Recently by Wythe

For those of you who haven't heard the grim/hilarious news, "we" = Georgians, specifically Atlantans, and "water" = "the life-nourishing substance we [humans] have spent the last two hundred years systematically polluting and using up."

It's all gone. We're fucked. (Well, I live in New York; my parents and two of my brothers are fucked.)

Lil Jon did of course gift us Crunk!!!, a delightful beverage indeed. And I take great pleasure in Itoen's Tea's Tea, which is just tea - really good tea. But somehow I think plentiful water will remain in the near future as essential to human life as it's been over the last, oh I dunno, hundred million years.

Georgia's genius plan to keep its millions of citoyens watery? Invade the fuck out of Tennessee.

I guess Paul and Patrick and Sam and I are gonna have to go down there and wrassle some Chattanoogans or something.

(Thanks to Paul for the article.)

So the Times today reports that religious fluidity in America is way up, which makes me happy, but that, according to Rice University's assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life, "Religion is [still] the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors."

Anyway, here's the breakdown, so you ADHD kids can skip the article itself:

Big losers in the irrational monolithic meme wars of recent years: Catholicism, Protestantism.

Big winners: Syncretic faiths of all kinds. Agnosticism.

Other big winners, according to my extrapolations: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster-ism. Jedi-ism. Clean CSS layouts-ism.

America's biggest families raised by proponents of: Mormonism. Islam.

America's smallest families probably raised by: Infertile nuns who hate babies.

My picks for the "Whatever Happened To...?" file: Zoroastrianism. Mesmerism. Kris Kross (not a religion, but what happened to those guys?).

Craziest shit reported in connection to: Scientology. Self-mummifying monks.

Turkey invaded northern Iraq some time last night to hunt down Kurdish rebels*, and this hilarious photo was one of three the BBC posted to help us irenic hipsters imagine the event.

What the fuck are they wearing? They look like they're part of the Stay-Puff Brigade, about to invade Gum Drop Mountain.

*Kurdish separatists = the Itchy to Turkish nationalists' Scratchy. Kurds, like ethnic Albanians in Serbia (until a couple days ago), Palestinians and the majority of the Armenian people, have been denied a state; Kurds live in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and probably New York City. None of this explains the huge puffy backpacks in the photo.

Japanese animal clothing store "The tailor of a cat CAT PRIN" and Cat Wigs will both blow your mind. Seriously blow. Like the wind, movies about cocaine, sexual euphemisms, etc.

In blogging about progressive political theater, I've increasingly wondered what "other side" (there are probably a few other sides, Venn diagram-like) is (are) thinking. So I googled "Republican blogs" and looked at a few top results. Here's what I found, in the order I found it:

1. This was a top result, an old lady in Texas who likes racist cartoons and reports, regarding terrorists within the U.S., "We're all probably better off not knowing." Wow. You see, every time I give the far right a chance to make sense, it comes up with racist cartoons and contradictory points about "security" that alternate between nuke-worshipping and head-in-sand-burying. One racist cartoon:

2. A site that's currently down called "BoottotheSkull.com." I mean, does it matter what's on the site, if it's a political blog invoking boots to the skull? One flashes back to curb-stomping in that Ed Norton movie about Nazis, soccer hooligans, Abu Ghraib, The Siege, etc. Let's hope the barbarians who run the site don't read this post and find Steve and steal his cute dogs.

3. This is the worst of the bunch, partly because it's the most reasonable (unreasonable as it is), and it's authored by the youngest blogger - a mere 18 year-old, a kid who hasn't had time to look at all the philosophical positions in America yet. He does have crazy typoesz ("...the election’s still a ways off, and I’m there’s a conservative out there somewhere who’ll step up..."), so that makes him more of a crazy internet kid, right? But he also has a right wing/Christian magazine called "Regenerate Our Culture." (Not currently in print, as the kid's off to college. The homepage invites you to "pursue our archives," lol.) Overall impression: Not so hateful, but not a great source for real educational or political material. These are top results. This means these blogs, for whatever reason, by whatever magic feat of SEO and Digging, have had lots of hits, at least in the last few years. They span from young to old, heartland to coast, but they all seethe with undisguised rage - rage you'd never find here, as Ryan posts about Assassin's Creed or I post about giant scorpions or Harry Potter.

