the human cell genome."

Scarier still, Agrobacterium has been theorized as a possible culprit behind the mysterious Morgellons Disease, which continues to baffle doctors - to the extant that many still don't believe the condition even exists. A 2007 study by Raphael Stricker and Vitaly Citovsky claimed to have found Agrobacterium in skin samples from all the Morgellons patients examined in the study; however, an attempt by Dr. Randy Wymore in 2010 to duplicate their work failed to find any Agrobacterium.

The cleanup crews of the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico have been using a toxic mix of methods: at the same time as the controversial Corexit dispersant has been applied, experimental genetically-engineered bacteria that thrive on oil have also been put into the environment. According to Florida Gulf Skywatch:

" These microbes were designed to literally consume the oil and hydrocarbons leaking into the gulf. However, some of these microbes (even before they are genetically engineered) can cause skin rashes and immune responses in humans.

All of these bacteria can transfer genes to other bacteria through a process called, "Horizontal Gene Transfer." What is potentially terrifying is that we do not know exactly what genes were added to these bacteria and could have been transferred to bacteria native to the Gulf of Mexico. We could have countless new strains of bacteria growing and multiplying in the gulf as we speak!"

According to World Vision Portal, that is exactly what has happened, and doctors are finding the resultant "blue plague" harder to dismiss than Morgellons.

Lip Hair Follies

2011-03-14T22:53:00.008-04:00

Back in my antique-hustling days, I always enjoyed the peculiar Victorian relic known as the Mustache Cup. In days of old, men would lift these specially-made teacups and mugs to their mugs, and sip secure in the knowledge that the enclosure on the inside of the lip would protect their precious mustache.

But all this time, I just thought the idea was that a gentleman didn't want to get his stache wet. In fact, men of those times invariably had their proud facial hair waxed heavily, and hot coffee and tea would quickly soften and melt the wax. This not only left the fellow with a wilted face but rendered his drink nasty-tasting due to post-meltoff drip.

Which got me thinking: it's easy enough to find antique mustache cups these days, and some diligent souls even manufacture new ones - but where does a Transylvania Gentleman go to procure some mustache wax today? Besides the Interzone Mercantile, of course.

A quick tiptoe through Google's tulips revealed that mustache wax never went away and is apparently used by hordes of men, even though the subject has never come up in conversation with anyone I know. There's Gravy Jay's, Oregon Wild Hair, Firehouse, Clubman, and many more. There's a whole mustache subculture going on that I'm not privy to.

The British Handlebar Club has been keeping the lanolin lip hip since 1947. You can read their mustache wax FAQ here and check out their fascinating history here.

Since they all seem like a good bunch of old fashioned headcoat-wearing, pipe-smoking chaps, I'd probably fit right in with them, but for one sad fact: I cannot abide facial hair. For myself, I mean, on my own face. Other than an occasional Don Johnson-ish field of stubble (usually the spawn of laziness, not fashion), I'm strictly all about the clean-shaven look. Although you never know - when I get older I might finally experimentally descend into it. Till then, I'll live vicariously through the adventures of these blokes.

As The World Churns

2011-03-13T23:47:00.006-04:00

It's horrific enough that the recent 8.9 earthquake in Japan has had such a tragic death toll, and even worse that the world faces nuclear contamination that could make Chernobyl look like a backyard weenie roast. But what's really boggling my mind this evening is the news that whatever just happened under the sea and under the Earth's crust, it was bigger than we thought. It was big enough to move Japan by 8 inches, and it shifted the entire Earth on its axis about 6.5 inches.

And this isn't trash talk from the tinfoils, this is on mainstream media like CNN.

According to space.com, "A new analysis of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan has found that the intense temblor has accelerated Earth's spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory". And this is apparently a growing trend, indicating big Earth changes are underway deep down below the surface; the articles goes on to note, "The 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile last year also sped up the planet's rotation and shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds. The 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004 shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds."

Add to this the eye-opening data on hydrothermal vents spewing primordial soup from far inside the Earth; the Yellowstone caldera which many believe is on the verge of a cataclysmic explosion literally any minute now; and the far-ranging subterranean damage done in the BP disaster that seems to be getting worse even as the mass media clams up on the subject.

And then consider the rise in unexpected sinkholes and cracks in the Earth.

And now, on top of everything else, this.

When the hippies say "we're all just fleas that Mother Earth is trying to shake off", brother, they're not far wrong.

Candid Camera, 1890

2011-03-12T19:48:00.003-05:00

This YouTube video from a documentary is short and sweet, but a nice glimpse at ordinary life in Oslo, circa 1890. The photographer walked around the streets with a disguised camera, surreptitiously snapping pictures of people who were unaware, even as he chatted with them.

Granite Mountain Records Vault

2011-03-09T12:30:00.002-05:00

One of North America's greatest achievements sits quietly in the Utah desert, and most are unaware of its existence, except for genealogy enthusiasts.

Granite Mountain is a massive and imposing formation of solid quartz monzonite (not actually granite), one mile up Little Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch range of Utah. Since 1963, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have operated the world's largest collection of genealogical material at this site. They've collected 2.5 million microfilm reels of every kind of public-records document you can think of: birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, church rosters, census files, wills, probates, and personal memorabilia and paper ephemera - some of which dates back to the Middle Ages.

All in all, the Granite Mountain Record Vault contains information on around 2 billion deceased persons, and approximately 40,000 new rolls of microfilmed documents are added to its archives each year. This makes the Mormon Vault a mind-blowingly invaluable resource for geneologists, and before the advent of the internet, it was commonplace to make records requests to the LDS Church when seeking information about one's own family tree. But since 1999, the contents of the Vault have been made public to the world for free, at familysearch.org.

Why do they do it? Because genealogy is very important to the Mormon ideas regarding salvation of the dead, which allows for retroactive, posthumous baptism of one's ancestors under certain circumstances.

It is said that specially constructed Mosler vault doors, weighing fourteen tons at the main entrance (see image above) and nine tons at the smaller ones (see image below), are designed to withstand a nuclear blast. If, in the event of a global disaster, the bugs that evolve and take over the planet will at least know who we were.

العمارة الإسلامية

2011-03-06T13:36:00.017-05:00

There's no getting around the fact that some of the most beautiful architecture on this planet comes from the Islamic world. One example is the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul, pictured above. More examples:

Mosque of the Prophet, Saudi Arabia. ( المسجد النبوي )

Jeddah Mosque, Saudi Arabia.

Ahat Jami Mosque, Ukraine.

Mazar-e Sharif Mosque, Afghanistan.

Bibi-Khanym Mosque, Uzbekistan.

Imam Hussein Mosque, Kuwait.

Mosque Maryam, Chicago, Illinois.

Al-Abbas Mosque, Iraq.

Fanar Mosque, Qatar.

Imam Ridha Shrine, Iran.

Id Kah Mosque, China.

Assalam Center, Boca Raton, Florida.

Abu Darweesh Mosque, Jordan.

Coquimbo Mosque, Chile.

Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām, Mecca. ( المسجد الحرام‎ )

Follow the Smoke

2011-03-05T15:02:00.006-05:00

Before there was telephone and the internet, there was smoke. And where there's smoke, there's fire.

Cro-magnon man, or something like him, realized that building a fire is fine and all, but in so doing you are broadcasting your location from a great distance via the smoke. And so the earliest forms of smoke-signal commnication came between cavemen who simply used the smoke like a flare, to say "hey, I'm over here" in order for separated groups on a hunt to keep tabs on one another's location.

As man's mind became more complex over time, so did his smoke signals. Simultaneously in the Arab world, in China, and in ancient America, tribal peoples began to employ variations of smoke and imbue them with meaning. Using forked sticks piled high with damp grass (which smolders far better than dry), one could place them on the fire and off again, creating a sort of morse-code staccato pattern to be interpreted.

Around 150 BC, the Greek scholar Polybius devised an elegant alphabetical code for use with smoke signaling.

The Polybius Square as seen here is a 5x5 grid in which each letter is represented by its coordinates - therefore, the word "help" would be rendered numerically as "23 15 31 35", and via smoke signal using two torches, one representing the first numeral and one representing the second. Some versions of the square get 26 letters into 25 squares by combining the I and J; others omit the K and use C in its place. Prisoners have used this as a "tapping code" for centuries to subtly communicate with one another, and still use it to this very day. The acronym-heavy "text talk" of cellphones and the internet actually began here, before any of us were born - in order to shorten tapping time and hasten the message, abbreviations began to appear such as "GN" for "goodnight" and "GBU" for "God Bless You".

The Great Auk

2011-03-04T23:56:00.004-05:00

"The Great Auk is known to have been preyed upon by Neanderthals more than 100,000 years ago, as evidenced by well-cleaned bones found by their campfires."

"In July 1840, the last Great Auk seen in the British Isles was caught and killed. Three men from St Kilda caught a single "garefowl", noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, until a large storm arose. Believing that the auk was a witch and the cause of the storm, they then killed it by beating it with a stick."

"The last colony of Great Auks lived on Geirfuglasker (the "Great Auk Rock") off Iceland. This islet was a volcanic rock surrounded by cliffs which made it inaccessible to humans, but in 1830 the islet submerged after a volcanic eruption, and the birds moved to the nearby island of Eldey [pictured above], which was accessible from a single side. When the colony was initially discovered in 1835, nearly fifty birds were present. Museums, desiring the skins of the auk for preservation and display, quickly began collecting birds from the colony. The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 July 1844, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot."

(All quotations from Wikipedia.)

The Zone of Avoidance

2011-03-03T08:41:00.007-05:00

When I was a kid, I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of the Milky Way. Once it was pointed out to me in the sky, on a dark clear night in a remote area, it was terrifying. It was like something out of a science fiction movie to discover that something so immense was taking up so much of the sky at night but you just don't notice it most of the time unless you really look. (And, of course, the more you look, the less you know.)

But even then, it took a long time as a child to really "get" the big picture, that we were part of the Milky Way galaxy, but out on the very fringes of it, looking sidelong at the edge of its spiral disc shape. And every star that we can see at night with the naked eye is also part of this galaxy. I feel sorry for the inhabitants of planets much deeper into the galaxy - they have no clear view of the night sky and their sense of astronomy is atrocious. On the other hand, their skies are freakin' gorgeous.

The Milky Way does throw a slight monkey wrench into our own astronomy, however - we have a very poor concept of what the Universe looks like on the other side of it. The Milky Way obstructs our view of about 20% of the sky at visible wavelengths, which is why optical surveys of the Universe are incomplete around the galactic plane. This area is known as the "Zone of avoidance", and remains one of the biggest (literally) mysteries in Science.

What little we know about the other side of the Milky Way has been gleaned from radio astronomy, but even then pickings have been slim. In 1995 an Australian project to survey the Zone via radio resulted in the discovery of The Dwingeloos, a pair of galaxies with one orbiting the other.

In 2003 a deep blind survey to map this uncharted portion of space was conducted as a joint effort between Universities in Mexico, New Mexico, and Australia. Analysis of the data revealed the presence of slightly over a thousand previously unknown galaxies. It also yielded a treasure trove of new information about little-understood places like the Norma Supercluster and the constantly-growing Local Void.

We know the Milky Way is moving in a specific direction, and it had previously been believed that it was being sucked toward something called The Great Attractor. But in 2005, the CIZA Project to explore the Zone via X-Rays, discovered that what is actually pulling us toward it is not the Great Attractor, but something even more powerful behind it: the Shapley Supercluster.

Even as the Shapley Supercluster is sucking everything within its sphere of influence toward it, the Local Void is expanding and pushing our "Local Sheet" of galaxies away from itself, at a rate of 600,000 miles per hour. From our own terrestrial perspective, Relativity prevents us from sensing the chaotic roller-coaster ride this section of the Universe - including our planet - is presently in.

