Konami vs. Capcom

Steve inspired me to stretch my journalistic tendons and find articles about a cat who survived an arrow attack to the neck. This did not prove difficult.

But I also bring our dear Reader's eyes gently to a rather ungentle article, this an account of a monocular reptile attacking a hapless golfing Floridian.

As the golf course dude says:

"Unfortunately, that's part of Florida," course general manager Rod Parry said. "There's wildlife in these ponds."

My sincere hope is to one day own a successful alligator/ocelot ranch outside New Orleans whereat my animals will have to prove themselves impervious to archery, loss of binocular vision, and golf. Anyone (read, "investors") interested in raising huge animals in the swamp, please be in touch.

O Everest - how we de-magnify your magnificence...

Check out this story from the New York Times detailing China's innovations on the great mountain.

Basically, China's adding cell towers, a paved highway to base camp, and other un-Everest-y Olympic doodads so that they can reap money from foreign tourists, amateur mountaineerers, and confused middle income goats.

FYI: Tibetans call [Mt. Evererst] Chomolungma — the “Goddess Mother of the Universe.”

Meaning, besides taking from the Tibetans their political freedom and right to peacefully meditate and hang out with goats, we (the modern, corporate, "MADE IN CHINA" world) are also planting cell phone towers on their momz, yo. Weird.

So last night after I made the last post I was kept up thinking about the war in Iraq, the death toll, the sanctity of life, and the right to have an abortion.

Our President talks a great deal about how abortion and stem cell research are very bad things that should be outlawed in the country, and avoids talking about his faith-based rationalizations by citing 'The Sanctity of Life.' He even declared January 19 "National Sanctity of Human Life Day."

He might be able to sway my opinion if he worked hard to get a better, more comprehensive welfare system in America. Universal healh care in America would go a long way in convincing me that his feelings about human life were genuine. Certainly, making college free for all students above a certain GPA would help, too.

But, clearly, Bush's feelings about abortion and stem cell research have very little to do with the sanctity of human life. Because human life extends beyond the birth canal, but George doesn't care about those other years that come after a child is born. He believes that every life is precious and sacred, except the mother's if it is endangered by the fetus, right up until the moment it emerges from the vagina or c-section. Then you better pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Like he did.

But the continuing war in Iraq is a much more powerful example of how human life really doesn't matter all that much to our president, and that the continuing focus on September 11th from politicians of all stripes is a gross distraction from the real source of terror in the world.

Right after September 11th, I remember seeing news reports on the war in Afghanistan. The images were haunting by omission. When the twin towers were hit, you could see footage and photographs of people flying through the sky from the buildings, people covered in soot, families crying, and all the carnage and destruction in the pit of ground zero. But when we started attacking Afghanistan (and, later, Iraq) we got underexposed green footage of rocket trails sailing through the sky and a lot of maps with arrows on them.

What happened on September 11th was terrible, really awful, but that horrible day has stretched on for years in Iraq, and the suffering over there is barely even hinted at in the bulk of coverage.

Not for the faint of heart, Salon.com has some terrible images that bring the reality of war to the ongoing story of our neverending 'war against terror'. Or 'global fight against islamic extremism.'

I forget which one we're doing this month.

(Edit: These pictures were taken in 2004 & 2005.)

Link

Maybe she could help out that guy

But in real life.

Ahahaha....ahhhhh

Without extensive surgery and lessons, I will never be an aviatrix. Cover
After Hours sung by Mo Tucker / Coil, but not that Coil
After Heather, my roommate was Amber. This is Amber:

Nice girl. Into being cute full time. Anyway, she played the song After Hours a lot. It's a good song. VU is great and Mo Tucker is great. She was, what I imagine, the feisty lil drummer girl. But she got preggers, quit the band and moved to Georgia and worked at Wal-Mart for the minimum wage until Penn, that libertarian magic guy, put out her records, or some other odd fairy godmother nonsense. Can you imagine going from being a rock star to domestic servitude? The moral of the story is don't get pregnant, just close the door, the night could last forever. Vampires are cool.
The band covering After Hours is Coil, but not the how-to-destroy-angels/analstaircase Coil, but some Japanese band off the same VU cover cds that brought us, you Who Loves The Sun? And what the hell, take an official live bootleg of the version with a Lou Reed intro. Double the hell, here's a clip from Penn And Teller Get Killed where Penn shows off how much he likes the Velvet Underground and the 3 Stooges.
[VU]--------[Coil]--------[VU live]--------Penn and Teller Get Killed VU Clip

My New York age is 44

This New York age puts you-generally speaking-into the old-age category. Don't worry-this isn't a bad NYC age to be. Your tastes are more refined and developed, and people have always told you that you're mature for your age anyway, right? Still, you may want to see more live music (check out Studio B) and should probably visit Superdeluxe.com. Olde English is funny at any age.