The Republican blogs, these random samples, don't challenge my views via argument or information.

I love what my friend Garrett Heaney at Wishtank stresses about information. It's harder, actually harder, to change someone's mind by arguing simply from an emotional or even an abstractly logical standpoint. And if you personally differ on views ("Well, I was raised as a...;" "I don't think all men are such..."), what can you do besides argue your emotion or lay out an ideal logic? Well, you can provide data. You can back up your words with sources. You can do research and keep telling people "look at these numbers!" or "look at this video!" until someone looks.

Well, or at least not have such crahze typoes whne you'r talingk about infallible dietys and how stupid liberls are.

I'm live-blogging about Culture Project's A Question of Impeachment. Check it out, if you're interested in the whole impeach-our-lying-leaders thing. (And what a thing it is.) The series will consist of songs and lawyers, mostly the latter, as they depose witnesses and mock-impeach our fearless Pres and VP.

Why live-blogging? I'm not sure. They, the producers, asked me to do it, and I was/am intrigued. Let's see where it goes.

Viva la revolucion (sp?),

W.

A must-read: What the fuck is happening to Bushwick?

Says one real estate guy: "People in the neighborhood are ready to take their lives to the next level."

I'm so confused by that sentiment that all I can do is dribble green tea out of my mouth until my brain stops burning.

The crux of the problem is monetary, of course:

"It's happened so fast," says Roberto Marrero, a Legal Services attorney who has handled housing cases for the poor in Bushwick and Williamsburg for 10 years. "Rents were all around $600; that was what owners got. Then all of a sudden, in the last couple years, they doubled. Everywhere people looked, owners were asking $1,200—like that was the magic number all of a sudden." Even if the rent hike is well above the maximum set under state rent-stabilization guidelines, owners just take the chance that they won't get found out, Marrero says. "If no one challenges it for four years, it's legal."

Who's paying 1200 a month? Who? Where? ARGH.

The real travesty is that landlords don't listen to tenants, don't make repairs, and try to evict families if they think they can double rent. Read the article. It's astounding. (Thanks, Justin, for forwarding it.)

Check out this article from the Times about Evesham, NJ.

Long story short, an educational video called "That's a Family!" has just been banned because one of the families discussed is of the two-dads (a.k.a. "gay dads," "happy dads," "multi-dads") type, which upsets roughly 49% of the town. Apparently, if you show kids that gay people are normal and can raise families, you run the risk of convincing those kids to disown their parents. I don't get it.

Here's what one proud hetero child-builder had to say:

“I don’t think it was appropriate,” said Jennifer Monteleone, 35, who is a parent of two children at the Robert B. Jaggard Elementary School. “If it was maybe in fifth grade, but in third grade they’re a little too young.”

Riiight. By that reasoning, I know plenty of thirty-year-olds who are too young. Newsflash Jenny: Little bigots grow up and become big bigots.

These goings on in New Jersey almost disturb me as much as the disappearance of the bees and gorillas does. WTF, ebola gorillas? That's like some Bioshock Steve King South Park totally evil heavy shit.

Follow up article about the Harry Potter knock-offs that have flooded China in recent years.

In addition to my personal favorite, "Harry Potter and the Big Funnel," we also now have:

"Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl"

"Harry Potter and Platform Nine and Three-Quarters"

"Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry"

I'm not much of a sports fan, but even I know that Barry Bonds, a roid-enhanced SF Giant, just beat former Brave and ATL hero Hank Aaron's home run record. Bonds' record: 756 homers.

Alas, we Japanophiles must note that, once again, the real record belongs to someone you've probably never heard of in Tokyo. Bonds' and Aaron's numbers are both impressive, but perhaps as or more impressive:

Oh Sadaharu has 868.

Says Mr. Oh, when asked about Aaron's/Bonds' record/s: “I’m just a man who happened to hit a lot of home runs in Japan.”