Bill Hicks was right - life is just a ride. Enjoy it.

The Meaning of Mexico

2011-02-27T23:51:00.003-05:00

What exactly does the word "Mexico" mean? Even the Mexicans don't know.

Originally, the area we now call Mexico was broken up into many smaller pre-Columbian Mesoamerican territories. They were all combined as one when Spain took over and dubbed the whole shebang "Virreinato de Nueva España" (Viceroyalty of New Spain). The capital was Mexico City, which had formerly been called México-Tenochtitlan in the good old ancient Aztec days.

Historians disagree over the etymology of the name "Mexico" and the word "Mexica" for its original Aztec inhabitants; we know the word is Nahuatl but we don't know what it actually means or its derivation.

The leading contenders are:

* Metztli - a Moon Goddess associated with Lake Texcoco, which was believed to be symbolic of the rabbit. Aztecs also saw a rabbit, rather than a face, on the Moon.

* Mextli - God of war and thunderstorms, to whom ritual sacrifice was necessary.

* Mectli - another name for Mayahuel, the Goddess of Maguey, aka Agave, that magickal and most holy succulent plant that gives us pulque, tequila, and my latest alcohological obsession, mezcal.

Now, you might think Mextli is the obvious choice, being the most similar, but those learned men of academia tend to lean toward Metztli as being more likely. Me, I would prefer to root for Mectli, since I genuflect often at the altar of the Goddess of Maguey.

The X-37B

2011-02-25T12:34:00.008-05:00

In yesterday's post, I wondered aloud about the Pentagon's mysterious lack of interest in the Space Shuttle after 1992. Clearly, they must have developed some sort of newer and better black-budget secret program of their own. But what?

One name that keeps coming up as a likely tip of the covert iceberg: the X-37B.

The Boeing X-37 was originally developed by NASA but then acquired (some would say "seized") by DARPA in 2004. It certainly does seem to make the Space Shuttle irrelevant - its first orbital mission, USA-212, was launched on April 22, 2010 with the help of an Atlas V rocket and it remained in space until just three months ago, returning to Earth in December 3, 2010. It is said that the X-37B is strictly for unmanned missions, but actually there is nothing preventing astronauts being on board.

The X-37B is powered by a massive array of solar cells, but it also has its own fuel tank that allows it to fly around in near-Earth space and change its orbit. On its maiden voyage, in fact, it did just that: amateur astronomers spotted it from their backyards and quickly computed its orbit in order to predict where it would be next, and when. But then the craft's orbit abruptly changed to an entirely different trajectory, momentarily confounding the terrestrial observers.

Now an entire fleet of DARPA's next-generation version, the X-37B, is on the way. One is fully operational and a second one is nearly completed. The next 270-day flight of the X-37B will launch on March 4 from Cape Canaveral.

According to Wikipedia:

As the mission of USA-212 and the X-37B program are classified, public commentary on the program is speculation. James Oberg speculated that the concurrent launch of Air Force's Hypersonic Technology Vehicle HTV-2 was related to the mission...

William Scott, coauthor of the techno-novel Counterspace: The Next Hours of World War III and former Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine believes that with X-37B, the Air Force might test weapon delivery from a space plane in low Earth orbit. This hypothesis aligns with speculation that the launch of USA-212 marks the beginning of military operations in space.

Secret Shuttle

2011-02-24T20:36:00.006-05:00

While watching the live broadcast of STS-133's launch today, I can't help but feel an odd mix of excitement and apprehension about what happens next. STS-135 will be the last and final shuttle mission, and it may even end up being scrapped in favor of closing the program down after STS-134.

And then what?

One would be forgiven for having the same sinking feeling that we're about enter another long "dead zone" for manned space exploration, just as when Richard Nixon inexplicably and without warning put an abrupt halt to one of his administration's greatest successes - the Apollo manned moon missions. What did Nixon know that we dont?

If you, like me, were a space nerd growing up, you probably felt cheated by the Space Shuttle when they finally got around to rolling it out. The 1970s began with us making repeated trips to the moon in a flimsy little lunar module, yet the decade ended with us staying in Earth's orbit in a huge, bulky, clunky-looking "space plane" that couldn't even get off the ground without the help of a rocket and was in constant danger of exploding if any of its super-thick tiles were comprised. What the heck is wrong this picture?, we asked ourselves. What do they know that we dont?

(We geeky kids all campaigned and fought so hard to get NASA to name the first shuttle named Enterprise after our beloved Star Trek ship, only to subsequently be told that this would only be a prototype and never actually go to space. D'oh!)

Early on in the Space Shuttle's career, it became evident that something had happened somewhere in between the age of Grissom and the age of Crippen; the space program was, now more than ever, firmly in the hands of the military.

STS-4 was the first to carry a classified Pentagon payload. supposedly it was admitted later that the secret cargo was a pair of missile-launch detection systems, and supposedly the attempt to place them into orbit failed.

The 15th shuttle mission, STS-51-C, was the first to be completely dedicated to a secret mission for the Department of Defense. The details are still largely classified, but one alleged story leaked to Aviation Week is that one of the purposes of the mission was to launch an ELINT spy satellite in geosynchronous orbit.

More top-secret missions followed in quick succession: STS-51-J, STS-27, STS-28, STS-33, STS-36, and STS-38. And then something strange happened. After STS-53, the CIA/DoD stopped commandeering shuttle flights for classified national security purposes. Whatever it was they had been doing, had they had enough and didn't need any further surreptitious skulking in space? That hardly seems like them. But from 1992 on, the Pentagon seemingly had no further need for the Space Shuttle's services. And I asked myself once again, what do they know that we don't?

On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush announced that the US would return to the moon by 2018. Many scoffed, but by that year's end, congress approved the start-up funds for Bush's moon plan.

On December 4, 2006, NASA announced that they were planning a permanent human colony on the moon, to be fully operational before the year 2020.

On September 28, 2007, NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin looked even further ahead, stating that the moon base would then provide a leap-frog platform to send a manned expedition to Mars by 2037.

But on February 1, 2010, President Barack Obama ordered NASA to take a hard about-face, and scrapped all these plans. This drew much anger from NASA officials who have spent years and millions of dollars working on the moon base, and the level of animosity between the President and NASA is extremely high at this moment.

After decades of conversative opposition to further moon landings, we finally had both Republicans and Democrats in agreement about the way to proceed, and now this. Why would President Obama do this? He stated that it is his belief that NASA should direct its focus on more long-range deep-space matters, with telescopes and unmanned probes.

And just one more time, I will ask the room out loud: what does he know that we don't?

The Green Fairy of Absinthe

2011-02-23T23:19:00.008-05:00

The Absinthe Drinker, Viktor Oliva (1861–1928)

Green Muse, Albert Maignan (1845-1908)

Advertising poster for Paul Beucler Absinthe, Jean-Désiré Ringel d'Illzach (1849-1916)

La Fin De La Fee Verte, 1910 poster protesting the Swiss ban of Absinthe, Albert-Henri Gantner (1866-?)

Leah Hirsig

2011-02-22T00:00:00.006-05:00

Raise your glasses to Leah Hirsig, born in Switzerland in 1883, moved to NYC at the age of two, became a high school teacher in the Bronx.

But Leah was no ordinary high school teacher. She and her sister Alma had a growing interest in the occult, one which grew so intense that they finally dared in 1918 to knock on the door of Aleister Crowley and pay him a visit. Crowley and Leah immediately felt a powerful attraction to one another, as evidenced by the description in Lawrence Sutin's book Do What Thou Wilt:

The "little sister" reminded me of Solomon's friend, for she had no breasts... She radiated an indefinable sweetness. Without wasting time on words, I began to kiss her. It was sheer instinct. She shared it and equaled my ardor. We continued with occasional interruptions, such as politeness required, to answer her sister in the rare intervals when she got out of breath."

Upon the sisters' second visit to Crowley's home, he again found himself unable to maintain conversation with Alma because of his lust for Leah: "While we talked, I took off her [Leah's] clothes and asked her to come and pose for me when she felt inclined." Although Crowley had never drawn or painted nudes before, Leah quickly became his greatest artistic muse of all. He went on to paint her portrait many times (albeit in his rather naive folk-art expressionist manner) including a special request she had for him to paint her as "a dead soul".

In 1920, she left with Crowley to institute Abbey of Thelema in a remote and abandoned part of the ancient mysterious city of Cefalù. During this time, she took on the name "Alostrael", performed some rituals with goats that are probably best not described here, and was promoted by Crowley to "Scarlet Woman" status.

"Scarlet Woman" was the name Crowley used for his female sex magick practitioners. The term derives from the book of Revelation, in which the 666 beast's consort is to be a scarlet woman. According to Wikipedia, "Aleister Crowley believed that many of his lovers and magical companions were playing a cosmic role, even to the point of fulfilling prophecy." Among these important women in his life were Rose Edith Crowley, Mary d'Este Sturges, Roddie Minor, Marie Rohling, Leila Waddell, Dorothy Olsen, Bertha Almira Prykryl, Jeanne Robert Foster, and of course, Leah.

Crowley's health began to seriously wane in 1924, and sensing Leah's increasing unhappiness with the drudgery of being his caretaker, he broke up their relationship. She remained fiercely loyal to him nevertheless, and continued to help out in his magickal pursuits in any way she could, even though Dorothy Olsen now replaced her as "Scarlet Woman".

Of Leah and the Cefalù period, Crowley penned in his diary: “She loves me for my work… She knows and loves the God in me, not the man; and therefore she has conquered the great enemy that hides behind his clouds of poisonous gas: Illusion." Also during this time, he wrote the infamous obscene poem "Leah Sublime" about her.

Leah moved to Paris, France and lived as a prostitute on and off for some years. Ultimately she returned to America, settled back down to a more normal life with a new husband with whom she bore a son, and returned to teaching.

She died on February 22, 1975, but she lived to see the huge resurgence in interest in Crowley, Thelema, and the OTO. Leah Hirsig achieved a lasting fame and immortality for herself by her connection to Crowley, and to this day fan sites exist for this woman who explored the unknown with he who some called "the wickedest man in the world" - even though many of today's devotees weren't even born yet when she died.

Farrakhan's UFO Symposium

2011-02-21T20:55:00.005-05:00

Disclosure regarding extraterrestrials seems to be on more and more minds lately. Just last month we reported on the Global Competitiveness Forum, a Saudi Arabian business conference that shocked its patrons with a surprise visit from Bill Clinton and an assumption that aliens are on the way: "They were told flying saucers are real, and they had better start thinking about the business implications of extraterrestrial life and technologies."

Now the Rev. Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam are hosting a UFO symposium called "The Truth About the Existence of Unidentified Flying Objects". The symposium, which is part of their annual Savior's Day event, features a panel of UFO experts. It'll be held this weekend at the Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, IL.

Among the speakers: Dr. Roger Leir, author of Aliens and the Scalpel, who claimed to have removed alien implants from his patients; and Steve Colbern, a nanotechnology specialist who has examined these implants and pronounced them genuine.

Voynich Manuscript Carbon Dated

2011-02-15T19:41:00.007-05:00

Of all the unexplainable "what does it mean? how did it get here?" baffling books out there - from the Oera Linda to anything by Thomas DeQuincey - none has fascinated me more than the Voynich Manuscript. Written in a seemingly alien language that no man has ever been able to decipher, it is filled with copious illustrations that make about as much sense as the text; that is to say, none whatsoever. It is named after Polish revolutionary and bibliophile Wilfried Voynich, who acquired it in Italy in 1912 and gave it its first public presentation in 1915.