Does your age reflect how you're living? Let us know.

What's your New York age? Take the Time Out New York quiz and find out!

Without extensive surgery and lessons, I will never be an aviatrix. Cover
who loves the sun by VU / Honey Skoolmate
Tis still the summer solstice on the wrong coast, the longest day of the year, where the sun pants you in front of yr friends. Luckily, I worked till dusk and avoided the sun: The guy is a jerk.
There's a great cover album of Velvet Underground songs called Rabid Chords, which is filled with Japanese bands that may or may not be obscure. I've heard of the seagulls screaming kiss her kiss her. There's also some USA bands like Of Montreal and that Jim O'rourke guy. it also has these little vingettes of someone named Gerard talking about Andy Warhol and the Velvets. He sounds like he could be huge tic of a man, on scented pillows, recounting the past, stroking an old Warhol wig, the tinsel platinum eroding on his fingernails. I could google it, but maybe Sam can grace us with a comment.
So the sun's a fucker, and Honey Skoolmates know bad spelling and barking dogs do make a good cover on all ends. It also starts to rock in the middle. Be sure to look for another VU nihongo band cover soon, just so I can talk about the tragic magic life of mo Tucker.
[VU]--------[Honey Skoolmates]--------Comments Welcome

In Louisville Kentucky today, a girl's feet were severed at the ankle when a ride "malfunctioned". The worst day I ever had at an amusement park was getting sick to my stomach from riding in the teacups for too long. This girl lost her fucking feet. Oh God Superman, give her back her feet!

A fifteen year old boy in India performed a cesarean section while being filmed, in an attempt to break the world record for youngest surgeon. Jesus. Babies delivering babies.

"Remote viewing is the magical ability to transcend time and space and gather information about a target, which can be located at: anytime, anyplace and anywhere."

Meaning, after I learn how to remote view, I will be able to see you... in the past... taking a shower... Mmmm, bath bubbles...

[Ahem.] I found this site rummaging around on Skilluminati, a treasure trove of bizarre science, curated by one of my friend Dan Briggs' friends, a neo-hippie rapper who's, as far as I can tell, the king of psychedelic future-ghost blog-land.

Let me know if anyone out there's already remote viewing me. Or just take a picture of Future Wythe and post it. Wonder if I'll ever lose the moustaches....

I have left you all anxiously awaiting the results of classes 2 and 3. But do not fret! I have not forgotten! We simply thought we had lost our digital camera somewhere between Bushwick and Massachusetts only to find that it was indeed in our computer bag this whole time! Even though Stephen had already checked there twice before! My suspicion is that the technology elves crept in to our apartment in the middle of the night and returned our digital camera so that I could keep blogging.

Click on the pictures to enlarge:

Day 2

In other news, I recently faxed an invoice to a mile-deep trench in the Pacific; a camel just sent me a "lolcat" pic from his Blackberry wireless device (tm); Apple's new i-Juniper trees come with built-in BlueTooth; the petri dish on my desk has completed two low-income-housing blocs playfully entitled "Park Place" and "Boardwalk;" etc.

From today's New York Times, "Conquering the Peak Test of Technology," by NOAM COHEN:

AFTER weeks of climbing, Rod Baber recently reached the summit of Mount Everest, ... took off his oxygen mask and called his voice mailbox, leaving an exuberant, if weary, message.

“Hi, this is Rod, making the world’s highest phone call. It’s the 21st of May, I have no idea what time it is.” He then looked at his watch. “It’s 5:37. It’s about minus 30. It’s cold. It’s fantastic. The Himalayas are everywhere.”

It was either the first mobile phone call made from the top of Mount Everest, as Mr. Baber and Motorola, which set up his voice mail, proclaim, or the umpteenth, as climbing experts who track the comings and goings there say.