Touche, little dude. Touche.

I know what you're thinking: "I don't want to read a book about a twee British boy with a rad scar, but I would read that book if it were loaded with kung-fu fights and lessons about civic morality in a sprawling, hyperspastically-developing empire."

Well look no further.

China, purveyor of all things bootlegged, has been pumping out Harry Potter books for years - particularly "final" episodes, because waiting is for losers - and many of the books tack on China-tastic elements like kicking and speaking out of synch with your lips.

Here are just some of the sweet, sweet books about little boys with brooms between their legs that you've not only missed but will continue to miss, since (besides their titles) they've yet to be translated into English:

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince”
“Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon”
“Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire”
“Harry Potter and the Young Heroes”
“Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon”
“Harry Potter and the Big Funnel” (this is obviously the winner)
“Harry Potter and the Chinese Porcelain Doll”

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL. One man, eager to please his young, Potter-crazed son, wrote a 250,000-word (wtf) final episode with a no-nonsense title. From the New York Times:

The result was “Harry Potter and the Showdown,” a 250,000-word novel, the final version of which he placed recently on Web sites, followed by a notice saying he was looking for publishers. The book quickly logged 150,000 readers on a popular Chinese site, Baidu.com’s Harry Potter fan Web page.

“This is fantastic,” Gu Guaiguai, an admiring reader, wrote online about “Showdown.” “I wonder if Rowling would bother to continue to write if she had read it.”

Another reader was even more breathless. “You are the pride of our Harry Potter fans,” he wrote, adding, “We expect you to go on and write Harry Potter number eight,” which Mr. Li has in fact already begun.

[Disclaimer: I have not read any of the HP books; I think they're a scam by Hewlett-Packard to sell more non-working Ease-E Break printers. I have seen the movies and enjoyed watching scary demon-things continually punk British kids. I am, however, deeply entrenched in Harry Potter number nine, tentatively entitled "Harry Potter and the Crazy Bamboo Warriors," or perhaps "My Dinner With Harry Potter... and Andre... and Crazy Bamboo Warriors." It's complicated.]

There are literally dozens of hilarious cereal mascots, most of which are invented animals who like to hug children, especially as the children are trying to eat.

The above bizarre Critters aside, I think the whole cereal mascot meme ("hmm... cereal" = "delicious singing invented animal wants to hug me") is one of those things we'll just never be able to explain to Martians.

From "Smart, Curious, Ticklish. Rats?" by NATALIE ANGIER, New York Times:

In the Georgia study, rats were asked to show their ability to distinguish between tones lasting about 2 seconds, and sounds of about 8 seconds, by pressing one or another lever. If the rat guessed correctly, it was rewarded with a large meal; if it judged incorrectly, it got nothing.

For each trial, the rat could, after hearing the tone, opt to either take the test and press the short or long lever, or poke its nose through a side of the chamber designated the, “I don’t know” option, at which point it would get a tiny snack. During the trials, the rats made clear they knew their audio limits. The closer the tones were to either 2 or 8 seconds, the likelier the rats were to express confidence in their judgment by indicating they wanted to take the lever test and earn their full-course dinner. But as the tones edged into the ambiguous realms of 4 seconds, the rats began opting ever more often for modest but reliable morsels of the clueless option.

Goddamn I love animal science, esp. animal ethology (Lat., lit. "why we do stuff-ology"). I'm going to train rats to write blog posts about rats, and then I'll be out of pseudo-work and finally able to enjoy this giant spinning wheel I built. Joy!

Are aphrodisiacs, according to Penthouse.

I'm a fan of celery, and I drink enough coffee each morning (and afternoon and evening and sometimes night) to chemically lobotomize a healthy water bison.

So I was real happy about this finding until I read that, "Men who drink a cup a day are twice as likely to describe themselves as sexually active." Meaning the surveyed men only think they're sack-tigers (that phrase doesn't work when inverted, does it?). They could be lying, exaggerating, or drinking decaff.