The Voynich Manuscript has finally been definitively carbon-dated by University of Arizona researchers and the verdict is: it dates back to the early 15th century, which means the book is a century older than scholars had previously thought.

What does this tell us about about the book that we didn't already know? Well, for one, it rules out some people's conspiracy theories that Voynich cooked up the book himself. It also strikes Roger "Doctor Mirabilis" Bacon off the list of contenders for the book's authorship, and he had been a leading theory among some in academia.

According to Wikipedia: "The earliest confirmed owner of the Voynich manuscript was Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Baresch apparently was just as puzzled as we are today about this "Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years."

And Live Science says, rather self-contradictingly: "While knowing the date of the book helps put one of the pieces of that puzzle in place, it's possible its complete meaning will never be deciphered. The key to the book's code could have been destroyed long ago, making it impossible to crack. The latest computer programs and cryptographers can't decipher its meaning, but there is hope that future technologies could crack this mystery book's code, the researchers said."

One of the aspects of the text that intrigues me most is that the flow of its quill-penned lettering suggests the author wrote at a very even pace, just as any skilled calligrapher would writing in a normal language. This implies that the words came naturally to the writer, rather than pausing to contrive (or if encoding, to calculate) these characters.

Wikipedia again:

The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other by narrow gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each.

Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript.

On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. Firstly, there are practically no words comprising more than ten glyphs, yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section.

C. Auguste Dupin

2011-02-11T17:44:00.003-05:00

Edgar Allan Poe may not have realized when he wrote Murders in the Rue Morgue that he was giving birth to the genre of detective fiction, setting the stage for everything that was to come, from Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Fell to Sam Spade to Lovejoy. Even the superhero genre could be said, without making too far of a stretch, to have its roots in Poe's mentally-gifted crime-solver C. Auguste Dupin.

Dupin used what he called the process of ratiocination to make his deductions; this entails combining his superhuman intellect with his lucid imagination. By imagination, he seems to go beyond figuratively trying to put himself in the mind of the criminal, but rather almost literally doing so. Sometimes he appears able to supernaturally read the mind of his unnammed companion, who narrates all three of the Dupin stories. (The other two are The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter.)

The similarity between the ultra-logical Dupin and his anonymous friend to Sherlock Holmes and Watson are uncanny. The two live together in a flat in Paris, having met by some extreme synchroniciy in which they both arrived at an obscure library in search of an obscure book at the exact same time.

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Doctor Watson actually compares Holmes to Dupin, to which Holmes replies: "No doubt you think you are complimenting me... In my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow... He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appears to imagine".

The 1951 film The Man With A Cloak, set in 1848, features Dupin as a character but it is ultimately revealed that Dupin is Edgar Allan Poe himself. He also made an appearance in Alan Moore's 1999 comic book League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume I.

The Green Hornet

2011-02-10T19:54:00.007-05:00

As our manifesto here states, we regard the two hundred year period from 1766 to 1966 as Earth's last (and probably final) "Golden Age". And that glorious year of 1966 brought us The Green Hornet television show, based on the old film serial which was in turn based on the old old radio drama.

The Green Hornet is Britt Reid, a newspaper publisher by day who goes out in his masked secret identity at night to fight crime. He is accompanied by his sidekick Kato (Bruce Lee), who drives their Batmobile-like supercar, the "Black Beauty." Kato's ethnicity seems to keep wavering over the years, from Japanese to Filipino to Korean.

Although little mention of this has been made in recent decades, the Green Hornet is actually related to the Lone Ranger in the context of both shows (they were both created for WXYZ by Fran Striker). In the original Lone Ranger radio show, his nephew Dan Reid is the same character as The Green Hornet's father. Britt Reid is the Lone Ranger's great-nephew.

It's a tragedy that only 26 episodes of the Green Hornet's TV series were filmed (27 if you include their guest appearance on an episode of Batman.) The show seemed immensely popular at the time, and its pop culture clout still resonates far beyond that which is usually commensurate for a show that was cancelled after only one season. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any show with similar longevity-to-content ratio other than The Prisoner - and that doesn't really count because it wasn't cancelled, it was deliberately intended to conclude in one season.

The short-lived show also spawned a short-lived comic book, on the Gold Key imprint. I used to have one of the three issues published, and would dearly love to get it again, along with the other two issues. (Other Green Hornet comics have also been published before the TV show, tying in with the serial and radio incarnations of the Hornet.) Two novels tying in with the TV series were also published: The Case of the Disappearing Doctor and The Infernal Light.

Keeping with the spy-gadgetry obsession of the 1960s, the Green Hornet was considerably techno-augmented for the TV show: the Hornet carried a gizmo called his "Hornet's Sting", which would telescope out and project ultrasonic waves that
could somehow open locked doors, set things on fire, and cause guns to explode. He also had a special gun loaded with extremely fast-acting tranquilizer gas. Kato's outfit was fitted with green darts that fired from his sleeves, even though he still tended to prefer hand-to-hand Kung Fu fighting.

Their Black Beauty car could fire explosive torpedos from retractable panels under the headlights, a sleep-gas sprayer in the center of the front grille, and something they called "The Scanner", which was a small flying video/audio surveillance device which launched from the vehicle, went on recon, then returned. This was years before the concept of the unmanned miniature drone become commonplace as it is today.

Surprisingly, the TV series is currently not available in America on DVD or Blu-Ray. However, there is a pricey Japanese box set.

Pyracy

2011-02-09T15:06:00.007-05:00

Much of what people know today about the pirates of old comes down from one singular codified source - the book A General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724 and written by an anonymous figure calling himself Capt. Charles Johnson. I say "anonymous" because there is no record of this man ever having existed, aside from this book and its sequel, so it is generally held that it is a pseudonym. Many have attempted to credit Daniel DeFoe or Nathaniel Mist with authorship, but that theory is extremely specious one and has fallen out of favor with academia. We may never know the true identity of the good Captain.

According to Wikipedia:

While Johnson's identity is unknown, he demonstrates a knowledge of the sailor's speech and life, suggesting he could have been an actual sea captain. He could also have been a professional writer, well versed in the sea, using a pseudonym. If this is true, the name was perhaps chosen to reflect the playwright Charles Johnson, who had an unsuccessful play with The Successful Pyrate in 1712, which glamorized the career of Henry Avery and had been something of a scandal for seeming to praise a criminal. Following it, however, many authors would rush forward with biographies and catalogs of criminals, including catalogs of highwaymen and prostitutes. By this theory, the pseudonymous "Charles Johnson" of the pirate catalog was merely taking part in a burgeoning industry in criminal biography.

On the other hand, whoever the editors of the Wikipedia page about the book are, they mistakenly refer to such pirate traditions as peg-legs, the Jolly Roger, and the concept of buried treasure to be myths that Capt. Johnson fancifully made up for his book. That is so not so.

The Jolly Roger, far from being a myth, was a slang term for skulls in general, and was applied to pirate flags that sometimes employed a skull or skeleton motif. Richard Hawkins, when captured by pirates in 1724, reported that these pirates carried a black flag bearing the image of a skeleton stabbing a heart with a spear, which they called "Jolly Roger". Since pirates were probably poor seamstresses, many simply employed a black flag to symbolize their piracy, but nevertheless many called these black flags "Jolly Roger" as well. Although Wikipedia sorts this out relatively truthily on their Jolly Roger page and provides numerous examples of the specific Jolly Roger flags flown by individual pirates such as "Black Sam" Bellamy, they perpetuate yet another falsity there when they state "It is assumed by most that the name Jolly Roger comes from the French words jolie rouge, meaning "pretty red".

As for the "myth" of buried treasure, Wikipedia's own page about it admits that Capt. William Kidd did indeed bury treasure, and that stories of pirates burying their treasure existed a century before the era of Capt. Johnson's book.

And if you think the idea of pirate peg-legs are a myth, you might want to ask Francois LeClerc about that. If you can reach him on the Ouija board.

Wikipedia, as usual, contradicts itself and is not to be fully trusted, being written by humans with agendas, most of whom really need to get a life anyway.

We here regard the entirety of Cap'n Johnson's glorious book as being essentially accurate, and it can be found here in the Eastern North Carolina Digital Library.

Apophis Now

2011-02-08T23:09:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow, an asteroid about the size of an automobile will hurtle past the Earth, missing impact with us by only about 64,300 miles. That asteroid is called 2011 CA7 and was discovered by astronomers only a month ago - a fact that should give pause to those who believe unquestioningly that NASA's Near-Earth Object Program has everything under control when it comes to watching for unexpected oncoming objects.

Scarier still, a four-foot-wide boulder we call asteroid 2011 CQ came within just 3400 miles of Earth on February 4th, but you didn't hear much about it in the media. It was only discovered only 14 hours before it made its close-enough-to-smell-us pass. Think on that awhile.

The asteroid 99942 Apophis was once believed to be in danger of colliding with Earth on April 13, 2012. That risk has since been ruled out by NASA, but now Russian scientists have announced that Apophis will come disturbingly close to Earth on its April 13, 2029 flyby. "On that date," says Wikipedia, "it will become as bright as magnitude 3.3 (visible to the naked eye from rural as well as darker suburban areas, visible with binoculars from most locations). This close approach will be visible from Europe, Africa, and western Asia." The chart above, also from Wikipedia, indicates the potential impact zone for Earth along Apophis' path.

NASA maintains the Russian scientists' calculations are in error, however, and that Apophis will be at least 18,300 miles from Earth at its closest approach. Still, considering that the potato-looking asteroid is almost 900 feet wide, and given that it will pass well into areas inhabited by our orbital satellites, it still has great potential to wreak havoc.

Novalyne Price

2011-02-01T08:39:00.004-05:00

Robert E. Howard, the stunningly prolific master of pulp literature who brought us Conan the Barbarian, Kull the Conqueror, and, uh, Dark Agnes de Chastillon, did it all for the one true love of his life. And her name was Novalyne Price.

According to Wikipedia:

Price initially sought out Howard for advice as to how she could get her writing published. Common interests and personal chemistry, however, created a strong bond of friendship between the two. Despite personality differences, misunderstandings, and unsuccessful attempts to bring their relationship beyond casual dating, Price and Howard remained close until Howard's suicide in 1936. After Howard's death, Price shifted her focus away from a writing career and strove to become the best teacher she could be, ultimately remaining a teacher until her retirement.

Throughout her life, Price did sell a number of articles and short stories, but it is her 1986 memoir (One Who Walked Alone) about her relationship with Howard for which she is best known. The movie, The Whole Wide World, starring Vincent D'Onofrio and Renée Zellweger is a direct adaptation of One Who Walked Alone.

Her influence on Howard's writing may be best seen in "Red Nails", published in Weird Tales after a trip to New Mexico with Truett Vinson, during which he discovered that Vinson had also been dating Price at the same time. He and Price never spoke again.

Howard committed suicide in 1936. He had made oblique foreshadowing of this when he told Price she was "in his sear and yellow leaf." Although the phrase sounded familiar to Price at the time, it was not until later that she discovered the source was Shakespeare's Macbeth:

I have liv'd long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

Epsilon Aurigae's Dark Companion

2011-01-30T00:08:00.003-05:00

Epsilon Aurigae was first observed to be a variable star by German astronomer Johann Fritsch observed it in 1821, and it's been confounding scientists ever since. Wikipedia describes it this way:

Epsilon Aurigae is an unusual eclipsing binary system comprising an Fo supergiant and a companion which is generally accepted to be a huge dark disk orbiting an unknown object, possibly a binary system of 2 small B-type stars. About every 27 years, Epsilon Aurigae's brightness drops from an apparent visual magnitude of +2.92 to +3.83. This dimming lasts 640–730 days.[3] In addition to this eclipse, the system also has a low amplitude pulsation with a non-consistent period of around 66 days.[4] The distance to the system is still a subject of debate, but modern estimates place it approximately 2,000 light years from Earth.