It has taken a couple of generations of technological improvements, but Mount Everest, one of the most remote places on earth, is now officially overexposed.

Tom Sjogren who with his wife, Tina, founded mounteverest.net, a news site that reports on ascents of the mountain, estimated that at least 70 teams on Mount Everest “did more or less daily Internet updates with images, text, positions and videos from the mountain.”

The effort to digitally connect Everest has been aided by a series of technological breakthroughs, including a faster, cheaper satellite modem for sending files destined for the Internet, and the introduction this spring of a light, relatively inexpensive Thuraya satellite phone that can take pictures and video and upload them. (The Thuraya, with a long antenna, is already a favorite of insurgents around the world, too.)

It wasn't a dream. Corey Feldman? Really?

he is self-obsessed
not even likably so
a total snooze fest

In the early half of the decade, my close friend Adam quietly released an album of cover tunes entitled Adam's Greatest Hits. After the critical acclaim that album received, there was no more output from this modern genius.

Until today. Last night Adam passed me his latest release, a cover of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive.

Please, enjoy.

Dear Madam,

I tip my hat to you. I offer my congratulations: you have mastered the pelvic thrust.

Now, however, it is time to learn new dance moves. There is quite a bit you can do with your legs, torso, arms, hands, and head. You have your entire body to work with. It is time to move on from the pelvis and explore the dancing opportunities available elsewhere in your body.

Love,

Stephen

Antikythera mechanism?

As my brother Zac notes, "holy shit. we must get our hands on these projects."

From Kenneth Chang's "Light Fantastic: Flirting With Invisibility," in today's New York Times:

[Picture caption:] Duke researchers built a simplified version of their cloaking device out of copper rings and wires patterned onto fiberglass sheets and demonstrated that it successfully diverted microwaves.

Increasingly, physicists are constructing materials that bend light the "wrong" way, an optical trick that could lead to sharper-than-ever lenses or maybe even make objects disappear.

Last October, scientists at Duke demonstrated a working cloaking device, hiding whatever was placed inside, although it worked only for microwaves.

In the experiment, a beam of microwave light split in two as it flowed around a specially designed cylinder and then almost seamlessly merged back together on the other side. That meant that an object placed inside the cylinder was effectively invisible. No light waves bounced off the object, and someone looking at it would have seen only what was behind it.

I needn't point out to you good dames and gents that this is fucking amazing. Soon we will have personal cloaking devices, anti-cloaking scanners, and invisi-cats (who will take petite but hard to find invisi-poops).

[Non-poop-related] downsides: Invisi-rapists, invisi-tanks, invisi-slippery banana peels.

Upsides: You will not see me walking around my apartment in my underwear, Bushwick.

The weather's been perfect lately. I had a lovely trip to the Alps. I'm working on stuff I'm excited about. My hair has been looking great. But something was...missing. I didn't feel like myself. And then it came to me; I haven't been doing enough hating! Well, my fellow Thats Plentyites, I bet you can guess how I remedied my problem. That's right, I went down to the local theater to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, in its full English glory. Now you may recall my thoughts on the Black Pearl, and I recalled them too. However, I had hopes that my craving for needless big American spending and action would negate the issues I had with the last movie. And that's the story of how I wasted 12 Swiss Francs and 168 minutes.

World's End was more convoluted and tedious than ever. Each complicated action scene was followed by a more complicated action scene which didn't correspond with the last. Don't get me wrong, as confusing as it all was, I wasn't seeing anything new...no feast for the eyes, no fresh stunts to delight. It was one big pirate fight after another slightly bigger pirate fight. I saw ceaseless pirate fighting in the last two movies, what makes them think I paid to see 3 more hours of it? (Although, I did pay to see it, knowing full well what I was in for, so...well played, World's End. Well played indeed). There wasn't much else besides the fighting. Any interest one may have once had in the characters is gone by this movie. Even Elizabeth Swan and whatever Orlando Bloom's character's name is don't seem to care whether they get together or not.

The only new thing the movie offered was about 60 seconds of Keith Richards and his two lines. I say...meh. 60 seconds of Keith's well-worn face does not make a movie, my friends.