Perhaps the effects of celery and coffee at the same time should be tested... Or [roommate's name omitted] should stop buying Penthouse.

The photography's terrible, and the wooden articles about "guy stuff" feel as if they were written by either small boys fantasizing about "real manly adult life" and all the "cars" and "hot chicks" and "coffee" they'd eventually encounter...

or by very intelligent rhesus monkeys, perhaps the subjects of advanced cognitive research, deep in the heart of New "Old" Jersesy... In which case... I don't mean to be a dick, but everyone knows chocolate's an aphrodisiac, Siwwa. And give Jetal her damn ornamental mirror back or we'll have to tranq you with the Mystery Juice again!

And no one likes the Mystery Juice...

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.

"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....

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.)

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.

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."

Man, I love Creationism: Instead of saying, "If God can sculpt the entire fucking earth out of nothing, then maybe he could create even a complicated process like evolution," thus rendering biblical objections to natural science effectively moot, the apparent bulk of serious Creationists insist that earth is 6000 years old and that man lived in harmony with dinosaurs until L. Ron Hubbard, Marilyn Manson, Sponge Bob, and I came and fucked it all up.

Well, they're right, I guess, because they now have a 27 million dollar museum explaining that they're right. How very P.T.Barnum of them. I salute anyone willing to put $27 mil. into a wrong idea, just to prove how very right it is. Next time I'm in Kentucky, I'm definitely checkin it out.

Read the good news your(damned)self...

Ahhh, yes, we are again reminded that, sometimes, the best news is bad news (for the monkey).

As Henry "Big Pookie" James once said (I paraphrase): "Cats and monkeys, cats and monkeys... All you need to know of human life you can learn from cats and monkeys."

And poisoned plague squirrels, it turns out.

(Steve, this sounds like a board game we need to invent right now: Zombie Squirrels of Catan.)

Anyway, read the article, it's hilarious. And the monkey's name was Spanky!

(Question-Proem: Why don't we have a frickin "Animals" category? I mean, come on, guys... Let's get on the ball. In it = to win it. Anyway...)

All the bees are disappearing.

This is obviously a sign that we are all dead; the Apocalypse has already occurred; only demons and (rapidly diminishing apiary arthropods) are left; thus we are demons.

This theory of demon-hood was posited by a friend recently. We were both drunk at a party. I thought about it, forgot about it, and thought about it again after reading about the Rapture Of The Bees (see below).

I would here quote poems by Emily "Bees-n-Depression" Dickinson, but I'm too frightened:

If I'm a demon, I'm a demon who loves some muthafuckin honey...

Read about the End Times, in the Times...

by Robert Pinsky

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

***

Robert THE MAN Pinsky arbitrated a metaphor-battle between Sean Penn and Stephen Colbert.

Here's some video...

by Mark Strand

Fire

Sometimes there would be a fire and I would walk into it
and come out unharmed and continue on my way,
and for me it was just another thing to have done.
As for putting out the fire, I left that to others
who would rush into the billowing smoke with brooms
and blankets to smother the flames.When they were through
they would huddle together to talk of what they had seen—
how lucky they were to have witnessed the lusters of heat,
the hushing effect of ashes, but even more to have known the
fragrance
of burning paper, the sound of words breathing their last.

That's right: All you corny motherfuckers making clownish videos of George Washington, watch out. Insulting the founder of a nation can get you in big trouble.

You Tube learned this recently when Thailand and Turkey started punching/kicking it in the taint, angry that the young video empire would not take down satirical videos mocking the former's current monarch and the latter's Leading Historical Badass (besides Suleiman), Ataturk.

I wonder what Thomas "The MAN" Paine would have said about both You Tube's woes and Tim O'Reilly's plan for a new era of internet Civility.

[Oh, and thanks, Dylan--you rock more than even granite rocks... But, you know, you metaphorically "rock;" it's not like you're a naturally occurring aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids.

Other people: Dylan recommended that I check out Paul Collins' The Trouble With Tom, which I did. I now heartily endorse it as new Required Reading.]

Anyway, more about those nasty censorship gremlins in Thailand and Turkey to be found below...