Citizen Sky is currently running a project encouraging armchair astronomy enthusiasts to help observe the Epsilon Aurigae eclipse, which is currently still ongoing. They provide you with a finder chart and tutorials so you can collect and contribute scientific data to help solve the mystery. No equipment is necessary, nor is any prior experience in amateur astronomy. Epsilon Aurigae is very bright in fall, winter and spring - sufficiently so that it can be observed by anyone with decent eyesight.

World Business Leaders Told Aliens Exist

2011-01-29T00:12:00.001-05:00

Michael E. Salla's Exopolitics Institute, always a good source for cutting-edge information, is reporting that a Saudi Arabian global business conference recently made some surprisingly frank declarations about alien life:

"At five thousand dollars a ticket, some business leaders got more than they bargained for when they attended the first day of the Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF) being held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. They were told flying saucers are real, and they had better start thinking about the business implications of extraterrestrial life and technologies. Convened each year by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority, the GCF brings together business and political leaders to discuss ways of promoting business competitiveness. For the first time at its annual conference, the GCF held a panel discussing UFOs and extraterrestrial life. Titled “Learning from Outer Space” the panel comprised five speakers who all endorsed the view that extraterrestrial life is real, and has many implications for the world as we know it.

The panel was held on January 23, and was a “main plenary” session meaning all GCF participants were able to attend and hear what the experts had to say about UFOs and extraterrestrial life. Up to 1000 participants included business and political elites such as former British and Canadian Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien; Jim Albaugh, President and CEO of Boeing; Andy Bird, chairman of Walt Disney International; Jared Cohen, Director of Google ideas, and many others. The advice they got was that the issue of extraterrestrial life is real, and they better start paying attention to the business implications."

Read the entire article here. And in a follow-up article, Salla mentions that President Bill Clinton also took part in this conference, and addressed the crowd with remarks on the necessity for innovation. Clearly this is no small-time eccentric convention, but a serious symposium of some of our planet's major players. Also on hand were Stanton Friedman, Jacques Vallee, Nick Pope, and Michio Kaku.

Salla in convinced that this means, more than ever, that disclosure about extraterrestrial civilizations is imminent, and we tend to agree. This year of the rabbit could indeed bring us interesting times!

Year of the Rabbit

2011-01-28T06:22:00.002-05:00

"May you live in interesting times", so says the Chinese curse. Soon we shall all live in interesting times indeed, every last one of us: February 3 begins the Chinese Year of the Rabbit.

Rabbit years have always been associated with upheaval, motion, activity, and most of all, sex. An article on Yahoo News quotes a Feng Shui master as stating, "it will be a year of more sex scandals and sexual affairs".

The chaos that comes with a Rabbit year can be of a playful and mischievous sort, much like the happy-go-lucky hippity-hop behavior of bunnies themselves. But remember that one man's mischief can be another man's murder: 1963 was a Rabbit year and John F. Kennedy's head was blown apart by multiple gunshots. The "lone nut" patsy was of course none other than Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was nicknamed "Ozzie Rabbit" (after the Walt Disney cartoon character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit) during his time in the military with David Ferrie.

It's gonna be a bumpy ride. Put me in, coach. We're gonna need a bigger boat. We're gonna take 'em out a whole new door. Always in motion is the future.

Telephone Telepathy

2011-01-27T17:11:00.005-05:00

Good old Rupert Sheldrake, he of the Morphic Field Theory, has an intriguing new telephone telepathy experiment that anyone can take part in.

According to his website:

Many people claim to be able to know who's calling them before they answer the call. Is this just coincidence or is some other factor involved? The Telephone Telepathy experiment attempts to answer this question empirically.

To participate in the experiment you will need a U.S. phone (cell or landline) and provider as well as 2 people with whom you share a close relationship (eg. friends, family). These people will require a U.S. cell phone and provider.

Once you have registered you can login and add some friends. After logging in, further instructions for conducting the test will be available.

Sheldrake's works seem far-ranging, free-thinking, and eminently workable - therefore we here approve wholeheartedly. Sociopaths and professional skeptics violently oppose his ideas, which of course makes us all the more convinced that the man is on to something.

The Thirteenth Sign Hysteria

2011-01-14T09:43:00.005-05:00

Talk about your Zodiac-killer: for some reason, most of the news media is abuzz with claims that Ophiuchus is being officially added to the traditional 12 Signs of the Zodiac and that everyone's charts are now ruined, because their sun sign will be different as a result of the reshuffling. And of course, the sheep of the world are all in a tizzy about the Earth-shattering news about this "new" sign of the Zodiac.

Problem is, it isn't true.

There is no official governing body that gets to determine, by fiat, the status of the Zodiac, as if it were daylight savings time or a standard unit of measurement. Some astrologers have already embraced Ophiuchus years ago, while most have not. Hate to break it to you kids, but there's nothing "new" about Ophiuchus: it's been part of Japanese astrology since before you were born, and in other Sidereal astrology systems.

A Minnesota teacher named Parke Kunkle recently released a statement pointing out that the current Zodiacal system is inaccurate because the Earth's axis doesn't rotate in the same direction all the time; it actually wobbles to and fro in its eccentric orbit. This wobble causes discrepancies on how humans have viewed constellations since they were first charted 2000 years ago in the Babylonian culture. But this does not amount to a universal and official "new Zodiac in effect" as of now; it's just another volley in the neverending game of astronomers critizing astrology.

(Image: constellation of Ophiuchus, from allthesky.com by way of Wikipedia.)

Neta Snook

2011-01-07T07:43:00.005-05:00

And speaking of Amelia Earhart, let's dispel that common assumption that she was the first and greatest early aviatrix. Amelia's mentor and teacher was also a woman - one Neta Snook.

Neta was the first female aviator in Iowa, the first female student accepted at the Curtiss Flying School of Virginia (only after being persistent - her first application came back stamped "no females allowed"), the first woman to run her own aviation business and the first woman to operate a commercial airfield.

Yet her name is forgotten in the pages of history to all but the most avid aficionados of early 20th century aviation.

Nikumaroro

2011-01-04T20:03:00.005-05:00

Regardless of whether that the tiny bone fragments recently discovered on Nikumaroro Island (formerly known as Gardner Island) turn out to be those of Amelia Earhart or not, one thing is certain: there was a woman castaway on this island, and her story could end up being even more fascinating than Amelia's. If not Amelia, who was she? How did she get here? How many more were here with her?

But the evidence is mounting in Amelia's favor. Parts of a jackknife have been found, just like the one Amelia was to known to carry. A bottle said to be for a woman's freckle cream called "Dr. Berry's" has turned up, and historians say that Amelia did indeed try to cover up her freckles.

And according to Wikipedia:

In an area on the atoll's northwest side called the "Seven Site" the team has found and cataloged artifacts such as flakes of rouge and a shattered mirror from a woman's cosmetic compact, parts of a folding pocket knife, traces of campfires bearing bird and fish bones, clams opened in the same way as oysters in New England, "empty shells laid out as if to collect rain water" and American bottles dating from before World War II, their heat warped bottoms showing they "had once stood in a fire as if to boil drinking water."

The expeditions to search for Amelia's remains have been very arduous, as the island is teeming with rats and aggressive Coconut Crabs which have powerful enough claws to break open coconuts (imagine what they can do to people!)

Victorian Film Festival

2011-01-02T00:01:00.003-05:00

A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899)

The Sick Kitten (1903)

Santa Claus (1898)

Ladies on Bicycles (1899)

Le Diable Noir (1905)

Emotional Contagion

2011-01-01T15:18:00.002-05:00

Recently one of our readers, "Melissa", left a startling comment about the concept of "emotional contagion", something I'm embarrassed to say I'd never ever heard of until now. But I'm quickly making up for lost time.

According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, it would appear that modern psychology has finally caught on to something that many of us have taken for granted for a long time now - that unpleasant emotional states can be transferred and caught like a disease, or like barnacles that adhere to a ship and must be scraped off regularly. It's just very surprising to me to hear such things openly espoused by medical professionals now. On one hand, I'm excited that they've made such progressive strides into territory previously explored only by the bravest thinkers; on the other hand, given my general distrust of the pill-pushers in the "mental health" industry, I have to wonder if this isn't leading up to something ugly.

Be that as it may, here's what Wikipedia says about emotional contagion, and I'm all ears:

"Vittorio Gallese posits that mirror neurons are responsible for intentional attunement in relation to others. Gallese and colleagues at the University of Parma found a class of neurons in the premotor cortex that discharge when macaque monkeys execute goal-related hand movements or when they watch others doing the same action. One class of these neurons fires with action execution and observation, and with sound production of the same action. Research in humans shows an activation of the premotor cortex and parietal area of the brain for action perception and execution. Gallese continues his dialogue to say humans understand emotions through a simulated shared body state. The observers' neural activation enables a direct experiential understanding. "Unmediated resonance" is a similar theory by Goldman and Sripada (2004)."

"Unlike cognitive contagion, emotional contagion is less conscious and more automatic. It relies mainly on non-verbal communication, although it has been demonstrated that emotional contagion can, and does, occur via telecommunication. For example, people interacting through E-mails and "chats" are affected by the other's emotions, without being able to perceive the non-verbal cues."

"Given that emotions function to help humans adapt to social situations it makes sense that one person's emotion would affect another's. Just as herd animals would benefit from rapidly passing messages about risk and reward, emotional contagion seems to be adaptive for humans to function in groups. This system can enable a rapid communication of opportunity and risk, mediate a group interaction, and help humans attend to social rules and norms such as maintaining harmonious interaction with a powerful ally".

But the real kicker to all of this comes in the part where the article discusses emotional detachment, and lists it as a solution to avoid negative emotional contagion. There are two kinds of emotional detachment, it says: the involuntary kind, which is not good since it essentially is an inability to relate or communicate; and the second kind, the good kind, which is:

"...a positive and deliberate mental attitude which avoids engaging the emotions of others. It is often applied to relatives and associates of people who are in some way emotionally overly demanding. A simple example might be a person who trains himself to ignore the "pleading" food requests of a dieting spouse. A more widespread example could be the indifference parents develop towards their children's begging. It is not to be confused with being wilfully cold or unpleasant, because it is a positive mental attitude. Of course, the decision as to whether emotional detachment in any given set of circumstances is considered to be a positive or negative mental attitude is a subjective one, and therefore a decision on which different people may not agree.

This detachment does not mean avoiding the feeling of empathy; it is actually more of an awareness of empathetic feelings that allows the person space needed to rationally choose whether or not to be overwhelmed or manipulated by such feelings."

Thank you. The defense rests, your honor.

Full Mental Jack

2010-12-26T11:47:00.019-05:00

The internet has no shortage of armchair theoreticians examining the subtextual undercurrents of Stanley Kubrick films. I'm but one of many, but I'm the least dogmatic one I know; most of the leading Kubrick online "experts" have a tendency to indulge in wild speculation out of left field, then insist that their interpretation is absolutely right. Do a little digging and you'll find whole clusters of internet assholes arguing bitterly about what Kubrick really must have meant in his films, like medieval monks fighting over how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

But Kubrick wasn't supporting any of these guys' interpretations when he was alive, and he sure isn't supporting them now.

I merely present these disassociated fragments for what they are: puzzling evidence from Full Metal Jacket. What do you make of this, Professor?

* Satan. According to several online sources, the Vietnamese phrase "TIếP TụC PHụNG Sự QUỷ NGÀI" seen on a building during a battle scene, means "To continuously serve Satan, your excellency." Given that there's already been some conspiratorial rumblings about Kubrick's fascination with Satanism, this would seem to be a wakeup call to assess Full Metal Jacket with the same scrutiny as The Shining, even though on the face of it the film appears to be a completely normal war flick, even by Kubrick standards.