I'll admit, Johnny Depp made me giggle once or twice, because, well, he just has that privilege. Poorly done on the screenwriter's part to make him such a secondary character, but I suppose everyone becomes a secondary character when you are trying to write for 7 main characters.

Oh, and btw to those who have seen it, how about that final scene with Calypso? Was that not a total rip-off from the Little Mermaid? Do they think we've forgotten Ursula so soon?

In conclusion, when I think of kids a few years down the road, preparing for a Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy sleep-over, I wish them luck, because there are not enough Nacho Cheese Doritos or bottles of 99 cent grape soda in the world that can last them the near 500 minute commitment. But I'm not too worried about these hypothetical kids...I suspect there won't be any, because these movies SUCK!

P.S. If you were in the Brethren Court, how pissed would you be when too-big-for-her-pirate-bloomers was named Pirate King? I mean, these are the most bad-ass and awesome pirates in the world and I can tell you for a fact that they would not put up with that shit. I can reluctantly accept the ridiculous action sequences, but the fact that those 9 pirate lords didn't make a 9-way prissy-pants-nonpirate shish kabob out of her is an insult to pirates, and thus, to me.

Can you explain the paris hilton thing? I can't contribute at water cooler talks.
edit holy shit she's a scary person

Paprika, now playing at the Angelika, follows a team of psychiatrists who can, with the help of what looks like a high-tech hairbrush, dive into their patients' dreams.

Of course, not fifteen minutes after the movie's started, somebody steals one of the dream-hair-clippies and becomes the world's first dream-terrorist. Madness, a good deal of jumping, some Suntory drinking in a dreamed online cafe, musical frogs, toy robots, and a generally vivid, must-see film ensue.

Drawing his characters with concise, Updikean exchanges that better resemble a good NYC indie than the average anime, Kon Satoshi (Tokyo Godfathers, Perfect Blue) tells the story of the titular Paprika's dream-apotheosis (she's, uh, maybe the alter-psyche of one of the doctors, who can maybe merge with the collective world-dream in order to save it from the terrorists?) with no holds barred and no BS.

The plot sounds confusing but isn't, except in its deliciously theophanic final moments, when most of Tokyo is destroyed (poor film-Tokyo!), and Paprika becomes a giant baby, then a giant tween, then a giant Paprika.

Again, a must-see, regardless of my inability to parse a movie as epic as Akira (or, better, Taxi Driver) into English, much less brief English. Perhaps the best I can say is: "The Science of Sleep meets Alice in Wonderland meets High and Low."

I had my first portrait drawing class at Cooper Union tonight. I have only ever taken one art class (Intro to Drawing at NYU) and that was five years ago. I was nervous to start drawing again. I was worried about how my work would compare to the other students. I had to keep reminding myself that no matter how brilliant the other students might be, ultimately I am taking this class to improve my skills. It is about commitment to create.

For the next eight weeks I will draw on Monday nights for three hours. I would never do that alone in the comfort of my apartment. It is far more likely that I would come home from work and start doing laundry or cleaning the kitchen. These are, of course, important tasks in the interest of good hygiene and cooking excellence. They absolutely need to be done. And the sense of joy I feel whilst snuggling in my dryer-sheet-fresh-bedding or reaching for my favorite cooking knife (thanks Ron Popeil!) straight from the magnetic strip can be so satisfying! But all that progress and happiness dies so quickly. Clothes and dishes will always be dirty again. And washing them over and over again will certainly never elevate their maximal level of cleanliness, ultimately causing frustration and a bad attitude about cleaning.

So.

But.

If I keep drawing I will continue to get better. And there will always be room for more improvement.

So, in closing, drawing (much like cleaning) is bound to be an endless task, but promises to be much more fun and rewarding. I think it might even make me happier.

Oh, and if you're wondering, that drawing of me up above? (Yes, that's supposed to be me.) That is my attempt at a self portrait without looking in the mirror. It was our first assignment. I won't be illustrating New Yorker covers any time soon, but I am happy to say my walls will look less bare. Even if my life is dirtier because of it.

is the saddest thing

some movie is being made called '9' with Frodo and Crispin Glover. It's based on this short cartoon:

by shane acker, who will be directing the full length. Post apocalyptic rag dolls and eerie green lights. However, if yr brave, watch an earlier cartoon he did after the jump, which is very difficult to viddy

who will be in nyc arond the 4th of july? it's a wednesday