Boarding two helicopters, they left for their base in Devon, where they are to be debriefed and to undergo medical and psychological checkups, said Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of the defense staff.

The above taken from today's NYTimes article about the 15 Britons returned to their native Albion by those scallywag Persians (who not only don't torture their captives, but feed them three meals a day, give them cigarettes to smoke and beds to sleep on, and even provide pajamas to sleep in--what terrorist rascals they be!).

Okay, but seriously, I know we have more guns, bandwidth, secret prisons, instant foods, and other benchmarks d'civilization, however... America will never, ever be half the nation England is until we start naming people [first name] "Jock," [last name] "Stirrup." Huzzah, sirrahs!

Steve posted a while back about the hope-inspiring/scary/very new study that, at least in Africa, circumcision can play a significant role in the reduction of AIDS transmission through sex.

Today's NYTimes brings that study and its results much closer to home:

New York City... is planning a campaign to encourage men at high risk of AIDS to get circumcised in light of the World Health Organization’s endorsement of the procedure as an effective way to prevent the disease.

What y'all think about that? [Damn, I love any conflict in which the word's "penis" and "foreskin" play a central role...] Full text follows...

by Ted Hughes

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

by D. Nurkse:

Separation at Burnt Island

Brothers and sisters, who live after us,
don't be afraid of our loneliness,
our dented wiffle ball, the little kerf
the dog chewed in the orange frisbee.

Don't grieve for our kite; not the frayed string
that clings to your ankle, not the collapsed wing.

We lived on earth, we married, we touched each other
with our hands, with our hair that cannot feel
but that we felt luxuriously, and with promises.

We made these bike tracks in the sand
—don't follow them—and this calcined match head
is the last statue of our King.

We lived between Cygnus and Orion,
resenting the blurriness of the Pleiades,
in a house identical to its neighbors—
stepwise windows, ants never to be repelled,
TV like a window into the mind
that can't stop talking, redwood deck
facing the gulf.

Everything was covered with sand: the seams
of the white lace dress, the child's hinged cup,
the watch (even under the crystal), the legal papers.

We were like you, or tried to be. We divided our treasures
(a marble with no inside, a brooch from Siena),
signed our names with all our strength, and went home
in two directions, while the marriage continued
without us in the whirling voice of gulls.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. could be blunt. The worst he would say about George W. Bush in the early going was that he was “an amiable mediocrity.”

--Robert B. Semple Jr., todays NYTimes.

From today's NYTimes:

Tezuka sought out a Japanese computer scientist, Ryutaro Himeno, to test his theory. They published a book in 2001 called “Makyuu no Shoutai.” Translated, the title of the book means, “Secrets of the Demon Miracle Pitch.”

“I’m reading about George Washington still... My attitude is, if they’re still analyzing No. 1, 43 ought not to worry about it and just do what he thinks is right, and make the tough choices necessary.”

Combing the NYTimes and BBC as part of my daily ritual of doing as little actual work as possible before noon (this is one of the five Esoteric Tenets of Producing, the remainder of which I'll endeavour to sketch for you in successive posts), I came across not one, not two, but four blog-worthy fuck-ups from around the world:

1.

Two-time Italian Pime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, on reason why foreigners should invest in Italy: "Aside from the good weather, we have beautiful businesswomen and also beautiful secretaries."

Mr. Berlusconi can now been seen from space, he's so fierily blazing with embarrassment. His wife just published an editorial in one of Italy's biggest papers asking him for a public apology for publicly flirting with so many women. Berlusconi apologized, publicly. Critics wonder why Hillary never asked Bill for a public apology. The public wonders why Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, isn't smart enough to flirt privately.

2.

An Arizona 12-year-old named Casey Price was just arrested... for actually being a 29-year-old convicted sex offender. Apparently, he was "quiet," so no one noticed, you know, the lack of interest in Spongebob, the raunchy stubble... or the boy-touching.

3.

Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden of Delaware announced his bid... right after he said Barak Obama is: “The first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Wow. I wouldn't have the heart to announce my next trip to the shitter after that, but this guy's asking people to vote him into the Oval Office. That's not kablamo.