In an early draft of Kubrick's script, Hartman says, "Have you seen the light? The white light? The great light? The guiding light? Do you have the vision?" And as you should already know, Lucifer is known as "the light bringer".

Further occult symbolism appears throughout the film, but one of my favorites is the scene where the men are all standing like religious statues out of ancient Egypt, ostensibly for the purpose of having their fingernails examined.

* Changing directions. One of the oddest things about the film is its unconventional plot structure. For the first third of it, the stars of the movie are Private Pyle and Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, and the plot is solely concerned with Pyle's torment by Hartman through basic training. Then something very strange happens: both these main characters die, and the movie takes a hard left turn into following Joker and a newly-added character, Rafterman, into battle.

This theme of "changing direction" pervades the film. Cowboy even says it aloud: "okay, listen up, we're changing direction." In that same scene, there's a shot where Doc Jay is seemingly dragging Eightball's body in the wrong direction, and if you take the time to obsessively map out the line-of-fire trajectory of the female sniper's shots, you'll find that none of it makes internal sense. And if we can claim to know one thing about Kubrick, it's that he was obsessive about such details - so even if something looks like a grievous continuity error, it isn't.

A sign reading "TÂM PHƯƠNG" reportedly translates as "center direction".

* John F. Kennedy. Collative Learning suggests the way the sniper scene was filmed with impossible shots is meant to indicate a subliminal commentary on the Kennedy assassination, and its "magic bullet" that impossibly changes direction. That Hartman mentions JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald earlier in the film, and that Cowboy is from Texas, also supposedly is connected to this. There's a lot of smoke there, but there's some fire.

To this end, I would also note that the magician rabbit stuffed animal that turns out to be a booby-trap could be a reference both to the "trickster rabbit" archetype, which, as we have already examined here, has parallels with Lee Harvey "Ozzie Rabbit" Oswald.

* The Shining. Parallels with The Shining are found aplenty here. Compare the bathroom scenes in both films. Note that subtle placement of images of Snoopy and Mickey Mouse appear in both. And speaking of the "trickster rabbit" archetype again, remember the Bugs Bunny thread running through The Shining. Also note the "indigenous people" subtext of both films (and in FMJ, there's even a scene where a giant graphic of a Native American appears behind Joker's shoulder)

And most important of all, note how Pyle's face begins to morph impossibly into Jack Torrance's, shortly before he puts his rifle in his mouth and commits suicide. (Remember in The Shining when Ullman mentions that the 1970 Grady did exactly the same thing?)

Is Pyle, in fact, demonically possessed? He certainly looks like it. And when he says "I am in a world of shit", it could be another subtle Kubrick joke (he is, after all, in the restroom and his name is Pyle) but it could also mean that he is in literally in Hell. Note that Hartman uses the same phrase earlier, when he instructs the men that Marines are not allowed to die, and when they do they end up in "a world of shit." At the film's end, the phrase appears for a third time. Joker walks through a hell-like landscape of fire as he acknowledges that he too is now "in a world of shit."

* Unreality. And just like in The Shining, things keep moving around, shifting, changing. Bullet holes disappear and reappear. Buildings change position. A burning Monolith-like structure comes and goes on the battlefield. And Pyle himself impossibly changes his place in line in the film's opening sweep past each of the men. We clearly see him in one place, then he's suddenly in the opposite corner of the room just seconds later.

Consider the notion that these men are actually in a literal netherworld, a purgatory, a Hell: there are a few indicators that maybe none of this real and is only a dream (which is a theory some have applied to The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut as well). When Hartman discovers that Pyle has gone insane, he shouts, "what are you animals doing in my head?"... "Head" being military jargon for toilet, of course. And just prior to this scene, Joker shines his flashlight on Hartman's name and then the word "Head" on the other door, very slowly to make sure we get it.

Perhaps the film should be best summed up by Cowboy's comment to Pyle after they beat him in the middle of an eerie blue-light-tinged night: "Remember, it's just a bad dream."

Temporarily Light

2010-12-13T16:55:00.014-05:00

After my previous musings on just what the hell is going on in Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining, I offer some further random thoughts and observations:

If Danny began to channel "Tony" in Nursery School, right about the time he was injured by Jack, that would place his age at around 3 or 4. But Wendy says that right after the incident, Jack gave up drinking and hasn't had a drink in 5 months.

How can the incident have been only 5 months ago? That makes no sense. Danny is clearly about 7 years old. There's no way this child can be only 5 months out of Nursery School. And if it's been only 5 months since his arm was pulled out of its socket, I think he would still be recovering from that.

One way to look at it is to assume that Wendy is simply lying to cover Jack's ass, but she's obviously not doing a very good job and she can't get her story straight. And when she lights her cigarette, note how her hand is trembling with theatrical nervousness. But why would she even admit to the incident and bring it up in the first place?

Consider when Jack is seated at the bar and confesses of the arm-dislocation incident to Lloyd, he speaks of it as being three years ago. And yet, he also reiterates Wendy's confused timeline about having given up alcohol 5 months ago. From this, we may infer that Jack has actually harmed Danny more than once.

Clearly, the timespace dilation that is causing discrepancies throughout the events of the film is also at play here. I think by the point Jack is drinking at the bar, he has his feet in two different points in time, perhaps even two different universes. It may be that one of these incidents he speaks of was actually committed in a previous life.

The case of Grady and his two daughters is similarly puzzling. We're told at first by Ullman that a man named Charles Grady killed his wife and two daughters with an axe in 1970. But most people who watch The Shining never even notice that when we think we're meeting him as a butler who spills Advocaat on Jack, we're actually meeting Delbert Grady, who cannot be the same man as Charles. Delbert is part of the 1921 crowd who manifest to Jack repeatedly, and is theoretically the father of the two twin girls in Alice in Wonderland-like dresses look like they're from that time period. So we have two different men named Grady who axed their families - one in 1921 and one in 1970.

Actually, we may have three different incidents, because the newspaper article that Jack reads in the Overlook Hotel scrapbook he finds (you can see it in the foreground beside his typewriter in the scene when he's telling Wendy not to interrupt his writing) says that Delbert Grady hacked them up "into little pieces" with the ax. But as Danny sees in the apparition of the twin girls in blue, they are fully intact, though dead from abdominal wounds. And consider that Ullman already told us that Charles Grady didn't leave his victims laying out in a hallway, he "stacked them neatly in one of the rooms". So what the heck?

Is this related, then, to the reason why two, possibly three, different naked women appear in the bathroom of Room 237? (One young, one old, and then there's seemingly a variant old one with shorter hair.)

With any other director - even Hitchcock - I would chalk these matters up to carelessness, sloppiness, and mere continuity errors. But we all know that Stanley Kubrick, the greatest obsessive-compulsive control freak in the history of motion pictures, left absolutely no detail thoroughly unresearched and exercised fanatical control over the placement of every word spoken and every picture hung. The man spent over a year picking out drapes and carpeting for this film; it's no wonder he only made a handful of films after "Spartacus".

Another sign of timespace dilation: watch when Jack walks down the hallway towards the Gold Room after Wendy accuses him of strangling Danny. Right after he says "me??" to himself, we can see his reflection appear on a mirror on the left hand side. Moments later, as he walks on, his reflection appears again in a second mirror, but not the third. If you watch this scene over and over - pause it at the reflection moments to study it closely - you can see that it is not possible for Jack's reflection to appear in those mirrors at the points that they do. I don't even know how Kubrick did the shot, unless there are some well placed mirrors hovering from the dolly as it rolls backward to film the shot. And when Wendy rolls the dining tray down the same hallway earlier in the film, there are no such impossible reflections.

Jack's hair and his typewriter both change color in the course of the film.

Does all of this mean anything, or is Kubrick just messing with us? Both, maybe.

The Satanic undercurrent in the film - which goes over the heads of most casual viewers - is practically shouted from the rootops. Jack's Baphomet pose in the photograph at film's end; his reference to his "employers" and the "contract" he signed with them, which would jeopardize his future if broken; Lloyd's hints that they are in either in hell, purgatory, or some sort of timespace-limbo where "your money is no good here"... and don't forget Lloyd's ominous reference to "the house".

Jack seems to be entering this world more and more as the movie progresses. Whereas only Lloyd manifests to him in his first bar sighting, the entire ballroom and all its patrons appear to him the second time. And these people are real, not spectral ghosts - real enough that Grady can spill Advocaat all over Jack, help him wipe it off, and then unlock the door of the storeroom to let him out. Tony and Hallorann's false assurance that these people aren't real indicates that they don't know everything that's happening here.

The Advocaat that Grady spills, by the way, is surely one of Kubrick's little jokes that he inserts into his films. Since this is apparently Satan's hotel, and the drinks come "from the house", then what Grady is bearing is "the Devil's Advocaat". Get it?

Advocaat, by the way, is a liqueur made from eggs, and eggs are well known as a symbol for the soul (as referenced by another cinema Satan in the film "Angel Heart".) Eggs also appear when Jack is eating them sunny-side-up while staring at his own reflection in bed.

Finally, I think it's interesting to note that Jack's Volkswagen in the original book was red, and Kubrick changed it to an egg-yolk yellow (the same color as Kubrick's typewriter from which all of this was conjured). And if you look closely at the car wreck that Hallorann slows down to observe as he makes his way in the Snowcat, a red Volkswagen has been totalled by an overturned semi-truck. Is this, as some have joked, Kubrick's little "fuck you" to Stephen King (who was unhappy with all the changes he made to his story)? Or is it meant to suggest that we're seeing a momentary convergence of parallel universes, and that this is literally the book version of Jack, Wendy and Danny?

Don César de Bazan

2010-12-06T10:39:00.003-05:00

Who the heck was Don César de Bazan?

As a character, he first appeared in the Victor Hugo play Ruy Blas in 1838. For some reason, this side character became the star of a play titled Don César de Bazan by Adolphe d'Ennery and in a different production also called Don César de Bazan by Jules Massenet. And finally, from that opera came another, grander one called Maritana which then became the standard-bearer for the Don Cesar story.

A man named Thomas Rowe (the same guy as the Australian architect? I'm not sure) was so obsessed with Maritana that he built Florida's Don CeSar palace in its honor.

But why all this fixation about this Don Cesar guy? Was he a real person? How did this side-character from a failed Victor Hugo play end up having such a lasting reverberation through the 19th and early 20th centuries? It's like if a whole theatrical cult of Mercutio had splintered off into a life of its own - which maybe, some say, Shakespeare in fact did by pinching him from The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet.

(Photo above: cigar box illustration promoting Maritana.)

The Arsenic Factor

2010-12-02T16:01:00.006-05:00

Some citizens are astonishingly blasé about it, but the announcement made today by NASA is nothing short of explosive. A new form of bacteria discovered in California's Mono Lake - called GFAJ-1 - has a different DNA structure than any life form ever known to exist on Earth, and ever thought possible.

This new form of bacteria replaces phosphorus at the DNA level with arsenic, and as C-Net notes:

That would distinguish it from every other form of life known to man, all of which, no matter how diverse, is comprised of the same six elements, phosphorus, sulfur, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. But the bacteria found in Mono Lake--which is known for its unusual chemistry, including very high levels of salinity, alkalinity, and arsenic--is made partly of arsenic, and has no phosphorus in its DNA.

This puts a new slant on everything.

Now that we can throw out the long-held tenet that all life in the Universe is made of the same six components, we have to start all over again in our examination of planets, exoplanets, moons, asteroids, comets and what-have-you, and reassess the possibility of life on them. Jupiter, for example, has an abundance of arsenic in its composition. Until today, the official scientific party line would have been that life as we know it could never exist there. And now, it could be possible that something like GFAJ-1 could thrive in pockets of Jovian arsenic.