4.

Finally, and best of all, the city of Boston is suing Ted Turner over Aqua Teen Hunger Force ads that use harmless magnetic lights to, well, light up Err and Ignignot as they flip off passing motorists. But no one's mad about the Mooninites' vulgar hand motion; Boston's mayoral office is mad because they mistook the remarkably cartoonish and non-terrorizing ads for terrorist "devices," a vague term that leads me to think more of my boss' broken Powerbook than of dirty bombs.

So, imagine it's the Sixties. You're NASA. You want to get to space, but you're worried about what happens when you get there. Suppose there's Commie Reds! Guns--you got guns. Okay, now suppose there's aliens! Same diff.

But now suppose that your astronaut (Gre. astrum nautilos, "space dude") falls out. Or that the ship has an engine malfunction (Lat. "bad function")! What do you do--think fast.

Answer? You hire General Electric to build you this.

That's right, long before the current glory days of "satisfectellent" (sp?), the marketing people at GE were ahead of the game, thinking up dumb names for dumb shit. In space.

I typed the name of a play about Muslim women living in Holland, a play called "The Veiled Monologues," into Google's Arabic Translator tool and hit "translate." The result was a tiny string of Arabic characters, followed (or preceded, reading the way we do) by two exclamation points. "Now," I said to myself, "why the hell does it have exclamation points? I didn't put those there... Maybe it's angry?"

I re-translated the Arabic into English and discovered that "The Veiled Monologues" (admittedly not the simplest title, but, still, only three words) had become, simply: "WORDS!!" While I would love to work on a play called "WORDS!!" with two exclamation points, I also think Google should keep coding... You'll get there eventually, guys.

I just tried to link some film festivals to our page at work, and one of the links was wrong. Instead of simply saying, "404 error, you're wrong," the fucker proceeded to spout the following, which really offends me (and Sam--come on, Sam) because we're originally from the 404 area code, metro Atlanta:

"Ah, the ubiquitous 404 Error: you've tried to access something that isn't there. Statistically speaking, this would have to be about the most common of all errors on the Internet. In fact, the 404 Not Found error is something of an icon on the Net to the point where people register domains called 404error.com and musical groups called '404 Not Found'. It's likely that pretty soon many webmasters and web-enthusiasts who don't get enough sun will start describing real-world objects as '404' (that's 'four-oh-four') - it will become a newly-coined adjective for 'absent'. Strange, really. But the Internet is an especially strange place, as you either know already or are quickly learning from this friendly error message.

"Perhaps the link was mistyped, or perhaps you've tried to visit a page which was once here but isn't any longer because someone's moved. Or disappeared. Or maybe it's meant to be there one day but hasn't been put in place as yet. Check the spelling on the filename, delete the filename and start from the directory level perhaps."

Locus Novus now features one of my prose poems, animated by a Turkish artist/writer who's written a manifesto on graphic design. High-five for manifestos!

These are some of the artists whose work is appearing in the festival I'm producing. (Well, assisting in the production of, technically...) Anyway, I'm a fan. Check em out.

www.harrellfletcher.com/theamericanwar
johnmovius.com
ethanrafal.com
www.wyattgallery.com

Robert Edwards' Land of the Blind...

Locus Novus is publishing/animating a story/prose poem of mine pretty soon, which is primarily exciting for me and for people who enjoy animated stories/prose poems. I like the site; maybe you will, too.

(Also, my Lord is cooler than yours, so you pretty much have to do what I say, or else I will utter a single word in my native tongue and melt all your pots and pans, and you will be unable to fashion elbow pasta and cheese for yourself when you are very drunk.)

Now, some of you clods out there might tend to disagree, but this is the greatest comic of all time, period. The book version is also delicious. I recommend all of you who still use Old Fighting Techniques to upgrade immediately. In fact, let's go over a case study: The Crocodile Hunter was a pretty hard dude; he wrestled every manner of critter and even charmed little children who should've known better via his crazy-sounding Australian bullshit. But, in the end, his Fighting Technique was not Unstoppable. At least, not Anti-Ghost Sting-Ray Unstoppable. (Sorry to use your untimely demise didactically, Stevie, or should I say, "Mr. Hunter," but you understand.) Hope that clears everything up. You're all very welcome.

Today we share "Entering Yellow Stream and Hearing an Ape" by Liu Zongyuan, who, was, sadly, "another victim of political intrigues." Sometimes I think I am like the ape, who will probably never get the servant to fetch him his primal-slippers...

The road and stream bend for a thousand li,
Sorrowfully, an ape somewhere calls.
The lonely servant’s tears are now exhausted,
The heartbreaking sound is in vain.

alushinrio

"One of Dr. Smith’s favorite venomous fishes is the stargazer, which buries itself and can fire electric shocks as well as venom. In some cultures it is a delicacy (cooking destroys the venom, and so does the human digestive tract), and Dr. Smith has seen it for sale in fish markets in Chinatown in Manhattan, with the electric organ carefully ripped out by fishermen."

Hey, how come there's no "Animals" category?

alushinrio.com

(Wrote this a while ago and never posted it:)

'What bores they are with their politics!' said theh notary Cardot. 'Close the door. There's no science or virtue that is worth a single drop of blood. If we were to call on truth to settle its accounts we should perhaps find it bankrupt.'

'Ah! It would no doubt have cost us less to enjoy ourselves doing evil than to quarrel about doing good. And so I myself would swap all the last forty years' speeches in Parliament for a tasty trout, a fairy-tale by Perrault or a sketch by Charlet.'

'You're absolutely right!...Pass me some asparagus...For, after all, liberty engenders anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings us back to liberty. Millions of people have perished without being able to establish any one of those systems. Is not that the vicious circle in which the moral world will always turn? When man thinks he has brought things to perfection, all he's done is to shuffle them around.'

From The New Yorker:

After his most recent exhibit, at a Tokyo gallery, [Yamataka Eye's] art work was stolen. "This guy just walked in one morning and took it all," Eye told me. Several weeks later, the thief sent Eye a package containing all but five or six works, along with a pair of sandals, some watermelon seeds, and a copy of his will. "We have a picture of him from the security camera, when he stole the stuff," Eye said. "He had a hat on, and he looked really cool. We are going to put his picture on a T-shirt. We have to."

Shanna Nash actually came up with this last night, and, like all good crafters of koan, had no answer herself, or no answer more comprehensive than "well, Anytime has really great food and $1 PBR."

The Challenge: As briefly as possible, name the Five Best Bars in Brooklyn &/or Manhattan and explain why (and tell where). I'm not qualified to answer this Challenge mydamnself, owing to my technically being a Recently Relocated Southern Gentleperson, but I'd like to hear/read your responses.

(You get bonus points if you record or videotape yourself drinking at these bars, assuming you edit out most of the "glub-glubbing" sounds of drinking and the idiotic murmurs of the drunken Czech partiers beside you, the ones who keep inviting you to "cool room" where they want to do "dance thing" with your breasts. You don't even have breasts. What the fuck is going on here? Why did you come to this bar in the first place? Oh, I know: Should've checked the Challenge.)

Was quite a toughie: Whether or not to file this under "Books" or "Bad Art," but I figure "News" has a nice, antiseptic ring to it, so fuck all, that's what this is: News.

(Definitely not just upping my blog-count... Well, maybe a little upping my blog-count, which from now on will be called "pulling a Christopher Lambert," in honor of that great French actor, and not because he ever inanely upped his blog-count, but because he was in The Highlander movies, which are the sweetest movies about inane competition I have ever seen, excepting possibly Jet Li's The One, which is meta-sweet, because Jet Li is inanely competing against... Jet Li.)

Anyway, the point of this post is: My friend Paul Vargas and I have started an online literary venture, something in between McSweeneys.net and Kaiju Big Battel, except actually more like just McSweeneys.net. Our site is called A Lush In Rio (alushinrio.com) and is replete with Treasures divers and Soul-Opiates such as those found in ye Bloggs of Hyghest Qualities throughout the Land.