And it doesn't stop at arsenic. The floodgates are open now to argue that other combinations of elements could conceivably make up new kinds of DNA that most scientists hadn't even imagined until now. (Of course, Star Trek had it right back in 1966 when they posited life based on other elements instead of carbon.)

My question is, how did this bizarre new bacteria manage to survive in Mono Lake without being noticed up till now? Is the possibility not a large one that it got here extraterrestrially via a meteorite or something?

Accept the Mystery

2010-11-30T10:11:00.009-05:00

"Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." - Rashi.

I recently rewatched the Coen Brothers film A Serious Man for the first time since its Blu-Ray/DVD release back in February, and enjoyed it much more this time out. The Coens have always been merchants of misanthropy, but it was just so intense and over-the-top in this film that I could barely stand to watch it.

Re-appraising it over the weekend, however, I managed to tune out the bulk of the film - consisting mostly of scene after scene after scene of harassment and humiliation heaped on lead character Larry Gopnik - and focus on the subtle goodies sprinkled lightly throughout. The periphery is always where the most interesting stuff happens in Coen films anyway, but you really have to mine for it a little harder in A Serious Man.

The film opens with a seemingly non-sequitur bit about a Jewish couple (Velvel and Dora) about a hundred years ago. They are visited in the middle of a dark and snowy night by a man claiming to be Reb Groshkover. Dora, aghast, insists the man must be a Dybbuk because she knows the real Groshkover is dead.

(In Jewish tradition, a Dybbuk is a possessing spirit that floats around seeking bodies to attach itself to and inhabit, like a virus and its host. The word itself literally means "attachment".)

Dora stabs him in the sternum with an icepick, and it appears at first that her superstitious theory is true: Groshkover has virtually no reaction to the stabbing, and in fact laughs heartily at her. Just before he gets up to leave (saying "one knows when one is not wanted"), however, we see a pool of blood forming around the icepick that is still protruding from his chest. Groshkover disappears into the night, and the couple still disagree on whether this was a Dybbuk or not. Since the scene ends there, we will never know - was he or wasn't he?

This places Dora and Velvel's mysterious visitor in the same unknowable Eigenstate as Schrödinger's Cat, the example commonly used to illustrate the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics.

Gopnik, later in the film, actually gives his students a lesson on Schrödinger's Cat, and points out to them the futility of trying to truly know anything - even as he expects them to study the subject and subsequently take a test on it. Gopnik clearly seems incapable of applying the lesson of Schrödinger's Cat to his own life - two different people in the course of the film urge him to just "accept the mystery", and he just doesn't get it.

Gopnik's brother Arthur, meanwhile, is an idiot savant who lives with him and spends all his time working on a mysterious document he calls The Mentaculus. Arthur believes that the Mentaculus, when completed, will be the end-all, be-all, unified field theory of everything in the Universe. Gopnik largely ignores him, and wishes he'd just get his own apartment and go away. But we see hints that Arthur is actually on to something: Arthur applies his theories to gambling, and in so doing becomes quite successful at it. Seemingly he really can predict the future with his Mentaculus and its "probability map", but he's too socially inept and withdrawn to harness this knowledge properly.

At one point, Gopnik interestingly uses the phrase "bolt from the blue" to describe the upheavals in his life, and says "everything I thought was one way turn out to be another." And at another point, a Rabbi uses the phrase "right where you are sitting now" in the course of telling a convoluted story with no apparent point, about a dentist who thinks he sees the words "help me" (עִזרוּ לִ) in Hebrew on the teeth of a patient.

At film's end (sorry about the spoiler, but the movie has been out for well over a year now) we're left with another unresolved Schrödinger's Cat. Gopnik gets a call from his doctor that he needs to come in immediately for a serious discussion about his X-ray results. The doctor then repeats and underscores the seriousness of it by stressing that Gopnik must come in to see him right now.

Meanwhile, across town, we see Gopnik's son staring at a tornado headed directly for him as his teacher is unable to get the storm shelter door open.

Fade to black. Credits.

Headquarters

2010-11-13T08:47:00.010-05:00

I always knew I was the center of the Universe, and now Robert Lanza agrees.

Lanza's book Biocentrism, which contends that human consciousness is what is really determining the shaping of reality - is making waves in the media lately. Even Huffington Post is all over the concept now, giving Lanza ample space to drop some science:

Cosmologists propose that the universe was until recently a lifeless collection of particles bouncing against each other. It's presented as a watch that somehow wound itself up, and that will unwind in a semi-predictable way. But they've shunted a critical component of the cosmos out of the way because they don't know what to do with it. This component, consciousness, isn't a small item. It's an utter mystery, which we think has somehow arisen from molecules and goo.

Lanza goes on to enumerate in great detail how extremely unlikely it is that the Universe could have formed in such a way that made conditions just right for this spiral arm of the Milky Way to have formed this planet whose conditions are just right for hosting human life and that we happen to have "evolved" here at just the right time to take advantage of it, despite a long chain of factors and variables that make all of the above statistically near-impossible to have occurred in sequence.

Does it mean that the "Creationists" are right after all? Or does it mean mankind is just the luckiest critter in the Universe?

Lanza says no to both - Lanza says that we dodged all those dangers of the physical world because we were here first and we are shaping reality as we go along - "we" being life itself, the life force, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it that is really piloting these golems of flesh and bone we're lumbering around in, that St. Francis of Assisi referred to as "Brother Ass". Though human consciousness may or may not carry greater weight in that reality-creation, life means life, and that includes not only you and me, but all life, even yeast, fungi, and microscopic dust mites.

Lanza isn't the first to propose these ideas, of course - not by any means - and some previous blazers of these trails have expressed them more elegantly, in fact. But by building on the works of those pioneering thinkers who came before him, Lanza is having some success at entering these radical ideas into the mainstream at a time when even our grandparents are finally just starting to have an inkling of the ramifications of quantum physics.

His view of Biocentric Cosmology can be broken down into seven basic principles:

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

4. Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The "universe" is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.

6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

My old pal David Thompson at NASA's Astroparticle Physics Lab in Maryland has effusively embraced Lanza's work, describing it as "a wake-up call" for us all.

Dresden Angels

2010-11-12T20:39:00.001-05:00

The folks at Dresden Star offer some amazing Victorian-style one-of-a-kind Christmas ornaments handmade almost entirely from reclaimed bric-a-brac of the period.

The hot-air-balloon bunny above is made from "old glass ornament(s) with beautiful patina; detailed embossed scrap(s) (most of them predate the 1900s and are meticulously backed with early papers and/or old tinsel); a variety of old fabric - chenille, lace, ribbon and metallic trims; old decorative tinsel (most of which is from old tree garlands); and old papers of all kinds, including lovely old-stock Dresden paper trims, old foil, gift wrap, and other embellishments."

The angel below is made of "antique scrap bust of demure young Victorian maiden, early vintage Dresden paper harp, vintage rhinestone (jewel on necklace), circa 1920s Dennison crepe paper (covered over cardboard that has a built-in cone for hanging as a topper), the finest hand-tatted antique Victorian lace, buff-colored antique lace edged with chenille, early vintage silk flower petals, Dresden paper wings, 3 early vintage and antique Dresden paper medallions, circa 1920s old-stock multi-colored spun-glass halo, antique Dresden paper bows, 3 different antique Dresden paper trims, antique tinsel roping, delicate antique gold cording (hanger)."

The End of Time

2010-11-03T11:18:00.004-04:00

Meatloaf may not have to pray for the end of time for as long as he thought.

Scientists are now saying that time itself may cease to exist in just a mere five billion years. They say this will occur "coincidentally, right around the time our sun is slated to die," but consider that this isn't a coincidence at all, but rather an indicator of our own live demonstration of quantum uncertainty and humans creating their own reality, unwittingly, via our own perceptions - as far as we're concerned, in a very real sense, we really are the center of the Universe.

The time-will-end theory depends on acceptance of the idea of the Multiverse (and that's an idea we fully endorse here, in case you haven't caught on), and in discussing this, the above-linked National Geographic article actually elucidates one of the most radical, dangerous, and paradigm-shattering truths there is:

"The problem with a multiverse is that anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times, and that makes calculating probabilities seemingly impossible."

If the above sentence doesn't simultaneously terrify you, inspire you, make you burst into tears, make you start laughing like a maniac, make you want to quit your job, make you want to go lay down and try not to think about it, then you haven't truly wrapped your head around the implications of what it really means.

A related phenomenon that we're just starting to understand is the unknown structures tugging at our own universe that would have been total sci-fi fodder not long ago, but it's quickly become accepted as business as usual. There's a so-called "dark flow" towards the edge of the Universe that's causing hundreds of galaxy clusters to zoom, en masse, in the same direction at over 2.2 million miles an hour, and according to leading physicists, it is the best indicator we have of objects outside our universe and outside what we call "reality" influencing objects in our own.

When you start really grasping these concepts with the same part of your brain that you think about your day-to-day life stuff - and not just quickly filing it away in the "gosh, how bout that, aint that somethin" part of your brain - you might start caring a lot less about the little things on this rock that so many people waste their entire brief existences obsessing about (sports, politics, scrapbooking).

(Image above: the currently most distant known object in the Universe, a little something we like to call "UDFy-38135539".)

Victorian Ladies Spy Camera Concealed in Watch

2010-10-29T21:11:00.003-04:00

"Secret gadgets up under her clothes,
Stuff you hear about but nobody knows,
It ain't no use - all women are bad."

- Lux Interior, 1989.

Spotted on Watchismo:

“The Lancaster Watch Camera was patented in October 1886 and made until 1890. Such tiny cameras were the forerunners for the ‘spy’ camera – a mechanism disguised as a different object. However, it would have been very inconvenient to use as four very small catches had to be released in order to remove the glass screen and to fit a separate metal sensitised material holder for each exposure. As a result, the model sadly sold badly and is much rarer than the improved version which came on the market in 1890. The ladies’ pattern is therefore particularly special, and only four original models are known to exist."

Indiana Jones Does Thimble Theatre

2010-10-28T10:32:00.004-04:00

Chuck Forsman is a minor deity and here's why. Someone hire this man and put him to work rendering all modern films into E.C. Segar's style, immediately. I want to see him do Inglourious Basterds.

Buy a print of the full sheet of strips here.

The Sitchin Situation

2010-10-27T11:42:00.015-04:00

The news hit me yesterday like an atom bomb: Zecharia Sitchin is Dead. Everyone, including myself, was shocked, but the guy was ninety years old. Sitchin seemed timeless, ageless, exempt from death, more of a force or a fixture than a mere mortal. As it turns out, he passed away earlier this month but few knew about it until it was finally announced on the official Sitchin site:

The family asks that you respect its privacy during this difficult time and refrain from contacting family members directly. Instead, to offer tributes to Mr. Sitchin or to contact those handling his affairs, please email tributes@sitchin.com or send a letter to P.O. Box 577, New York, NY 10185.

Far from simply succumbing to senescence, "old age", or so-called "natural causes", Sitchin was still extremely active at 90 and published a new book just a few months ago. It was apparently lingering complications from an "acute abdominal problem" in July that did his physical shell in.

It's rather difficult for me to enunciate a general summary of Sitchin's work, since its tentacles extend to virtually all aspects of life, and since I disagree vehemently with portions of it even as I champion other portions. And those conflicting portions are so intermixed, that even discussing and debating it can be, as Russell Long once said of the JFK assassination mess, "like pickin' gnat shit out of pepper."

Unlike many armchair researchers (like, say, Erich Von Daniken), Sitchin actually travelled extensively and was out there in the field, mixing the map and the message. On one of his "Earth Chronicles Expeditions", he actually visited Phaestos, the city where the Phaestos Disc was unearthed, and made some fascinating discoveries of his own. No, far from being the charlatan that internet negativists sometimes accused him of being, Sitchin was the real deal, and did more hands-on archaeology than some archaeologists I know.

On the other hand, Sitchin did promote a convoluted mythology involving the Anunnaki, a race of extra-terrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. According to Sitchin, the planet Nibiru (or "Planet X") has a severely elliptical orbit in our own Solar System, and makes return visits to us with a long periodicity. Sitchin insisted that the ancient Sumerian culture - which in turn could be said to be the cradle of all subsequent civilization - was created by the Anunnaki, who were also supposedly the same entities as the Biblical Nephilim and the Islamic Jinn.

Wikipedia says: "Sitchin's speculations have been ridiculed by professional scientists, historians, and archaeologists, who note many problems with his translations of ancient texts and categorize his work as pseudohistory and pseudoscience." And that's true enough, but you know and I know that some of the greatest achievements of our lifetime have been labeled "pseudoscience" by the ignoble intelligentsia. The halls of the non-existent museum of pseudoscience are littered with inventions and ideas that really worked, independently of the skeptics who seek to supress puzzle pieces that don't fit their idea of what the big jigsaw puzzle is supposed to be depicting.

Me, I applaud Sitchin's research on its own merits and for its own sake; the puzzling evidence is patently obvious, but Sitchin and I simply differed on how to interpret that evidence. This in no way invalidates the subject itself - I simply prefer to leave most of the blanks unfilled-in and unknown for now, while Sitchin tended to abhor a vacuum every bit as much as the rationalist-skeptics who attacked him, and would fill in the blanks of any unknowns he encountered with a theory to explain them away. Sitchin was rarely heard to say "I just don't know" or "I have no idea what this might mean."

Of course, the Sumerians aren't here to contradict us. They didn't even call themselves Sumerians - they called themselves ùĝ saĝ gíg-ga ("ung sang giga"), which roughly translates as "men with black heads". The terms "Sumer" and "Sumerian" didn't come about, to be retroactively applied, until thousands of years later!

For better or for worse, Sitchin's work has influenced or inspired a whole raft of other para-cosmologies, from The Raelians to The Nuwaubians to David Icke to Nancy Lieder and the Zetas. To his credit, Sitchin took great pains to distance himself from the most rabid of the internet's doom-hungry legions who constantly claim that Nibiru will destroy Earth either in 2012 or any day now. As is so often the case, the problem is not with the originator of an idea or a philosophy, but with demented individuals who appropriate that material and misuse it. The best thing you can do is not to read about Sitchin (this blog post included), but go read what Sitchin himself wrote.

Sitchin's most important work ever was in progress at the time of his passing. In his new book, he proposes that the ancient Sumerian Puabi was an alien goddess whose 4500-year-old skeletal remains may still contain DNA from her alien race. And he was in the process of mounting the "Goddess of Ur Genome Project", an effort to test that DNA and prove that aliens seeded humanity. Perhaps his death will spur his devotees to spearhead this testing through - and posthumously prove him right.

"And of His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the living creatures that He has spread out in them. He has the power to bring them together when He so wills." (Ash-Shura 42:29)

1928 Time Traveller?

2010-10-26T09:20:00.014-04:00

There's been a lot of hubbub about this alleged "time traveller" film clip going around the interwebs for a few days now, and it seems to be gathering steam. I hadn't planned on covering it here, but I suppose I should, given the circumstances.

Basically, there's this film footage shot at the 1928 premiere event for Charlie Chaplin's movie The Circus, which seems to show a woman walking around talking on a cellphone. Of course, within conventional thought, that's not possible.

Some have suggested that perhaps it's merely a walkie-talkie, but the earliest walkie-talkies were in the 1940s, and so huge that they were contained in a backpack. It wasn't until the 1950s that handheld walkie-talkies were developed, and even then they were as big as a loaf of bread. These devices were strictly for military use anyway, and public use of walkie-talkies didn't occur until even later.

Maybe she's just listening to a Dodgers game on a small radio and holding it against her ear to hear it clearly? No. Handheld radios didn't happen until the transistor radio boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

For a few moments I thought I'd solved the mystery when I started looking at hearing aids of the time, but then realized that all "ear trumpets" are meant to be held longways with the end against your ear, not the side. If our mystery lady is indeed employing one of those, she's doin' it wrong. And she's apparently talking to it.

So what are we seeing here? Though by no means do I wish to invalidate the idea that this could be a time-traveller or one of the Men in Black, it should be noted that a mobile communication device that transmits through space and time is quite a stretch, and would require some sort of quantum psycho-cybernetic nano-implant, which would then render the need for such a large clunky physical device unnecessary.

Consider that there were crazy people wandering the streets back then, just as there are today. Consider that it is not impossible that some nut is walking around talking to herself while holding a loofah up to her ear or something.

And there have also been suggestions from some quarters that this may actually be a man. I'm indecisive on that point, but if it is a crossdresser, he's not a very good one. Though the shoes and skirt are definitely female, the cloak and hat are mannish, and almost suggest Jack the Ripper.

But let's leave that door shut just now.

Jupiter Over Jefferson County

2010-10-21T11:27:00.003-04:00

The planet Jupiter has recently been closer to the Earth than at any time since 1951 or 1963, depending on conflicting media sources.

How close is it?

It's so close that last night, standing in E.P. Sawyer Park in Anchorage, KY, I actually managed to see (I think) one of its 63 known moons through high-powered binoculars.

It's so close that I even managed to take photos with my ordinary and mundane digital camera (an Olympus SP-350, 8.0 megapixel) that, while, not likely to appear in Sky & Telescope anytime soon, are good enough to show Jupiter's characteristic pinkness.

Sea of Shibboleths

2010-10-11T19:02:00.012-04:00

A Shibboleth is an ancient concept extending back to Biblical times, from the Hebrew word שִׁבֹּלֶת meaning "grain-bearing plant" (such as wheat or corn). Members of the tribe of Gilead found that enemy members of the tribe of Ephraim invariably mispronounced this word, and so used it as a code word to detect spies.

Today, shibboleths occur in everyday talk and in political speeches via Cant Language, using words and phrases that help to subtly and silently distinguish members of any given group from non-members. Politicians such as George W. Bush II have peppered their language with keywords and phrases that act as a signal to certain extreme right-wing Christian organizations, who say "hey, this guy's one of us!" when they hear them. The phrases are usually innocuous enough that they pass unnoticed, even through the major media scrutiny that a politician's speech receives.

One of my favorite films, Inglourious Basterds, is all about the nuances of language and codes and customs and shibboleths - even its very name is a shibboleth. Tarantino, a devout film buff, liberally loaded his movie with film history references, some obvious, some abstract. And throughout the film, we see the characters scrutinize each other in terms of language, of accent, and of certain social cues:

* The Jewish family's inability to speak English seals their doom as they hide under the floorboards of the French farmer's house, unaware that Landa is openly discussing their demise. And by pulling out a Sherlock Holmes pipe and puffing on it as he prepares to reveal that he has known all along that the farmer is hiding the family, Landa is practically telegraphing this to the farmer - but it only makes sense after it's too late.

* British agent Lt. Hicox gives himself away as a spy first by his German accent (which, good as it may be, cannot fool an authentic German) and then by being unaware of the cultural custom of holding two fingers and a thumb up to signal the number three (rather than the more common method of simply using the main three fingers).

* At the Nazi film event, Landa can instantly detect the Basterds are spies by their poor Italian accents.

* And at the restaurant alone with Shosanna, Landa drops some shibboleth-hints to suggest he secretly knows who she really is, by making overt references to milk and cream as he grills her about her made-up identity.

I tend to speak in shibboleths anyway, through no conscious effort or conspiratorial agenda of my own. I often weave pop-culture references into things I say (but in a dry and ironic way, and not necessarily endorsing the sources of those references.) Example: speaking to a group of children at an art education event a few years back, I pronounced the word "authority" as "autho-ri-tahhh", a la South Park's Cartman. The kids immediately burst into laughter en masse, while the reference was lost on all the adults in the room, who looked around confusedly, wondering what had just happened.

I love those kind of moments, and that's why I sprinkle shibboleths around for my own amusement, and to enjoy bisecting a conversation into multiple invisible levels, each of which may have a different effect on a different listener. Sometimes my associate J.T. Dockery and I will have conversations that consist solely of quotes from old songs and movies that we both adore, which can be quite puzzling to an outsider.

1877 E. Howard Tower Clock

2010-10-08T17:04:00.004-04:00

Last week I spotted this clockwork wonder in the lobby of the Henry County courthouse in Kentucky. It was the original courthouse tower clock, which had been abandoned when it ceased to work many years ago, but then some enterprising soul rescued it from whatever guano-encrusted shed in which it had been stored, and coaxed it like Frankenstein's Monster back into renewed life.

The clock was manufactured in 1877 by a Boston, Massachusetts company specifically for the Henry County courthouse's original incarnation. I was thrilled to discover such a Steampunky find out in the glory lands of rural Kentucky, but the locals seem jaded about it, and found it a source of considerable mirth that I was taking pictures of it like a foreign tourist.

Alek James Hidell

2010-09-30T00:20:00.001-04:00

My good friend and Interzone bowling partner Lee Harvey Oswald was the subject of a song I demo'd for the Lexington, KY punk band Nine Pound Hammer way back in the day (1887, wasn't it?) but the song was never recorded. I ended up recording it myself with The Kentuckians for their debut CD on Creeps Records in 1999, where it was available in stores only briefly before lapsing into utter obscurity. Now it's back from the dead for the YouTube generation - click here to inwestigate, Comrade.

Steampunk Kaleidoscopes

2010-09-29T10:40:00.003-04:00

Just happened across this video showing off some of the super-snazz kaleidoscopes from Kevin C. Cooper's workshop.

Cooper's kaleidoscopes are made from brass and mahogany and use antique parts whenever possible, such as Victorian-age brass candlesticks and old clock gears and cogs.

Also scope him out on Etsy.

Alien Ambassador

2010-09-26T13:55:00.006-04:00

Mazlan Othman, a Malaysian astrophysicist, may soon become Earth's first official ambassador to extra-terrestrial civilizations.

Most people aren't even aware that the United Nations has an Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), which Othman is Director of. Discussions are currently underway for Othman and UNOOSA to become official representatives of Earth if and when formal diplomatic communications channels need to be established between ourselves and some other alien life forms. UNOOSA's global headquarters (pictured above) is an extraterritorial area, meaning that although it is physically located in Vienna, it is not subject to any local law. It is, like military bases and embassies, floating in a limbo of no fixed jurisdiction.

UNOOSA suggests that Kepler's recent discovery of hundreds of extrasolar planets makes the discovery of extraterrestrial life increasingly likely. Apparently they're serious enough about this to suggest that we need to be ready for aliens to arrive and say "take me to your leader" - Othman recently said in a speech that when extraterrestrial contact is made, "we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination."

This all comes not long after Stephen Hawking's recent controversial pronouncements about alien life. Hawking, widely regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of our planet, indicated that alien contact would almost certainly be a bad thing, because odds are good that their technology would be superior to ours and we would therefore assume a subservient role. Said he, "The outcome for us would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans."

The Vacuum Coffee Maker

2010-09-19T15:51:00.006-04:00

It's a rather Rube Goldberg way of going about it, to be sure, but hey, who among us doesn't love Rube Goldberg? I came across this video recently posted to YouTube showing a working "vacuum siphon percolator" using ordinary school chemistry laboratory equipment. Other variations on the "coffee still" trick are here and here and also here.