So: Please visit my new literary venture, which includes word-games (by a Doctor of Mathematics!), and please submit humorous writings of all sorts (1001 words or fewer, please) to submissions@alushinrio.com. We love publishing our friends.

Oh, and if you love web design, feel free to offer a lended hand, because Paul and I are, as we say in the quasi-professional world, "quasi-professional writers," which is synonymous with "bad at technical stuff, but really enthusiastic about other people doing it for us."

"There is no apparent necessity for rooms with changeable gravity, nor is it clear why aliens need ghost children."

This from the New York Times, about a new video game called Prey. Your guess = as good as mine. The article was as confusing as I imagine the game is.

In the latest New Yorker, by Charles Simic. Seems appropriate, considering all the, you know, lunatic disasters going on in the Levant right now.

This next number is a fucked up little song about rain, and summer changing into autumn, and how evil Nature is--like one big, evil clown with a fake knife that's really a real knife... Fuck, that's so fucked up... Anyway, we can thank Paul Laurence Dunbar for:

Because maybe ours is, in fact, a party at which work gets done, I present, I hope legally:

"The Vegetarians," by John Ashbery, from Shadow Train, one of those excellent books you are obliged to purchase if you want to avoid defenestration at the hands of my team of trained howler monkeys, who move through the night like India ink spilled across slick litter (perhaps a magazine; probably Vogue). And you'd better watch out: The monkeys have been lifting tiny, organic weights, and each receives a ration of one Clif Bar per diem, so, they have the strength to beat you up and the endurance to outlast you in a footrace, assuming you don't have a crazy rocket-unicycle (why would you have a crazy rocket-unicycle? are you that afraid of my ink-monkey death-brigade, that you'd purchase or build or force some poor Czech genius to invent a fucking rocket-unicycle?).

Point is... you know, read the fucking poem:

http://mcsweeneys.net/2006/7/11moe.html

Death

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

Besides pornography involving nuns (speaking of nun-sex, anyone remember Bad Lieutenant?), gin, asking any given dog if the dog is a good boy, then affirming that, in fact, that dog IS a good boy, and/or World of Warcraft, the most addictive thing on the planet might just be:

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/proximity.html

[Macro to micro, in descending mirror-onion-flutter of perspectives:] So we have a Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, another New Englandy type, and he's quite all right, though I myself'd've voted more for NaS or even more preferably MF DOOM, but that level of conceding something to populism and relevance will have to wait.

In the meantime (and times do get mean), I'll have to admit: I rather enjoy this idea: What if I were to post, daily or something like daily, though not necessarily, strictly, "every day," a poem of graspable, chewable Value (to me, at least), to share with my friends? Not a harsh conjecture this, and so we begin, at once, with Vasko Popa, who was old at one point and wrote many poems about wolves:

I get to work around three o'clock every day. At that time, walking from the West Houston 1 to the corner of Greenwich and Clarkston, I usually pass, somewhere around Clarkston and Varick, a tall, pretty woman, can't be more than thirty years old, with very dark blond or very light brown hair cut in an upside-down flower-bell shape, close to the scalp at first, then flipping up and out, like a drooping fan of petals accidentally looking into the water.

I will probably never speak to this woman, nor necessarily should I, but I wonder, does she see me, and does she sometimes bemoan the absence of the time needed to meet strangers on the street. If we met, what would we talk about? We have exactly a block and a half in common, and, though the curiousities of that block are many (inordinately large number of brown or russet pigeons, shirtless man with huge boxer's cheeks who cleans sidewalks and yells at me about the sexual prowess of Puerto Ricans, children trying to learn handball and failing, etc.), I'll wager they are not curious enough to cement a relationship.

Thus we pass each other, circling and circling and drooping our stares into our feet, who, unappreciated huskies, keep mushing on, from the subway to the sidewalk, where the brown pigeon lands too close to the cheeky man's broom and makes a noise like a little vacuum powering down. Even the pigeons, I think, do not have time to say hello.