I wish the World Market Coffee Club would issue one of these. I'd buy it. Guess I gotta build it.

The Islamic Cellphone

2010-09-18T00:36:00.002-04:00

Is there such a thing as Islamic chic? Most definitely. Take a gander at this Ilkone phone found here. For a Steampunk enthusiast, the cognitive dissonance between the modernity of a cellphone with the old-old-world style is an aesthetic beauty to behold.

According to Fahad, the Ilkone I800 phone generates five automated reminders a day at prayer time and contains the entire Quran, both in Arabic and in English. It also has a built in Qibla Locator that determines the precise direction towards Mecca.

Data Instability

2010-09-17T00:00:00.002-04:00

You know what happens the more you look, right? Well guess what, the upstate ballot results are in and it's now official: we know absolutely nothing.

Two major astronomical observatories recently wrapped up an exhaustive study of the fine-structure constant (also known as alpha or the "magic number" which defines the strength of electromagnetism). This constant has for years been a keystone on which our understanding of physics depends.

Well, guess what they learned? The constant is not constant. According to Kotaku:

"After measuring alpha in around 300 distant galaxies, a consistency emerged: this magic number, which tells us the strength of electromagnetism, is not the same everywhere as it is here on Earth, and seems to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the universe," Professor John Webb from the University of New South Wales said.

Oops. Back to the old drawing board.

Paper Steampunk Arm Weapon

2010-09-16T11:19:00.004-04:00

Spotted on Design Taxi: Artist Philip Valdez built this mechanical prop weapon for a Steampunk wedding. See more images on Valdez' blog and his Flickr.

Design Taxi's comment "paper isn’t a material you’d normally associate steampunk with—metal seems a likelier choice" sticks in my craw though: the Victorian period was actually the golden age of paper artistry, and before the advent of plastics, papier-mache was omnipresent.

Old Growth

2010-09-14T22:47:00.010-04:00

In my recent musings on Hitchcock's Vertigo, I repeated the often-held datum that the Giant Redwoods are the oldest living things on Earth. Allow me to check myself and correct the rec, because I've just been reading about some other startling life forms whose age is said to surpass even the Redwoods.

Crystal Falls, MI hosts the "Humungous Fungus", which spans over 38 acres underground near the Wisconsin border. Believed to be between 1,500 to 10,000 years old and estimated to weigh about 100 tons, this massive specimen of Armillaria Bulbosa (also known as Armillaria ostoyae) is one of this planet's most amazing success stories. The mushrooms it produces, known as the "honey mushroom", are edible.

But even larger than that: another specimen in Washington State covers about 6 square kilometres (1,500 acres), and one in Oregon has been determined to span 2200 acres underground, and it's at least 2,400 years old, possibly older. From The Independent:

The largest living organism ever found has been discovered in an ancient American forest. The Armillaria ostoyae, popularly known as the honey mushroom, started from a single spore too small to see without a microscope. It has been spreading its black shoestring filaments, called rhizomorphs, through the forest for an estimated 2,400 years, killing trees as it grows. It now covers 2,200 acres (880 hectares) of the Malheur National Forest, in eastern Oregon.

"There hasn't been anything measured with any scientific technique that has shown any plant or animal to be larger than this."

But then there's Pando, described by Wikipedia as "a clonal colony of a single male Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) located in the U.S. state of Utah, all determined to be part of a single living organism by identical genetic markers and one massive underground root system." Pando has been estimated by some to be approximately 80,000 years old.

By comparison, the oldest known living Redwood tree is about 2200 years old, although it is believed that at one time, 5000-year-old ones existed on America's west coast.

I have a fondness for plants that work in this manner, appearing to be separate entities above-ground while all actually connected as one network-entity beneath the soil, out of sight. Bamboo is another such plant, and Japanese Knotweed is another.

(Top photo: scraping away at a Douglas Fir's bark to reveal Armillaria ostoyae taking it over from the inside. Second photo: Pando.)

Come Take a Trip in my Airship

2010-09-07T11:24:00.004-04:00

George Evans' "Come Take a Trip in my Air-ship", rendered on a giant metal disc in 1905 for a Mira 18-inch "Grand Concert" music box.

Hear it and view it here.

Victorian Artificial Hand

2010-09-05T21:43:00.002-04:00

Artificial left arm, Europe, 1850-1910. "Made from steel and brass, this unusual prosthetic arm articulates in a number of ways. The elbow joint can be moved by releasing a spring, whereas the top joint of the wrist allows a degree of rotation and an up-and-down motion. The fingers can also curl up and straighten out."

Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee

2010-09-01T16:30:00.014-04:00

It's about 4:30pm EST as of this writing, and I'm watching the news coverage unfold of a man named James Jay Lee who has hijacked the Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring, MD.

Lee apparently has a history of protesting outside the Discovery Channel's headquarters, and was arrested in 2008 for throwing money at people coming and going out of the offices. His website, now taken down, featured a rambling, incoherent, childishly written manifesto full of caps-lock and exclamation points. The upshot of his "argument" is that there are too many human beings in the world, and mass depopulation is in order to save the planet. His self-proclaimed mission is, quote, "stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies" and he demands that the Discovery Channel start airing programming that supports his position.

Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen. For Mr. Lee to believe he could make a cable network start generating programming espousing his beliefs by holding hostages in their own offices, well, that's the apex of stupidity. Did he see movies like Airheads and King of Comedy and mistakenly come to think that one could really do something like that in the real world? Evidently he did.

This monumental ignorance seems at direct odds with his manifesto's reference to lofty concepts like Malthusian Theory and the "New Tribalist Movement" embodied in the works of Daniel Quinn. The conspiracy theorist in me finds something about this whole incident just not jibing. There's a cognitive dissonance even within Lee's manifesto itself, which seems to me to be the work of two different people - the differing writing styles and education levels can clearly be seen contrasting one another when one looks at the text analytically.

I'll be very interested to see what happens next with this James Lee guy, and what we learn about him. Something about all this stinks to high heaven.

(His myspace page lists Star Trek's Captain James. T. Kirk as being his hero. Somehow, I don't think this cowardly bit of TV terrorism would be Kirk's style. Maybe Lee, in his muddled thinking, believed he was employing some sort of heroic subterfuge or sabotage (or as Shatner would say, "sab-a-taaaaage") in the vein of The Corbomite Manuever or The Enterprise Mission.)

The Fraudulent Arabian Hit Parade

2010-08-30T21:15:00.006-04:00

There's a little palindromey phrase of music that has come to be synonymous with "exotic" and "Middle Eastern" in the last century, and you'd have to be living under a rock in Nebraska to not know what I'm talking about. Most of us learn it in kindergarten as one of a million variants on "There's a place in France where the naked ladies dance", "There's a place in France where they don't wear underpants", etc.

Jimmy Kennedy's "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" was a top ten hit for the Four Lads in 1953, and has since been covered by Bing Crosby, Caterina Valente, Santo & Johnny, and perhaps most notably, They Might Be Giants in 1990. The song employs the mystery melody at the part you hear them say, "Even old New York was once New Amsterdam".

The melody also turns up in the country song "Bonaparte's Retreat", written by Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart and recorded by many including Kay Starr, Hank Williams, Billy Grammer. The eerie faux-Arabian sound is especially accentuated on this home movie of Archie Campbell. Another country song to prominently use the melody is Roy Hogsed's "Snake Dance Boogie" in 1951.

Even earlier, the phrase appears prominently in Raymond Scott's "Twilight in Turkey" for the film "Ali Baba Goes to Town" in 1937 (which is where the images in this post come from.)

The Persian scale has a dark and peculiar sound that lends itself well to such arpeggios that conjure up images of snake charmers. In fact, many people know the melody as simply the "Snake Charmer Song".

Still others know it as the intro to Steve Martin's "King Tut".

So what is this passage of music, and where did it come from? Tricorder readings are indeterminate, Captain. Some say it's from a song called Streets of Cairo, written in 1893 for the famous bellydancer/stripper Farida "Little Egypt" Spyropoulos, who was herself immortalized in song by the Coasters and Elvis.

But others say - and they're probably right - that it goes back much further, to a French song from 1719 called "Colin Prend Sa Hotte". And according to some sources, this French song is in turn referencing an Arabic song titled "Kradoutja".

We suspect it goes back even further than that, perhaps to antediluvian times. Perhaps, like the worm of Ouroboros, the song has no beginning and no end.

The Airship Victoria

2010-08-26T08:47:00.003-04:00

Now this is what I like to see - while many Steampunk enthusiasts are content to simply sit around at home wearing some brass goggles while listening to Vernian Process and drinking Old Fashioneds, here's a gang of glorious geeks who are building their own airship.

It's called the Airship Victoria, and though it isn't a zeppelin, it's a very impressive congregation of helium balloons with what appears to be a plasma lightning generator and a dangerous-looking platform suspended from cables. You can see the original prototype they tested out here, at San Francisco's Burning Man Decompression 2009.

A Wide Open Field Awaits the Wide Awake Man

2010-08-25T22:06:00.007-04:00

In the 11th century, a heretical religious movement began that espoused very different views from the common man of the time. A movement that opposed everything about the entire material world we live in; a movement who held as doctrine that the God of the Old Testament was not the true God but rather, an evil demon impersonating God. The real God, they held, would never have tricked Adam & Eve with a sting operation, would never have asked Abraham to kill his own son, would never have destroyed the entire world in a flood.

If they had a name for themselves, they kept it a secret and history does not record it. Publicly, they mainly referred to themselves as simply "the good people."

(I'm reminded of a scene in the TV show Lost: Michael, utterly floored and confused by the mysterious doings of Ben Linus and "The Others", asks "who are you people??" Ben's reply: "We're the good guys.")

They also had a term for certain members of their faith who had sufficiently developed their spiritual nature: Perfecti, or "perfect ones". Members who had not yet achieved the state of Perfecti looked up to those who had, and furthering their goal toward it was an important part of their spiritual journey.

The Catholic Church referred to these people as "the Cathars", which was a derogatory slang term, but it stuck and it's the term which we of today tend to know this ancient gnostic sect by.

The Cathars were universally misunderstood by their peers in the 11th and 12th centuries. They thought of humans as spiritual beings inhabiting temporary bodies and, as such, trapped in this stifling world of physical reality and matter. They opposed the physical world to such an extreme extent that the Catholic Church decided they were too radical to live. In 1209, Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade which sought to exterminate the Cathars completely. At least 1 million Cathars were murdered by the Catholic Church in this travesty.

Though opposed to this physical realm of matter, the Cathars had a keen interest in harnessing it for their own ends - they especially had a fascination for textiles and fibers, and were expert weavers and spinners. Legend has it that they communicated secret messages via a Morse Code-like cypher embedded in the very weave of the cloth they manufactured.

(I'm reminded of Lost again: at one point, Sawyer makes a very odd remark about how he could tell that whoever the kidnappers were, they weren't Ben's "Others". When someone asks him how he knows that, he says he noticed the kind of weave used on the fabric bags they placed over his head was different from that of the "Others".)

To the Cathars, the Holy Grail was not a cup - it wasn't even a physical object at all. It was a process, a sequence of gradual steps one took toward enlightement and awakening. This process, they believed, came from Christ himself and was also something they encoded covertly into the weave of the fabrics they made. Yet they also are said to have sought after a luminous stone that fell to Earth, called "the Grail Stone" (not by the Cathars but by later writers).

Cathars have become unfortunately trendy in all the wrong ways. Some entrepreneurs in Europe have turned "Cathar Country" into a tourist-trap cottage industry that depends on the general public's ignorance of the subject. Many books and websites have been churned out in recent years trying to spin (no pun intended) their story into some sort of adventure-myth akin to The Da Vinci Code.

The truth is even more interesting than those fictions, however.